Dead Ringer (13 page)

Charlie

Charlie kept scanning the crowd and
locking eyes with people he’d known for years—Billy Cosentino from down
the block, Cole from soccer, Rachel Goldberg, who he had a crush on in second
grade, Amy Keseday, the girl who frequently beat him in coed soccer shoot-outs…
Soon enough they would probably all be questioned by the Englewood police
regarding what they knew about Sarah Castro-Tanner’s death, and it would be all
Charlie’s fault—not Amanda’s, not Kit or Miller’s, but
his
. He was
the one who started this whole avalanche because he was dumb enough to fall for
Sarah’s prank. Sure, what she did was sick and twisted, but it wouldn’t have
worked if he hadn’t taken the bait, and it wouldn’t have led down the path to
this point if he hadn’t been so enraged after the truth came out,
and
it
wouldn’t have all unraveled if he hadn’t needed to get revenge so badly that he
told Amanda, who put the entire payback plan into motion.

Charlie watched as his classmates all scrambled to the floor
to do that wiggly line dance everyone was so obsessed with at the moment. Then
he saw Laura. She was standing next to Kit and Miller doing a totally
uncoordinated version of the moves, which she’d obviously learned two seconds
ago. She looked up, caught his eye and gave him the world’s cutest
please-don’t-watch-me
face. Charlie smiled back. “
Too late
,” he mouthed, and then took out his
phone and snapped a picture of her before she could hide behind Kit.

What if Laura knew what a monster he’d been? What would she
think of him if she found out that he’d totally lost control because he was so
consumed with keeping his precious reputation intact? And what if she found out
what happened between him and Amanda before that?

Charlie felt his chest start to expand and contract like
he’d just finished a ten-mile run. He tried to take a breath, but he could only
make out short, shallow gasps. His head felt light, but not in a good way.
Something was seriously wrong with his body.

Before he could run out of the gymnasium to get some fresh
air, Amanda stepped up onto the stage and grabbed the microphone from the emcee.

“Hey, hey, hey, EHS, welcome to your night in New York City!
Everybody having fun?”

The crowd cheered, and Charlie joined in. Something about
screaming in that moment made his body relax, and he started to gain control of
his breath again.

“We have a little surprise for you tonight before we
announce the homecoming court and crown our king and queen. Think of it as
something to get you psyched about this year with a little trip down memory
lane. Billy? Let’s roll it!”

With that, the lights turned down and a large, white screen
unrolled from the gym ceiling.

“What’s so great about Englewood High?” a disembodied voice
said as a picture of the school’s front was projected onto the canvas. Charlie
was pretty sure it was Miller’s voice; Amanda was always using it for her
social committee videos.

The school shot quickly dissolved into a time lapse of the
crowded halls in between classes as a cool, pop version of the Englewood fight
song played. Charlie was impressed. Either Amanda had become even more creative,
or she was giving excellent orders to the AV club kids who did all her work.

“What’s so great about Englewood High?” Miller’s voice
repeated.

“US!” a crowd of voices replied.

Everyone in the gym screamed at that line, and they
continued to yell and cheer as the video kicked into high gear with dozens of
pictures featuring the fun of life at EHS flying across the screen. Next were
clips from soccer games, car washes, and the Battle of the Classes, which took
place each spring. Then interviews with groups of friends answering questions
about what made life at school so great were layered in, and mixed among that
were still shots of the senior class growing up throughout the years—from
elementary school through the present. Every single time a new image came onto
the screen, people would cheer for their friends or themselves. Charlie had to
hand it to Amanda, this was a genius way to get everyone fired up and ready for
the year ahead.

He made his way into the crowd hoping to find Laura. He
figured she might be feeling a little awkward since there weren’t any photos of
her in the slides. It was still too early for the yearbook committee to be
shooting new candid pictures or getting coverage of all the activities. Charlie
found her standing next to Kit, Miller, and Amanda near the front of the stage.
Kit gave Charlie one of her typical knowing smiles. Charlie figured this one
meant that she was happy they were being nice to Laura for the time being and
had spoken to Amanda about the situation. Kit could say a lot with a single
look, though the skill was usually wasted on Miller.

