Dead Ringer (23 page)

Charlie

The last thing Charlie expected to
see at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night was Sean Miller walking up to his
apartment building.

“I should have come here the minute I heard the news about
you getting cut from the team,” he said after he walked through Charlie’s door.
“I’m sorry.” Then he reached his hand out for their typical handshake-and-hug
combo.

* * *

“I get it,” Charlie said as they picked
at the leftover mac and cheese his mom made for dinner. “I wouldn’t want to go
anywhere near me after everything that’s happened. I’m toxic, but it still hurt
to be abandoned.”

“I know.” Miller said. “I was just trying to protect Kit.”

Charlie knew he shouldn’t
blame
Kit and Miller for
practically vanishing from his life—especially because he’d seen Kit
unraveling over the past months—but he didn’t have to be friendly about
the situation either. They were all involved, and now they were all terrified.
They could spend less time together to draw attention away from the group, but
they didn’t have to pretend like nothing was happening. After all, they could
have been there for each other in secret to make this whole thing a little more
bearable.

“It’s been…hard for Kit, you know. And I have to stand by
her.”

“I see what’s going on with her, Miller. How bad is it?”

In their almost six years of friendship Charlie had only
seen Miller express two emotions: happy and mad. Even when everything happened
with Sarah, he never cracked or showed stress like the rest of the group. He
was mad about the way things turned out, and then it was like a wall went up
and all the feelings were shut down. Charlie was convinced that he was a robot,
and Kit even called him that jokingly from time to time. That’s why Charlie
felt his own heart clench when he looked over and found Miller with tears in
his eyes. The sight of the strongest one of them all finally losing it was too
much to bear.

“She’s bad,” Miller finally said. He quickly wiped his face
on the sleeve of his varsity jacket, but it was clear he was using every muscle
in his very strong body to hold back more tears. “Her parents want to take her
to get meds or something because she’s bitten her fingers to shreds, and she won’t
stop pulling at her hair, and now she started picking at her skin all over,
making herself bleed. She keeps telling them it’s school stress, but I’m afraid
they’re not going to believe that for much longer. I’m afraid that if they send
her to a doctor she’s going to tell, Charlie. And I don’t know what do to. What
am I supposed to do?”

Charlie didn’t have an answer. It was no mystery to anyone
in the group that Kit fully opposed everything that happened with Sarah that
night. She went along with it because that was Kit, but she took it the hardest
after Sarah died, just like she was right now. Kit was not cut out for this
like the rest of them, and Charlie could not blame her. But he also couldn’t
let her ruin them.

“What if I could get her some meds to calm her down?”
Charlie asked.

“Like what?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll go visit my mom at work and see if I can
chat with the lady who runs the overnight pharmacy enough to let her leave me
in there. They must have Xanax or something to calm her down.”

“Yeah. I don’t know. I guess that might help.”

“It’s worth trying. I’ll see what I can do. Can you just
tell her to hold on until then?”

“I’ll try,” Miller said. “I just want her to be okay,
though, Charlie. Don’t hate me for saying this, but I’d rather go to jail than
have Kit hurt herself.”

Charlie understood the feeling, even though it terrified him
to hear that Miller might stand aside and let Kit confess. “She’s going to be
okay,” he said. “This might all be over soon. We just don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Miller said. “That’s the real reason I came over
tonight. Remember how my mom was doing some temp work over at the Englewood PD
awhile back? Well, she’s back now, helping out with some filing stuff, and she
found some papers starting the process of closing the investigation around all
of us.”

Charlie couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had been
bracing himself for another terrifying interaction with Detective Pierson for
the past week. He’d figured that the suicide note would only fuel the
detective’s fire to find out whether or not Charlie and his friends made Sarah
kill herself, but apparently it had the opposite effect.

“Why?” Charlie asked. “Nothing changed with the suicide
note.”

“I know, but I heard my mom tell my dad that she thinks they
were only after us as a murder case, not a bullying case or whatever that
means. I guess Sarah’s parents would have to press charges for it to go in that
direction, and maybe they’re not willing?”

“Are you sure about all this?”

“That’s everything I know, but it’s been almost a month
since we all talked to that detective guy. Don’t you think we would have heard
something if there was more still going on?”

