Free Sara, Book 3 by Esther And Jerry Hicks Page B

out on top of it.
    “They were talking about it over at Pete’s Drugstore.”
    “Well, tell me!” Sara shouted angrily, grabbing Jason’s wrist and looking him hard in the face. “What did they say?”
    “I don’t know!” Jason shouted back, yanking his arm back defensively. “Geez, Sara, what’s it to you?”
    “I’m sorry, Jason, I didn’t mean to grab you. I mean . . .” Sara’s voice trailed off. She wasn’t about to explain to her little
brother the wonderful friendship that she had discovered with Seth, Samuel’s big brother. She couldn’t explain that in a hundred
years of trying. And anyway, this wasn’t the time to begin it. “Just tell me what you heard.”
    Jason looked stubborn. He didn’t like the way Sara often tried to boss him around, and he liked knowing something that she
wanted to know. It made him feel powerful.
    “Please, Jason, what did you hear? Please tell me!”
    “Just that this stupid little kid had tried to build a raft, and he was trying to float down the creek, but when the creek
dumped into the river, the raft turned over and he fell off, and the current was too swift for him. Oh, and something about
his brother pulling him out just in time.”
    Seth! Sara thought. “Is he . . . are they all right?”
    “I don’t know, Sara. That’s all I know.” Jason ran off toward home.
    Sara stood in the middle of the bridge, not knowing what to do next. Should she go to Seth’s house and just knock on the door?
That seemed bold. She had never been inside of his house. Maybe I’ll just walk past and see what’s happening there. She turned the corner and headed toward Seth’s home.
    The street looked pretty much like it always looked. Sara couldn’t see anyone; there were no cars around, and no people either.
The house looked quiet, as usual. Nothing seemed to be stirring anywhere.
    Sara’s heart was pounding hard in her chest. She wanted to find her friend and feel his reassurance that everything was all
right, but she didn’t know where to go. She rarely saw Seth on the weekends. She didn’t know what to do. Sara began running
toward the drugstore. Maybe they would still be talking about it. Maybe someone there would know what happened.
    Sara blasted through the front door of the drugstore, which was in an old, dilapidated building. The familiar smell of medicines
and perfumes, combined with that of hamburgers and onions cooking on the grill, greeted her. She saw a handful of people sitting
at the soda fountain, chatting eagerly with each other about something. She hid behind the magazine stand, so as to not be
detected, and moved as close as she dared, straining her ears to hear.
    “Stupid kids. They just don’t seem to understand the dangerous currents of that river. They think it’s a playground, only
there to entertain them.” Sara heard an elderly woman complaining.
    “Well, that’s just the way kids are these days, you know. They think everything is a game. You can hardly get them to work
anymore,” Pete, the owner, said, wiping the counter with a stained and greasy-looking rag as he spoke.
    Sara winced a little as she listened. C’mon, she thought. What happened? Get to what happened.
    “Well, this isn’t the first kid to nearly drown in that river. Didn’t the Henderson girl nearly drown, too? What’s her name?
Sara, isn’t it? I heard that she fell in and nearly drowned. Somebody should do something about those kids playing on the
river. They just shouldn’t be allowed to do that.”
    Sara shrank behind the magazine rack. Her heart began to pound so hard she was afraid they would hear it. She wanted to run
and hide, but there was nowhere to go. She would just die if they caught her hiding there.
    “Her mother told me that she had told that girl to stay away from that river a thousand times, but it didn’t do any good.
I still see her dangling out over the river from time to time. Well, I’ll tell you, if they were my kids, they