The Ex Who Glowed in the Dark (Charley's Ghost) (2 page)

He made an elaborate show of waving his hands around and through the laptop as if he were a stage magician performing a trick. Finally he proclaimed, “Ta-da!”

The screen sprang to life.

Charley had told the truth about the display.
Numbers and letters in some sort of raw data format. Definitely not a user-friendly Windows program. Why had Dawson been so anxious to hide this? Amanda wouldn’t be able to make sense out of it if she had the rest of her life to study it.

“He’s coming back,” Charley warned.

Too late. Dawson stood beside her.

“I’m sorry,” Amanda began, but he interrupted her.

“I’m glad you know.” He sank into the chair with an enormous sigh and put his head in his hands. “What should I do?”

Amanda looked from the screen to Dawson to Charley. What was it she was supposed to know from that strange display? If she didn’t know what it meant, she certainly didn’t know what Dawson should do about it.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. That stuff is gobbledegook to me.”

Dawson lifted his head. His glasses sat slightly askew, but Amanda could see his eyes clearly enough to tell they had a strange look. The only word that came to mind was
haunted.

Haunted
? Dawson was quiet, intense, OCD, but—
haunted?
 

She knelt on the floor in front of him. “You’re starting to freak me out. What’s going on?”

Dawson clenched his lips and his fists, looking very young and vulnerable, a little like a child holding in horrible secrets.

Secrets and Dawson just didn’t go together, but apparently he had a few.

Impossible images raced through Amanda’s mind.

Dawson the mild-mannered nerd—a secret life as a bank robber?

Nah.

A spy who sold government secrets?

Certainly not.

A career as a writer of erotica?

Probably not.

He sat straight in the chair, squared his shoulders, and drew in a deep breath. “They took my brother. They’re going to kill him if I don’t give them a program my dad wrote, and I don’t have the program.”

Chapter Two

“Your brother?”
Amanda frowned. Had she been so obsessed with her own life, with Charley and divorce and murder, she’d somehow missed the fact that Dawson had a brother?

She looked at Charley and mouthed the word,
Brother?

Charley shrugged. “I never heard of one.”

She turned her attention back to Dawson and considered how to tactfully bring up her lack of knowledge. “I don’t think I ever met your brother, did I?”

Dawson managed a half smile. “No, you’ve never met him. I never told you about him.”

“I’ve known you for two years a
nd you just sort of forgot to mention that you have a brother?” When she’d hired him, he’d said he had no family, that his parents had died in an automobile crash. Why hadn’t he mentioned a brother? Were they estranged? Was this an older brother who lived in another country or up north somewhere?

“I didn’t forget. I deliberately withheld that information. His name is Grant, and he’s my little brother. He’s eleven years old. We were—” He straightened his glasses and drew in another deep breath. “We were trying to avoid notice. Fly under the radar. But they found us.”

Fly under the radar?
Dawson had always seemed the epitome of honesty and integrity. What on earth was he talking about? Was he having some sort of paranoid episode? Had he played too many games on the computer? Confused cyberspace with reality? “Who are
they
?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Well, at least his mysterious
they
didn’t have an identity like Romulans or the CIA. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. “You don’t who they are, but you think they took your brother, as in
kidnapped
?”

He nodded.

“Then we need to call the police. Right?”

Dawson shook his head vehemently. “No! They said they’d kill him if I contacted the police!”

Amanda rose slowly to her feet, trying to appear calm though her stress level was ratcheting rapidly upward. She gave Charley a desperate look. As a ghost, maybe he had special knowledge of the mysterious
they
who kidnapped boys she’d never heard of and threatened to kill them.

Charley shrugged. “You want my opinion? I think Dawson’s lost it.”

Amanda didn’t often agree with Charley, but she was starting to have some doubts about her assistant. He was not acting rationally. Did he really have a brother? Maybe she hadn’t heard about this brother Grant because he didn’t exist. Maybe Grant was an avatar in some computer game.

She put her hands on his shoulders. “Dawson, you need to relax. If something’s happened to your brother, we’ll figure it out. It’s going to be all right. I promise.”
And if there is no brother and you’re flipping out on me, we’ll figure that out too.
Dawson was her friend. Friends didn’t let friends flip out alone.

Dawson focused on her, blinked twice, and his lips twisted into a wry smile. “You think I’m crazy.”

“No, of course not.” She dropped her gaze, unable to look at him and lie. “Well, maybe a little.”

He turned in the desk chair and pulled out the wide middle drawer.

“He’s got a gun!” Charley shouted, dropping to the floor. Heroic as always.

Dawson pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to Amanda. “I printed the e-mail they sent me last night.”

Amanda took the paper tentatively as if it might spin away from her or do something else bizarre. 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

You will receive directions as to when and where to bring your father’s source code for Project Verdant. If you fail to do exactly as we tell you, your brother will die. If you contact the police, your brother will die.

Charley came to stand beside her and read the note. “Dawson’s playing some kind of a joke.”

Amanda looked at the agony on Dawson’s face.

It wasn’t a joke.

He stood and rolled over another chair. “Sit down,” he said. “I need to tell you some things, like my name.”

Amanda sank into the chair. “Your…name? You’re Dawson Page. Aren’t you? Of course you are. I checked your references when you came to work here. I made a photocopy of your driver’s license. It has your picture. It’s you.”

Dawson sat beside her and clenched his hands in his lap.
“Yeah, about that. It’s all a fake. Well, not completely. My real last name is Dawson.”

