by H. P. Bayne
“Hal doesn’t know anything about a keycard either, I’m afraid,” Lana said. “As for any Cloud passwords, we aren’t sure. I knew the password to his laptop, since he had to call me once from school to have me email him a copy of a report he’d written. But that’s all I can help you with there, I’m afraid.”
Actually, that seemed like plenty. “Is there a way I could have a look at the laptop?”
“Sorry. I gave it to Evan after Carter died. Evan didn’t have a lot of money to buy one himself. He was going to wipe it and reprogram it, was my understanding.”
Sully thought back to the items still in the room. “How about his video game system? Would there be any photos on there? Newer systems access the Internet, so some might be able to download photos from the Cloud.”
“We can certainly check.” Lana led the way back to her son’s room and toward the large television. The video game system rested on the shelf below, and she stared at it a moment before touching it. “He loved this thing. Every night after school, he spent at least two hours on it. He was on here before he left that last day. I haven’t touched the controller since.”
Sully hadn’t looked directly at the woman, the hood preventing it, but the direction of her voice when it next came suggested she’d turned to look at him. “I know this may sound silly, but could you use the second controller? I just, I mean this one was his, so—”
Sully cut in, sparing her the need to provide further explanation. “You don’t need to explain. I get it. I’ll use the other controller.”
“Thank you so much for understanding.”
Sully waited while Lana readied the system, ensuring the second controller was working before passing it off to her guest. It had been years since Sully had used a gaming system; Dez had one when Sully came to live with the Braddocks, and their parents had later bought them a new one to share. But that had been a long time ago, and technology had advanced significantly since.
“Do you have any idea how to find out if there are photos on here?” he asked.
“You too, huh?” she said. “I could never figure these things out either.”
She took the controller back, and Sully watched the screen as she scrolled through various games and menu options. Toward the end of the top menu was an app for music. There were also apps for Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, but Sully suspected he wouldn’t find what he was after on social media. If there really was something improper going on between Carter and a teacher, no way he’d post photos of her where others could see.
His heart thudded as Lana scrolled over one more spot in the menu. There it was: an app marked “Photos.”
“This should help,” Lana said unnecessarily as she clicked on the app. Instantly, a grid of thumbnails popped onto the screen.
Almost as instantly came the sense Carter had reappeared. From beneath the hood, Sully couldn’t see him. But he could feel the static electricity, the chill, the sensation of tension and anxiety Sully recognized as belonging to someone other than the two physical people standing within this room.
A moment later, the device clicked off.
“Damn it,” Lana muttered. “It did this to me once before when I was looking through the machine. I didn’t bother again after. I think it must be broken.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Sully said. “Carter’s here. I think he’s anxious about something in his photos. Could you give me a few minutes? It might be there’s something on there he’d rather you not see.”
“Carter’s here?” Emotion thickened the woman’s voice. “Why wouldn’t he want me to see?”
Sully thought back to the image Carter had accidentally revealed, the one of the grinning woman in her underwear. “Um, well… he’s a teenage boy. With hormones. I think he might be a bit embarrassed about….”
Sully was embarrassed himself, not wanting to have to finish the statement. Thankfully, Lana figured it out without the need for additional disclosure. “Oh, I see. I get it. I’ll give you a few minutes here. Will you let me know what you find?”
Sully assured her he would, then watched her feet as she stepped from the room. Only then did he turn his attention fully to Carter. “I know you might not want certain people to see certain things, but I need to, okay? I need you to let me in.”
A pause. Then the device blinked back on. A moment later, the thumbnails reappeared on the TV screen.
Using the spare remote, Sully scrolled through photos of family, of friends. Of Carter and Evan together. Carter with Roanna. Lars in his spelunking gear—Sully spent a little time on those before deciding there wasn’t much to be found. Plenty of selfies showing the good-looking youth Carter had been before the cave collapse.
He paused in his search as his eye caught on the colour brown—or, more specifically, the brown of a short, shiny bob.
The tension in the room had eased a little when Lana left. Now it spiked again, and Sully worried Carter might decide he didn’t want anyone looking at these images.
“I know there might be some embarrassing stuff on here,” he told the teen. “I get it, okay? Believe me. I’ve been around a little too, so don’t worry.”
“Been around,” if that meant sleeping with Takara. Because, in all honesty, Sully had been too shy to so much as approach a girl before Ara had come into his life. A lifetime’s worth of secrets didn’t lend itself to intimacy.
Not that Carter needed to know those details. The fact the thumbnails remained on the screen was a sign Sully had been successful, so he continued scrolling, searching for a good image of the young woman’s face—one where her eyes weren’t concealed behind a pair of large sunglasses.
He was a few shots in when he came across three photos he suspected were the cause of Carter’s anxiety. The previous shots revealed little besides a teenage boy’s crush on a pretty, young woman. These photos showed this was more than an innocent schoolboy crush.
