Dead Ringer (14 page)

Laura

Laura pulled the blankets up to her
chin. It had been a very, very long night, though she didn’t think she could
fall asleep any time soon. Watching the old clock on her wall tick very slowly
to midnight did not help. Laura had spent hours trying to calm Charlie down
after what seemed like a series of panic attacks prompted by the picture of him
and Sarah at the homecoming dance, but now she was the one who needed calming.

When the picture popped onto the screen at the dance, Laura turned—and
saw him gasping for air. She knew what to do—her mom used to get similar
attacks when Laura was little because she was so afraid of flying. They’d
consume her whole body, and it was really hard for her to calm down unless she could
remove herself from the situation. So Laura grabbed Charlie’s hand and rushed
him out of the gym and into his car. He was shaking all over, and Laura could
tell he was afraid to say whatever was on his mind. He just kept apologizing
and telling her he didn’t mean to ruin her time at the dance. Laura convinced
him to let her drive his car to her house so he could drop her off, and then
she helped him try to catch his breath by closing his eyes and counting to ten
really slowly. That didn’t work, so she just sat with him in the car, rubbing
his back and trying to help him count while breathing. After awhile Charlie
calmed down, but the moment still clearly haunted him. Laura told him that no
matter what he had to say, she could handle it. That’s when he finally said the
first coherent thing he’d said since they left the dance: “
I’m being pranked
.”

Charlie didn’t say what the messages were, but he mentioned
some email from a “Sasha” and some other messages from a “CO.” Now, lying in
bed as her clock slowly crawled to morning, Laura couldn’t stop thinking about
who was messing with Charlie, what they knew, and if she might be their next
target. Would they use her to get to him? If it was someone at school, then
they knew all about the fact that she was dating Charlie. If it was someone
from outside school, then that seemed even scarier. What if it was a crazy
relative of Sarah’s? Or some guy who hated Charlie from soccer? Charlie said the
mystery person knew something about what happened to Sarah, but what if it was
all just a joke to terrify him?

Laura knew that she shouldn’t get involved, but she couldn’t
stop herself from letting her mind wander into detective mode. The obvious first
question to be answered:
who put that photo in the slideshow?
It didn’t
match the happy, active shots that came before, and the show seemed to be
designed to linger on that moment for longer than the rest. Plus there was the
look on both Charlie and Sarah’s faces—rage on his and fear on hers.
Someone wanted to upset Charlie. That made Laura’s second question even more
concerning:
why?

* * *

Laura spent all day and night on
Saturday thinking about the mysterious source. Whoever they were, they were
totally raining on her parade. Things had finally been great with Charlie and
his friends were warming up to her. Why couldn’t Laura just enjoy a few weeks
of happy high school life without something totally bizarre getting in the way?

 
Charlie texted that he needed the weekend to
focus on practice and training for a few big soccer games the following week,
so Laura had plenty of time to let her mind wander. She didn’t have a
conclusion about the source of the photo, but she did have thoughts on where to
start looking. The first place was the yearbook committee.

Amanda wouldn’t have gathered the content for the video from
dozens of individual people. If she had, there would have been a call for
submissions on the activities bulletin or an announcement during the morning
news. She must have gone to one place with a large collection of photos, and
that place was the yearbook office. Laura didn’t know who inside that group
might have a vendetta against Charlie, but she did remember an article about
Sarah Castro-Tanner’s suicide mentioning that Sarah was in the yearbook club at
Englewood. Maybe someone on the yearbook staff knew about Sarah’s obsession
with Charlie.

Or what about the computer club? If anyone knew about
hacking into files—such as the one with the slideshow or the ones that
held the entire yearbook photo archives—they would be in that club. A
totally oblivious teacher supervised the group, and rumor had it that they
spent their hours after school doing whatever they wanted. A few weeks back
there had been an unplanned fire alarm in the middle of an assembly on
bullying. Everyone at school was whispering about the fact that it was the work
of the computer club. Laura decided she would do some snooping around their
meeting area to gather more information, but first she needed a cover.

