Jenny didn't answer, but she didn't mind his teasing, either. He'd been doing it ever since they started, and not just about the scene with Diana. He had a wry sense of humor, and Jenny responded to it, which he seemed to eiyoy. In fact he seemed to eryoy her a lot, and Jenny found herself attracted to more than just his looks.

Every time they unlocked a clue and added another item to their bag, they giggled together like little kids who*d found a prize buried at the bottom of the cereal box. Except they weren't little kids, and the prize wasn't a trinket covered with Cheerio dust. To Jenny, the prize was just being together. In between stops, as they walked from house to house or drove to another neighborhood, they talked as if they'd known each other a long time ago and were catching up on each other's lives. He learned almost everything about her family's many moves, her hopes that this would really be the last one before college, her dream of someday sinking her roots down so deep that it would take an act of Congress to get her to move again. She learned that he'd lived in Rimrock for ten years, that he thought he might like to teach someday, but he wasn't sure,

that he loved climbing the blujff (Jenny decided not to hold that against him), and that a lot of his favorite things were blue: the color blue, blueberry pie, and blue jeans. She also learned that she'd never liked someone so much, so fast, as she liked David Howell.

That was how she felt, anyway. She wasn't positive about David's feelings, but she had a couple of clues. For one thing, even though everyone had divided into groups at the beginning of the hunt, the groups turned out to be very loose. They kept running into the others on their search, naturally, and each time, Jenny noticed that the alignments had changed. Dean and Karen and Diana were together when they'd raced toward one house to see if the owners were possibly harboring a stuffed owl. The next time she saw them, Karen and Dean were together, and Diana was with Alice and Marc. Then she saw Sally and Brad and Marc dumping a telephone book into Brad's car, and she figured that Diana had gone back to Dean. Alice, she assumed, was on her own for the moment.

"I don't get it," Jenny had commented. "If everyone keeps changing teams, who knows who won?"

**We trade off sometimes," David explained. "Somebody might have two of something, so you make a trade with somebody else to help your team."

*Why haven't we done that?"

He smiled, his eyes on the list. *We don't need to," he said. * We're doing fine on our own."

Jenny stood on tiptoe, peering over his shoulder at the list. She saw that they had ten of the twenty items. She also saw that his hands looked strong, with long, tapering fingers.