The first showed the woman leering at the camera while modelling a tiny, royal blue bikini. The second was of her topless and lying in bed, upper body propped up by lightly toned arms. The pose concealed the curve of her breasts, but it didn’t hide much else. The smile on her face was coy and alluring, the expression of someone who’d already crossed the threshold from friend to lover.
The third confirmed any suspicions. Taken at the same time and place, it showed the still-naked woman; next to her, his arm’s positioning revealing he was the one taking the selfie, was Carter.
To placate the nervous teen, Sully scrolled past the shots quickly, but soon found himself called back to them. There were no other photos of the woman that followed, and none that showed her face so well as those ones did.
There was probably a way to email them to himself, but without a clue how to go about it, Sully settled for snapping photos of the racier pictures with his phone. He then took another photo, one of the more innocent shots of the woman while fully clothed, her eyes concealed by her sunglasses. It wasn’t perfect, but it would be a more innocuous picture to show certain people—people like Lana and Hal Devereaux.
Powering down the machine, Sully turned to Carter.
“Thanks for letting me see. I think this will help. I appreciate it.”
Phone in hand and the clothed photo on the screen, Sully left the room and found Lana in the kitchen.
“Did you find what you needed?” Lana asked.
“I found a few photos. I’m wondering if you can tell me if this looks like the woman you saw in the one on Carter’s phone.”
Lana approached and took the phone from him. She’d held it all of a second when she responded.
“I’m pretty sure that’s her.” She returned the phone to Sully with a question. “Is there something I should be worried about here? I mean, I know I told you Carter had a crush on her, but you don’t think there was anything else to it, do you?”
That was the question Sully had dreaded, the one that left him caught between a spirit’s desire for secrecy and a parent’s
right to know about her child’s life. There was no question Lana and Hal needed to be told about this woman’s relationship with Carter, but there were other questions Sully needed to answer first—namely, whether this woman was definitely the teacher Theresa Hanson. If it turned out Lana—who’d never met the woman—was wrong in her identification, Sully risked ruining a teacher’s reputation over nothing. There was the matter of Carter’s trust to deal with. Sully was convinced the dead teen was still holding onto something, some secret surrounding his death. If Carter decided Sully had betrayed his trust, there was a very real chance he’d shut Sully out.
Carter was in the room; that much Sully could feel. What he did with this moment could make or break the tenuous bond he’d been able to form with the young ghost.
“I don’t have all the answers yet, Mrs. Devereaux,” he said. “But I’m working on it. I promise I’ll share what I find once I know more for sure.”
She accepted his answer with a new question, one that changed the subject just enough to take the heat off Carter.
“What’s it like, what you can do?” she asked. “Seeing the things you see? I can’t imagine that’s easy.”
“It isn’t,” Sully said. “It’s a weight. But I’m getting better at carrying it.”
21
Evan Radich hadn’t attended Pintlake for classes but, as Carter’s best friend, he would be in the best position to know whether anything was going on between Carter and a teacher. Teenage boys shared things with each other they didn’t with their parents. Chances were Evan had not only seen photos of Tessa Hanson, but the photo.
Not that Evan would be happy to see Sully. Three more calls to his phone went unanswered, as did another text. It was possible he was in class, but that didn’t explain the radio silence since Sully and Dez had tried to reach him after the meeting in Marc’s office.
The best place to find Evan, given the hour, was at the university, so Sully plotted out the bus routes he’d need and made his way there. But it wasn’t a small campus, and there was no simple way to find out what classes Evan had on his schedule for today.
Sully thought about Marc as someone who might be able to ask around for him a bit. Either that, or Sully could hang around the sociology department and hope for the best. Neither seemed like a great option, one likely to get Marc into some hot water and the other holding the potential for becoming a colossal waste of time.
As it happened, life threw Sully a line. He didn’t see Evan anywhere as he entered the wide expanse of lawn around which the university’s oldest buildings were set.
But he did see Roanna.
She sat, book in hand, on one of the benches lining the Bowl. As luck would have it, no one was next to her. Roanna looked up as Sully sat on the opposite side of the bench. He spotted the flash of recognition, followed by a slight widening of her eyes.
“Hi.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was trying to find Evan. He’s not returning my calls.”
Roanna turned back to her book. “Maybe he doesn’t want to.”
“Did he tell you we wanted to talk to you?”
Roanna closed the book and stuffed it into a bag at her feet. “I’ve got to go.”
“Wait. Please. I just want to talk.”
She’d been about to stand, but something held her back. She asked the question without looking at Sully. “Evan told me you can see Carter. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“What does he want?”
“Whenever I see them, they need someone to help them. Usually it’s about finding justice. Sometimes it’s something else.”
There was another question on her lips, the way they parted. Sully waited, gave her what felt like a long time to ask it. “He hates me, doesn’t he?”
“Why would he hate you?”
“I’m dating his best friend. Evan and I have been together since it happened. We’re serious. We’ve even talked about getting married someday. Maybe Carter feels like we betrayed him.”
“Is that why Evan isn’t calling me back?”
