The Ex Who Glowed in the Dark (Charley's Ghost) (3 page)

That narrowed the field to a few billion people. “Okay, let’s get back to your parents. Tell me why you think their deaths were murder and not an accident.”

“The police said so. I guess I need to tell you the whole story.”

“Yes,” Amanda agreed, “you do. The whole story would be a good place to start.”

“My dad was a professor at a university in Kansas. He taught economics, but his passion was computers. He had me coding while I was still in grade school.” Dawson’s lips tilted upward in a small sad smile at the memory.

“Coding?” Amanda repeated. “Like in
The DaVinci Code
?” Instead of clearing things up, Dawson sounded goofier with every word.

“Writing source code for computer programs. You write it in English, then you compile it to machine language and—”

Amanda held up a hand. She could tell Dawson was going off into a language that might as well be machine code for all it meant to her. He did that a lot, assumed she understood everything he said. “Got it. You were writing computer programs at an early age. Go on.”

“Mom worked at a bank. She taught college before Grant and I came along, but she liked the short hours at the bank so she could spend more time with us.”

“They sound like wonderful people. I’m sorry you lost them so young.”

Charley snorted. “I can’t believe you’re really falling for this garbage.”

Amanda made a note to remind Charley that she’d been naïve enough to fall for his garbage and marry him.

“My parents were wonderful,” Dawson agreed. His eyes became moist, but he wiped them with the back of his hand and continued. “Looking back, I think they got a little quiet and secretive in the last few months, but I didn’t really notice at the time. I was only eighteen. I’d just graduated from high school and was excited about going on to college. I was a selfish kid, completely involved in my own life.”

He sounded as if he thought eighteen was very young and very long ago, but if his parents died two years before, he could only be twenty now. Three years younger than the identification he’d given her when he applied for the job as her assistant. Then or now, one time or the other, he’d deceived her. She’d have sworn he was always honest, incapable of deceit. Second time she’d got that wrong about somebody, and the first one still haunted her. Literally.

“One evening Mom and Dad went to a play. Grant and I were supposed to go too. We had season tickets for all of us, and usually we went together. But that
night Grant wanted to stay home and play some online game with his buddies. I made fun of him for wanting to play a little kid game.” Dawson bit his lip. “I didn’t mean it. I was just being a rude big brother. But I told Mom and Dad I’d stay home with him. It was a musical, and I didn’t really want to go either. So they went without us, and on the way home, their car ran off the road and crashed. There wasn’t a lot left of the car, but the police found evidence of a bomb.”

Amanda’s hand flew to her mouth.
“Oh, Dawson! I’m so sorry!” She still wasn’t sure about the false identities and the kidnapped brother, but she heard the sincerity and sadness in his voice when he spoke of his parents’ deaths.

Charley harrumphed but said nothing.

“The police came to the door and told us. They offered to send over a counselor, but Grant and I didn’t want a stranger in the house. Grant kept saying it wasn’t true, they’d made a mistake. He was nine then, just a little kid. He ran into their room and started throwing things around, looking everywhere, like he was going to find them in the closet or under the bed. I tried to calm him, but then he opened Dad’s briefcase, and there was an envelope addressed to Mom that said,
To be opened in the event of my death.
” He paused and swallowed. “I opened it and found a key to a safe deposit box along with a letter telling her what to do if anything happened to him. In that letter he said he was talking to the authorities, but he wasn’t sure he trusted the guy. He said the safe deposit box contained cash and new identities for Mom, Grant and me in case something happened. I guess he hadn’t counted on Mom being killed too.”

Dawson took a tissue from the box on the desk and blotted his eyes. Amanda found her own suspiciously moist.

“In his letter Dad gave instructions that we should pack what we could get in the car, put my bicycle on the rack, drive north and abandon the car in Nebraska. I was then to take the bicycle and ride to a used car lot. With one of the new identities, I was to buy another car for cash. We were to take that car and head south to Texas. If we ever felt threatened, we were to pick up and move again using another identity. Grant and I were freaked out that our parents were dead, and we didn’t know what to do. So we did what he said. We ran.”

“I don’t understand,” Amanda said slowly, trying to take in the strange tale. “What was your father talking to the authorities about? Who are you running from?”
The mysterious
they
again?

Dawson pulled off his glasses and shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s the problem. I assume Mom knew, but she’s dead too. Now these people want some code that Dad wrote for Project Verdant, and I don’t have it. I took all our laptops when we ran, Dad’s, mine and Grant’s. I know about computers. I’ve been through all of them, and I can’t find anything about Project Verdant. There's a lot of code that Dad wrote, but it's all small stuff for his economics classes. I can’t give them what I don’t have. How am I going to get my brother back?”

Amanda shivered. If Dawson was telling the truth, if he was sane and sober, the situation was bad. If he wasn’t, well, that could be worse. Either way, they were in trouble.

Chapter Three

Dawson picked up the laptop and stood. “I’m sorry. I can’t work today. I need to go home and—” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Search through the computers again. Do something.”

Though he stood only a couple of feet away, Dawson seemed to be a million miles away, all alone and scared.
Amanda thought of her own recent trip to the courthouse with her father by her side. She could have done it without him, but it had meant a lot to have him with her. Later in the day she would be meeting her birth mother for a celebration. Then there was also the mother who’d raised her and wanted to see her, albeit to talk about baby shower invitations. Her family might be a little offbeat, but they were there for her. Dawson was trying to face his problem alone.

“Of course you can’t work today. Neither can
I. We’re not busy. We’ll close the place and I’ll go with you to your apartment to help you look for Grant.” Or look for his sanity. Whichever had been lost.

