Dead Ringer

by Jessie Rosen

  For the first time, though, a tiny piece of Sasha had wanted to hold back. So far everything she’d done to eke a confession out of Charlie or his cohorts was private. The message to the police was intense, yes, but none of them had to first hear it in the presence of three hundred classmates, and it didn’t officially implicate them. This was different. Charlie would be standing in the middle of the room when this bomb was dropped, and he would probably be standing with Laura. That girl had done nothing to deserve all the attention she’d received since the beginning of the school year, and Sasha wasn’t helping. But then again, she was the one who decided to date Charlie Sanders. Girls who loved boys like Charlie were not girls that Sasha cared to defend. The whole point of the painstaking process she’d been through to crack the Sarah Castro-Tanner case was to stand up for the defenseless girls who stood in the shadows while the Charlies and Amandas glided through life like it was a game they were already set up to win. The time she was now spending inside the Hunter household only confirmed that fact in her mind.

  Everywhere she turned, there was another shrine to the goddess, Amanda. Every dinner was planned with Amanda’s healthy diet in mind. The girls were required to be silent when Amanda was studying and perfectly behaved when Amanda had friends over. Even the front hall closet was filled with Amanda’s extra dresses and coats. It was as if two adults and two young girls were lucky to be living in the house of a seventeen-year-old. Sarah Castro-Tanner definitely never got that kind of love or got away with that kind of behavior. As far as Sasha could tell, there was no one else in the world defending her life. Whatever happened on the night she disappeared was not Sarah’s fault, and Sasha’s singular goal in life was now to make sure that the next “Sarah” out there knew it.

  Sasha let Charlie’s files finish uploading onto her computer and made a silent wish that they would turn out to be much more than candid soccer team shots. When she finally opened the folder, she wasn’t sure whether or not her wish had been granted. She was staring at over one hundred twenty email exchanges between Charlie and a girl named Chelsea Sacks.

  Who was Chelsea Sacks? She’d never once heard of this girl in the now thousands of monitored exchanges between Charlie and his closest friends. Sasha racked her brain to try and place the name. She switched over to the main tracking panel for Englewood and plugged it into her search field. Just as she suspected, there was not a single reference. Sasha could not for the life of her figure out how that was possible. How could no one at Englewood reference a girl that Charlie was close enough with to warrant over one hundred emails?

  There was only one logical answer: no one at Englewood knew of a “Chelsea Sacks” except for Charlie, and she, whoever she was, vanished before Sarah died and Sasha’s tracking began. Now Sasha had to figure out why and what in the world that had to do with the bigger picture.

  She took a few minutes to skim the first exchanges. They were typical emails between a flirting guy and girl. It wasn’t clear how Charlie and Chelsea knew each other, but these messages referenced other chats and texts, so they were only part of the puzzle. Sasha skipped ahead to some exchanges in the middle, hoping to notice a shift in the conversation that might provide a clue. She ended up finding a single line inside an email from Charlie to this mystery girl that made everything even more confusing:

  I really want to kiss you. When can we finally meet in person?

  They had been carrying on for months and had never actually met? How was that possible? Did Chelsea live far away? Or was it that Charlie didn’t want to see her for some reason?

  Sasha hoped that the last of the emails would answer her questions. She skipped ahead to the second to last exchange, the one with the subject line “Please…”

  My Charlie,

  You have to believe that I never meant to hurt you with all of this. You have to also know that we would have never fallen in love if I didn’t become Chelsea. You’ve known me for years and never once noticed me, or what I could be to you. Chelsea was just a way to show you that we are perfect together, Charlie. The fact that she isn’t real doesn’t change that fact. Everything I said to you as Chelsea was the absolute truth. When you told Chelsea you loved her, you were telling me. When you told Chelsea about what happened with Amanda and she said your secret was safe, she was telling the truth. You don’t need to be mad or embarrassed or ashamed. It was all true and real. So please don’t ignore me at school. Please don’t tell everyone I’m a freak. We’re both freaks, Charlie. We’re the same. We belong together. And I already have a plan for how we can make it work with the whole Amanda situation. Please, please return my calls, and we’ll talk it all over. It’s all going to be okay. I promise. I love you.

  –Sarah

  Sasha almost fell out of the desk chair she was sitting on. “Sarah” had to be the Sarah based on the timing of Charlie downloading these messages, and that meant that Sarah Castro-Tanner had been posing as Chelsea Sacks!

  Now Sasha understood why Charlie didn’t talk about her. He needed to bury all of this information because it connected him directly to Sarah, and the date stamp on the emails showed that they were sent just weeks before she killed herself.

  Sasha sat back, stunned, to think about what this meant. From the sounds of it, Sarah had truly been crazy. This was an email from a desperate girl who had done something creepy and was still trying to make Charlie believe that they should be together. It was the work of a person with serious mental issues.

  Sasha was crushed. She’d spent all this time defending Sarah’s life, when maybe it was Sarah who caused this whole mess all along. In a way, Sasha felt like she had also been tricked. Based on this discovery, Sarah was a liar and Charlie was her victim.

