Dead Ringer

by Jessie Rosen

  But that didn’t solve the problem of “Sasha’s” inconvenient invite to what had to be a strange, memorial get-together with Charlie, Amanda, Kit, and Miller. This was not what Laura needed four days before the final phase of her plan came together. She didn’t care if the other three spent their Saturday night in the cemetery where she was memorialized, but she needed Charlie in a cabin in Beacon, New York. The details were coming together perfectly, and on the perfect day. Lexi’s little revenge moment couldn’t possibly top what Laura had put together. It had to be stopped.

  Maybe Charlie would say no to whatever Sasha requested and go with Laura anyway? It was impossible for her to know what Lexi’s email to Charlie said, so that was a tricky assumption. If he did tell Laura there was a change of plans, would he tell the truth? It was hard to imagine Charlie confessing that the girl terrorizing him was back, and that she had enough information to scare him into doing whatever she threatened. Charlie still hadn’t confessed to Laura what really happened that night. She couldn’t see him destroying all the progress he’d made on their relationship since they started to get back together. If Charlie cancelled, the only option was for Laura to reach out to Lexi and figure out a way to make her stop. That was going to require a very clever approach. Laura would have to work on that over the next twenty-four hours to be sure she had a back-up plan. In the meantime, she also needed to make sure Charlie knew just how important this weekend was, and that he absolutely could not cancel.

  Laura took a deep breath, wiped her eyes, and left the dressing room. She didn’t feel like searching through the racks anymore, but luckily she’d already found a low-cut, red dress among the 70s-style goodies that would work perfectly. She grabbed it, paid at the register, then left to grab two juices over at Clover as a surprise for Charlie. They were planning to get together later that night to make a plan for their road trip up to Beacon.

  Laura drove to the juice spot’s strip-mall parking lot, but she never made it out of her car. Before she even turned off the engine, her eyes caught something that made her freeze. Through the passenger side window of her convertible was the outline of a familiar person. He was tall, thin, and scruffy from what looked like a few days without a shave. He wore a baseball cap low over his eyes and those ski-style sunglasses with the rainbow-colored lenses that covered the entire top half of his face. Laura tried to look closer without moving her body an inch. She didn’t think he could see her from that far away, but she couldn’t take any risks.

  After checking his phone, he got into a large, white sedan that looked more like something a retired couple would drive and backed out of his parking spot. That’s when Laura realized that she hadn’t been breathing since the second she saw him.

  There is no reason in the world that Andrew Craig should be in Englewood, New Jersey, Laura thought to herself. For one, he was supposed to be at medical school in San Francisco, but more importantly, a pretty terrifying legal document stated that he cannot be within one hundred feet of one Laura Rivers or he’ll be thrown straight in jail.

  “There’s no way that’s Andrew,” Laura said out loud this time, but she still couldn’t bring herself to get out of the car until he’d driven out of the lot and far away down the street. Even then, she felt safer not getting out of the car. Charlie would have to live without a juice.

  Charlie

  “I’m not going there without a gun in my pocket,” Miller said.

  “Why don’t you say that a little louder, Miller. I’m not sure the entire Englewood Police Department heard you,” Amanda said. Charlie watched Kit, who didn’t react to either comment. At the moment, she’d reverted back to being a complete shell of a person.

  It was only the second time that the four of them had been alone together in over a month, and things were not off to a good start.

  “Let’s try to stay calm,” Charlie finally said. “I’m going to figure out what we should do.”

  “Well, this time could you be sure to tell us before you make a decision?” Amanda said.

  “Guys. I need this to be over,” Kit said unexpectedly in a quiet voice. “I can’t go back to the way things were. I swear to God, I’ll die.”

  Miller shot a cold look at Charlie and Amanda and placed his arm around Kit.

  The last thing any of them wanted was for this insanity to go on for a second longer, but as far as Charlie could see, there was no way out of this situation with Sasha that didn’t involve more trouble.

  Charlie suggested they meet at Old Country Buffet in Franklin Lakes to come up with a plan. He didn’t feel safe inside their houses in case someone’s parents overheard, and this was a restaurant that no one under the age of sixty-five ever visited, and it was located in a town at least twenty miles from Englewood. The chance they would be seen enjoying early-bird dinner was highly unlikely.

  Still, the whole thing felt like a waste of time. No one knew what to do or say. No one—except apparently Miller—even knew how to protect themselves if they did go to the cemetery like Sasha demanded in her latest email. They were more trapped now than they’d been when she’d given the mystery tip to the cops. Yes, the case was technically closed, but Sasha was claiming that she had the kind of information that could open it all up in a second.

  “What if we tell someone we’re being threatened?” Charlie asked the group.

  “Who could we tell that wouldn’t want to know why?” Amanda fired back. “Then we’d have to either come up with an elaborate lie, or tell the truth.”

  “We’ve lied before,” Charlie said.

  “And look where it got us,” Amanda reminded him. “Besides, that was nothing like what this would be. We would need to invent an entirely new story about why we’re being threatened for no reason. The first time we lied, we just didn’t tell anyone we knew anything about what happened to Sarah. That’s very different.”

