One of Us Is Next(73)
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, 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?”