A Charmed Death

by Madelyn Alt

It was a question I knew she would be pondering for some time to come, and I didn’t envy her the heartache. What do any of us do wrong, when it comes to love? We love too much, and the best of us are blinded by its brilliance. How are any of us to know when love has begun to go very wrong until it is too late?

  Chapter 16

  We left the Roberson house shortly after Mrs. Roberson handed us a list of personal trivia she had compiled at our request—things like Amanda’s date of birth, middle name, favorite pet, Wendy’s maiden name, et cetera. In other words, anything she could think of that might possibly be something Amanda had used for a password. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

  That done, I drove back to the store. “What I really need to do is catch up with Marcus,” I told Liss. “I know he probably hasn’t had enough time yet to break much of anything, but I really want to show him these photos and give him the list of personal data that Mrs. Roberson was kind enough to give us. Keep all of our discoveries in the same basket.”

  “Tonight’s your early night, and this afternoon is Marcus’s computer workshop at the high school. You should be able to catch up with him there.”

  They say once you leave high school, you can never go back again. As I pulled into the mid-twentieth-century brick building’s parking lot later that afternoon, I had to wonder at that little nugget of misplaced logic. Of course you could go back again. You just couldn’t have the tight little butt you had when you were sitting in Mrs. Ochmonek’s English class, doodling the football captain’s name on the inside cover of your spiral notebook, and daydreaming about the day he’d finally come to his senses and recognize you for the love of his life.

  Who was I kidding? I’d never had a tight little butt. Wanted one, but never had one. And I still didn’t.

  Some things never change. Dammit.

  At least Christine blended into the surroundings. I cozied her up between a rusting Ford Escort and a GMC pickup that had so many different parts from so many different eras that its true age was no longer discernible. Mostly it seemed to be held together by rust and Bondo and a goodly bit of duct tape.

  It was just past four-thirty when I walked through the front doors into the long, glassed-in hall we’d nicknamed Eyeball Alley because that was where everyone who was anyone went to observe the comings and goings of everyone else. From the gym doors at the north end of the hall reverberated the constant slaps of leather basketballs against the polished gym floor and the rhythmic chants of the cheerleading squad. I turned away from the noise and headed for the stairs and the computer lab I knew I’d find on the second floor.

  When I was still in school, the computers had been oversized metal monstrosities with monitors the size of boulders, and they took ten minutes to power up. (Okay, so that is a slight exagerration—but not by much.) As I reached the open doorway to the computer lab and stuck my head in, I was at once impressed by how things had changed. The current lab was decked out with recent versions of the top-model Macs, enough for a computer for each student in a class, as opposed to the measly ten we’d had to duke it out over. Either the school had discovered some previously untapped government grant, or someone in Stony Mill was being very good to our school system.

  My bet was on the latter. In the last few years the school board had been soliciting funds to expand the curriculum in ways meant to draw even more big-city tax refugees to our borders. One unfortunate by-product of this was the pilfering of tracts of farmland for the kinds of houses the rest of us could never hope to afford.

  Big-city people with big-city expectations had made for bad feelings among the old-time Stony Millers, who saw the newcomers as intruders upon a way of life that would never be again. That Stony Mill was suffering growing pains was an understatement. Each side faced off on a nearly daily basis over a river of convictions a mile wide, each certain of the rightness of their personal missions, and neither giving an inch. Not even a centimeter.

  I guess so long as it benefited the students of Stony Mill, did it matter who was right?

  Marcus’s computer workshop appeared to be, for the most part, over, with only a few students milling about in the back of the room. Marcus looked up from the computer station he was fiddling with as I knocked on the open door.

  “Hello, Sunshine,” he greeted me, waving his hand for me to come on in. “Liss called to let me know you might stop in.”

  “Did she now.” The kids in the back didn’t seem to be paying attention, so I circumvented the first row of tables and set my purse down on the Formica desktop beside him. “Are these your kids?” I asked, nodding toward the loiterers in the back.

  “A few of them. The rest headed out already. These are my diehards.”

