Following

by Jeffry W. Johnston

  At least on the outside.

  And we do need to think this through.

  When a theory turns out to be wrong, a good investigator takes a fresh look at the evidence.

  “Amy says she was at church camp all weekend, right?” I say.

  Charlie looks like she just wants to fight rather than answer my question, but after a second, she says, “Yes. I heard her telling some girlfriends.”

  “So how come when you called the camp, the woman said she wasn’t there?”

  Another pause. “I was wondering about that myself. The woman I spoke to said Amy wasn’t there based on her name not being checked.”

  I look at her. “So you think it was a clerical error? Amy was really there, her name just didn’t get checked?”

  Charlie shrugs.

  “You would think they’d be more careful,” I tell her. “Make sure the list matches up with the actual camper count or something.”

  “Maybe the woman I spoke to wasn’t a counselor. Maybe she was just a secretary or receptionist who works out of the camp office, doesn’t deal much with the kids. The counselors see Amy is there, they assume she’s been checked off, but really, the secretary didn’t. She made a mistake.”

  “Or,” I say, a little light going off in my head, “Amy was late.”

  Charlie looks at me. “Huh?”

  Talking about it like this has helped calm the hammering in my chest. A tingle of excitement takes its place. “She was late because she was at Miller’s Park.”

  “You’re not making sense,” Charlie says. “We know Amy was at camp.”

  “That doesn’t mean she wasn’t late. She probably got there after the secretary had left for the day, which is why her name wasn’t checked when you called on Sunday.”

  Charlie thinks about it. “Okay. So?”

  “We know Amy and Greg were at the field because I saw them there.”

  Charlie scowls at me. “So you say.”

  “Are you saying I made it up?”

  Charlie crosses her arms.

  “You found her cross necklace there.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “So Amy was late to camp because she needed to meet Greg at Miller’s Park first. From what I saw, following him there, he wasn’t happy about it. She was probably the one who called him on his phone, making sure he was on the way. But why meet him all the way out there?”

  “Because she didn’t want anybody to see her,” Charlie says. “She was supposed to be on her way to church camp.”

  “And she knew they’d be arguing,” I add. “So she wanted a private place to do it. What were they arguing about?”

  “Maybe he was seeing somebody else and she found out.”

  That brings me up short. “Greg? Cheating?”

  Charlie bites her lip. “I’ve heard a rumor.”

  “Is it true?” I press.

  She seems to be considering it, then says, “Nah. I didn’t believe it when I heard it. I still don’t. I’m sure there are kids jealous enough to spread rumors. See if they could break them up.”

  “That sucks.”

  Charlie shrugs. “I guess Amy could be pregnant, and that’s when she told him.”

  “Pregnant? Amy? I just figured they were…”

  “Virgins? Not doing it? What I know of them, I’d say the same thing. But they’ve been together a long time. How much longer can they just kiss and hold hands?”

  I nod my head. “That could’ve been it. Greg couldn’t handle it, he got mad, and he hit her with his backpack full of books.”

  “But maybe it wasn’t as bad as you thought.”

  “You saw the blood on the backpack. And his clothes. And she was lying on the ground.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie says, her voice suddenly rising. “But the big thing you missed was that she wasn’t dead. She was alive, and you know this because you saw her walking around in freaking school today!”

  Charlie puts her hand on her forehead. “Look at me, letting you get me caught up in this again.” Abruptly, she steps closer, and now she’s towering over me. “Okay, I get it, you needed to make that first call on Friday, but when the police didn’t find anything, we should have just let it go. If we’d just waited the weekend, we would have seen on Monday she was fine. But, no, we had to play amateur sleuth. We were going to solve the case. Greg killed Amy, and we had the proof. Except our proof is crap, because that’s not what happened.”

  She leans even closer. “You want to hear my theory? Yes, they had an argument. Why? Who cares, it’s none of our business. Maybe he hit her, and that’s awful. If someone I was dating did that to me, I’d slug him back and tell him we’re finished, get out of my life. But maybe he didn’t hit her, did you think of that? What did you really see? You didn’t actually see him hit her. You saw her lying on the ground with him holding the backpack. But for all you know, she tripped and hit her head against that dugout wall before falling. We found blood there. Maybe she landed on the book bag and that’s how her blood got on it. Maybe all Greg had done when you saw him was pick up the backpack from the ground. Maybe if you hadn’t panicked and run away, you would have seen him helping her up, then taking her to a doctor to get stitched up before she went off to camp.

  “And maybe they were sorry they had argued, maybe it was their first one. They didn’t want anyone to know so Amy decided to lie and say her cut happened at church camp, and Greg decided to get rid of the clothes he was wearing after he couldn’t wash the blood off and would have done the same thing with the backpack if we hadn’t taken it.

  “What does all that prove? Well, it tells us that maybe Greg and Amy aren’t as perfect as everyone thinks they are. But it doesn’t make Greg a murderer because, hey, guess what? Amy’s still alive.”

  Charlie finally stops ranting. I don’t know if it means she’s finished though, so I let the silence grow.