Charlie didn’t want to let himself believe that they could
possibly be safe. Every time he’d felt like he had control over the situation
in the past, something blew up in his face. First the pranks from CO, then the
contact from Sasha, who may or may not have been the same person as CO—Charlie
still had no idea. After that came the letter to the police, then the note from
Sarah to Hayden. It had been a total onslaught since September. The idea that
it could all slowly start to fade away was unimaginable.

“I thought there was no way out,” he said to Miller. “I was
going to ask my mom to transfer schools.” Then he said something that he never
expected to confess to anyone. “I thought about killing myself, Mill.”

“I know,” Miller said soberly. “Kit was talking about that,
too, at first, but then she said we deserved to suffer like Sarah suffered.”

Charlie had thought that same thing lately. Maybe that’s why
it felt strange to be excited about the investigation ending—because
there was a chance they were going to get away with everything, and that still
felt wrong.

But he still couldn’t stop himself from dreaming of the
possibility that all the fear and anxiety might go away. Maybe everyone with
information had said all that they knew and it wasn’t enough to frame Charlie
and the group? Maybe they really were safe? It would be months, if not way
longer, before Charlie felt comfortable in the community, and he still had
sessions with Dr. Walter to complete before he could go back to school, but for
the first time since that initial VidBit, Charlie felt like there was hope.

Then, just after Miller left, Charlie’s phone buzzed. His
heart immediately sank. It had to be another chat from CO, an email from Sasha,
or a message from Detective Pierson—a moment of karma reminding him that
he was still in the wrong. He had allowed himself two seconds of relief, but
now the truth was coming back to haunt him.

Charlie held his breath as he grabbed his phone off the
couch and turned it over to see what flashed across the screen.

Charlie breathed out. Maybe it was okay to hope. Maybe the
worst was over.

Sasha

Sasha’s grades had taken a serious
dive since all the activity around Sarah’s story erupted, and her guidance
counselors were concerned. They threatened a meeting with her parents for the
Monday morning after winter break if things didn’t improve. Sasha had four weeks
to get her act together, one of which was technically vacation. And yet all she
could think about as she sat through the chemistry lecture of the day was the
latest contact from CO.

Why would someone put so much effort into terrorizing Charlie
and then just give up? If this was a friend, who was it? Sasha didn’t spend
much time with Sarah in the year before she died, but she figured she would
have at least heard of a person who cared enough to do what CO had done. Could
it have been someone from camp? Maybe that boy whose name Sarah wrote all over
every single one of her notebooks when she got home—Andrew, wasn’t it? Sasha
didn’t even have his last name, and she certainly couldn’t ask Sarah for
details. And what did CO mean by “it feels too risky?” Was he or she hacking,
too?

It seemed like the goal of that email was to stop Sasha from
making any contact, but, if anything, it just fueled her fire.

That afternoon Sasha was scheduled to babysit at the Hunter
house until five o’clock. The week prior she’d heard Amanda pick up a cellphone
call from Charlie, and from the sounds of it, they were being friendly again.
Then a few days later Kit and Sean showed up with Italian ices to help Amanda’s
sore throat, and the three of them watched a movie together in the den.
Apparently all it took was Sarah’s suicide note for the gang to get right back
together. None of them seemed fully back to normal, especially not Kit, who
looked much skinnier than Sasha remembered, but they were hanging out together,
which was bad enough. It sickened Sasha, but it also motivated her to figure
out how to break them all apart again.

After work at the Hunters’, Sasha rushed straight home to
her computer. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t gone through this process yet,
but the first logical place to start in terms of figuring out who CO could be
was inside the Englewood High system. The most obvious connection would be
someone with the initials
C
-
O
. Sasha ran a search on all those
letters within the hundreds of real names and usernames, but only three came up:
Courtney Orleans—a senior who had transferred from a neighboring town the
year prior; Chad Ochsman—a foreign exchange student from Sweden; and
Candace Orsinsky—a freshman who was two years younger than Sarah. Technically
there was also Owen Cleary and Olivia Crespew—in case
C-O
was someone’s
reversed initials—but they were also both younger than Sarah and hadn’t
once alerted Sasha’s system with a single mention of Laura-the-look-alike’s
arrival. None of these were likely candidates, but Sasha enhanced the system to
account for extra tracking around those five names just in case.

Then Sasha stopped and allowed herself to think through
something she’d pushed back many times before during this process. This time it
felt too risky to just hope without knowing. She typed one more name into the
system with a flag for enhanced screening:
Becca Asher
.

