Free Darnay Road by Diane Munier

crying?” I say.
    “No,”
she cries. “Are you?”
    “No,”
I say.
    “Well
I just don’t want to go to Florida and now the poor kittens. We can’t even find
them.” Then she just bawls and I have to hold her again.
    “Who
do we have for suspects?” I sniff again.
    Abigail
pulls away then. She’s pretty easy to distract. Granma does it to her all the
time.
    So
Abigail gets out her small notebook with the pencil stuck in the spiral at the
top and she turns a few pages and says, “Disbro Peak.”
    He’s
top of the list, of course.
    “Bobby
and Mike, though they can’t do anything without their leader.”
    I
agree with that.
    “Then
we have Ricky, but he wouldn’t,” Abigail says. “Then Cap and Easy because they
knew the kittens were under there but they probably wouldn’t,” she says. “Then
Granma.”
    “My
Granma?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well
I never said to put down my Granma.”
    “Well you know a
suspect can be right before your eyes but if you’re blinded with love they can
get clean away with it. Like the bad seed?”
    “My
Granma is not like the bad seed!” I declare. The Bad Seed is one of the
best movies I’ve ever seen in my whole life. It’s about a little girl who is
the very age I will be on July Fourth and Abigail May will be on August
Sixteenth. This little girl, played miraculously by Patty McCormack, is a
cold-blooded killer. I mean she’s killing everybody. And her mother is just
blind about it. She can never imagine that her little dear daughter is a
murdering maniac. But my Granma is nothing like that.
    “I
have to put her on the list of suspects because she knew about the kittens.”
Abigail May licks the pencil lead like she’s Lois Lane.
    “Then
put yourself on there,” I say pretty mad.
    “I
will but I’m putting you too.”
    “Go
on. I have nothing to hide. You think I got rid of my own kittens?”
    Abigail
is writing furiously, and she writes my name bigger than all the rest.
    I
try to grab that notebook away, but she won’t let me, then she runs off. So of
course I chase her. She is the most exasperating girl I ever knew.
    I
can’t run as fast as usual with my broken arm, and no one can catch her anyway.
But she stops running and I catch her pretty quickly. She has her purse and she
swings it at me and I duck just in time. “Abigail May!” I yell cause she just
doesn’t think sometimes. “You could have hit my arm!”
    “I
don’t even care,” she shouts, then she takes off again.
    “You’re
not spending the night at my house,” I yell after.
    She
stops and throws her purse at me and it lands near my feet. I am wearing my
white patents with the small bows off to the side and anklets. I am also
wearing a full skirt and a white eyelet blouse with no sleeves. I have my hair
in a ponytail and my pink headband skimming back my hair. I am kind of dressed
up and Granma doesn’t know. Abigail is also dressed up, wearing my clothes
which are a tiny bit big as a rule, but my white crop top and my pink pleated
skirt fits her pretty fine.
    I
pick up her purse and take it to her. She is still holding the notebook. She
takes the purse and puts the handles on her skinny arm. She is wearing my pearl
pop-bead necklace and bracelet. The necklace has popped open so it’s hanging
around her neck in a broken loop. I go ahead and fix it by snapping the beads
back together. “There,” I say.
    “Thank-you,”
she says feeling the beads to make sure they’re back to normal.
    “Sorry,”
I say. I’m about to add, ‘But you shouldn’t throw your purse.’
    “Sorry,”
she says, so I don’t have to.
    So
we’re walking home and the crickets are singing like they do, just the boy ones
who are looking for lovers, Granma says. So they’re singing away and I’m
wondering how we can interview all of these suspects and get to the truth, and
here they come, all those boys.
    They go by and they are
so stupid mostly, Bobby riding along and singing, “Come on Baby take a