Dead Ringer (25 page)

December
14

Charlie

Almost two weeks passed before
Charlie’s first day back at Englewood, and he was happy that it fell only four
days before winter break. Walking through the double-steel doors that led from
the student parking lot into the back entrance of the school was ten times
scarier than stepping foot in Laura’s house for her Friendsgiving party.
Despite that, Charlie had the same plan for this moment as he had then: he would
keep his head down and not respond to any comments from anyone. But the moment
he walked into the building all his nerves were eased. Laura was standing
directly inside the doorframe, casually waiting for him.

“Oh, hi,” she said. “I thought I might find you here…and
that it might be helpful for you to find me.”

Charlie wanted to wrap her in a giant hug, but they’d both
agreed to take things slow, so he didn’t make any more moves than necessary. His
return was enough to get everyone in school talking. The fact that he might be getting
back together with Laura would make them explode.

“You’re the best,” Charlie said as they walked toward
English together.

“I know,” she said with a nudge of his arm and a smile.

They had started talking and texting again right after her
Thanksgiving party and hanging out soon after. So far they had mostly hung out
and watched movies at her house when her parents weren’t home, but over the
weekend before this Monday back at school, they ventured out to Clover for
sandwiches. They didn’t see anyone who would have taken issue with them hanging
out, and they also didn’t hear any choice words from random Englewood people
who were still anti-Charlie. It was a welcome change. The next step would be to
ease back into school, then hopefully spend more time with Laura there and in
public.

“You can come meet me in the newspaper office for lunch,”
Laura said as they sat down in English. “I talked to Becca about it, and she’s
okay.”

“But after what you told me about her, Becca must hate me
more than anybody.”

Now that they were trying to be together again, Laura had
insisted on a policy of not keeping any secrets. She told him that she snooped
on Becca because she thought the pranks might be coming from her, but
ultimately learned about Becca’s past with Lexi Castro-Tanner. It inspired him
to confess that he had been thinking about killing himself that night on the
bridge when she found him. It felt good to get that out, even if he still
hadn’t told Laura everything. He wanted to, and he was building up the courage
to say as much as he could without confessing to the actual crime itself.
Charlie planned to tell Laura everything when they were away together at her
grandmother’s cabin. .

The timing of this little getaway turned out to be perfect,
despite the strangeness of it falling on the anniversary of Sarah’s death.
December 23 was a half day at school and it happened to be a night that his mom
had a double shift at the call center. That meant she went in to work at
mid-afternoon on the twenty-second and didn’t come home until almost 4:00 p.m.
on the twenty-third. It was a deal she’d made with a coworker so that she could
spend Christmas Eve
and
Christmas Day with Charlie this year. Typically
she missed one or the other, but she said that she thought it was important for
them to be together for both after everything that had happened this fall.
Charlie felt slightly guilty spending the night with Laura and not telling his
mom, but he knew it was a harmless lie and that she’d have no way of finding
out.

In eight short days they would be together up north, away
from it all. Right now all Charlie needed to focus on was getting through eight
hours of school, five times. He had already lined up lunch with Laura in the old
Chronicle
office to make thirty minutes of that time more bearable. He
was going to survive.

Gym was the period that came right before lunch, and it
would be Charlie’s chance to interact with Amanda, Kit, and Miller. They were
all in the same section and currently all assigned to the same unit:
volleyball.

“Good to have you back,” Miller said as they threw their
backpacks into their lockers and took out their shorts and T-shirts. “Is it
good to be back?”

“It’s weird,” Charlie confessed. “But I’m hanging in.”

“Have you seen Stanley yet?” Miller asked.

“Not today, but we had a meeting before I came back, and
it’s…pretty much all good between us.”

“Cool,” Miller said, then he leaned closer to Charlie. “Do
you think maybe it’s all over now?” he asked.

Charlie knew what he meant. He’d wondered the same thing at
least a dozen times a day. It had now been four full weeks since Sarah’s
suicide note was found, and none of them had heard a peep from the cops, Sasha,
or CO. Charlie didn’t like to admit it to himself because it felt like jinxing
the whole thing, but he truly felt like the worst had passed.

“I don’t know,” he said to Miller, “but I hope so.”

Miller nodded, agreeing, then slammed Charlie on the back as
lovingly as possible. Both guys finished changing and went to close their gym
locker doors. But just before they did so, there was a familiar
ping
,
one from each of their backpacks. It was the sound of an incoming email.

“Should we—?”

“No. We’ll check it later.”

“But what if—?”

“No, Charlie. Let it go.”

Charlie knew that Miller was right, but couldn’t stop
himself. The old paranoia came right back, and he grabbed his phone out of the
front pocket of his backpack and flipped the screen on. He felt his face go
completely blank.

“No…” Miller said.

Charlie couldn’t talk. He just turned the phone and held it
up to Miller’s face. On the screen was a single email from Sasha. The subject
line:
It’s time for a little get-together.

Sasha

Sasha couldn’t be 100 percent sure
that all four of them would show up after receiving her invite, but she was
pretty confident. If she had received an email like the one she’d sent, she
certainly would have done whatever the person asked.

Sasha told two lies within that one simple paragraph, but
she didn’t care. The first was that she would continue to torture them if they
didn’t show up. She knew that there wasn’t much further she could go in
threatening Charlie, Amanda, Kit, and Sean. Her parents had confirmed with the
EPD that they didn’t want to press bullying charges, so unless one of the four
confessed to actually killing Sarah, the case would stay closed. Sasha didn’t
think a confession was likely, so she had decided that this would be her last
act with the whole ordeal.