  She lets out a big sigh. “My dad’s not gonna let this go. He’s gonna be pissed. With the two calls, not to mention those two other calls you made a while back that didn’t pan out, he’s gonna think he’s got a serial prank caller on his hands. He’ll investigate. He’ll probably want to talk to every kid in school. He finds out I was part of this, I won’t be allowed to see daylight for a year.”

  “He doesn’t have to know,” I say cautiously.

  “You’re right about that,” she says. “And he’s not going to. This stays between us. Right?”

  “Right,” I say in a quiet voice.

  We revert back to silence. Charlie sits down in the chair Uncle Bill likes to fall asleep in after dinner. If things were different, we’d turn on the TV, put on Netflix, and find a movie to watch or a series we’re bingeing. Instead, we just sit here, not looking at each other, until I feel compelled to say, “I’m sorry, Charlie. I really am. I thought we were—”

  “Doing the right thing,” she finishes for me. “Yeah, I know.”

  After more silence, she says, “The thing I feel the worst about is how I let myself get sucked in.”

  “What do you mean, ‘sucked in’?” A new sense of unease rises in the pit of my stomach.

  “It’s like we were playing a game,” she says. “Cops and robbers… No. Cops and killers. Amy’s someone we see every day at school. We’re not friends with her, but we know her. We might say hi to her in the hall. And she’s so sweet she makes me cringe sometimes, but I like her. She’s a person, Alden. But when we thought Amy had been murdered we turned it into a game. Like Clue. Or like those murder mysteries where people dress up as characters. Only we thought this was real. And we still made it a game. What’s even worse… I was having fun. How sick is that?”

  Finished, Charlie lapses back into silence. I want to argue with her, but I’m not sure how. I think of how much fun she seemed to be having when she broke into Greg Matthes’s house. Had
I been doing the same? Maybe trying to prove something?

  All at once, Charlie stands up. She reaches for the ginger ale she hasn’t touched since drinking half of it. Instead of taking a sip, she just stares at it before placing it back on the coffee table. “I know it’s difficult…” She hesitates.

  “What’s difficult?” A lump is suddenly forming in my throat.

  “Your parents. What happened to them.”

  Now the lump is even bigger.

  “I remember watching you at their funeral. You looked sad, but you weren’t crying. I was sure you’d want to talk about it. I wanted you to talk to me about it. I wanted to be there for you. But you didn’t. Not to me, your best friend. Not to anyone. Instead, you play this stupid game.”

  I bristle at that. “What do you mean?”

  “I know why you do it,” Charlie continues. “You tell yourself you weren’t able to save your parents. You tell yourself it was your fault. You tell yourself that if you keep an eye on people, stay vigilant, follow them even, you’ll be able to stop the next tragedy. But what if you did? What if you saved somebody and everyone thought you were a hero? It wouldn’t change anything, would it? Your parents would still be gone, and you would still blame yourself. No matter how many times you do it, it’s not going to make the pain go away. And all you’re doing is spying on people. That’s not right. Everybody has secrets. It’s not your place to invade other people’s privacy. You don’t have the right…we don’t have the right…to do that.”

  She stops. The lump in my throat makes talking difficult, but I manage to get out, “I…I didn’t know you felt this way.”

  “I’ve told you before you should stop. You even promised me.”

  I don’t have anything to say to that.

  Charlie stares at me another moment before she says in a hushed voice, “It’s not your fault they died. It’s the fault of the creep who killed them.”

  I want to cut her off. Tell her to stop. It feels like my throat is going to explode.

  “Your parents did not die because you didn’t recognize that the man had a gun.”

  “He dropped it, Charlie.”

  “I know.”

  “I had it in my hand,” I hear myself say, though it seems to be coming from somewhere else.

  “You barely touched it,” Charlie says. “That’s what you told me back then.”

  “But on some level, I knew something was wrong. Something was off about him.”

  “You had no way of knowing—”

  “I should have been more observant. I could have stopped him, told somebody, told your father.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Alden, I was there, too.” Tears hover on the edge of her eyes. “I was the one that told you it was nothing, remember? I’ve thought about that a lot. I ask myself, what if I had listened to what my best friend was saying instead of being so gung ho about going on that stupid zip line? Maybe—”

  She stops. Takes a deep breath. I’m not sure if I want to hug her or tell her to get out.

  Charlie gets herself under control before she turns those intense eyes of hers on me and says, “I loved your mom and dad, Alden. They were great people. I miss them, too. What happened was awful. But we don’t know what might have happened if we’d reacted differently. We don’t. And I refuse to let speculation and what-ifs control my life. And you should do the same. Stop playing this game. It’s dangerous. You could really hurt somebody. Especially yourself.”

  I stare at her, afraid to say anything, afraid to move. Afraid of what might happen if I did.

  The look on her face makes me think she can read my thoughts. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ve probably said too much. I think I should go.”

  She heads for the door. I don’t try to stop her. With one hand on the handle, she turns to look at me. “I don’t think we should see each other for a while.”

  Something heavy and cold drops into the pit of my stomach. “What?”

