Dead Ringer (17 page)

He couldn’t share all the details about the pranks and the texts
and the VidBits because that would give the cops even more ammunition to
question him and his friends. He had to make them believe him without giving
away any more information about what was happening. For that to work, he had to
make a bold claim.

“Well, I don’t know how to prove it to you, but this isn’t
true,” he finally said. “I mean, my friends and I didn’t harass her beyond the
one time I told her to stay away from me when she came up to my locker at
school. You can have our cellphones or get our phone records or question all of
us. We’ll even take lie detector tests. Not one of us bullied her outside of
school or inside.”

Neither man knew what to say next, and Charlie figured it
was smartest to stop talking. If the cops really did follow through and search
all his phone history, they would find nothing cruel. If they hooked him or his
friends up to a polygraph, they would pass. Of course, that was because
bullying Sarah was not the way they planned to get their revenge for what she
did to Charlie, and it wasn’t why they were with her that night. Their plan
didn’t involve typical harassment. It was much crueler than that. But as of
right now, that piece remained a secret.

Detective Pierson slowly walked from the corner where he was
standing until he was directly in front of Charlie’s face—so close that Charlie
could practically taste the coffee on his breath.

“I don’t believe you,” he said. The words came out slow and
soft.

Charlie didn’t know how to respond. Something told him
silence was the smartest option.

“Did you hear me?” Pierson said, louder this time.

“Yes, sir,” Charlie replied. The detective was even closer
now. He’d lined his eyes up directly with Charlie’s so that they were forced to
stare at each other. It was excruciating.

“I think you’re a liar. How does that make you feel?” Again,
Charlie was tongue-tied. “I said,
how does that make you feel?!
” The
heat from Detective Pierson’s breath hit Charlie’s skin, giving him chills over
his face and neck.

“Um…angry?” Charlie said.

“Oh
you’re
angry? Why? Because you’ve been inconvenienced?
Because people are going to say things about you in the halls? A girl is dead!
Gone! Her family is destroyed! And you’re just going to sit there like you have
nothing to do with that?! You do. I know it. I know it in my bones, Charlie.
And I’m going to prove it. Then we’ll see if you feel something other than
anger.”

The detective paused for one more second before finally taking
a step back. Charlie caught the look on Principal Hayden’s face; he was just as
terrified.

“I’m done with him,” Pierson said. “Let him go.”

“One second,” Principal Hayden said. “Charlie, there’s one
more element to this situation, and, because of it, I’m going to recommend that
you go home right now and stay home from school tomorrow.”

“What? Why?” Charlie asked, bewildered.

“Someone—we’re trying to find out who—leaked
this letter from Sarah to the school newspaper, and the digital version got emailed
out to every single student in this school an hour ago.”

Just before Charlie squeezed his eyes shut, he noticed the
smile on Detective Pierson’s face.

Sasha

Sasha was sitting in Algebra II
trying to focus on what Mrs. Bates was saying and not that fact that she was
screaming it at them like some kind of drill sergeant. In fairness, her lack of
attention wasn’t exactly Bates’ fault. Sasha could barely make it through a
class these days without either nodding off or faking focus while staring at
her tablet and tracking more information from the Englewood feed.

Paying a little more attention to Laura Rivers turned out to
have an unexpected benefit, even if it did account for the loss of sleep.
Laura’s internet searches revealed very quickly that she did think Becca had
something to do with the messages Charlie was getting. Sasha tracked Laura digging
through Becca’s social media profiles, looking for some connection to Charlie,
Amanda, Kit, Miller, and even Sarah. Laura also did a more general search for
Becca’s name related to the terms “suicide,” “drugs,” “mental illness,” and “Navesink
River”—maybe thinking it was simply the idea of Sarah’s death that upset
Becca enough to terrorize Charlie? Sasha couldn’t be sure, but she did know
that Laura’s snooping was a little bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand,
this was great news because it meant Laura was far off the trail of finding
Sasha. Granted, Sasha could make herself impossible to find thanks to her
skills in that arena, but it was still a plus. But the negative was that if
Becca did actually have some tie to Charlie—something Sasha might be able
to use if she could find the connection that Laura could not—there was a
chance Laura’s suspicions would throw Becca into hiding. Sasha couldn’t decide
if she should intervene or not, and she certainly wasn’t making any headway
listening to Bates drone on.

