One of Us Is Next (22 page)

Knox

Thursday, March 26

A couple of hours after we leave the park, we have a license plate number, an address, and a name. Sort of.

“The car is registered to David Jackson,” Maeve reports, her eyes on her laptop screen. “So maybe David Jackson is Intense Guy?” We’re sitting at my kitchen table after dropping off Luis and Phoebe. My parents are out to dinner with the neighbors, so we’re eating buttered noodles and carrot sticks because that’s the extent of my culinary repertoire. Luis, I am not. In more ways than one.

Yeah, I saw. I’m trying to be happy for them. It’s not like I’m jealous. It’s just—for once in my life, I’d like somebody to have that kind of reaction to me. Maybe that only happens to guys like Luis, though. “Great,” I say, unlocking my phone to open Instagram. “That’s a super uncommon name. If I search it I get…too many to count.”

Maeve frowns. “I’m Googling his name and the town and—hmm. Nothing interesting.” We tailed the blue car to a tiny ranch home in a rundown section of Rolando Village, which the city’s assessor database tells us belongs to a couple named Paul and Lisa Curtin. Maeve thinks it must be a rental. “There’s a local dentist with the name David Jackson. He has terrible Yelp reviews.”

“Well, Intense Guy does seem like he’d have a bad bedside manner. Or chairside, I guess,” I say. “But he’s a little young to have made it through dental school.”

Maeve bites into a carrot stick and Fritz, who’s sitting between us, snaps his head toward her with a hopeful look. “You wouldn’t like carrots,” she assures him, petting the graying patch of fur between his ears. Fritz looks unconvinced. I lean across him so I can see Maeve’s screen better, and she angles it toward me. “This David Jackson is in his fifties,” she says. “This one just retired from a gas company…” Maeve clicks to the second page of results, then sighs and leans back in her chair. “They’re all old.”

“Maybe David Jackson is Intense Guy’s father,” I say. “Dad owns the car, and his kid is driving it?”

“Could be. That doesn’t help us much, though.” Maeve catches her lower lip between her teeth, looking pensive. “I wish Phoebe would talk to her mom about what’s going on.”

On the ride home from Rolando Village, all of us tried to convince Phoebe to tell Mrs. Lawton about Intense Guy and the note. But Phoebe wouldn’t go for it. “My mom has enough to worry about,” she insisted. “Plus, this is obviously a case of mistaken identity. He’s looking for a different Phoebe.”

I can understand wanting to think that. And I hope it’s true. Although I feel sorry for Different Phoebe if it is.

An alert flashes across Maeve’s laptop screen.
The website you are monitoring has been updated.
God, she has PingMe synced to
everything.
I swallow a groan as Maeve opens a new browser tab and brings up the Vengeance Is Mine forum. I’d rather plug David Jackson’s name into social media platforms for the next hour than wander down this weird rabbit hole again.

Then a string of messages pops up:

Fuck you, Phoebe, for not showing up.

Yeah I used your name.

WE HAD A DEAL—Darkestmind

My jaw drops as Maeve turns to me, eyes wide. “Oh my God,” she says. Fritz whines softly at the tension in her voice. “This
cannot
be a coincidence. Do you realize what this means?”

I do, finally. I’ve made fun of Maeve the entire time she’s stalked the Vengeance Is Mine forum, because I didn’t believe there was any connection between the delusional ramblings on there and what’s been going on in Bayview. Now these messages are smacking me in the face with how wrong I’ve been. I point at the user name on the screen in front of us. “It means Darkestmind and Intense Guy are the same person.”

“Not
only
that,” Maeve says urgently. Fritz drops his head on her knee, and she strokes one of his floppy ears without taking her eyes off the computer. “I’ve thought all along that Darkestmind is the person behind Truth or Dare. Remember? He kept talking about Bayview, and a game, and he even said
tick-tock,
just like Unknown always did. So if I’m right about that—Intense Guy is
also
Unknown. The three strands we’ve been following all lead to a single person.”

“Shit.” I’ve been staring at the messages from Darkestmind for so long that the words are starting to waver. “So you’re saying we just followed the Truth or Dare texter?”

“I think we did,” Maeve says. “And he officially does not go to Bayview High. I knew it wasn’t Matthias,” she adds, almost to herself. “You could tell that little taste of visibility he got from Simon Says terrified him.”

