Free If She Should Die by Carlene Thompson

don’t understand.”
    “Look, Jeremy, maybe she did come down here with her boom box before you went next door to play Ping-Pong at the Torrance house with Danny.”
    Jeremy nodded. “Yeah. That’s when she left.”
    “Okay, let me finish. Let’s say she came down here, but it started to rain and before you came home from Danny’s, she went back to the house. Maybe she was really upset about something and she’d decided to leave home. You know she was always threatening to run away.” Like a nine-year-old, not a nineteen-year-old, Christine thought. “She came back and no one was home, so she packed up some of her clothes. You know things were missing from her room—things she would take if she were leaving. And she wrote the good-bye note. You saw it. Then she had someone pick her up in a car. They picked her up at the house, Jeremy, not here.”
    “Nobody ever said they picked her up.”
    “She could have sworn them to secrecy, made a secret pact. Remember when we used to make secret pacts?”
    “Yeah.” Jeremy was not to be placated so easily, though. “But we were kids. Grown-ups don’t make pacts so much, and everybody knew how scared Ames was that she might be dead, so they wouldn’t have told him they took Dara away from the house.” Jeremy shook his head vehemently. “Nobody helped Dara run away, and
I
know this is the last place she was.”
    Christine stared at her brother, panic racing through her. Three years ago when Dara disappeared, Sheriff Buck Teague and some other Winston citizens were suspicious of Jeremy. Many people knew he’d had a crush on Dara. And Jeremy was big. And retarded, they said. Who knew what a big retarded guy might do if he was rejected, angered, hurt? Ames had quieted a lot of the speculation by letting it be known Dara constantly talked of leavingWinston and that many of her clothes and possessions were missing. He’d also told everyone of his acquaintance about the first letter he’d received supposedly from Dara postmarked Miami, Florida. Wilma Archer had also spread the word to her many friends, but Christine knew not everyone was convinced Jeremy Ireland had not harmed Dara. Now he was insisting he knew where Dara had been on her last night in Winston, which would certainly stir up old suspicions. Dangerous suspicions.
    Fear for her brother struck so deep that suddenly Christine couldn’t speak. She stood staring at him while he looked back with an injured expression growing in his blue eyes. Christine could have kissed Streak when he said easily, “Jeremy, why don’t we just hang around the creek for a while and talk? It’s quit raining and the stars are out. And you’ve got Rhiannon with you. Let’s make this a fun midnight adventure.”
    Jeremy hung his head. “I don’t feel like having fun.”
    “Oh, come on, I know you like adventures.” Streak took Jeremy’s arm and began walking toward the creek with him. “I think looking at a flooded creek at night in the moonlight is really cool. Don’t you?”
    “I guess,” Jeremy said listlessly, as if all the emotion had abruptly drained out of him.
    “Don’t you think it’s cool, Christine?” Streak prodded.
    “Oh yes,” she said tonelessly, following them to the creek bank. “Sort of spooky cool. Jeremy loves spooky cool things.”
    “Like on TV,” Jeremy said with a tad more enthusiasm.
    “Yeah, like on TV. I love having exciting experiences like the ones on TV,” Streak went on, knowing that cajoling Jeremy out of a mood took patience and verbal repetition.
    “Don’t you feel sad that Dara might be dead?” Jeremy asked Streak.
    “Right now I’m not thinking of Dara. I’m having fun.”
    “I’ve heard people say you’re weird and you don’t like to have fun.”
    Jeremy with his complete honesty and lack of tact, Christine thought, hoping Streak wouldn’t take offense.
    But he laughed. “Jeremy, some people say lots of things that aren’t true. The people who say I don’t