Right now it was taking all her energy not to grab the tablet
out of her school bag and refresh the feed to see if any new messages had
popped up in her tracking system. A nearly inaudible
ping
from inside
Sasha’s bag saved her from the exercise in willpower; there
was
new
activity.

Sasha grabbed the device out of her bag when Bates wasn’t
looking and checked the notification. There had been one
ping
, but what
she saw was way more than one email or download. From the looks of it, every
single student at Englewood was sharing, tweeting, emailing, or chatting about
the very same web link. Sasha picked a random student’s chat feed and clicked
on the link. It took her straight to an article on the homepage of
The
Englewood Chronicle
.

The minute her eyes registered what the headline said, Sasha
grabbed her bag and ran out of class.

She didn’t breathe until she was behind a stall inside the
second-floor girls’ bathroom.
Sarah Castro-Tanner Speaks Out,
the front
page of
The Chronicle
blared, and this was not a gimmicky newspaper
trick. This was a real letter from Sarah with extremely damning allegations
about Charlie Sanders and his crew. Sasha read the letter addressed from Sarah
to Principal Hayden, reread it, and then read it for a third time. Even then,
she could not believe what she was seeing.

It wasn’t just the shock of knowing that Sarah had gone to
get help and no one listened—that maybe her death could have been
prevented—it was the fact that Sasha did not plant this email with
The
Chronicle
. She didn’t even know it existed. That meant that someone out
there was doing exactly what she was doing to Charlie and his friends, and she’d
had no idea.

Sasha couldn’t decide whether to be ecstatic or terrified. The
letter, meanwhile, was even further evidence of what she had been tracking for
months now: four people had something to do with Sarah’s death. They had clearly
harassed her, scaring her to the point of telling her school principal. After
Sarah killed herself, all anyone could talk about was how sick she was, how
troubled she had always been, and the fact that there’d probably been no hope
for her to ever have a normal life anyway. But that wasn’t true. People drove
Sarah to do this to herself, and Sasha didn’t believe that they stopped at
harassment. Based on what Charlie said in Kit’s basement, they’d been with
Sarah on the night she died. There was more to the story than even this email
revealed, and as far as Sasha was concerned, the four students should fess up
to the full lot so they could finally pay for whatever they had done.

But there was a second and even more prevalent question
running around Sasha’s brain: who planted this note with the newspaper? Who
else wanted these people revealed as guilty? And how had Sasha missed them in
all her digging and tracking? It seemed completely impossible. Her system was
extensive and, so far, flawless. Sasha needed to get home immediately so she
could dive back into her tracking boards and figure this out.

After one faked nurse visit and a forty-five-minute walk
home, she was back in front of her computer. She decided that she needed to
think about this less like a hacker and more like a detective. As of right now,
every single person was a suspect.

Sasha grabbed an old white board and markers from inside her
dad’s office and tape from the kitchen junk drawer. She needed to organize all
her thoughts before she could move on. She needed to walk through each and
every potential source. First up were Kit Jacobs and Sean Miller.

Sasha picked up the original photo of them that she had
turned into a prank weeks ago and stared at the high school sweethearts—he
the loveable jock and she the perky Goody Two-shoes.

Kit and Sean seemed less likely to have a vendetta against
their own friends, but Sasha didn’t want to rule them out. They were part of
whatever plan unfolded, but had been curiously more silent on the matter than
Charlie and Amanda. There was no question that they might be plotting against
the two dominant teens in their group. Neither had been the ringleader throughout
this whole charade. Besides, Kit’s recent online binge suggested she was close
to cracking. So what if Kit and Sean wanted to rid themselves of Charlie and
Amanda forever by implicating them? What if they truly did have less
involvement? That would make them innocent enough to frame Charlie and Amanda,
and
keep themselves out of the story. Sasha taped their photo up to the board and
underneath it wrote: “
friend framers.”