Sasha could still bring herself to tears at the mere thought
of what she’d done to Becca. Theirs’ wasn’t just a first love. Becca was the
person who helped Sasha truly understand all the confusing feelings going on
inside her brain and body. Becca accepted her for who she was and kept her safe
from people who wouldn’t understand. Becca tried to help her after everything
that happened with Sarah, and Sasha thanked her by vanishing because life was
too hard in that moment. But maybe Becca never forgot about what happened to
Sasha’s sister. Maybe she was trying to help as a way to get Sasha back. Sasha
felt a sense of relief as she finished typing Becca’s name and closed her
computer, though she feared that was not the answer to the mystery.

Sasha’s next task was to try and figure out if CO could be
someone from Sarah’s past outside of Englewood high. The camp her sister went
to was called Mackinack, Sasha remembered, so the
C
and
O
weren’t
specifically a reference to that, but maybe there was a bunk name or summer
activity that played a part in the handle?

Sasha decided that her next best option was to go through
the box of things her parents had saved from Sarah’s room right before they
moved, even though it was the last thing in the world that she wanted to
experience.

It was only the second time since Sarah died that she’d
opened the plastic Costco bin and dug through the clothes, books, and memories.
The first time was on the first anniversary, almost one year earlier. All she could
remember from that moment was the smell. She hadn’t ever thought about Sarah
having a distinct scent until she opened that box, but the second she did, it
filled her nose and brain. It was like Sarah was sitting right there next to
her. The scent was a little sweet, like the deodorant she wore, and a little
dusty-smelling because Sarah lived in old sweaters that she bought at vintage
stores. Sasha had to breathe through her mouth as she sifted through all
Sarah’s things that day. The smell made it too hard.

She started to do the same thing today even before she
pulled the bin down from the closet in her parent’s room where it was stowed
away, probably forgotten by them. Sasha started with a few things from camp—some
T-shirts, a lanyard, the program for the camp play—but apparently they
hadn’t saved the Mackinack yearbook for her to check the names.

She took the stack of VHS tapes that her parents had saved
from recordings of when she and Sarah were growing up. They never watched them
as a family after Sarah died, but Sasha knew what was on them from earlier
viewings: Sarah’s first birthday party, Sarah’s first swim lesson, the first
time she and Sarah put on a dance recital in the backyard… They were all taken
in happier times, before her sister’s behavior problems set in and their
parents started the miserable cycle of trying to figure out what was wrong. Sasha
doubted there was anything on the videos that would reference CO, but she
decided she’d try to watch them later if she didn’t find anything else.

Other than those, the camp things, clothing, and a few
stuffed animals, it was only two school notebooks: one marked “Chemistry” and
the other “English.” Sasha didn’t understand why her parents felt compelled to
save old homework. Maybe they wanted to see Sarah’s handwriting or remember
that she was an incredibly smart girl despite her issues?

Sasha opened up the folder where all the papers were kept
and grabbed the first sheet her fingers hit—a chemistry worksheet with
Sarah’s notes and scribbles all over it. It was a series of Lewis dot
structures for compounds, the same lesson Sasha had been staring at and zoning
out on in her own Chemistry class that morning. Sasha had forgotten that she
was now the exact age her sister was before she died and taking the exact same
classes. The fact gave her instant chills.

Sasha tried to refocus on the series of dots, dashes, and letters on the page
but her eyes did all the work—they immediately jumped to the compound drawn
at the very bottom of the page. It was impossible to miss because it was
circled at least five times in deep, red pen.

If Sasha had paid any attention in class over the past
months she would have known what the letters
C
and
O
surrounded
by those dots and lines stood for, but instead she had to rush over to her
laptop to look it up.

Sasha didn’t read past the words “silent killer.” That
was all she needed to see.

It seemed ridiculous to draw the connection
—
this
was probably just a spot on the chart that Sarah couldn’t remember so she
circled it a bunch of times to help. If there was any more evidence, it might
be something to consider, but all the doodles around the page were just of
shapes and squiggles. Unless… Her fingers flipped the piece of paper over and
she immediately dropped it to the ground. It landed backside up, forcing her to
stare at the hundreds and hundreds of handwritten
CO
s all over the page.
Then, in the bottom right corner, so small that Sasha didn’t see it at first,
were the words that made her stop breathing: “
the silent killer.”

Sasha didn’t realize she spoke the words out loud until they
were out of her mouth and hanging in the air: “Sarah…is it you?”