Amanda opened her mouth to speak then closed it when she couldn’t think of anything to say. That morning the sun had risen in the east, she’d gone to court with her father and Charley’s ghost, and her life had seemed quite normal. Now she felt as if she’d fallen down the rabbit hole even though she hadn’t had any mushrooms. Not even any cheap champagne.

“What is he trying to hide?” Charley, never at a loss for words, demanded. “Ask him what he’s trying to hide. People don’t change their names unless they’re trying to hide something. You get on my case because I’ve done a few little things like blackmail and adultery and all the time you’ve been harboring a mass murderer!”

Little things like blackmail and adultery
? Dawson a
mass murderer
? Maybe Charley had been nibbling on a magic mushroom.

“I don’t understand. You’re a clean cut college kid studying computer science. Are you saying that’s not who you are?”

“No—I mean, yes, that’s who I am. But my real name—” His gaze darted around the room, searching the corners, as if he expected to find someone lurking in the shadows. Romulan? CIA agent? White rabbit?

Even if Dawson’s agony was real, Amanda couldn’t rule out the possibility that his delusion wasn’t.

She leaned forward. “Your
real
name?”

He cleared his throat. “Kevin Dawson. My parents were Wesley and Carol Dawson. Maybe I shouldn’t have kept Dawson as part of my name or let Grant keep his real first name. But he was so little and scared. It was bad enough we lost our parents. We both just wanted to keep some part of our family, but maybe that’s how they found us.” He met Amanda’s gaze. “I’m not making any sense, am I?”

That was the first sane thing he’d said since she’d walked in the door. She shook her head slowly. “No. Not really.”

He exhaled a long sigh and straightened his shoulders. “My father left us several false identities to choose from. I probably should have chosen one of the others, like John Ferguson or Thomas Waller. It was just so hard to let go of my real name, of all connection to my life and my parents.”

“You’re still not making any sense. Why don’t I get you a fresh Coke and you start from the beginning, like why your father left you several false identities.”

“Be careful, Amanda,” Charley warned. “Fathers leave their sons a house or a gold watch or a life insurance policy. They don’t leave them false identities. Something’s not right.”

Amanda went to the small refrigerator in the corner of the room and took out two Cokes. While she had her back turned to Dawson, she whispered to Charley, “Yeah, you know so much about fathers. You told me yours was an evil dead drug dealer when he’s very nice and very alive and coffee is his drug of choice.”

“Amanda, you really need to learn to let go of the past. That’s probably why I’m stuck here, because you won’t forgive and forget. It may be a good thing you have something new to focus on. I’ve always known there was something sneaky about Dawson. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their eyes. He has shifty eyes.”

“Stuff it,” she whispered.

Holding two Cokes, she went back to the desk. Dawson looked up as she
approached, his blue-gray eyes wide and filled with pain. Yeah, you could tell a lot by looking at a person’s eyes. Dawson’s gaze was innocent while Charley’s…but that wasn’t fair. She’d once thought Charley’s gaze projected mischief and fun. She’d just missed the totally self-centered part of that mischief and fun.

Dawson accepted the soft drink and gulped a large portion of it.

Amanda’s cell phone rang. She took it out of her purse and looked at the name. Her mother. Maybe not the last person in the world she wanted to talk to right now, but pretty far down the list. Dawson was either having a meltdown or his brother had been kidnapped by some mysterious
they
. Jenny’s baby shower seemed even less important than it had before, and it already ranked alongside washing her car in a thunderstorm.

She silenced the ringer and shoved it back into her purse. “Let’s start at the beginning,” she said to Dawson. “You told me your parents were both dead, killed in a car crash. Is that true?”

Dawson nodded, the movement jerky. “Mom and Dad were murdered two years ago.”

Cold fingers traced down Amanda’s spine. “
Murdered
? Not killed in a car accident?”

“They died in a car crash, but it was no accident,” Dawson affirmed. “It was murder.”

The cold fingers raced back up Amanda’s spine then clutched around her heart. “Murder?” she repeated.

Charley placed himself between her and Dawson. “You see? He murdered his parents! I told you so! No telling how many other people he’s killed!” He balled his fist and threw a punch to and through Dawson's nose.

Dawson shivered. Charley’s touch had that effect on people. “Did you turn the air conditioning down?”

“No. It just seems cool in here because it’s so hot outside.
Texas in July.” She brushed a hand through Charley, feeling a chill as she did so. “There’s an ugly draft right here.”

Dawson reached a hand through Charley’s abdomen. “Yeah, there is,” he said.
“A cold spot. I’ve never noticed that before.”

“I can take a hint.” Charley stepped aside and hovered next to Dawson. “But I’ll be here to protect you when you need me.”

The idea of Charley protecting her was such an absurd statement, Amanda had to fight the urge to laugh. Laughter was not appropriate in the face of murder, kidnapping and possible insanity. “Dawson, tell me about your parents.”

“I might as well.” He sighed. “There's no reason to hide anything anymore. They’ve found us and they’ve got Grant. I’ve got to save him. I can’t let them hurt him. I’m his big brother. Since our parents died, he’s looked up to me and expected me to take care of him. I’ve always tried but now I don’t know what to do.” He leaned back, his expression bleak as if all hope was gone from the world.
From his world.

“They,” Amanda repeated. “They would be [email protected]?”

Dawson clutched his Coke can so tightly the sides dented in. “I don’t know who that is and I don't know what Project Verdant is. I tried to trace the e-mail, but they’ve bounced it all over the world. When you came in, I was looking at the metadata, but these guys obviously know their way around computers.”