  Then Sasha noticed that the very next email was Charlie’s response.

  Dear Freak,

  If you mention what you did to me to a single soul, I will end you. If you come near me in the halls at school, I will end you. If you send me another email, I will end you. And if you ever repeat a word of what I told you about Amanda, I will do something even worse. You’ve messed with the wrong guy. I’m not going to let some insane girl with serious mental problems ruin my reputation. No one can ever know that you tricked me into falling for some girl you created—no one. You may have fooled me once, but the joke is going to be on you if this gets out. Stay the hell away from me, forever. You’re a monster.

  And with that, Sasha’s interest was re-piqued. Charlie may have been the victim, but based on this exchange, he was a victim with a motive. It was just the kind of information that the Englewood police would love to know, Sasha thought as she took screen grabs of both messages and thought about her next move.

  Then the pinging started up again. Sasha turned her focus back to her computer as she watched Charlie delete all but four of the emails he’d just uploaded. Sasha didn’t have time to read the ones he saved before he attached them all into an email and sent them directly to the Englewood Police Department’s Sarah Castro-Tanner tip line.

  For the second time in under an hour, Sasha’s world was turned upside down. Charlie Sanders appeared to be confessing.

  Chapter 9

  Laura

  Laura pulled the blankets up to her chin. It had been a very, very long night, though she didn’t think she could fall asleep any time soon. Watching the old clock on her wall tick very slowly to midnight did not help. Laura had spent hours trying to calm Charlie down after what seemed like a series of panic attacks prompted by the picture of him and Sarah at the homecoming dance, but now she was the one who needed calming.

  When the picture popped onto the screen at the dance, Laura turned—and saw him gasping for air. She knew what to do—her mom used to get similar attacks when Laura was little because she was so afraid of flying. They’d consume her whole body, and it was really hard for her to calm down unless she could remove herself from the situation. So Laura grabbed Charlie’s hand and rushed him out of the gym and into his car. He was shaking all over,
and Laura could tell he was afraid to say whatever was on his mind. He just kept apologizing and telling her he didn’t mean to ruin her time at the dance. Laura convinced him to let her drive his car to her house so he could drop her off, and then she helped him try to catch his breath by closing his eyes and counting to ten really slowly. That didn’t work, so she just sat with him in the car, rubbing his back and trying to help him count while breathing. After awhile Charlie calmed down, but the moment still clearly haunted him. Laura told him that no matter what he had to say, she could handle it. That’s when he finally said the first coherent thing he’d said since they left the dance: “I’m being pranked.”

  Charlie didn’t say what the messages were, but he mentioned some email from a “Sasha” and some other messages from a “CO.” Now, lying in bed as her clock slowly crawled to morning, Laura couldn’t stop thinking about who was messing with Charlie, what they knew, and if she might be their next target. Would they use her to get to him? If it was someone at school, then they knew all about the fact that she was dating Charlie. If it was someone from outside school, then that seemed even scarier. What if it was a crazy relative of Sarah’s? Or some guy who hated Charlie from soccer? Charlie said the mystery person knew something about what happened to Sarah, but what if it was all just a joke to terrify him?

  Laura knew that she shouldn’t get involved, but she couldn’t stop herself from letting her mind wander into detective mode. The obvious first question to be answered: who put that photo in the slideshow? It didn’t match the happy, active shots that came before, and the show seemed to be designed to linger on that moment for longer than the rest. Plus there was the look on both Charlie and Sarah’s faces—rage on his and fear on hers. Someone wanted to upset Charlie. That made Laura’s second question even more concerning: why?

  * * *

  Laura spent all day and night on Saturday thinking about the mysterious source. Whoever they were, they were totally raining on her parade. Things had finally been great with Charlie and his friends were warming up to her. Why couldn’t Laura just enjoy a few weeks of happy high school life without something totally bizarre getting in the way?

  Charlie texted that he needed the weekend to focus on practice and training for a few big soccer games the following week, so Laura had plenty of time to let her mind wander. She didn’t have a conclusion about the source of the photo, but she did have thoughts on where to start looking. The first place was the yearbook committee.

  Amanda wouldn’t have gathered the content for the video from dozens of individual people. If she had, there would have been a call for submissions on the activities bulletin or an announcement during the morning news. She must have gone to one place with a large collection of photos, and that place was the yearbook office. Laura didn’t know who inside that group might have a vendetta against Charlie, but she did remember an article about Sarah Castro-Tanner’s suicide mentioning that Sarah was in the yearbook club at Englewood. Maybe someone on the yearbook staff knew about Sarah’s obsession with Charlie.

  Or what about the computer club? If anyone knew about hacking into files—such as the one with the slideshow or the ones that held the entire yearbook photo archives—they would be in that club. A totally oblivious teacher supervised the group, and rumor had it that they spent their hours after school doing whatever they wanted. A few weeks back there had been an unplanned fire alarm in the middle of an assembly on bullying. Everyone at school was whispering about the fact that it was the work of the computer club. Laura decided she would do some snooping around their meeting area to gather more information, but first she needed a cover.