Dawson shook his head. “I appreciate that, but there’s nothing you can do. My brother’s gone. They came in and took him in the middle of the night and didn’t leave any trace evidence.”

“Trace evidence?” Charley repeated. “He’s been watching too many crime shows. Do not go with him to his apartment. He’ll get you in there and lop off your head.”

“I’m sure you know more about trace evidence than I do,” Amanda said, speaking to Dawson while glaring at Charley, “but let’s go look again anyway. We’ll start at the last place you saw your brother. Where and when was that?” If he said he’d last seen his brother during a computer game, she wouldn’t count on finding any unknown DNA in his apartment.

“Last night. He finished his homework, went into his bedroom and closed the door, and that’s the last time I saw him. I didn’t even check on him. I just left him in there, and they took him.” Dawson headed for the door, his movements mechanical like those of a robot.

This man should not be allowed to ride the motorcycle that was his only mode of transportation. That settled it. She absolutely had to go with him, help him somehow.

“We should take the truck,” she said, referring to the battered pick-up they used to transport bikes and parts. “I’ll drive.”

Dawson looked back, his expression vague. “Okay.”

He hated to ride in that truck with its disorderly ripped seats, missing radio knobs and other imperfections. It completely offended his OCD sense of order. The fact that he didn’t argue about riding in the truck or leaving his bike at the shop said a lot about how upset he was.

“I’m going too. You shouldn’t be alone with him.” Charley made it sound as if he had a choice of whether or not to go along when the reality was that he couldn’t get more than a few hundred feet away from her. They were bound by some invisible tether which neither seemed able to break. When she’d filed for divorce while he was still alive, he’d told her he was never going to let her go. It appeared for once he hadn’t lied. “I’ll ride in the back of the truck,” he said. “You might want to think about riding back there too just in case Dawson loses it and attacks you with a thumb drive or a CD or something.”

Amanda shot him an irritated glance. Whether or not Dawson really had a brother, he was suffering. Charley had not been a compassionate person when he was alive, and dying had improved him only marginally. Amanda could understand why that white light had been snatched away from him, and he didn’t seem to making much progress toward reaching it.

*~*~*

As Dawson directed Amanda to his apartment building, she realized she had only a vague idea of where he lived. In their two year association, he had kept secrets, and she’d been so involved in her own problems, she’d never even noticed.

A few miles from her office, they pulled up to a run-down red brick apartment building. Their dilapidated truck fit right in with the other vehicles in the small, badly maintained parking lot behind the building. 

Amanda, Dawson and Charley walked around the side of the building and along the cracked walk to the front door. Actually, Charley floated, but he liked to go through the motions of walking. He said it made him feel more normal. Not that he’d ever been
normal
even when he had a body to walk with.

“This place sucks,” Charley said. “You need to pay crazy boy more money.” 

Sometimes Amanda wished Charley wasn’t already dead so she could kill him or at least torture him for a few hours. So far she hadn’t been able to figure out a way to torture a ghost but she hadn’t given up on the idea.

They walked inside the building and were greeted with the smells of moldy carpet and stale cigarette smoke. Maybe she
should
be paying Dawson more.

Wordlessly he moved to the staircase and started to climb.

Amanda followed.

“I’ll take the elevator.” Charley shot upward, laughing.

Since he was only energy in his current state, maybe she could zap him with a battery charger and cause an overload.  Or suck him into a rechargeable battery then put that battery in a flashlight and leave it on until the charge was exhausted.

Upon reaching the third floor, Dawson led her to a door marked 3D in black metal digits, unlocked two deadbolts, and opened the door.

The apartment was old but immaculate. No surprise there. Dawson regularly created order from Amanda’s chaos at the shop. The furniture was minimal with little of a personal nature. No paintings decorated the walls, no vases or candles sat on the dust-free coffee table, no sign that people lived there.

Dawson set the laptop on a small kitchen table off to one side of the living room. Two more laptops were already on the table. Dawson had mentioned three laptops, his, Grant’s and their father’s.
One checkmark in the sanity column.

“Where’s Grant’s bedroom?” she asked.

“Over here.” Dawson crossed the faded but clean tan carpet to a short hallway and opened the first door.

The change was radical. Dallas Cowboys and Texas Rangers posters covered the walls. An MP3 player with headphones sat on the small desk.
Rumpled sheets and a colorful spread draped half on and half off the twin size bed. An eleven year old boy could live in this room, an eleven year old boy who’d been taken from that very bed during the night. Dawson’s story was becoming more credible.

He walked over to the bed and picked up a stuffed dog that was missing one ear, most of his hair and some of his stuffing. “Mom and Dad gave him this for his fourth birthday. He’d already stopped sleeping with it before they died. He said he was too big to play with stuffed animals, but he brought it when we had to leave and now he sleeps with it every night.” He turned pain-filled eyes toward Amanda. “We have to get him back. He can’t sleep tonight without his dog.”

“Do you have a picture of your brother?”

He nodded and left the room. Amanda stood in the doorway of the child’s room, afraid to enter for fear she might destroy some of that
trace evidence
Dawson hadn’t been able to find.

Charley had no such inhibitions. He darted in and reached down as if to touch the bed, but his hand slid into it.

“Don’t do that,” Amanda protested. “You might contaminate—oh, never mind. I guess a ghost can’t contaminate evidence.”

Charley flinched. “I hate it when you do that, call me a ghost and act like I don’t matter.”

Dawson returned with a framed picture and handed it to her. Amanda studied the family looking back at her, four happy people smiling at an unseen camera. An older version of Dawson stood with his arm draped around an attractive woman with kind eyes. Dawson, a couple of years younger and wearing a carefree smile she’d never seen, sat next to a boy with a mischievous grin. Grant?