Dead Ringer (27 page)

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

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 Gram 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.

Sasha felt her left arm reach out and grab the ledge of the
desk, saving her from falling right off her chair. She held on as she read the
words over and over and over again:
I am alive
.

After the shock subsided, Sasha was filled with an
overwhelming sense of joy. Her sister was not gone. All the sadness her family
struggled through over the past years would be lifted. Sarah would come home,
and they would start to rebuild.

But that excitement was fleeting. Sasha couldn’t do any
celebrating. In fact, she couldn’t tell a single person. Sarah’s email was very
clear about that fact. Her sister needed her to stay quiet, and as frustrating
as that was to Sasha, she knew that whatever had driven Sarah away in the first
place—what happened to get her to wherever she now was—would only
push her farther if Sasha defied her orders. Sarah’s email was the most
exciting thing that Sasha had read since the day she came home four months ago
to find the chat exchange between those two Englewood High girls who first
mentioned Sarah’s name, but it was also the most terrifying.

That was three days ago, and that night, Lexi obeyed. She
sent the email to Charlie, Amanda, Kit, and Sean calling off their meeting. She
didn’t feel like she had a choice.

But that didn’t mean her search for her sister was over.
Lexi had worked too hard for too long to find out what happened to let Sarah
herself stand in the way of the answer. It wasn’t fair. If Sarah was alive and
planning something then she had to be near Englewood. Lexi decided that unless Sarah
was also a hacker—which she obviously wasn’t or she would have found Lexi
out far sooner—she wouldn’t have any way of knowing if she was being
tracked. Lexi didn’t want anything from her sister; she just needed to see her
with her own eyes. She needed to know that Sarah was alive and this wasn’t some
elaborate hoax by CO.

It would take long hours and hard work, but with a little
help from Syke, Lexi could track absolutely anyone. Now that she knew Sarah was
alive, Lexi was going to find her, whether she liked it or not.

December
23

Laura

It was hard to concentrate on
anything but the night ahead as they drove up to Beacon, but Laura didn’t have
a choice. Charlie kept asking her questions about all the roadside stops they’d
make when she was going up to visit her grandmother as a child, and she kept
having to make up lies.

“Yes, we used to go to that Stewart’s Drive-In all the time,
and my dad would get a float but with chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla,
and my mom thought it was super gross,” Laura said as they passed the old
stand. Or, “I don’t know this stretch as well; Gram used to take some country
back road that she never told anyone about because she was afraid it would get
filled with traffic.”

The truth was that Laura had never been to Beacon, New York,
in her entire life. She picked it because it was far enough away for Charlie to
have trouble getting home if he wanted to run away—or rather,
when
.
There wasn’t a bus stop in town and the trains stopped running at nine o’clock
in the evenings. The cabin she found might have belonged to someone’s
grandmother, at some point, but her own Gram died long before Sarah and Lexi were
born and ironically lived in California for her entire life. This was a small
cabin at a good price on a remote piece of land where there was no cellphone
reception. That last detail had been the selling point for Laura when she
searched for weekend rentals online—that and the fact that there weren’t
any photos of the owner’s family in the pictures she could see online. Laura would
tell Charlie that her family rented the property out when they could so they
didn’t keep any photos of themselves around, for safety. She would also tell
him that this was her first time coming up alone, so she didn’t know exactly
how to open the house or turn everything on—her parents or Gram always
did those tasks. Otherwise she had taken care of studying the map to the
grocery store, pizza place, lake area, and The Roundhouse for their dinner date
so she would seem like a total local.

Though, so far, none of that prep seemed like it was going
to matter. Charlie believed every word of what Laura was saying. She assumed
that was because all he could really focus on was what he thought was going to
happen that night. Laura had been hinting at the fireplace, the wine she’d
smuggled, and the little, red something she was going to wear after dinner…the
hints worked. The truth was that Laura was planning for a little, red, lace
surprise
before
dinner. She had a feeling that Charlie wouldn’t exactly
be in the mood after their meal.

Charlie’s reaction was the one wild card in this entire
plan. Laura could not predict it, but she decided that, no matter what happened
after she said everything she planned to say, it didn’t matter. She could
vanish just as easily as she arrived if need be. But deep down Laura didn’t
think there would be the need. She had crafted a pretty impressive offer for
Charlie, and she did not believe he would refuse.

Laura slouched down in the passenger seat of her car and
covered her shoulders with the blankets Charlie brought. He insisted that they
drive the whole way with the top down even though it was the end of December.
She insisted that they drive her car because it was new and more reliable—and
because she would be holding the keys if his reaction was to try and escape.

The heat was blasting and they were both wearing sleeping
bag-style coats and hats with the floppy fuzzy ears and gloves. Charlie had on
one of those ridiculous face guards that covered everything but his eyes,
nose, and mouth, but as Laura looked over at him, she could still see his big,
goofy smile. It hadn’t changed since the day she met him in Mrs. Berenson’s seventh
grade class—aside from these past four months, of course.

Sorry, Charlie
, Laura thought to herself.
That
smile will probably be wiped away again for a few months more, but eventually
it will be back, and you’ll realize I was right all along
.