  I shook my head, smiling. “I still can’t believe you’re a teacher.”

  “Some days, neither can I. But I’m not, technically. Just a volunteer. One day, maybe.”

  The three kids in back slung heavy backpacks over their narrow shoulders and made their way toward the door. Two cast a curious glance my way as they left, but said nothing. The third waved and said, “See ya, Mr. Quinn,” in the same semisheepish undertones used by insecure teens worldwide.

  Poor kid. He looked to be about fifteen and a little on the small side at that. Something in his eyes made me want to hug him and tell him that none of what he was going through now mattered one whit in the grand scheme of things, to stick with it and stay true to himself, because ten years down the road he’d be signing paychecks for the nimrods who had made his high school life a living hell.

  Marcus waved back at him. “Have a good one, John. And good work today! That game sequence you programmed was just awesome. Very advanced stuff. You keep that up and you’ll be VP at Microsoft someday.”

  The kid lit up like a two-hundred-watt bulb, his shoulders straightening with pride. He was cute, in a geeky way. Give the boy some confidence in his own abilities, and he’d have no problem attracting the opposite sex. Especially once he’d left SMHS behind and entered the real world.

  As soon as the room had cleared, I slid onto the desktop, swinging my feet back and forth over the edge. It was something I would have done as a teenager, and it felt remarkably good. Just being here was like a step back in time. Can’t go back again? Piffle.

  “So, what’s on your mind, Sunshine?”

  Every time I saw him, he seemed to have a new nickname for me. I had to admit, I kind of liked it. In that way, he reminded me of a younger version of my grandpa. “The plot thickens in Amanda’s murder,” I told him.

  “News?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing that’s gone through official channels. Or at least not yet.”

  He stopped checking cables and looked up at me, waiting for me to elaborate.

  “Liss and I found something. Inside the clock Amanda had bought for Mrs. Roberson from Enchantments on the day she died. Mrs. Roberson didn’t want the clock around, so Liss took it back as a return.”

  Marcus looked intrigued. “What was it?”

  “A tiny little storage disk for a digital cam. One of the pics showed Amanda and . . . someone . . . in a compromising position.”

  He didn’t laugh. I’d half expected him to. He was a guy, after all. “Could you tell who the man was?”

  I shook my head. “They were on a pontoon boat called the Shady Lady. It was a recent model, by the looks of it, fairly posh.”

  “Hmm. I’d like to get a look at those pics.”

  I slugged him. “Marcus!”

  Surprise flickered over his features, then he laughed. “Not for that. To see the boat, you goof. Do you have them with you?”

  “No, but Liss has them on the laptop at work.”

  “Hold on a sec. I can have her e-mail them to me.”

  I waited while he whipped out a cell phone, dialed the store, and spoke briefly with Liss.

  “Bingo,” he said, ending the call. “She’ll shoot them over straightaway. Who knows, maybe someone around here will recognize it.”


  “Only we won’t really be able to show them around, Marcus,” I cautioned him. “I have a feeling these pictures are important. I think we’re going to have to hand them over to the police ASAP.”

  “Huh. That bunch of boobs couldn’t detect their way out of Sheehan’s Corn Maze,” he said, referring to the county attraction some crazy farmer had gotten into his head to plant every year.

  “That’s probably not quite fair,” I pointed out, even though I had at times come to the same conclusion. “It’s not that they’re boobs. It’s that they prefer to take a”—I scrambled, trying to recall Tom’s exact words—“more methodical approach. There’s a protocol to investigation, Marcus. Logical. Orderly.”

  Ahem. Was word theft a crime? Well, what Tom didn’t know . . .

  “Yeah, except logical isn’t a word I generally associate with our honorable boys in blue.”

  “Tsk, tsk. Such animosity.”

  He made a face at me. “Maybe I have good reason.”

  I didn’t say anything, just sat there, swinging my feet back and forth.

  “Or maybe I’m being a fool. Wouldn’t be the first time. Won’t be the last.”

  I laughed, and he grinned back at me.