Next was Amanda. Charlie first suspected Amanda of pranking
him with the Vids, but had since dropped the accusations. But what if it
was
Amanda who sent the letter to the school newspaper? Maybe she was the jealous
girlfriend who wanted to make Charlie pay for leaving her in favor of Laura?
Maybe she was conniving enough to make herself seem innocent of whatever
Charlie and the rest of them did? If she was telling on him, then she could
control everything, and since she was part of the story from the beginning,
maybe she knew about this letter Sarah wrote and somehow got a copy? Anyone
from inside the halls of Englewood could hide a file in the principal’s
archives and sneak a story into
The Chronicle
. Why not Amanda?

Sasha printed a copy of Amanda’s profile picture and taped
it up next to the picture of Kit and Sean. Under it she wrote: “
girlfriend +
revenge.”

After that, there were Becca and Laura. The reason Becca
didn’t seem a likely culprit to Sasha was because she’d known about Sarah’s
story for years and done nothing. She was raised in the town. Why would she be
out to get vengeance now? What was her motivation? And for that same reason,
how could Laura ever be on the culprit list? Yes, Becca and Laura both worked
at
The Chronicle
, meaning it would be easiest for them to just publish
the piece, but anyone with basic hacking skills could do the same. Sasha could
not find a connection between Becca and Laura prior to the start of the school
year, so it didn’t make sense for them to be working together. Plus, Sasha
still could not figure out a way that Becca or Laura had access to the email
from Sarah in the first place. The person who planted this story in
The
Chronicle
had information straight from Sarah from a long time ago, information
that couldn’t even be found through a hack of Sarah’s computer. Sasha had
personally searched every single device that Sarah Castro-Tanner owned after
her death, and there wasn’t a shred of evidence that the letter existed.

The minute that thought left Sasha’s mind, a lightbulb went off.
Who says the letter is from a long time ago
?

She was falling for the same prank as everyone at Englewood,
including the principal and the cops. That letter didn’t need to be from a time
when Sarah was alive; it didn’t need to be from Sarah at all. Anyone could have
written it now and planted it to seem like it was from years ago.

And in that case, maybe it wasn’t about uncovering the truth
behind Sarah’s death. Maybe the person who planted this just wanted to ruin
Charlie Sanders with whatever information they could gather. That meant they
didn’t need to know Sarah when she was alive; they only needed to know Charlie
back then. Sasha had been tracking him since shortly after Sarah’s death, but
what if the person responsible for this knew what happened to Sarah before she
set up her system?

Sasha didn’t know anything about Charlie’s whereabouts
before Sarah’s death. Maybe Amanda was furious about something he did in seventh
grade and had finally snapped? Or maybe Charlie met Laura years ago through
some friend of a friend and did something to make her angry, but didn’t
remember?

There were no immediate answers, but if Sasha had learned
one thing from this entire experience, it was that people’s desire for vengeance
should not be underestimated. Look at her. Two years ago she was a quiet middle
school student, and now she was a cyber criminal. Anything was possible.

Sasha printed pictures of both Becca and Laura and placed
them on the board below Amanda, Kit, and Sean. Next to them she wrote two giant
question marks. Their motive was unclear, but they couldn’t be called innocent
quite yet.

With that massive task finally done, Sasha decided to take
herself for something to eat in town. Her parents wouldn’t be home from work
for hours, as usual, and she needed some space to think. She would grab a
burger at the bistro and then come home to scan the system for any more clues.
Time away from the thinking felt impossible, but Sasha knew that she needed to
keep a clear mind if she was going to continue. She could not afford to slip up
at this point, especially not with someone else after Charlie and his friends.
She would take thirty minutes away from her computer and phone, tops.

Thirty-three minutes later, after trying and failing to
enjoy a burger and some fries, Sasha found herself face-to-face with an email
that made her question ever walking away from her computer again. It was from
[email protected]. Sasha felt a nervous flutter in her heart as she
clicked through and starting reading the message.