One of Us Is Next Read online

  There. I said it.

  I inhale quickly, still not looking at him, and add in a rush, “It’s totally fine if you don’t feel the same way, because we can still be friends and I won’t be weird about it—”

  “Whoa, hold up,” Luis interrupts. “Can I answer before you answer for me?”

  “Oh.” My face flames, and I stare so hard at the dash that I’m surprised the numbers on my odometer don’t move. “Yes. Of course. Sorry.”

  Luis’s hand moves down my arm until his fingers lace with mine, and he tugs lightly at my hand. “Look at me, okay?” he says quietly. I turn my head, and there’s such a soft, open expression on his face that I feel a spark of hope. “I like you too, Maeve,” he says, his dark eyes steady on mine. “I have for a while.”

  My heart skips and then soars. “Oh,” I say again. I’ve forgotten all the other words.

  His lips quirk. “So, should we do something about this? Or would you rather keep torturing me from a distance?”

  My smile back feels big enough to take over my entire face. “We should,” I manage. “Do something.”

  “Good,” Luis says. He touches my face and leans in close. My eyes flutter shut and warmth floods my veins as I wait for his lips to meet mine—until my lap buzzes loudly. We both startle and pull back. “Damn it all to hell,” I mutter in frustration, snatching up my phone. “I forgot we were on a stakeout.”

  Luis laughs. “Never a dull moment with you. What’s up?”

  I read Knox’s text, blink a few times, and read it again. “Phoebe says it’s not Derek.”

  “Really?” Luis sounds as surprised as I feel. “Then who is it?”

  “She doesn’t know. She says she’s never seen him before.”

  Luis frowns. “That’s weird.”

  My phone buzzes with another text from Knox. He’s leaving.

  “Oh!” I grab Luis’s arm. The figure we’d been watching at the gazebo is suddenly a lot closer. “That’s him.” Intense Guy is cutting across the grass and through the edge of the playground, but he doesn’t spare a glance for the climbing structure where Phoebe is. He pushes past a group of kids and heads for the park exit. At this distance, there’s no mistaking the same person who confronted Mr. Santos a few weeks back. There are two paths he could take out of the park, and he chooses the one leading almost straight to my car.

  “Shit. He’s coming right this way,” I say, looking down to shield my face. The guy barely flicked his eyes over me at Café Contigo, but better safe than sorry. “Duck, Luis.” Instead, Luis does exactly what he shouldn’t do, which is lean forward for a better view. “Stop!” I hiss. “Don’t let him see you, he’ll recognize you!”

  “So?” Luis says. Honest to God, he might be the hottest guy I’ve ever seen, but he’s useless in a stakeout situation. I try to push him back, but he’s still craning his neck and Intense Guy is right there, about to cross in front of the car, so I have no choice except to grab hold of Luis’s face and kiss him.

  I mean, I probably have other choices. But this is the best one.

  I’m twisted awkwardly, held back by my seat belt until Luis reaches around me and unbuckles it. I break our kiss to slide out from behind the wheel. He pulls me closer, lifting me into his lap, and I return my hands to either side of his face. His arms feel warm and solid around me, holding me in place as we stare into each other’s eyes for a beat. “Beautiful,” he breathes, and I melt. Then his lips crash against mine, and it’s happening again—the heat, the dizziness, and the desperate need to be as close to him as possible. His thumbs sweep over my cheeks, my fingers are twisted in his hair, and the kiss goes on and on until I’ve completely forgotten where we are and what we’re supposed to be doing.

  Right up until the loud rap on the window.

  Oh God. It all comes rushing back as I look up, expecting to see Intense Guy glowering down at us. Instead, Phoebe cocks her head and waves, smiling brightly. Knox is still a few yards behind her, head down as he stuffs his binoculars into their case. She turns and positions herself in front of the window, her back to us.

  I have no memory of this happening, but at some point either Luis or I reclined the seat so that we’re practically flat. “Um. So.” I reach across Luis’s lap for the button, and can’t keep from laughing as the seat starts slowly rising while we’re still tangled up together. “This is the recline function,” I say, smoothing my hair.

  “Good to know.” Luis kisses my neck, his palm warm against my waist. “Thanks for the demonstration.”

  “No problem. I do this for everybody. It’s important to know how a vehicle operates.” Reluctantly, I slide off Luis’s lap and behind the wheel. Then I squeeze his hand, feeling giddy that apparently I can do that now. “To be continued?”

  He smiles and squeezes back. “Definitely.”

  “Well!” Phoebe opens the rear door and crawls across the seat. The hood of Knox’s sweatshirt is still up, the laces pulled tight around her face. Knox follows and closes the door behind him. He seems preoccupied with his binoculars. I’m pretty sure Phoebe ran interference quickly enough that he didn’t see anything with Luis and me. “I have officially never seen that guy before in my life. I have absolutely no idea who he is.”

  “So now what?” I ask. “Should we—”

  “Shit, here he comes!” Knox pulls Phoebe toward him, pressing her into his shoulder as she lets out a strangled yelp. I duck down automatically in my seat, but Luis—of course—stays where he is. He really is terrible at this. “Sorry,” Knox says in a calmer voice as he releases Phoebe. “But he just drove past us. Don’t worry, he didn’t look our way.”

  Phoebe leans forward and peers between the front seats. “The blue car?” she asks. When Knox grunts in agreement, she taps my shoulder. “Follow him. Let’s see what this weirdo does when he isn’t stalking girls he’s never met.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  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, th
ough.” 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—”