“Do you want to come, too?”
Christine realized Jeremy was talking to her. “What?”
“I knew you weren’t listening!” Jeremy said fretfully. “I hate it when you don’t listen.”
Christine mentally shook herself. She had come here to help her troubled brother, not indulge her own guilt. “This place just seems kind of strange to me and I got distracted,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Jeremy appeared to think this over before finally muttering, “Okay.”
“Thank you. You asked if I wanted to go. Do I want to go where?”
“This summer when everything dries up, Streak said we could go over and look at the mounds.”
“Jeremy, I know you’d enjoy that, but I don’t feel comfortable about your going to the peninsula at night.”
“It doesn’t have to be night,” Streak said.
“You mean you’d go out in the day?” Christine asked in surprise.
“I’m not a vampire, Chris,” Streak said in mock reproach. “I won’t burst into flames if a sunbeam hits me.” Jeremy, whose favorite show was about vampires, laughed out loud, and Christine felt relief. Laughter was a good sign that Jeremy was getting his anxiety in check. “I can go out in the day,” Streak continued. “I just usually choose not to. But I’d go over to the mounds with Jeremy and you.”
“I haven’t been over there for a few years,” Christine said. “I guess I could tag along with you guys. In the day. No power on this earth could get me over there at night.”
“ ’Fraidy cat,” Jeremy teased. “But we can go in the day if you want. Maybe we could even have a picnic.” Christine couldn’t think of a place she’d less like to have a picnic, but she would do it to please her brother. “And we’ll look for more Indian graves.”
“I draw the line there,” Christine said. “Absolutely no grave hunting.”
“We wouldn’t move the bones or anything,” Jeremy assured her. “Even though they’re not scary. Dara said the ones she saw a long time ago weren’t scary.”
“Maybe they weren’t scary to her, but they would be to me,” Christine said faintly, unable not to link the idea of Dara with skeletons. The body washed up from the river had been badly decomposed. . . .
A few minutes earlier a mist had risen and now it curled through the undergrowth, giving the surroundings a hazy, dreamlike quality. Something about the atmosphere felt ominous to Christine, almost as if the mist were trying to grab hold and drag her down into the dark earth that smelled of rotting leaves and stagnant water. A cold tingle quivered through her. She felt as if malevolent eyes crawled up and down her body. She glanced nervously around, sensing some kind of presence. A presence? In spite of her dislike of this place, she was really letting her imagination run wild, she thought in annoyance. The only presences around were those of animals. Squirrels. Opossums. Perhaps even a fox. But a fox wouldn’t attack a human unless it was rabid, in which case it wouldn’t have stayed quiet and watchful for so long. She was being ridiculous. Still, the feeling of being watched persisted. The hairs on her neck tickled.
“Jeremy, your sister looks tired.” Streak’s interruption sounded entirely normal, although Christine guessed she looked worse than tired. She felt jumpy and deeply apprehensive, and Streak didn’t miss much.
“I really would like to leave now,” she said. “I’m sleepy.” Another lie. “Are you ready to go, Jeremy?”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said reluctantly. “But I thought we were gonna have an adventure. Standing on the creek bank isn’t much of an adventure.”
“We’ll save the adventure for our picnic.” Christine smiled. “I might even get up my nerve and help look for graves. How about that?”
Jeremy smiled. “That sounds like lots more fun!”
“Grave hunting. My idea of a good time,” Christine muttered, then looked around and asked Jeremy, “Where’s Rhiannon?”
“Prob’ly hiding. I’ll go find her.”
Streak stared as Jeremy walked away through the brush, his gait easy and coordinated again. “Dara always brought that cat down here to the bridge at night. I used to take a break from my run to talk to her.”
Christine was surprised. “I didn’t know you two were friends.”
“Chats at the creek were about the only socializing Dara and I did,” Streak said quickly. “I don’t know if you’d call us real friends.”
“Did you ever tell Ames about your visits with Dara?”
“No. He’d forbidden her to come down here. I didn’t want to start a fight between them by ratting her out. But I understood his concern. This isn’t a good place for a girl to be hanging around by herself at night. So I always ran by, although I don’t think she ever guessed I was watching out for her. I always tried to make it seem casual, like I was just hanging around and shooting the breeze while I took a breather.” He looked slightly melancholy. “We had a few good talks.”
“About what?”
“Oh . . . nothing really. What I’d thought of her mother when I met her. What her father had been like when he was young.”
“And about Jeremy and me. Don’t try to tell me she didn’t have quite a few complaints about us.”
Streak grinned. “Your name might have come up once or twice. She pretended not to like you, but I think deep down she admired your maturity and intelligence.”
“You could have fooled me. What about the night she disappeared? Did you see her then?”
“I didn’t run that night. I was working on a difficult piece of software—something to do with fuzzy logic—and decided to skip my run so I could get it done. You don’t know how much I’ve regretted that burst of diligence.”
“You sound like Jeremy, as if you’re certain she disappeared from the creek area.”
“No, but if I’d met her here, I would have gotten a chance to talk to her, seen what kind of mood she was in—rebellious, ready to leave home, or frightened. And if something did happen to her here at the creek, maybe I could have prevented it.”