The second lie was that she would be there in person to meet
them. She had gone back and forth on that issue, but ultimately decided it was
safer to stay back. She would watch everything go down from a safe distance.
Finding some “security” she could bring into the fold felt like an unnecessary
risk and she couldn’t trust herself not to lunge at one of the four of them if
they were alone. Sasha also couldn’t trust that they wouldn’t hurt her in some
way, especially because at least two of them would recognize her immediately—Amanda
because she’d been working in her home for the past three months and Charlie
because they had met that one day in the Hunters’ entryway.

Just to be safe, Sasha had quit the job with Amanda’s sisters
the week prior. She couldn’t imagine which laws she’d broken by taking the job
in the first place, but it didn’t feel like a good idea to stay connected. The
entire time she was at the Hunters’ she was Lexi Hara—her mother’s maiden
name—so they were none the wiser. It seemed best for it to stay that way.

Sad as Sasha was to never confront the four people who saw
her sister last with some kind of furious rant, she decided it was time for her
to move on. Plus, what she planned for the little cemetery in honor of Sarah
would serve as plenty of revenge even if she wasn’t there in person.

 The idea came to Sasha after she sat down to watch the
home videos of Sarah as a child. The creepy periodic table discovery left her
feeling totally unsettled that night, and she thought some time with happy
memories of her sister might help. It didn’t ease her tensions around the
potential CO connection—the idea that Sarah might somehow be alive—but
it did give her the idea for how to leave Charlie, Amanda, Kit, and Sean with
another memory they would never forget. She was going to make them see Sarah as
an innocent, loving, happy child, and then she was going to leave them with a
message from “Sarah” that would haunt them until the day they, too, died.

Sasha would set up a TV at Sarah’s gravesite and program it
to start running the tapes when the group approached. It could all be done
remotely, and it required very little setup. Yes, maybe they would run away the
second they saw what was happening, but she had a feeling that they wouldn’t be
able to turn away from the sound of what they thought was Sarah’s real voice
with a few words for all of them. Sasha knew that she could sound enough like
her sister to be convincing, and since it was now proven that Sarah had taken
her own life—even if she did it during whatever game Amanda arranged—then
she might have recorded something for them all to hear and left it with her
little sister for safe keeping. Sasha wasn’t too concerned with those details.
She knew that the recording would speak for itself.

It took Sasha a few tries to get Sarah’s voice just right,
but she knew she’d finally nailed it when she listened back to the recording
and felt chills run all over her body. She imagined that would be the least of
what Charlie and his friends would feel.

“Hello Charlie, Amanda, Kit, and Sean. It’s me, Sarah.
Before you totally lose your minds, don’t worry. I’m not back from the dead to
haunt you, technically. I made this recording before I died and gave it to
someone I trust just in case you needed to hear it in the future
—
when
I’m gone. If you’re hearing it now, then that means more details came out about
my death, and you four still didn’t get in trouble.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen when I’m gone, and I
can’t control that, but I want to make sure you know that someone else in the
world knows exactly what happened between us all. They were watching. They have
proof, and they’ll use that proof just when you least expect it to ruin your lives
just like you ruined mine. Maybe they already have. If you’re hearing this
message, then they probably have. I have to leave that part to them, but I
wanted to make sure that I got to say one more thing to all of you.

“I forgive you. I know that you didn’t mean to do what
you did, but that you couldn’t stop yourselves because you are weak, terrified,
power-hungry people. You believe that you are more important than anything else
in the world. You have no real souls. I guess it’s a good thing you found each
other. But, unfortunately, the world is a much worse place with you four in it.
See you on the other side, hopefully sooner rather than later.”

Sasha didn’t care that a lot of the fake message she wrote
from Sarah was a lie, but they would never find out that she didn’t know all
the details “Sarah” claimed. This would either make them scared enough to
confess everything themselves or leave them crippled with fear for the rest of
their lives. Either was fine with Sasha. She was finally ready to move on.
There was just one final detail to figure out.

After this whole anniversary plan developed in her mind, Sasha
came up with one more element to try to close the last confusing part of the
case: she would invite CO, too. CO received a different email with a different
lure, but it was equally enticing. If it was an old friend of Sarah’s, he or she
would definitely show. If it was one of Charlie and his crew, there was a built-in
way for Sasha to find out which—she had told CO to wear a specific color.
And then there was option number three. Sasha had forced the last possibility
out of her mind the minute she saw the back of the paper with that periodic
table, but it kept popping back up when she least expected, haunting her.
Sarah
could not possibly be alive
, she thought.

Sasha had wasted hours and hours of her time praying for Sarah
to be alive after she went missing. Without a body, there was no real proof
that Sarah was dead, despite what every single detective and expert said. They
even conducted studies proving how quickly Sarah’s body could rush from the Navesink
River into the Atlantic Highlands inlet and then out to the ocean where,
apparently, a stronger-than-typical undertow could carry it out to sea within
minutes. It had happened before, they said. There was no way of finding her,
they said. It would cost thousands and thousands of dollars if the Castro-Tanners
insisted, they explained. That was all her parents needed to hear. They did not
even pursue a search.

For the first year after Sarah disappeared, Sasha wouldn’t
let herself believe she was dead. That’s when she dove into hacking and set up
the system to track conversation around Englewood. Someone had to know where
Sarah went. Her sister may have had problems, but Sasha hated to think she was
suicidal. But now the alternative seemed even more impossible to bear. If Sarah
was alive, then why was she hiding from Lexi? After all they had been through together
as little girls, why would she abandon her like that? Lexi wondered if she
would ever have the answer to that question.

On December 23, she would.