“Okay, but…” I blink a few times to clear my vision. “What the hell is this guy even talking about? He says he and Phoebe had a deal. A deal for
what
? Ruining her life at school? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t understand that part, either,” Maeve mutters. Her face gets thoughtful. “Do you think it’s possible there’s something she’s not telling us about all this?”

“Like what?”

She lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “Like maybe she really does know the guy, but it’s a bad-breakup kind of thing and she doesn’t want to talk about it.” Then she grimaces. “
Really
bad. That guy looked like he was out for blood.”

Out for blood.
The words strike a chord in me, and I sit up straighter. “Hold up,” I say. “I just had a thought. Let’s assume we’re right, and that Intense Guy equals Darkestmind equals Unknown. By the way, let’s stick with one nickname, because this is getting confusing. I vote for Intense Guy. That’s the most descriptive, and also, I came up with it. Anyway. Does Intense Guy have some kind of bone to pick with Brandon?” I gesture at Maeve’s screen. “I mean, this is a revenge forum, right? Nate thinks someone might’ve messed with the construction site landing. Intense Guy led Brandon there with a Dare. So maybe that wild theory I tossed out the other day was actually right, and he hurt Brandon on purpose.”

“But why?” Maeve asks. “Do you think he was jealous, maybe? Because Brandon was hooking up with Phoebe?” Her hand stills on Fritz’s head. “The whole game kicked off with a rumor about Phoebe and Derek, didn’t it? Maybe this guy can’t stand the thought of her with anyone else.”

“Maybe,” I say slowly. “But you weren’t with Phoebe in the playground. She genuinely seemed clueless about him. And I was thinking along different lines, more like—” Maeve’s phone buzzes and I pause. “Is that Phoebe?”

Maeve picks up her phone. Her entire face changes, taking on a rosy glow like somebody just injected her with pink champagne. “No,” she says, fighting a smile as she lets go of Fritz so she can text with both hands. “I’m just going to…answer this real quick.”

“Tell Luis I said hi,” I say, gazing around the kitchen. Fritz pokes his nose into Maeve’s thigh a couple of times, then sighs and flops onto the floor when he can’t get her attention back.

My eyes land on my mother’s black laptop bag, sitting in the empty chair where she always leaves it when she gets home from work. Being an insurance adjuster isn’t a nine-to-five job, and Mom usually hauls her laptop out at least once a night to work on a case. But right now, she and my dad should be gone for at least another hour.

When Maeve finally puts her phone aside, I say, “Maybe we’ve been asking the question from the wrong angle.”

“Hmm?” She still looks a little fizzy. “What question?”

“You asked why Intense Guy, in particular, would hate Brandon,” I remind her. “But maybe we should be asking this instead: what could Brandon have done that would make
anybody
hate him enough to want him gone?”

Maeve knits her brow. “I don’t get it.”

“I was just thinking about a conversation I overheard between my mom and dad. You and I weren’t talking then, so I didn’t mention it, but I’ve been wondering about it ever since. My parents were saying how ironic it would be if Mr. Weber sues the construction site, because of some lawsuit involving Brandon that Mom’s company settled three years ago. And my dad said something like, ‘The case shouldn’t have gone that way. All it did was show a kid like Brandon that actions don’t have consequences.’ When I asked them about it, they clammed up and said it was confidential. But maybe if we knew what happened back then, we’d know why somebody would go through this much trouble to target Brandon.”

“So are you going to ask your mom again?” Maeve says.

“No point. She wouldn’t tell me.”

“What if you told her about all
this
?” Maeve asks, gesturing at her computer. “I mean, your dad already thinks Brandon’s accident was sketchy, right? But he doesn’t know it was part of a game that deliberately led Brandon to the construction site. We’re the only ones besides Sean, Jules, and Monica who know that, because we’re the only ones who saw the video from Sean’s phone.”

I swallow hard. “We could, I guess. But the thing is…basically, my dad thinks I’m an idiot.” Maeve starts to murmur a dissent that I wave off. “It’s true. He does. And if I come at him with
this,
ranting about texting games and anonymous forum posts that disappear, and how I think some rando I followed to a park is behind it all? He’d never take me seriously.”

“Okay,” Maeve says cautiously. She looks like she wants to argue the point, but all she says is, “Then I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if your parents connect any of the same dots. They’re the experts, after all.”