“I see what you mean,” Christine said slowly. “But don’t you think you should have told the police you saw her out here regularly?”
“I did tell the police. I just didn’t tell Ames. He would have been furious with me for not telling him she came here all the time, although telling him wouldn’t have accomplished anything except to cause more trouble between him and Dara. Things were pretty tense back then, if you remember.”
“Oh, I remember,” Christine said dryly. “I never understood why she didn’t just move out into a small apartment.”
“A small apartment where she’d have to do her own cooking and cleaning?”
“I’d rather cook and clean than fight with people all the time.”
“But you’re not Dara,” Streak said. “She had a little bit of the princess syndrome.”
“More than a little, and it bothered everyone except Ames and Jeremy.” She frowned. “I hope Jeremy doesn’t tell everyone he knows Dara disappeared from down here. Sheriff Teague has always been convinced Jeremy did something to her, even though he had the whole Torrance family and several other teenagers to confirm that he was at a party at their house, playing Ping-Pong, until after Ames and Patricia got home and Dara was gone. But Teague kept saying that with all the commotion, Jeremy could have slipped out of the party and no one would have noticed.”
“I remember the grilling Teague put Jeremy through. It would have been worse if Jeremy hadn’t had Ames there to protect him.”
“And now there’s this new guy, Winter, who seems pretty interested in the case.”
“Winter?”
“Michael Winter. He’s the deputy who came to the store and told Ames about the body. He came to Winston from LA. I’m sure there’s a story behind that move. He seems nice enough but tenacious. I just have a bad feeling. . . .”
“Chris, you don’t think Jeremy hurt Dara, do you?”
“No! Of course not!”
“Well, if anyone el
se asks you that question, try to act like you’re not protesting too much.” Christine looked down and took a deep breath, wondering just how large was that ugly tendril of doubt about her own brother’s innocence. “But I understand why you’re upset. And I agree that Jeremy has to stop talking so much about Dara. You’ve got to keep him busy at the store. And let him stay at your house a lot. He can also spend some time with me. He likes computers.”
Christine looked at Streak gratefully. She knew how much he valued his routines and his privacy.
“He’ll love getting to visit you.” Christine plunged her hands in her pockets. “And I’ll love getting away from here tonight. This mist is giving me the creeps.”
“I thought you women loved mists like on the moors in Wuthering Heights.”
“You can have your mists and your moors, Streak. I prefer hot, sunny days.”
They both turned to look at Jeremy tramping back through the undergrowth. “Rhiannon’s hiding really good tonight,” he said. “I couldn’t find her.”
“How did you get her here with you in the first place?” Christine asked.
“Easy. I put her in the basket on my bike. I wrapped her up in that little wool blanket you have in her bed and left her head out. She loves to ride that way.”
“She also loves to climb,” Streak said, gazing beyond Christine. “She’s running up that old wild cherry tree after a squirrel.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Christine moaned. “We’ll never get her.”
“I can,” Jeremy assured her. “I’m great at climbing trees.”
“Not that one,” Christine warned. “It’s old and fragile and covered with damp honeysuckle vines.”
“The vines aren’t blooming,” Jeremy argued, standing beside the tree.
“They’re still slippery.”
“It’ll be okay.”
“No, it won’t. Jeremy! Streak, stop him!”
Streak ran to the tree, but Jeremy was already four feet off the ground. Short of grabbing his ankles and yanking him loose, Streak couldn’t get Jeremy down. “If that tree starts creaking under your weight, drop immediately,” Streak ordered. “I’ll catch you.”
“I’m too heavy! I’d mash you flat, Streak Archer!” Jeremy laughed. “Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”
Christine closed her eyes, envisioning the tree along with Jeremy crashing into the flooded creek below. Jeremy was an excellent swimmer, but if the tree fell on top of him . . .
“The squirrel went in a hole and Rhi’s trying to go after it!” Jeremy called. “C’mere, you little witch cat. You’re not going in that hole!” Christine heard an enraged meow before Jeremy yelled, “Got her! Oh! Here’s something else!”
“Leave the something else and come down right now,” Streak said. “It could be a snake.”
“It’s not a snake or an animal.” Meow and hiss from Rhiannon. Creak and groan from the tree. Christine held her breath. “It’s something in plastic!” Jeremy called.
Plastic? Christine’s thoughts immediately jumped to the plastic shroud on the corpse in the river. “Jeremy, come down this instant!” she ordered. “Leave the cat and the plastic thing.”
“You always think I’m gonna get hurt.” Jeremy began his descent. “I’m fine. I know how to climb a tree.” As he neared the bottom, Rhiannon leaped from Jeremy’s arms, throwing an obligatory enraged hiss at Christine and Streak before she ran to the side of the road and began vigorously grooming. While his feet were still three feet aboveground, Jeremy let go of the tree and thudded into the weeds, dragging a handful of honeysuckle vines with him.
Christine’s patience finally snapped into shrill carping: “Well, I hope that was worth it, Jeremy! You’re a mess! Do you know how dangerous that was? You could have fallen in the creek! You’ve probably sprained your ankle—”
“Gosh, Christy, will you chill out?” Jeremy stood up and scraped off the damp, clinging vines. “Let’s look at this thing in plastic.”
