Well. When she put it that way. Boy, I hate when someone gets the better of me. But I could not think of a single really crushing comeback. So I said, "I'll let it go this time."

Jordan rolled her eyes. "Thank you, thank you, Queen Rachel. I'm so glad you'll let me live."

My mom walked in, carrying two leather briefcases. One was normal size.

The other was one of those big, kind of square ones. She hefted them both up onto the counter.

She looked tired, like she usually does when she gets home from work.

She's not all that high up in the firm, so she works constantly. But she grinned.

"Hey! Congratulate me. I'm a celebrity. Did you girls eat?

How was school? Where's Sarah? And don't tell me she's at Tisha's house again. Every time she comes home from there I end up buying her another Barbie."

"School was fine," I said. "We haven't had dinner. You want me to make something?"

"Or we could order out," Jordan said smugly. "Rachel would like some pus-oozing, rotten shrimp."

"Mom! Mom!" Sarah yelled, tearing in through the door from the backyard.

"Tisha says they have a lawyer Barbie! A lawyer Barbie. Just like you!"

"So what's this about being a celebrity?" I asked.

"Oh, well, I was mostly kidding. You know that guy in the papers a few days ago? The one who was rescued by Arnold Schwarzman? He was on TV and CNN."

"Schwarzenegger?"

"No, the man he rescued. Anyway, guess what? I'm his lawyer. His family says he's incompetent. They want to -"

"Incompetent? Is that where you have to wear those adult diapers?"

Jordan asked.

"No, honey, not incontinent. They are alleging he's incompetent. Not able to look after his own affairs. That's what they allege."

"Nuts," I translated. "Wacko. Allegedly wacko."

"Don't say wacko," my mother said, looking pained. "Mentally unbalanced will do fine. His family want to have him institutionalized permanently."

"So what are you supposed to do?" I asked. "Prove he's not wacko? I mean, he is, right? He jumped off a building."

"Lawyer Barbie could save him," Sarah said.

"Actually, it's a little worse than that," my mom said, gathering Sarah up into her arms. "Apparently this poor man claims he has an alien living in his head."

My heart beat three times real fast. Then stopped.

"He calls them Yerks or Yorks or something."

"Oh that's the nuthouse," Marco said with satisfaction as we all gazed up the hill at the pleasant-looking but weirdly quiet two-story structure. "I always suspected I'd end up here."

He gave me a wink. I had to laugh. See, I was about to make that same joke about him. He beat me to it.

Cassie sighed. "I don't think the patients probably like to be called nuts," she said.

"Of course not," I agreed. "They'd have to be nuts to want to be called nuts."

Marco gave me a discreet low five behind my back.

"Cassie's right. It's not politically correct to call nuts nuts," Tobias said.

Cassie looked at me. "You know, I could swear I heard that bird talking. I must be nuts."

We all laughed. Even Jake, who was trying, with the usual total lack of success, to get us all to behave seriously.

We were gathered near the Rupert J. Kirk State Mental Health Facility.

It was two floors of red brick. There was a little fountain just outside the front door, and lots of shade trees and lawn chairs sitting out on the grass. It could have been an old folks' home, or a slightly aged apartment building. Except for the fact that it was encircled by a high chain-link fence. And there were three strands of barbed wire atop that fence. And there was heavy wire mesh on the windows. But aside from all that, it looked perfectly nice.

"Who else has the willies?" Cassie wondered. I held up my hand.

"What are willies?" Ax asked. He was in human morph.

"A vague, creepy feeling," Tobias explained. "The subtle, unsettling sense that something you can't quite see is desperately wrong."

"The feeling I get when I reach the school door every day," Jake muttered.

"School, nuthouse, what's the difference when you get right down to it?"

Marco asked philosophically. "Dumb rules and bad food in both places."

Jake jerked his head to indicate we should move along.

We were on the sidewalk across the street, lurking along a row of parked cars. And what's weird is, I swear the sun went behind a cloud the moment we reached the facility.

We walked along, with Tobias flitting from tree to tree overhead.

"Easy enough to bust in," Jake observed. "A fence, a door, big deal. Not like the Fenestre mansion or the Yeerk pool. Easy."

"Yeah," I agreed. "So we get in, we find this George Edelman and try to figure out if he knows something about the Yeerks. Then we leave Marco behind and get out."

Jake raised an eyebrow. "Okay, I think we may have to put a limit on the number of nut jokes. This is serious."

Marco made a deprecating noise. "Nan. This isn't serious."

"Every time we start to take something for granted we end up getting hammered," Jake warned. He grinned in anticipation. "We'd have to be nuts to get careless."

No one laughed.

"I say, we'd have to be nuts. . . oh, fine. Don't laugh. I don't care."

"We need an open window or something," I said. I looked over the building. No open windows that I could see. It was thick glass and heavy wire mesh all the way.

"We can't hurt anyone," Jake pointed out. "No fighting. Those are innocent people in there. We can't take the risk of hurting anyone. It's too far to travel in fly or cockroach morph. Hmmm. Maybe not that easy, after all."

Just then, like an answer to our prayers, a truck drove up the driveway and around to the far side of the facility.

"Was that a food truck?" Jake asked. "Tobias? Can you go take a look?"