Laura knew better than to ask Becca if she could write about
what happened at the dance for the paper. Even she agreed that it was too
intense for them to
print
, but maybe Becca would be willing to look past
her earlier weirdness about the Sarah Castro-Tanner case and go for a little
investigative, joint journalism project. They didn’t have to write about the
investigation, but two clever brains combined had to be better than one.

Mind made up, Laura headed into the
Chronicle
office
a little early that Sunday morning for the monthly weekend layout session. She
knew it would just be Becca and her slaving over layouts on a weekend morning.
Perhaps Becca would let Laura treat her to breakfast in exchange for agreeing
to chat about this mystery. The office was empty when she arrived, though, so
Laura sat down at Becca’s desk to text her about meeting at the coffee shop
down the block. As she did, her elbow bumped into the laptop, lighting up the
monitor from sleep mode.

Laura knew that the computer was technically Becca’s, but
she couldn’t turn away from what she saw on the screen. There were a series of
folders marked “
YEARBOOK
ARCHIVE
,” only one of which was open: the folder labeled “
FALL 2013
.” The last semester
before Sarah Castro-Tanner died. This was the exact folder that probably
contained the slideshow’s final image.

Laura looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was coming,
then quickly double-clicked on the folder. Her eyes landed on the very last
thing she expected:
nothing
. The folder was completely empty.

She searched for the trash bin along the bottom right of the
monitor and clicked on that next. Again, empty. Someone had deleted all the
files.

Charlie

Charlie hid out in his bedroom from
Saturday morning until late that Sunday night. He told his mom that he had a
gross cold coming on and only left the room to eat five helpings of the chicken
soup she made the minute he said he felt sick. He could barely bring himself to
watch the
Back To The Future
marathon he found on some random movie
channel, and there was usually nothing that could keep him from watching and
quoting every line of every installment of that series. He was scared, and he
was miserable, but more than anything, he didn’t want anything to bring on
another attack of whatever happened to his body Friday night.

Laura called it a panic attack, which made sense, but “shock
attack” felt like a more accurate description. Never in ten million years did
Charlie expect to see that photo pop up on the screen at the dance, but he knew
immediately that it was for his eyes. Sarah and Charlie weren’t friends, and
anyone putting that slideshow together knew it. Besides, who would end that
celebration of EHS pride with a reminder of the school’s saddest story? Charlie
didn’t even know that picture existed, but he certainly remembered the
conversation with Sarah at his locker. That was now running on a loop in his
mind.

It was the day after Charlie had his heart completely
shattered by “Chelsea,” and the last thing he wanted to do was talk to Sarah.
She was the reason it all happened in the first place. Charlie could barely
look at her that afternoon. He remembered that part very clearly. She showed up
at his locker and he turned to walk away. He was afraid that if he looked her
in the eyes he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from punching her in the face.

“I want to talk to you,” she said. “I can explain
everything.” Charlie ignored her and slammed his locker shut, but she kept
going. “Everything that happened between you and Chelsea was real, and I’m so
sorry that I ruined it.”

Charlie was livid at the memory of that ridiculous line from
Sarah. It made no sense. It was the defense of an absolute crazy person.

That was the thought that Charlie had been dwelling on
Friday night as he sat alone in his room after leaving Laura’s house. He needed
to take action against the “Sasha” character who was threatening to release
details about Sarah’s death, and to do that he needed to prove his innocence. The
way he could do that was to show that Sarah was crazy. If the police were
looking for confirmation that she killed herself without anyone else being
involved, he had a way to suggest that serious mental illness drove her to that
point. What she did to him was the work of a true sociopath. All he had to do
was find the series of emails she sent after she confessed to being Chelsea and
slip those to the police. He would be acting as a concerned citizen who did not
realize that Sarah’s suicide was in question. He would say that he assumed that
the police knew about her mental state the whole time. But if they were now
investigating further to prove once and for all that she took her own life,
Charlie would be more than willing to help. He would innocently explain that
he’d never been asked for these files before and certainly didn’t want to go
tattling on the poor girl right after she died. Her parents must have known
that she was troubled; they didn’t need a series of emails from some happy,
stable kid at her school to show them the level of her insanity.