  The computer next to me sang out, “You’ve got mail!”

  “Let’s have a look at these pics.”

  I slipped down off the table while Marcus pulled up a second chair.

  Liss had only sent over two. Marcus pulled them up on the computer and whistled out a long breath.

  “Do you recognize the location?”

  “It looks pretty isolated to me. Can’t tell the size of the lake at all from these pictures, but there doesn’t seem to be much around. It might not even be in this area, you know, although I would bet it is. Needle in a haystack.”

  “What about the guy with her on the boat?”

  He leaned back away from the pictures and shook his head reluctantly. “It could be any middle-aged man with money.”

  I looked at him curiously, amazed that he’d come to the same conclusion that Liss and I had already decided on. “Why middle-aged?”

  “Because a younger guy isn’t going to go for a pontoon boat, is he? This is some guy who’s accepted that he’s getting older. He’s beyond the need for speed.”

  Perhaps Amanda was filling that need.

  “Plus, no self-respecting younger dude is going to flaunt his jimmies in a Speedo outside of a swim competition. Count on it.”

  Well, I hadn’t thought of that . . .

  “Can you zoom in to get more detail?” I asked.

  He made a few adjustments with the program controls and tried, with the same pixilated result that I had obtained. He shook his head. “These are lo-res versions. Did you change the sizing or the resolution?”

  “Erm, I’m not sure. Liss did the honors, I’m afraid. She might have changed the size of the photos. I wasn’t paying too terribly much attention to that part of things, I hate to admit.”

  “Well, without a higher resolution, I’m just not going to be very much help. I would need a hi-res scan in order to zoom in with any detail, and even then they might need to be cleaned up. Do you have the storage disk with you?”

  Regretfully I shook my head. “It’s back at the store. Liss thought we should probably put it in the safe until we are ready to hand it over to the police. But I did bring this for you.” I handed him the list which Mrs. Roberson had made. “It’s everything her mother could think of that she might have made into a password. I was hoping it might help with the files on the CD. Who knows, maybe something on it will be of use.”

  “Thanks. I have something for you, too.”

  With an admirable flex of his shoulder muscles, he reached behind him and snagged the handle of a lumpy satchel I hadn’t seen on the floor beside him, so scarred and rustic that it might have been an antique at Enchantments but for its disreputable appearance.

  “Where on earth did you get that thing?” I asked, giggling in spite of myself. “It looks like it died a slow death a few decades ago.”

  He looked down and quirked his brows in mock disbelief. “What? This fine bit of leather craftsmanship? Surely you jest, woman. Actually, it’s from my uncle Lou. It’s my good luck briefcase.”

  “And does it bring you good luck?”

  “Hasn’t let me down yet.”

  While he dug in the depths of the bag, I said, “I don’t suppose you got anywhere with the files on the CD.”

  From his magic satchel he pulled out a pair of CDs. “I haven’t broken the code yet—but what I did do first thing was make a duplicate of the CD, which will allow you to turn the original over to the police in all good conscience while allowing me to keep working on it. I made a copy for you, too. Just in case.”

  Just in case of what? I shivered at the turn of my thoughts. Sometimes it was easy to forget that there was a man out there, walking the streets, who had killed a teenaged girl. “Marcus, you don’t think . . . you don’t think that it’s dangerous that we should have these, do you?”

  The look he gave me was quite serious. “Does anyone else know that you have the CD and the camera disk besides Liss and me?”

  I shook my head. “Just Mrs. Roberson. And I don’t think she would tell anyone—she didn’t even want to tell her husband.”

  “Then for the time being, I think it’s okay.”

  “You will keep working on breaking the code, won’t you, Marcus?”

  “As if you could stop me.”

  Technology, I decided as I tucked both my copy of the CD and the original in the teen diva case into my purse, could be a very useful thing. I really needed to get comfortable with it, for my own good.

  Shouts echoed up the hallway, interrupting my thoughts. Marcus shot to his feet and ran to the door. “What is it?” I asked breathlessly.

