He’d even been skipping classes to do research for me, research for Charlie. These days, our search was feeling very much like the first forty-eight hours of a murder.
Except it had been months.
The time between Charlie’s death and today had been far too long, and the trail on figuring shit out was getting cold.
Thatch’s face was grim.
“I can’t find her, man.” He had his hands together, laced on the computer desk. He eyed me over his shoulder. “I’ve tried everything. All my contacts have led to nothing.” He sat back. “I even reached out to my dad’s contacts.”
Thatcher had a few, all of us did, but we could only do so much poking around before our fathers caught wind of what we were doing. The four of us did what we could with names we’d heard over dinner conversations throughout the years and only made contact with them anonymously. We did nothing in a way that could be traced back to a pack of high school kids.
We couldn’t take the risk.
No one was stopping us. No one was stopping me from gaining the truth about what had happened to Charlie last year.
Not even our own goddamn parents.
They might put a hold on this whole thing knowing we were trying to work up shit. Our parents were trying to move on after what had happened, but they wouldn’t be able to completely unless they knew the truth. The four of us didn’t have enough evidence to give that to them unfortunately. So, at the present, we were conducting our own research.
Which was apparently turning up dry.
I wet my mouth. It was goddamn dry like the fucking Sahara. I touched my lips to my fist. “There has to be something else.”
“I’m telling you there isn’t.” He looked pained, his brow twisted with frustration and anguish. No one wanted this to work more than him. All of us were equally invested. Charlie Lindquist was our brother, all of ours. Not just mine. Thatch shook his head. “I’m fucking sorry. I fucking suck—”
I rubbed his shoulder. The guy had dark circles under his eyes and shit. I wondered if he slept, his nights spent pacing like I did. We were too young to be putting ourselves through all this stress. Especially Thatcher and Wells. They were barely sixteen, sophomores.
I only knew Thatch in particular was giving himself a hard time because he was a computer wiz and should’ve been able to find anyo
ne. He’d learned from the best. His father’s internet security company reached all over the world. We should have been able to find this bitch.
“Mayberry’s wiped off the face of the earth.” Thatcher sat back. “I can’t find her. Not without help.”
Our dear headmaster had skipped town after what had happened to Charlie. She’d claimed it was the stress and strain from witnessing the murder-suicide that had happened as a result of her abusive husband.
Except we knew the truth.
We’d found out the truth through Thatcher. At least, in part.
Charlie had been very careful about his contact with Principal Mayberry. In fact, once the police had issued my parents Charlie’s personal belongings, we’d searched, but there had been no conversations with himself and that bitch Mayberry.
But thanks to Thatcher, not all of Charlie’s secrets had died with him. Thatcher had been able to get us into Charlie’s social media accounts. One in particular showed a direct back-and-forth exchange between Charlie himself and an anonymous handle. The conversation discussed running away together. No names were given, but whoever it was had specifically asked Charlie to be with them.
He’d obviously decided to.
This wasn’t enough to implicate Mayberry, though. The bitch had obviously deleted her account. Nothing but a blank profile picture made it look like Charlie had been talking with himself that day. The pair of them also had been very good. They’d used no names or identifiable information. Neither Charlie nor Mayberry wanted anyone to know what they’d been planning.
We needed the source herself to admit her sins. She needed to admit what had really happened that night, but all leads were turning up dry and our hacker, Thatch, was getting defeated.
“I don’t know how much more I can do,” he said, swiveling back around to the computer. “Maybe if we had our dads’ contacts.”
That’d fix everything if our dads would have been on board with our theories.
We didn’t have enough evidence.
There simply wasn’t enough, and I personally couldn’t drag my family back into the media circus that had been the last year. The news reporters had just stopped stalking our house.
No, we couldn’t involve our parents. I couldn’t pull anyone else into this shit. It was bad enough that Wells and Thatcher were in this too. They should have been enjoying their sophomore year, and Wolf should have been enjoying our junior year. No one else should have had to deal with this.