  “Just trying to come up with options,” Charlie said.

  “I get it,” said Amanda, “But I don’t think there’s anything we can do. If Sasha has more information that could hurt us, then we have to go.”

  “So you still think it’s an ‘if’?” Miller asked.

  “No,” Charlie answered, not waiting for Amanda to say the same thing. “I think we have to go. All of us.” All three of them nodded, agreeing. Charlie thought he saw tears welling up in Kit’s eyes. Miller brought her in for a hug.

  “How are we going to protect ourselves if Sasha does something insane?” Amanda asked.

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said. “We might have to live with the fact that we can’t.”

  * * *

  Charlie knew that Laura would be disappointed that he couldn’t make their weekend plan work, but he didn’t expect her to be quite so angry.

  “I didn’t know you already bought all those snacks,” he said. “I’ll pay you for all of it. I promise.”

  “It’s not about the money,” Laura said, a slight crack in her voice. “It’s about me trusting you again, Charlie. I know you’re lying about why you can’t come.”

  Of course Charlie hadn’t told Laura the real reason. Things were finally coming together with their relationship. Tonight he was cooking her a romantic dinner at his apartment so they could plan their trip. He couldn’t risk everything falling apart again because of Sasha’s threat. Instead, he told her that his mom’s shift had switched, and she was now going to be home. It was the easiest, simplest lie, which was all Charlie could handle right now. There was no way Laura could find out that his mom’s schedule stayed the same, and since she was already going up to Beacon, she wouldn’t be able to check on him—or so he thought.

  “Fine. Then I’ll just cancel my trip and come hang out with you and your mom,” she said. Suddenly Charlie felt like he was in a battle of wits against a far cleverer opponent, and it didn’t look like the baked ziti he’d just made Laura for dinner was going to earn him any points.

  “You don’t need to do that,” he started. “You love going to the
cabin, you said. We can go another time and I’ll be here when you get back from vacation with your parents. Don’t ruin your trip so you can have a boring night with my mom and me.” He couldn’t tell whether or not that was remotely convincing, but Laura answered that question immediately.

  “You’re not getting it, Charlie!” Laura yelled. It was the first time he’d heard her raise her voice in the entire time they’d known each other, and hearing it now, Charlie was very happy about that fact. “I don’t trust you. I don’t believe you. I’m going to skip my trip so that I can check up on you because I cannot get into a relationship with you if you’re just going to lie to me again!”

  He was caught, and to make matters worse, his mom would be home any second. From the sound of it, Laura wasn’t going to leave without an answer, or an even louder fight.

  “Okay, okay,” he finally said. “I get it, and I want that, too. You can stay and we’ll hang out that night, but we shouldn’t just be here, that’s boring. I’ll take us out to a really nice dinner. The only thing is that I promised my mom I would go into the hospital with her around ten thirty to bring her coworkers a special Christmas gift. She’s not working the late shift, but they are and she wants to surprise them. So we’ll go to dinner, then I’ll go to the hospital with her, and then we can see a late movie or something.” The lies were piling up, but Charlie had no choice.

  “Thank you,” Laura said, her voice finally mellow again. “But I’ll go with you to the hospital. That will be so nice. I don’t do enough volunteer work, and the holidays are the best time.”

  If Charlie didn’t know better, he would have thought she knew he was lying and was deliberately trying to catch him. The look on her face was almost smug.

  “You can’t,” he said, feigning disappointment. “There are all these crazy rules. But I’ll find out about getting you clearance for another time.”

  At that, Laura stood up, grabbed her bag from the couch, and started to walk out of Charlie’s kitchen.

  “Whoa. What happened? Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Home,” she said. “Call me when you’re ready to tell the truth.”

  “What are you talking about? That is the truth!”

  Laura stopped and turned toward him. The look on her face was absolutely terrifying.

  “No,” she said. “It’s not. I don’t feel like enlightening you as to how I know that, but I know, and I refuse to be with a liar.”

  Then she turned around and walked out the front door.

  Charlie fell back onto the couch. He felt his chest tighten and his breath get harder to find. It was happening again. He was losing control. It was not over.

  Laura

  Laura looked up at the clock on her bedroom wall and realized she had been pacing for the better part of an hour. She threw her body facedown onto the bed, thinking maybe a change of elevation was what she needed to help force herself to make some sort of decision, but that only positioned her head close to her cellphone, which taunted her with missed texts from Charlie. She’d already let it go twenty-four hours without returning any of his attempts to make contact. If she wanted to salvage her plan for the Beacon trip, she needed to come up with a solution and then respond.

  Whatever Lexi had said to Charlie and his friends obviously worked. The only way for Laura to get Charlie to confess what the email said was to either tell him she’d snuck into his email or tell him she knew straight from Sasha…who was Lexi…who was her sister. And the only reason she knew any of that was because she, too, was terrorizing Charlie, and Lexi had found that out through what Laura was convinced was a very impressive hacking job.

  Lexi was always into computers, Laura remembered as she wracked her brain about how this could have all happened. She must have found a way to spy on Charlie, Amanda, Kit, and Miller through all their online activity. Shy of following them around town for almost two years, hacking was the only logical option.