  “I’m not sure. Come on.”

  The noise seemed to be coming from downstairs, so we hurried toward the stairwell, bursting out into Eyeball Alley straight into the source of the commotion. A ring of shouting basketball players, cheerleaders, and students circled what was obviously a scuffle going on in the center. Several someones were chanting, “Fight-Fight-Fight,” egging it on and proving that the human race really hadn’t progressed much.

  Marcus charged into the melee and tried to part the shoulder-to-shoulder high schoolers. “Out of the way. Let me pass!”

  I stood on the fourth stair and tried to see over the heads and shoulders into the flying arms and fists in the center.

  From the direction of the gym, Coach Abernathy came charging toward the skirmish, all barrel chest and testosterone. The crowd parted for him like the waters of the Red Sea. “Everett! Howell!” he barked. “Break it up. Break it up!”

  Coach and Marcus reached the boys at the same time. With the help of a couple of other boys who had been nudged from immobility with the arrival of their coach, they managed to pry the boys’ straining bodies apart. It took the lot of them to hold them down.

  “What’s gotten into you two?” Coach Abernathy said in his cheese-grater voice. “Jesus-Christ-in-a-box, do I have to tie you two up to get you to settle the hell down? Christ Almighty.”

  The two boys—hardly boys, almost men, with their long, lean muscles and flaring tempers—glared daggers at each other, chins set in loathing.

  “You want to tell me what started all this today?” Coach pressed. “You two have had your mad on for months and managed not to lay each other out. Come on. What gives?”

  The jaws set tighter.

  Coach raised an out-of-control salt-and-pepper eyebrow. “Okay, then. Barnes. What were they fighting about?”

  A tall freckled redhead sank into his shoulders. “Aww, Coach . . .”

  “No hard feelings, right, guys?” Coach said, pinning the two combatants with a stare that would have stopped a semi. “See, Barnes? Spill it.”

  The poor kid was stuck fast between a rock and a hard place. He had to do what the coach asked of h
im, but if he did, he’d be snubbed for weeks by his high school cohorts for ratting out his friends. He hemmed and hawed, but he knew he had no real choice. “Amanda. Okay? They were fighting about Amanda.”

  I would never have expected compassion to exist within the coach’s grizzled heart, but it was written in every crease on his rugged face. He turned to the crowd and waved his hands over his head to get everyone’s attention.

  “Show’s over, folks. I want you all to go home. Go on. Nothing to see here.”

  The crowd began to break up and melt away in twos and threes, leaving only me standing on the stairs, Coach Abernathy, Marcus, Charlie Howell, Jordan Everett, and the two boys holding them back.

  Coach stood there with his hands on his hips, gazing down at the two boys with the same gruff authority he might use when solving altercations on the court. “Look, why don’t you two ease off. Huh? Hasn’t there been enough tragedy around here? Huh, Howell? Everett? Talk to me now.”

  Of the two, I would have been able to pick out Charlie Howell in a heartbeat. Both Charlie and Jordan were tall, good-looking boys, well muscled in a way that only constant physical activity and youth can achieve. But in Charlie’s eyes I saw a glimmer of fire, an intense desire to prove himself that Jordan Everett with his moneyed background would likely never have. I saw fire, and something more.

  At the coach’s words, tears sprang into Charlie’s eyes. For a moment, he went limp. Then in an instant his entire body stiffened and he let out a howl of pain that tore at the very fiber of my being, so intense that it was all I could think of.

  And then my world went black.

  I came to moments later lying on a cot in the coach’s office, my feet lifted high by pillows. Gazing around at the institutional gray walls and the office littered by sporting equipment, dirty Ace bandages, and what looked like a million used towels, I lifted my hand to my head with a groan. My head felt strange, fuzzy, and if I wasn’t mistaken, I had a lump on the right side that was the cause of the pounding headache currently making my life a living hell.

  “Howell, Quinn, get that ice in here!” Coach Abernathy barged through the door, and stopped short. “Oh. You’re awake. How are you feeling?”