Charlie made his way to Laura’s side, reached out and
squeezed her hand. “This isn’t such a bad place to go to school, right?” he
said.

“Not at all,” she replied.

They turned back to watch. The music from the video was
coming to a crescendo and pictures were flying across the screen almost like
the finale in a fireworks show. Now everyone was cheering non-stop, anticipating
the big finish.

But the moment the final image hit the screen, the room went
quiet. It was like someone had unplugged the speaker. No one made a single move
or sound, though Charlie wouldn’t have heard it even if they did. He was too
focused on trying not to pass out.

In the center of the giant, white screen was a photograph of
Sarah Castro-Tanner looking terrified as she stood beside a row of lockers—talking
to Charlie Sanders.

October
16

Sasha

Sometime around 11:00 p.m. on Friday
night, Sasha’s computer started to
ping
. She’d set a special alert on
activity generated from Charlie, Amanda, Kit, or Sean’s computers and, from the
sounds of it, one of them was doing some serious work.

The system Sasha was currently running functioned so that
anything those four did on their desktops automatically downloaded into a
server that Sasha kept on her own system. If they took a screenshot from a
website, it replicated itself into a folder marked “Images.” If they sent
messages through any chat software, a copy of the conversation was saved into a
section she called “Correspondence.” And if they uploaded anything onto their
desktop from a remote source—a web portal, a cellphone, a jump drive—whatever
they migrated over also made its way straight into a file marked “Uploads” and
into Sasha’s hands.”

By the time Sasha opened her computer and clicked on the
folder marked “Charlie,” there were over one hundred twenty new documents in
the “Uploads” section. Sasha assumed Charlie was transferring files he needed
for some homework assignment from one place to another—maybe another
computer to his own via an external hard drive? But with a number so high, she
figured it had to be photos. Then a thought struck Sasha: maybe he was looking
through his old files to see if he could find a copy of the picture that put an
end to his lovely night at the homecoming dance? It
was
the big night,
after all.

If that was the case, Charlie was out of luck. He didn’t have
that picture. In fact, the only person who did had no idea that it was ever in
their possession. If Sasha were a kinder person, she would have contacted the
Englewood Yearbook office to inform them that their photo editor’s computers
had absolutely zero security settings. It had taken her five minutes to hack
into the main hard drive containing the archive of candid photos, all
conveniently organized by year. All she originally wanted was an image of
Charlie with Sarah in the same frame, but she ended up with something so much
better. The idea had been to send whatever photo she found straight to Charlie,
but once she heard chatter about a video montage at the Englewood homecoming
dance—organized by none other than Amanda—she devised an even
better plan.

For the first time, though, a tiny piece of Sasha had wanted
to hold back. So far everything she’d done to eke a confession out of Charlie
or his cohorts was private. The message to the police was intense, yes, but
none of them had to first hear it in the presence of three hundred classmates,
and it didn’t officially implicate them.
This
was different. Charlie
would be standing in the middle of the room when this bomb was dropped, and he
would probably be standing with Laura. That girl had done nothing to deserve
all the attention she’d received since the beginning of the school year, and
Sasha wasn’t helping. But then again, she was the one who decided to date
Charlie Sanders. Girls who loved boys like Charlie were not girls that Sasha
cared to defend. The whole point of the painstaking process she’d been through
to crack the Sarah Castro-Tanner case was to stand up for the defenseless girls
who stood in the shadows while the Charlies and Amandas glided through life
like it was a game they were already set up to win. The time she was now
spending inside the Hunter household only confirmed that fact in her mind.

