Free Following Christopher Creed by Carol Plum-Ucci Page A

be and where not to be, but this is no place for teenagers right now. I don't have to tell you we found a body tonight."
    "Right," I said, hearing the tarp being shaken out. "We were just leaving."
    "Turns out this corpse is recent. Four months old, tops. Don't forget your camera, Kobe," he said. "Until we figure out what happened, play it safe. It looks like a domestic squabble turned ugly, but until we're sure, do not be out in dark fields. Do you read me?"
    Obviously, Rye had a balanced, friend-foe relationship going with these kids.
    "Sorry. I thought it was Chris Creed's body at first," Kobe said. "You know ... old news."
    "No, it's not a Creed ... not either one of them."
    My body flooded with relief. No more fears of needing'séances to get my interview with Justin. Kobe and Mary Ellen got their things together and tramped on ahead to the trail. Once they were out of earshot I asked, "Can you say who it is?"
    Rye answered in a low voice, "I gave in to the hounding of the
Press of Atlantic City,
so I guess I can tell you too. It's a girl from the Pinelands, another jurisdiction. We'd heard she was missing, but word was out that she and her boyfriend, Danny, eloped to Vegas for a quick marriage license. The mother hadn't heard from her, but that's nothing new. They fought like cats and dogs. She never even reported her missing. Her mother identified the jewelry, so we woke up a Pinelands dentist to verify it's her teeth. DNA will be a formality."
    Not a Creed; it's no big deal,
I started to tell myself, to ward off bad feelings for some family out there. I could hear RayAnn scratching in the dark on her reporter's notebook.
    "What's the deceased's name?" she asked.
    "Darla Richardson."
    I gasped, and my shock doubled when Kobe and Mary Ellen mumbled, "Who's that?" as if they'd never heard this name before.
    "Darla Richardson?" I repeated loudly. "The wild and crazy thirteen-year-old sister of Bo Richardson from Adams's tale?
That
Darla Richardson?"
    "The same," Rye said. "Only now she's eighteen. Or was. Let's get moving. It's been a long day."
    I spun to them in amazement. Richardson was a "boon," short for "boondocks" and the backward people living out there, and had become Adams's friend despite their differences, yada yada, all this stuff from ChristopherCreed.com . I was slowly coming to comprehend that the website meant less to people in this town than it did to the legion of cult followers in faraway places.
    One passage came spilling back to me from Torey Adams's story: He, Ali McDermott, and Bo tried to get Chris's diary out of the Creed house, wanting to see if it said anything about where Chris might have gone. Ali knew Chris's secret hiding place. While Bo and Torey stood on the sidewalk between Ali's house and the Creeds', scheming on how to get it, they had a conversation about Bo's wild 92 and crazy sister, Darla. She was already staying out all night with boys in her neighborhood, Bo had said, and he was always trying to stop her from acting out.
    "Isn't she an upperclassman in your high school now?" I asked.
    Kobe said something about the high school boundaries being redistributed several years ago so that all the boons went to Pinelands Regional now. The boons had played such a major role in Adams's story, it amazed me to see this new generation hardly acknowledging their existence. People forget fast. Boons had been the backhoe kids at Steepleton High, the kids who gave the place an edge.
    "Darla Richardson," I repeated to the police chief. It wasn't funny, so I couldn't understand why I sensed him smiling until I grabbed Lanz and we started walking back to the car together. I realized he'd been eavesdropping.
    "Sorry if you're disappointed. Lydee tries quantum thought to conjure up one of the Creeds, and you get the chief of police. You're all short-circuiting somewhere," he teased.
    "Kids in high school make for strange interviews." I didn't mention that I had just tried the thing myself when I first