  But now Laura needed Lexi to stop, and she could not figure out how to make that happen without betraying her original plan. The way Laura saw it, she could delay the moment she’d planned with Charlie, or she could find a way to make her sister call off her little prank. They both wanted to make their moves on the night of her disappearance, of course. But Laura knew that she had much more riding on this Saturday night with Charlie than Lexi did. For the past two years, she’d dedicated her life to this moment. She’d put her body and mind through grueling experiences to make it possible. Thousands of dollars had been spent—even if they were coerced out of Andrew and his father—to bring her new self to life. She had broken dozens of laws in multiple states.

  But it wasn’t just about getting revenge exactly as she wanted it in the end. The whole point of this intricate dance she was doing with Charlie and the world was to end the cycle of insanity that Amanda and Charlie started way back when they lied about the baby. Sarah had always suspected that it was because of that secret that Amanda came up with the plan to terrify Sarah in the first place. Amanda couldn’t have anyone finding out the truth, and she assumed that Sarah knew through Charlie. Amanda’s final words to Sarah were, “I know he told ‘Chelsea’ who it really was, and I’ll kill you if it ever gets out.”

  Laura could not let Lexi stand in her way. She’d come too far to lose now.

  December 21

  Charlie

  Hi again,

  The little meeting is off. I can’t say more, but just know that I’m not gone. I’m just changing the plan. Stay on your toes.

  –Sasha

  It made absolutely no sense, but Charlie, limp with relief, didn’t care. He was safe again, for the time being.

  Charlie arrived at Laura’s front stoop with two-dozen roses that had just cost him way more than he expected. It was the Friday afternoon before they were supposed to leave for their overnight trip, though he had some work to do to ensure that was still happening. Laura hadn’t returned the texts or calls he sent about his mom’s schedule shifting again. She probably still thought the whole thing was a lie, but now that Sasha had cancelled whatever was up her sleeve, it definitely wasn’t worth confessing to Laura that her email threat was the real reason he cancelled the trip. Hopefully these flowers and some begging would do the trick.

  There was a sweet smile on Laura’s face when she opened the door, which helped calm Charlie’s nerves.

  “You didn’t have to,” she said as she let him in.

  “Are you sure?” Charlie asked. “You were really mad the other night, and then I haven’t heard from you since. Did you get my texts about this weekend?”

  “Yes,” Laura said. “Sorry. I was still really frustrated by what happened, but I think I was just disappointed.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. But I don’t know what else to say to convince you I’m telling the truth.” Accept all the blame, Charlie told himself as he blurted out that string of responses.

  “You don’t have to say anything else,” Laura said. “It’s about me getting over the past, too. I’m going to work on that, and I want to start by staying home this weekend to hang with you.”

  “No, no!” Charlie said. “Didn’t you see my text about my mom’s schedule? We can do this weekend. She doesn’t need me to do the thing.”

  “But you like to volunteer, so you should do that, and we’ll go to the cabin some other time.”

  “Laura, seriously, if it’s between being at a hospital and hanging out alone with you at some cool cabin in the woods, I’m doing that. Every time.”

  “Are you sure?” Laura said. “I mean we’d be going tomorrow.”

  “Definitely! I’ll throw some things in a bag tonight. Anything you need me to bring?”

  “Um, yes, actually,” Laura said. “Do you have a nice blazer?”

  “For what? Aren’t we just going to order in pizza at your grandmother’s cabin?”

  “We can do that if you want,” Laura said, “But if we’re going to make the trip then we have to go to this place my G
ram and I always used to go. It’s a famous restaurant in Beacon called The Roundhouse at Beacon Falls. It’s really amazing.”

  “Wow. Sounds intense,” Charlie said nervously.

  “It is,” Laura said with what seemed like a knowing smile. “So we could have a nice dinner there together, and then we can go home and order pizza for dessert.”

  “Whatever you want,” Charlie said. “This is your trip. You’re in charge.”

  “I know,” Laura said. Once again there was a weird glimmer of confidence in her eyes—the same one he saw in his kitchen just a few nights ago. “Now go so I can find something really hot to pack for our pizza-dessert party.”

  “Can I pick it out?” Charlie asked. Laura responded by playfully shoving him toward the front door.

  But just as Charlie turned to kiss her good-bye, he caught a glimpse inside her bedroom through the half-closed door. On the bed was a fully packed overnight bag, with what looked like a sexy, red, lace thing on top. Laura was already packed.

  Maybe she’d been hoping it would turn out like this? Or maybe she was still deciding if she would go by herself up until he arrived? There had to be some perfectly logical reason for that suitcase to be there, but it didn’t matter anyway. They were going to get away together, and from the looks of that little, red thing in the bag, they were going to have a very good time.

  Sasha

  There were no words to describe how Sasha’s body felt when she finished reading the latest email from CO. She wasn’t numb or frozen. She didn’t feel a panic attack coming on. She was lightheaded and a little blurry in the eyes, but that was probably just because she’d been staring at her computer screen reading the same sentence over and over again for at least thirty minutes.