“I don’t want to wait,” I say. “I want to know what Brandon did three years ago that was bad enough to get him involved in some kind of hush-hush settlement.” I lean over and grab my mother’s laptop case by its handle, hauling it onto the table between Maeve and me. “This is my mom’s work computer.”

Maeve blinks, startled. “Are you suggesting we…hack it?”

“No,” I say. “That’s ridiculous. I’m suggesting
you
hack it. I don’t know how.”

I open the case, pull out a black, blocky PC that looks like it’s from the early aughts, and push it toward her. She lays a hand on the cover and hesitates, her eyes wide and questioning. “Do you really want me to do this?”

I raise my eyebrows. “
Can
you?”

Maeve makes a dismissive
psssh
sound. “Challenge accepted.”

She opens the cover and presses the power button. “If your mom is running an old version of Windows there are some login workarounds—although, before I try that, what year was Kiersten born?” I tell her, and she murmurs, “Kiersten plus birth year equals…okay, no. What about Katie?” We repeat the process, and Maeve’s brow furrows. “Wow, I get six more tries before the system locks me out. That’s way too many. Kelsey is the year after Katie?”

“Yeah, but—” I pause when she grins widely, turning the screen to face me as it powers up to an old picture of a family hiking trip. “You’re kidding me. That actually worked?”

“Parents are the single worst threat to any type of cyber security,” Maeve says calmly, flipping the screen back toward her. “Okay, let’s search all documents for Brandon Weber.” She types, then leans back in her chair, squinting. “Nothing. Maybe just Weber.” She presses a few more keys, then grimaces. “Ugh, that’s a lot. We’re cursed with common last names tonight. Emails, phone directories, a bunch of other stuff…” She keeps scrolling and muttering to herself while I load our empty dishes into the dishwasher and top off the glasses of Sprite we’ve been drinking. Then I sip mine while she works.

“I think I’ve figured out your mom’s naming system,” Maeve says after a few minutes. “Cases are all tagged a certain way. So if I put those keywords in and cross-search with Weber…that’s a much smaller universe of files. And this was three years ago, you said?”

“Yeah. When my mom first started at Jenson and Howard.”

Her fingers fly across the keyboard, and she cracks a small smile. “Okay, we’re down to two documents. Let me try opening one.” She double clicks and nods, as though she just got exactly the result she was expecting. “Password protected, but—”

Fritz suddenly sits bolt upright, barking madly, and takes off running for the front door. Maeve and I both freeze except for our eyes, which snap toward one another in mirrored panic. The only time Fritz ever moves like that is when a car pulls into our driveway. “I thought you said your parents weren’t coming home till later,” Maeve hisses. She starts shutting down the computer as I scramble to my feet and follow Fritz. He’s still going berserk, and I hold his collar as I open the door and peer outside. The headlights shining into my eyes are a lot smaller than I expected.

“Hang on,” I call to Maeve from the doorway. Fritz keeps barking, his tail thumping against my leg. “Don’t put the computer away. It’s Kiersten.”

Maeve pauses. “Would she be okay with what we’re doing?”

“Oh hell no. But I can distract her for a few minutes. Email yourself the files, okay? Come out to the driveway when you’re done.”

I open the door just enough to push through without letting Fritz out, and jog down the front steps. My movement triggers our garage floodlight as Kiersten’s headlights flicker off. Her car door opens, and she steps onto the driveway. “Hey!” she calls, waving both hands in greeting. “I was nearby for a work thing so I just wanted to—”

Before she has a chance to finish, I’m hugging her so hard that I almost knock her over. “It’s so good to see you!” I yell, lifting her as far off the ground as I can manage.

“Um, okay. Wow.” Kiersten pats my back gingerly. “Good to see you too.” I lower her onto the driveway without releasing her, and her pats get a little harder. “You can let go now,” she says. Her voice is muffled in my shirt. I keep clinging, and she practically punches me between the shoulder blades. “Seriously. Thank you for the enthusiastic welcome, though.”

“Thank
you,
” I say, hugging her tighter. “For gracing us with your presence.”

“For what? What do—” Kiersten stiffens and pulls back, craning her neck so she can get a good look at my face. “Knox, are you
drunk
?” She sniffs me noisily, then uses three fingers to pull down the skin beneath my left eye. “Or high? Are you on something right now?”