Everywhere she turned, there was another shrine to the
goddess, Amanda. Every dinner was planned with Amanda’s healthy diet in mind.
The girls were required to be silent when Amanda was studying and perfectly
behaved when Amanda had friends over. Even the front hall closet was filled
with Amanda’s extra dresses and coats. It was as if two adults and two young
girls were lucky to be living in the house of a seventeen-year-old. Sarah
Castro-Tanner definitely never got that kind of love or got away with that kind
of behavior. As far as Sasha could tell, there was no one else in the world
defending her life. Whatever happened on the night she disappeared was not Sarah’s
fault, and Sasha’s singular goal in life was now to make sure that the next “Sarah”
out there knew it.

Sasha let Charlie’s files finish uploading onto her computer
and made a silent wish that they would turn out to be much more than candid
soccer team shots. When she finally opened the folder, she wasn’t sure whether
or not her wish had been granted. She was staring at over one hundred twenty email
exchanges between Charlie and a girl named Chelsea Sacks.

Who was Chelsea Sacks? She’d never once heard of this girl
in the now thousands of monitored exchanges between Charlie and his closest
friends. Sasha racked her brain to try and place the name. She switched over to
the main tracking panel for Englewood and plugged it into her search field. Just
as she suspected, there was not a single reference. Sasha could not for the
life of her figure out how that was possible. How could no one at Englewood
reference a girl that Charlie was close enough with to warrant over one hundred
emails?

There was only one logical answer: no one at Englewood knew
of a “Chelsea Sacks” except for Charlie, and she, whoever she was, vanished
before Sarah died and Sasha’s tracking began. Now Sasha had to figure out why and
what in the world that had to do with the bigger picture.

She took a few minutes to skim the first exchanges. They
were typical emails between a flirting guy and girl. It wasn’t clear how
Charlie and Chelsea knew each other, but these messages referenced other chats
and texts, so they were only part of the puzzle. Sasha skipped ahead to some
exchanges in the middle, hoping to notice a shift in the conversation that
might provide a clue. She ended up finding a single line inside an email from
Charlie to this mystery girl that made everything even more confusing:

They had been carrying on for months and had never actually
met? How was that possible? Did Chelsea live far away? Or was it that Charlie
didn’t want to see her for some reason?

Sasha hoped that the last of the emails would answer her
questions. She skipped ahead to the second to last exchange, the one with the
subject line “
Please
…”

Sasha almost fell out of the desk chair she was sitting on.
“Sarah” had to be
the
Sarah based on the timing of Charlie downloading
these messages, and that meant that Sarah Castro-Tanner had been posing as
Chelsea Sacks!

Now Sasha understood why Charlie didn’t talk about her. He
needed to bury all of this information because it connected him directly to
Sarah, and the date stamp on the emails showed that they were sent just weeks
before she killed herself.

Sasha sat back, stunned, to think about what this meant.
From the sounds of it, Sarah had truly been crazy. This was an email from a
desperate girl who had done something creepy and was still trying to make
Charlie believe that they should be together. It was the work of a person with
serious mental issues.

Sasha was crushed. She’d spent all this time defending Sarah’s
life, when maybe it was Sarah who caused this whole mess all along. In a way,
Sasha felt like she had also been tricked. Based on this discovery, Sarah was a
liar and Charlie was her victim.

Then Sasha noticed that the very next email was Charlie’s
response.

And with that, Sasha’s interest was re-piqued. Charlie may
have been the victim, but based on this exchange, he was a victim with a
motive. It was just the kind of information that the Englewood police would
love
to know, Sasha thought as she took screen grabs of both messages and thought
about her next move.

Then the
ping
ing started up again. Sasha turned her
focus back to her computer as she watched Charlie delete all but four of the emails
he’d just uploaded. Sasha didn’t have time to read the ones he saved before he attached
them all into an email and sent them directly to the Englewood Police
Department’s Sarah Castro-Tanner tip line.

For the second time in under an hour, Sasha’s world was
turned upside down. Charlie Sanders appeared to be confessing.