“I don’t want to look at it,” Christine continued stridently. “It’s dirty. Put it down.”
“It looks like a book,” Jeremy said.
“A book?” Christine drew closer, curious in spite of herself.
“It’s in one of those plastic bags you put in the freezer.” Jeremy wiped off the bag with his hand. “Got your flashlight, so we can see it better, Christy?”
“I don’t want to see it better,” Christine snapped, nevertheless pulling a penlight from the pocket of her jacket. “I just want to go home and make sure you’re all right. And sleep might be nice. It’s nearly dawn and I am so tired—”
“It isn’t nearly dawn,” Jeremy said testily, taking the penlight from her. “You sound like Patricia. Gripe, gripe, gripe.” He flipped on the instrument and shone a thin stream of light on a navy blue book cover bearing golden print. He read in a halting, hushed voice:
“Diary of Dara Marie Prince.”
CHAPTER 5
1
“What?” Streak sounded shocked. “Dara’s diary? You’ve found Dara’s diary?”
“I remember this,” Christine said slowly. “Patricia gave it to Dara that last Christmas. I never saw the diary after Dara disappeared. I thought if she did leave Winston voluntarily, she must have taken it with her.”
Streak frowned. “I used to see her writing in it when I’d stop by on a run. She was always quick to close the cover.”
“I remember it, too,” Jeremy said, holding the plastic bag almost reverently. “She said I must never look in it, and I never did.”
“Has this been here for three years?” Christine asked no one in particular. “Why wasn’t it found?”
“The police searched this area after Dara went missing, but their search wasn’t too enthusiastic,” Streak said. “High water, lots of mud. It was a mess here. Besides, who would look in a vine-covered hole in an old tree?” Streak drew closer, peering down at the book. “She must have kept it here all the time, wrapped in this bag. No doubt she suspected that Patricia did regular searches of her room.”
Christine quirked an eyebrow. “You mean she gave Dara a diary to encourage her to bare her soul so Patricia could read it?” Streak nodded. “I remember thinking when Dara opened the gift that a diary seemed like something for a young girl, not a nineteen-year-old. I thought Dara would sneer about it to me when Patricia wasn’t around, but Patricia must have known Dara better than I thought. Dara started writing in it immediately.”
“Patricia didn’t know her very well if she thought Dara would leave it around for her to read,” Streak said.
As Christine gazed at the dirty bag in Jeremy’s hands, she felt dread descend. “We have to take this to Ames. If he’s asleep, though, I don’t want to wake him.”
Streak said thoughtfully, “Maybe it should just be left alone, like Dara wanted.”
“You mean put it back in the tree? Streak, that’s absurd. Do you know what this would mean to Ames?”
“Of course we won’t put it back in the tree. But I could take it and give it to Ames someday when the pain of all this is past. It seems almost cruel to give it to him now.”
Christine hesitated. The diary was meant to be private. Privacy should be respected. Then she thought of Sheriff Teague’s conviction that Jeremy had done something to Dara. His conviction would only grow stronger if the body was identified as Dara’s, because she’d obviously been murdered. Add to the mix the things Jeremy was saying about knowing from where she vanished and her being in the water—things he would keep saying although she’d told him to stop—and the situation could prove disastrous for her brother.
But the diary could contain information they’d never known, never guessed at—things going on in Dara’s life that could have led to her murder. And if they could discover who killed Dara, the dangerous suspicions about Jeremy would be lifted. His freedom, his life, could depend on it.
“You know, Streak, there could be significant clues in this diary,” she said urgently.
“Clues about what?”
“Who Dara was seeing. What she was into back in those days.” She paused. “Maybe who could have had a motive to murder her.”
Streak seemed to recoil at the word murder. “Chris, that’s a real stretch.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s a real possibility.”
“You think that if Dara believed someone was going to murder her she would have written it in her diary but not told anyone? That’s crazy.”
“I didn’t mean she’d say anything so direct. But maybe reading about what she did, who her friends were . . . I don’t know. Anything might give us an idea of someone who was dangerous to her, even if she didn’t realize it.”
Streak looked troubled for a moment. Finally he said, “Okay, let’s say it is. What do we do with the thing?”
“Give it to the police.”
“The police!” Streak’s raised voice cut through the night. “But it’s so personal. You can’t have the police reading Dara’s most private thoughts!”
“You can’t read that diary,” Jeremy said stridently. “Dara said not to. She made me promise. She wouldn’t like it. If you read it, she might even come back from the dead and . . . and do something bad to you!”
“Jeremy, why don’t you round up the cat so we can leave?” Christine said gently.
“You’re just trying to get rid of me!”
“No, I’m tired and I want to go home and we can’t go without Rhiannon. You don’t want her to spend the whole night out here in the dark and the wind and the rain and the cold, do you?”
Christine had added every persuasive objection she could think of to drive home Rhiannon’s pitiful state if left at the creek. “I guess she would be scared. We could just wait on her,” Jeremy said.
If She Should Die Page 7
