Hallow Springs

Eleven

After I processed the scene and the fact that Jeremy had a stalker's photo collection of me, embarrassment settled in. I had already proven myself to be naïve and biased toward Jeremy. I had just came into the investigation and I was already treating him solely as the misunderstood victim. But to properly investigate a missing person, you have to investigate them as much as the circumstances of their abduction. I had to understand him to find him.

We began driving to the school. I wanted to check out his classroom to see if there was anything there. The Sheriff's department hadn't gone there yet so I figured we should give it a try. We had to work as a team to cover as much ground as possible as quick as possible.

I sat a stop light on Main Street with Peters who hadn't said a word since we left Jeremy's house. He knew I was digesting it all and afforded me the space to do so. I was appreciative of that. Maybe Peters had grown up, back in high school, he would be making fun of me and conjuring up Jeremy and I's future life as husband and wife. He wasn't concerned with that at all, but I could tell... he wanted to know. There was always a shroud of mystery in our relationship. People often wondered why the two of us hung out so much – Peters was no exception.

"Jeremy and I would walk to school together..." I stared out of the window as I began. "... and do our homework together and play and everything. We didn't spend that much time together at school. We were on two different islands at school. He was Mr. Popular and I was anything but. Regardless, he was my best friend, he was the only person who understood me and I was the only person who understood him. People saw this social and confident guy, but under it all Jeremy was just a nervous, anxious person who was unsure of himself at every turn. He showed me these sides of him and shared them with no one else. He tried to kill himself when he was a Freshman in High School. He called me and I talked him off the ledge. I told him he was trying to get attention and he was an idiot for feeling sorry for himself when he had the life he had. It put him back in place, believe it or not. He needed tough love, having only been raised by his mother. No one ever knew... The next day he went to school as a popular kid and I remained the band geek that I was."

"Weren't you in the drumline?" he couldn't resist.

"Yep."

We rolled up to the corner of 7th and Main. To our right was a retro styled store with large windows and a bar running the length of it inside. White vinyl letters spelt out: The Soda Shoppe. I dreamed through the window and saw an eighteen year old version of myself sitting in the window, sucking on a milkshake next to Jeremy. The best my memory could tell, I was happy, until he asked me something and then my face soured into beet red humiliation. I left him, storming out of the store, huddled over myself, wiping tears off my cheeks.

The light turned green, but I didn't pull forward. Peters took notice in the passenger seat.

"It's green."

"I know..." I stayed on the memory for a moment longer, losing all focus of what was in front of me. "You see that Soda Shoppe?"

"Yeah... it's been there forever." A honking truck pulled around me – the driver yelled out of his window as he passed. I didn't care.

"That is where Jeremy Wilson told me he loved me. It was only a month before we left for college. He told me that he had to tell me something or he would never be able to forgive himself. He said he had always loved me, but he couldn't work up the courage to do anything about it. Then he asked me if I loved him."

I watched Peters as the dots connected by the way his concentration slackened I could tell it clicked in him. I finally let my foot off the brake and my Buick Lacrosse rolled into the intersection.

"I said yes, but not like that... I asked him why he was doing this?... And of course, I began crying knowing full well that he had just taken a step in our relationship that he could never have back. Nothing would be the same again... it was one of those moments in life, where you don't know what to say and all you can do is stand up and leave. He begged me not to but I couldn't stop. I was a young girl with my whole life in front of me. I was going to college and so I went and met Sam. I finished in four years and got married and had his baby. The next time I saw Jeremy I was married and had a two-year-old. It was just too awkward for us."

"I'm sorry he turned out to be..." Peters tried to find the word. "... such a creep."

"He wasn't a creep." I stated plainly. Part of my job was to psycho-analyze everyone in the case. And finding those pictures was something that a small-town cop would jump on like a dog with a bone, while a lead homicide detective would file it away in the bank of possibilities. [ar

"He's got a shoebox of pictures of you in his house."

"So, what? Jeremy and I took thousands of pictures. Photography was his hobby, he called me his model."

"How sweet..." he patronized me.

"No seriously, creeps follow you when you leave. Jeremy paid me the respect to let me live my own life. I've seen creeps in my line of work – Jeremy is not one of them. There were no pictures of me after college. He didn't stalk me or take pictures of me undressing in my bedroom. He respected by distance and my new life, whether he loved me or not. He was a romantic, that's why he loved Shakespeare. But from his shoes, he was caught up in his own tragedy."

I felt like I had finally come to know an old friend. I had now become reacquainted with him. He was the same person as always, he was just now exposed. I slunk back in the driver's seat and concluded my assessment.

"Jeremy was a victim, long before he was kidnapped."

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