Missing with Bonus Material: The Secrets of Crittenden County, Book One by Shelley Shepard Gray Read Free Book Online Page B

in social situations? Or maybe it was her way of always analyzing things to the nth degree.
    But whatever the reason, he always felt a rush of protectiveness toward her. She needed him like few other people in the world did.
    He parked his truck off to the side of the driveway, and waved his hand as she watched him approach.
    “What’s up?” he asked, keeping his voice steady and easy as he threw an arm around her shoulders. “How was school?”
    “Fine.”
    “Hey, ‘fine’ is better than usual.” Walker tried to tease a smile from his sister.
    Now that everyone knew she’d found Perry’s body, her reputation at school had gone from being just another awkward girl to the weird one. It was painful to know that she was the new constant source of gossip and ridicule.
    “ ‘Fine’ means no one went out of their way to talk about Perry with me today.” She bit her lip. “And ‘fine’ means that Jessica didn’t make fun of me in chemistry.”
    “Hey, that’s a start, huh?”
    “I don’t know. I think she was just too busy with her new boyfriend to pay me much attention.”
    “Maybe she’s finally realizing that there’s more to you than she thought.” Jeez, he sounded like some kind of Dr. Phil wannabe, but he couldn’t stand her being so depressed. “I mean, you’ve been standing up to her and the other girls in her clique more and more, right?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
    “You should. Hiding won’t help.”
    Brushing a hand through her blond hair, so curly in the humidity, she looked him in the eye. “I’ve actually been waiting for you for another reason.”
    “Which is?”
    “Are you, um, busy right now?”
    “It’s five. We’re going to eat dinner in an hour.”
    “But after? Are you busy after dinner?”
    He was worn out from talking with the detective and Lydia. More than a little ready to just sit and watch TV. Plus he had a couple of chapters to read for Biology. But there was such sadness mixed with hope in Abby’s voice that he couldn’t bear to put her off without giving her a chance. “I’m just going to watch TV and study. Why?”
    “I wondered if maybe we could go visit Grandma Francis and Grandpa James.”
    He hadn’t seen that one coming. “Tonight?”
    “Well, yeah.”
    “Why do you want to go see them tonight?”
    “I don’t know.” She looked down. Fussed with a hole in her faded jeans. “You don’t have to stay there if you don’t want. You could just drop me off,” she added quickly.
    Walker didn’t want to go, but at the moment he was more interested in why she was going than the logistics of it all. “If I left, how would you get home?”
    “I could probably stay with them overnight, and then Mom or Dad could pick me up sometime tomorrow.”
    “But you have school . . .” Dismay filled Walker as he began to realize that this was probably yet another one of Abby’s schemes to get out of being at school. “You can’t miss again.”
    “I won’t be missing anything. Tomorrow’s a school holiday—teacher workday or something.”
    Walker nodded, hoping to give himself some time to try to figure out what to say. Though they all loved his father’s parents, it wasn’t a usual thing for him or Abby to want to visit them on the spur of the moment. Usually, visits to their Amish grandparents were accompanied by complaints about the heat, or the chores, or the quiet stillness that surrounded their home.
    “So, what brought this on?”
    “Oh, nothing.”
    Yeah, right. Abby’s voice was airy and she wasn’t looking him in the eye. “Come on. I know you pretty well, right? Suddenly, you’ve just decided that you want to go spend the night with our grandparents? Do they even know you’re coming over?”
    “No.”
    “So you just want us to show up? Without an invitation?”
    “They’ve always said we could stop by anytime. That means we don’t need to wait for them to ask, right?”
    He supposed she was