“Maybe there are things we don’t want to know. It took both of us a long time to get past what happened to Carter. You’re bringing it all up again.”
“I didn’t set out to bring it all up. Carter came to me. I can’t ignore that. He’s still just a seventeen-year-old kid, and he needs someone to help him. I know you can’t see him, so I get how you’d ask me to leave it alone. But if you saw the things I did, you’d understand that’s not possible. I need to ask you something, and it probably won’t be easy to answer.”
“What?”
“You and Evan. Were you two seeing each other while Carter was still alive?”
“Excuse me?” If she’d been trying for indignant, the squeak at the end ruined her intent.
Sully didn’t repeat the question, just waited. He’d given it some thought, the reason Evan was ignoring them. Sully didn’t think someone professing to care about his best friend would willingly leave that person lingering in a state like Carter was forced to exist, so it had to come down to one of three things: Evan thought “Oliver Chadwell” was off his nut; Evan was responsible for Carter’s death and was doing everything in his power to avoid detection; or he had something else to hide. It had seemed obvious back in Marc’s office Evan believed Carter was still around, and Sully didn’t have Evan pegged as a killer. That left option three, and Sully couldn’t think of anything else that might cause two people to go out of their way to avoid him.
“We weren’t seeing each other back then,” Roanna said. Another loaded pause ended a moment later with the statement Sully had been expecting. “But we wanted to.”
“Did Carter suspect anything?”
“Carter had other stuff on his mind. He was obsessed with caving, and the only person he wanted to hang out with anymore was Lars—or should I say Lars’s girlfriend.”
“Tessa?”
Roanna nodded. “Carter was obsessed with her. He thought I didn’t know, but I did. I’m not stupid. I didn’t know how to talk to him about it, though, so I went to Evan. I thought Carter might have told him something. If he was involved with her, I would just end things with him.”
“You didn’t ask Carter himself?”
“I didn’t know how. I’m not good with confrontation. If I was like one of those girls in the movies, I would have gone over and had some big blowup with him. But even thinking about doing that made me feel like I was going to throw up. I couldn’t, so I went to Evan instead.”
“What did he tell you?”
“I guess I’d hoped he’d tell me I was crazy, that no way would Carter risk screwing up what we had. But he didn’t. He told me he was worried Carter was in the middle of something that was going to get him in big trouble. He told me about some photos Carter had showed him of Tessa, stuff he said made it pretty obvious there was more going on than just friendship. He didn’t want to tell me, but he said it was better for me to know than have everything going on behind my back.”
“But you didn’t break up with Carter?”
“Like I said, I hate confrontation. Evan showed me those photos only about a week before the cave-in. I barely saw Carter after I learned the truth. It was summer and he was spending every free moment either down at the caves, maybe even with her. So Evan and I ended up hanging out, just the two of us. He was so sweet. He could see I was hurt, and he kept trying to talk me through it, telling me someone better would come along. Then, one day, it happened. We kissed. Nothing more. It wasn’t some big make-out session. Just one kiss. We both felt so guilty about it.”
“But you kept seeing each other?”
“Not seeing each other,” Roanna corrected. “Hanging out. As friends.”
“Sorry. That’s what I meant.”
“Yeah, we hung out. Every day. We didn’t mean to go behind Carter’s back. Both of us had been texting him, asking to meet up. I talked to Evan about breaking up with Carter, and he was t
rying to coach me through it. Thing is, Carter never got back to me, not with anything more than texts saying he was busy, could we meet up next week, kind of thing. So Evan and I just hung out more. Then Carter was killed, and it ended up Evan’s and my roles changed. He needed my support. He had a hard time with Carter’s death, worse than I did. They went back a long way, all the way to elementary school. And there was the other thing.”
“Carter wanted Evan to go with him that day.”
“Evan still thinks if he’d gone down there, maybe he could have prevented it somehow.”
“He told Carter he had plans, so he couldn’t meet him. Did those plans include you?”
“Yeah.”
“Were the two of you were together when it happened?”
“No. He was planning on coming over, but not until later. That’s what bothers Evan the most, I think. He kind of lied to Carter. In reality, he could have gone to the caves and still come and met me later. Evan just didn’t want to go. By then, he and I had got close, and he was really pissed at Carter over how he was treating me. Carter had more or less written us off, and Evan was starting to do the same back. He feels like he let Carter down in every possible way: he lied to him about being busy, he’d betrayed his trust by telling me about Tessa, he’d developed feelings for me, and he wasn’t there when he was killed. That’s a lot to have to live with.”
Sully had started to wonder something else, but it wasn’t a question to ask Roanna. Instead, he dug out his phone and opened his photos app, locating the less lascivious photo of the brunette from Carter’s gaming console, the one of her in the oversized sunglasses.
“Is this Tessa?” he asked, holding it for Roanna to see.
She nodded, lip curling slightly in disgust. “That’s her.”
“Is she blonde now?”
“No idea. I haven’t seen her since before Carter was killed.”
“She wasn’t at his funeral?”