For the first time since leaving the dance that night,
Charlie had allowed himself to take a full, deep breath. This time, the air
actually flowed in through his nose and out through his mouth without getting
sucked into the tight pit that had formed in his chest. He had a plan. All he
had to do was grab the email files he’d saved on the separate computer drive,
re-upload them onto his computer, and select the ones that made his case.

There were still five days left before the tipster “Sasha” claimed
she or he would release more details, which gave the police plenty of time to
run with his information and cut the tipster off. After Charlie selected the
right messages, he would delete the rest and destroy the file so that the rest
of the story could never be uncovered. Then the record of what happened between
him and Sarah Castro-Tanner would only include the version he wanted the world
to know, forever.

Charlie knew that if he continued to think it over he would
never make the move. He grabbed the file drive from the bottom drawer of his
desk, plugged it into his laptop, and started to search. Fifteen minutes later,
he put the emails he’d selected into a message to the EPD and pressed
SEND
.

That was Friday night. Now, a full forty-eight hours later,
the panic was almost unbearable. All Charlie could do to keep from pacing his
bedroom was lift weights in the garage.
It has to work
, he kept
repeating over and over again in his mind. But there were two sides to this
situation, and he had been ignoring the second. He didn’t just have the police
to worry about—Amanda and the rest of his friends would be livid when
they found out what he’d just done behind their backs.

Sasha

For the past few weeks Sasha had
been so consumed with all the clues pouring out of Charlie and Amanda, she
forgot that two other people were also probably involved in every element of
whatever happened to Sarah that night. Frankly, she probably wouldn’t have paid
them much attention until the Sunday after the homecoming charade.

All the IP addresses Sasha was tracking in her system fed
into a massive chart that specifically showed time spent online. It was an
automatic feature of the system. Since Sasha was monitoring everything, there
was a ledger of the time stamps on all that activity, but she rarely checked
that tab. The main concern was searches around key words—at this point
things like “Sarah,” “guilty,” “that night,” “Charlie,” “Amanda,” “Kit,” and “Miller.”
But Sasha still went through the process of exporting the time data into an
excel grid at the end of every week, mostly out of habit and her obsession for
organization.

But today, something stood out among all the numbers.
Someone had spent nine hours straight on the internet, actively searching. It
wasn’t uncommon for a person to sign in to chat or email and not sign out for
the day, but this account featured tons and tons of activity.

The moment Sasha clicked through to the user profile, she
realized this extra data was a massive blessing in disguise. The IP address
belonged to Kit.

It took Sasha only a few seconds to poke around and find out
what Kit was searching for. The poor thing obviously didn’t know that search
history is saved unless you clear it from your computer. Otherwise she probably
wouldn’t have spent an entire day inputting the following terms into what was
essentially an evidence collector: “voluntary confession,” “accessory to a
crime,” “manslaughter jail time,” and “plea bargain.”

All the words made Sasha’s skin crawl, but the last search
item peaked her interest most. Why would Kit be interested in how a plea
bargain works unless she was considering turning someone in to the police?

This answered the question about Kit’s involvement: she was
not the primary culprit in whatever happened between this group and Sarah, just
like Sasha had suspected. But she obviously knew enough to save herself from
some of the punishment. All along Sasha had thought of Kit and her boyfriend as
side players in terms of her plan to take the whole group down. She thought the
conversations in Kit’s basement were the only help they would provide, but this
discovery proved her wrong. A person had to be pretty obsessed to spend nine
full hours reading about a single topic, and an obsessed person could also be a
fragile one—maybe fragile enough to give Sasha the rest of the
information she needed.