  Laura knew better than to ask Becca if she could write about what happened at the dance for the paper. Even she agreed that it was too intense for them to print, but maybe Becca would be willing to look past her earlier weirdness about the Sarah Castro-Tanner case and go for a little investigative, joint journalism project. They didn’t have to write about the investigation, but two clever brains combined had to be better than one.

  Mind made up, Laura headed into the Chronicle office a little early that Sunday morning for the monthly weekend layout session. She knew it would just be Becca and her slaving over layouts on a weekend morning. Perhaps Becca would let Laura treat her to breakfast in exchange for agreeing to chat about this mystery. The office was empty when she arrived, though, so Laura sat down at Becca’s desk to text her about meeting at the coffee shop down the block. As she did, her elbow bumped into the laptop, lighting up the monitor from sleep mode.

  Laura knew that the computer was technically Becca’s, but she couldn’t turn away from what she saw on the screen. There were a series of folders marked “YEARBOOK ARCHIVE,” only one of which was open: the folder labeled “FALL 2013.” The last semester before Sarah Castro-Tanner died. This was the exact folder that probably contained the slideshow’s final image.

  Laura looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was coming, then quickly double-clicked on the folder. Her eyes landed on the very last thing she expected: nothing. The folder was completely empty.

  She searched for the trash bin along the bottom right of the monitor and clicked on that next. Again, empty. Someone had deleted all the files.

  Charlie

  Charlie hid out in his bedroom from Saturday morning until late that Sunday night. He told his mom that he had a gross cold coming on and only left the room to eat five helpings of the chicken soup she made the minute he said he felt sick. He could barely bring himself to watch the Back To The Future marathon he found on some random movie channel, and there was usually nothing that could keep him from watching and quoting every line of every installment of that series. He was scared, and he was miserable, but more than anything, he didn’t want anything to bring on another attack of whatever happened to his body Friday night.

  Laura called it a panic attack, which made sense, but “shock attack” felt like a more accurate description. Never in ten million years did Charlie expect to see that photo pop up on the screen at the dance, but he knew immediately that it was for his eyes. Sarah and Charlie weren’t friends, and anyone putting that slideshow together knew it. Besides, who would end that celebration of EHS pride with a reminder of the school’s saddest story? Charlie didn’t even know that picture existed, but he certainly remembered the conversation with Sarah at his locker. That was now running on a loop in his mind.

  It was the day after Charlie had his heart completely shattered by “Chelsea,” and the last thing he wanted to do was talk to Sarah. She was the reason it all happened in the first place. Charlie could barely look at her that afternoon. He remembered that part very clearly. She showed up at his locker and he turned to walk away. He was afraid that if he looked her in the eyes he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from punching her in the face.

  “I want to talk to you,” she said. “I can explain everything.” Charlie ignored her and slammed his locker shut, but she kept going. “Everything that happened between you and Chelsea was real, and I’m so sorry that I ruined it.”

  Charlie was livid at the memory of that ridiculous line from Sarah. It made no sense. It was the defense of an absolute crazy person.

  That was the thought that Charlie had been dwelling on Friday night as he sat alone in his room after leaving Laura’s house. He needed to take action against the “Sasha” character who was threatening to release details about Sarah’s death, and to do that he needed to prove his innocence. The way he could do that was to show that Sarah was crazy. If the police were looking for confirmation that she killed herself without anyone else being involved, he had a way to suggest that serious mental illness drove her to that point. What she did to him was the work of a true sociopath. All he had to do was find the series of emails she sent after she confessed to being Chelsea and slip those to the police. He would be acting as a concerned citizen who did not realize that Sarah’s suicide was in question. He would say that he assumed that the police knew about her mental state the wh
ole time. But if they were now investigating further to prove once and for all that she took her own life, Charlie would be more than willing to help. He would innocently explain that he’d never been asked for these files before and certainly didn’t want to go tattling on the poor girl right after she died. Her parents must have known that she was troubled; they didn’t need a series of emails from some happy, stable kid at her school to show them the level of her insanity.

  For the first time since leaving the dance that night, Charlie had allowed himself to take a full, deep breath. This time, the air actually flowed in through his nose and out through his mouth without getting sucked into the tight pit that had formed in his chest. He had a plan. All he had to do was grab the email files he’d saved on the separate computer drive, re-upload them onto his computer, and select the ones that made his case.

  There were still five days left before the tipster “Sasha” claimed she or he would release more details, which gave the police plenty of time to run with his information and cut the tipster off. After Charlie selected the right messages, he would delete the rest and destroy the file so that the rest of the story could never be uncovered. Then the record of what happened between him and Sarah Castro-Tanner would only include the version he wanted the world to know, forever.

  Charlie knew that if he continued to think it over he would never make the move. He grabbed the file drive from the bottom drawer of his desk, plugged it into his laptop, and started to search. Fifteen minutes later, he put the emails he’d selected into a message to the EPD and pressed SEND.