  “I know we’ll see each other at school,” she says. “But I need some space. I don’t like what I’ve turned into these last few days. I need time alone. To think.”

  I want to argue with her, but I’m not sure if I want to beg her to stay or tell her to get the hell out.

  “Goodbye, Alden,” she says finally.

  She hesitates as if she’s waiting for me to say goodbye back. But after several seconds, she turns away, and I watch my best friend walk out, the door closing slowly behind her.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  During a dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, another of the meals we eat a lot thanks to my guardian’s limited cooking repertoire, Uncle Bill asks me how my day went at school. I guess he hasn’t heard yet about the latest “prank” pulled today on the police and on Milton High School’s dream couple. But then again, why should he? He’s not exactly the hang-out-with-the-other-parents, go-to-PTO-meetings kind of guy. Still, I should tell him. He could find out by reading Milton’s local rag and wonder why I didn’t mention it.

  But what I say is, “Fine.”

  He doesn’t question it. I can see how tired he is. As usual, he ends up in his chair in front of the TV, a beer in hand.

  The chair is the only piece of furniture he brought with him when he moved in. When Mom and Dad were alive, there was only the couch. That way we were always sitting together in this room, whether to watch TV or, as we often did, play games. Board games and card games like pinochle and hearts. A lot of the time Charlie was with us, and sometimes so were her mom or dad or both. The games were always fun. What I remember most, though, was the laughter.

  I tell my uncle I’m tired, I’m going to bed early, and he wishes me a good night. Once I’m in bed though, I can’t sleep. I’m dying to call Charlie, find out what her dad might be saying; see if she learned anything about his conversation with Amy and Greg. But I decide it’s best to honor her request for distance. At least until I see her at school tomorrow.

  Or maybe I don’t call because I don’t want to try and guess what it means if she sees my name and number on her phone and doesn’t answer.

  I’m still awake when my uncle’s snoring starts downstairs. I’m still awake when he rouses himself and walks slowly upstairs to his room. And I’m still awake when the snoring starts anew from down the hall.

  On nights like this, my mind wanders into the past. I’m back at the annual fair last summer, waiting for Charlie again when I bump into Alan Harder. This time I grab the bag with the gun off the ground before he does, and he runs away, and when I take it to Charlie’s dad and explain what happened, he finds the man and arrests him. And no one is shot. Most importantly, my parents are alive.

  Or sometimes I picture Dad telling me, “We have some good news to tell you. Something I think you’ll really like.” And I think of all the possible things he might have been about to say if Alan Harder hadn’t stopped him with his gun.

  I guess I’ll never know.

  I once read about a scientific theory that says because human consciousness consists of energy, and since energy never dies, we don’t die. That the universe we live in is part of a larger multiverse, and when our physical bodies end, our conscious energy travels to an alternate universe where we get to live our lives again, but this time we make different choices, causing our lives to move in different directions than before.

  So I like to think that my parents are now in another universe somewhere, where Alan Harder did not kill them, and an alternate me is with them in an alternate version of our living room, smiling and laughing and playing pinochle.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I guess Charlie meant it when she said her father wasn’t going to drop it.

  The school day starts with an unplanned school-wide assembly instead of first period. After we all filter into the auditorium, the princi
pal introduces Charlie’s dad, who appears from behind the curtain at the other side of the stage. He looks deadly serious and kind of scary in full uniform as he strides across the stage to the podium. I turn my head to glance at Charlie, who is sitting one row behind me and to my right. A couple of the kids next to her are saying something, but she just nods and looks straight ahead, not returning my look.

  “I’m here to talk to you about something very serious,” Chief Walker begins. His hands firmly on the podium, he pauses, his steely gaze moving slowly, seeming to take in each and every student in the auditorium. If anyone was still talking they’ve stopped now. It’s pretty clear who Charlie got her intimidating stare from.

  Now that he has our attention, the police chief continues. “I’m talking about prank calls,” he intones in a deep voice that doesn’t need the microphone in front of him to be heard. “In particular, making prank calls to the police, reporting a crime that hasn’t happened. Not only is it against the law, it’s dangerous. It causes us not only to waste time instead of dealing with real crime, it also causes us to use resources that could be better used elsewhere, in some cases, to save lives. Yet, recently, it seems someone has decided it’s fun to make prank calls to the police anyway. And to make it worse, this person, or persons, thinks it’s fun to report that a fellow classmate has committed a crime, or even worse, been hurt or killed.”

  I suddenly feel as if every pair of eyes in the auditorium are on me, and I slump in my seat a little. It’s not true, of course. But I still feel like yelling out, They weren’t pranks! Not intentionally! I bite my lip instead.

  Taking in a deep breath so pronounced we can hear it through the podium’s microphone, Charlie’s dad says, “Well, I’m here to tell you that we are not just laughing this one off. We are taking this very seriously. We are not going to drop this.”

  I can’t help but glance at Charlie again. Again, she does not return it.

  “We are conducting a thorough investigation,” her dad is saying, “and we will not give up until the culprit or culprits are found. And punished.”