Chapter One

"Penny Carson! Get inside this instant and finish your breakfast!"

Twelve-year-old Penny Carson shrugged. She knew her mother would call her again in a few minutes. Besides, she had better things to do.

She was sitting on the curb with Mac McHale. They were just killing time in that perfect part of the day, when it was cool and there was still dew on the lawns, before the June heat knocked them over.

School was out, and after a year of bells telling her where to be every minute, it suddenly seemed important to Penny to do nothing. Nothing that required any strenuous thought, and certainly nothing that involved fractions. And sitting on the curb watching Mac fry ants with his new magnifying glass definitely counted as nothing.

Mac had cleverly placed a scrap of toast with jelly as bait on the ground, and the ants kept on coming despite the fact that their comrades were going up in smoke all around them.

"They're not very smart, are they?" Penny observed.

The sound of a car door opening and slamming shut made Mac hunch his shoulders a little and focus his attention on the sizzling ants.

"Come on, Angus, let's get moving!" a voice rang out. It was Mac's mother. She was the only one Penny had ever heard call him Angus and not be beaten to a pulp.

"Where are you going?" Penny asked.

"Dentist," Mac said in his typically laconic way. Penny felt a little sorry for the dentist.

Solidly built, with a mop of reddish-brown curls and fiery green eyes, twelve-year-old Mac was the undisputed tough guy of their little group, their own private bully. He was always getting into fights, so often that his mother had become friends with the triage nurse at the emergency room.

"Angus, I mean it. Get moving!" Mrs. McHale hollered out the car window. "I don't have time for this." Mrs. McHale was a divorced mother. Mac's dad had left years ago, and Penny never saw him around. From all accounts, neither did Mac.

Mac looked at the slow-backing station wagon and shrugged in a resigned way. "Can I borrow the magnifying glass while you're gone?" Penny asked. Mac narrowed his eyes, considering. "Don't break it." Then he handed the silver-handled beauty over to her.

"I won't," she promised.

"Angus!" Mrs. McHale yelled, her voice rising a notch.

Mac rolled his eyes. "Gotta go. See you at the fort later."

"Right," Penny said.

She watched as Mrs. McHale's station wagon disappeared up Mockingbird Lane, passing cookie-cutter split-level and two-story colonial houses, blacktop driveways, and neatly manicured lawns. Penny turned the shiny magnifying glass over in her hand carefully. The glass was thick, and bulged out like her baby brother Sam's belly.

On the street, the ants were still circling the jelly-covered toast, blindly following one another in manic little lines. She poised the glass over the toast to catch the sun, and as the glass caught the light, she heard the low thick rumbling of a revving engine. She looked up to see a sleek red Trans Am with tinted windows rolling smoothly down Mockingbird Lane as if it had a perfect right to be there.

Penny wondered who the car belonged to. She knew what everyone drove. The last person to buy a new car had been Oren Loew's father, and it was a flashy sort of Jaguar that her mother said he was buying because of a midlife crisis. But the Trans Am was something else. For starters, it wasn't the kind of car a dad would buy, or more to the point, it wasn't the kind of car a mom would allow a dad to buy, midlife crisis or not.

She watched its careful progress down the block. With its jacked-up wheels and custom hubcaps, it was a striking contrast to all the tame-looking sedans and minivans in the driveways. It seemed to slow down as it approached, as if casing the block. Was it a robber? she wondered nervously. The Albrights' house had been robbed the previous summer when they were down at the Jersey shore, and Benji's little sister, Becky, had had her piggy bank stolen.

The car came to a gentle stop across the street in front of the Bukvics' house, the engine idling. The driver's window rolled down, and a lightly haired masculine hand languidly appeared to flick open an antique-looking silver cigarette case. The nails on the hand were thick with grease, the fingers streaked with grime. Another gritty hand appeared to remove a cigarette and tap it once on the case. And then a lighter was conjured up, a flame sparked. The hand cupped the flame. A head bent, inhaled, lit the waiting cigarette with much-practiced ease. The cigarette glowed in the darkness of the car like a burning eye.

Penny leaned forward, squinting harder, and then she caught sight of the back of that hand—and the skull tattoo. She gasped audibly and dropped the magnifying lens, which struck the curb and shattered.

She had seen a picture of him, years ago.

They had been goofing off, playing at her best friend Amy's house. Amy's mother had been on the phone downstairs, so they had taken the opportunity to sneak into Amy's older brother's room and rifle through the treasures of a fifteen-year-old boy's desk. It was there they had found the small, carefully clipped photo from a newspaper article. It had been tucked in the back of the top drawer, behind piles of rolled-up tube socks. The article had been cut away, but the caption remained:

Local Boy Involven in Accident

Penny remembered that photo now, remembered the shape of the boy's head, capped with dark hair, and the thin, worn jean jacket he had been wearing. She remembered how his eyes had stared out at her from that photo, dark and glittering and unreadable. His hand had been curled around something at the edge of the photo, the menacing skull tattoo grinning from the back of his hand. The same exact tattoo she was looking at right now...

Excerpted from THE CREEK © Copyright 2003 by Jennifer L. Holm. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.