Twisted Fate (23 page)

Once inside the house I realized they were richer than I’d imagined or noticed before. Something about being there alone. The house really was a mansion. I was afraid the minute I got inside that I was in over my head.

The kitchen looked like it came right out of some celebrity chef show. Stainless-steel everything. Everything in the house was at once modern and also somehow antique. Had
the feeling of perfection and old money around it. Or at least the kind of money I’d never encountered before. Sure, some kids’ parents were doctors or lawyers or had inherited money—but this family seemed loaded in a way that you see on television. They also clearly didn’t hire a cleaning lady—even though the place was like a palace it was kind of a mess. Not the way it looked when Declan and Becky and I came over the other day. Books strewn about, papers piled on tables. Half-empty glasses left out with things moldering in their bottoms.

The central staircase was wide and winding and a chandelier hung in the center of the vaulted ceiling. I headed up to Graham’s room—quiet as a mouse. His parents’ bedroom had a fireplace in it and huge glass-front bookcases. It was the only room in the house that was actually cozy and not filled with some weird art.

There were four rooms upstairs: an art studio, a study lined with books, a room with floor-to-ceiling windows filled with plants, and Graham’s room. It was the farthest away from his parents. I expected when I opened the door for the place to be a complete mess like it was when I had seen it before—clothes strewn about the place kind of smelling like boy the way Declan’s room smelled. But when I opened it I was shocked. It was pristine. Ordered like some kind of laboratory. Not an article of clothing on the floor. The bed perfectly made. Not a thing out of place on the desk. No crumpled paper, no electronic cables or cords
lying around. Nothing. It looked like no one had ever used the room for anything. Like it belonged to a ghost. Like it was a room some parents had perfectly preserved, instead of a place where someone actually lived.

The fact that it was so neat made my heart race. Like he had already cleaned up the scene of a crime. I’d have to remember not to leave a hair out of place or he’d know someone had been in the room. The shelves were filled with DVDs and books. I was again shocked when I realized they were in alphabetical order. I opened his drawers—even the contents were squarely in order. There was a notebook, five identical black pens. A compass and binoculars.

He had two telescopes near the window. A small one and a bigger fancier thing that looked very technical.

I pulled the curtains aside and my blood went cold. The hair on my neck stood up. It was pointed directly at Ally’s bed. The placement of the telescope was unmistakable. I had been right. There was no way he wasn’t watching her.

I turned on his computer and waited for it to boot up and then I went into the files marked Copeland Productions.

There were so many files I could only hope he was as meticulous in filing them as he was in cleaning his room. I wished Becky was there so that she could just hack right into everything. But she was spending more time with her family and, just like Declan, spending more time studying.

Finally I found it—a folder labeled simply “Allyson.” There were dozens of films in it. I figure I’d start with the
latest one first—since the other ones were probably creepy things he took from the window before they were really talking.

I clicked on it and a window opened with my face. I was totally shocked. Graham had never interviewed me in his room before. But there I was sitting in the leather chair. I clicked Play. He was asking me questions. And I was shyly answering them. Then he started kissing me.

I watched in horror and fascination, trying to remember when I did this. My heart started pounding. I felt dizzy like I was going to be sick. I felt terrified. There was no way this happened or I would have remembered it. I did not do these things.

I clicked on another and it was me sitting in the passenger seat of Graham’s car, my hair blowing in the breeze and laughing. I never went for a drive in Graham’s car.

“Are you going to go for another ride with me?” he was asking.

“Of course,” Ally’s voice said while my lips moved.

“We’ll drive out and make movies like me and Eric,” he said.

“We’ll be stars,” Ally’s voice said dreamily while my face smiled.

I clicked on another one and it was me talking about baking muffins, wearing Ally’s clothes and the pearls she borrowed from Mom, and then I realized it was shot in the hold of Dad’s yacht. I haven’t been on that yacht since I was
in middle school.

Something was terribly wrong. I was freaking out, but then I realized he had simply found a way to transpose my image over hers and use her voice and her answers to the questions he asked her. I can’t believe he made it look like we were making out. That was the weirdest part. He must have really liked it that one time we kissed in the garage and just gotten carried away I guess. It looked like he had a whole bunch of films of me but they were all things Ally did and said. Why would he do that? Was this just more of his weird art? It had to be. Or was he doing something creepier like selling this film to some weirdo pervert but making it so they would see my image instead of Ally and go after me?

Graham Copeland was getting stranger and stranger by the second. Just as I was about to click on another movie I heard a door creak downstairs and then footsteps. I quickly logged out of the Ally files and shut down the computer. Then I looked out Graham’s window. His father’s car was in the driveway. I quickly opened the window and slid out onto the ledge, then pulled myself up onto the roof. I walked over the roof to the back of the house, then hung down and dropped onto the back balcony. Then I hung off the balcony, dropped to the ground, and ran quickly into the woods. My heart pounding in my chest.

I could not believe what I had seen.

I
couldn’t look at him after I saw that movie. But of course I had to. He lived next door. Our yards were connected. My sister was still in love with him. There were few things as horrible as that. Or at least I didn’t yet know how bad things could get.

I decided to talk to Becky about it because she was Junior Hacker Extraordinaire.

She had long since stopped talking to him after the stuff with little Brian.

“It’s not that hard to get some spyware on his computer, but finding out stuff that he has buried by using a Trojan horse or trapdoor is going to be really hard.”

“Can you do it?”

She looked really uncomfortable. “I
can
. But it’s the breaking and entering and doing something illegal that I’m not so into.”

“Are you kidding? For this guy?”

“I think we should stay
away
from this guy.”

“Can you teach me how to do it?”

She looked at me for a long time, like she was trying to figure out if I was smart enough.

“It’s tricky,” she said. “I could see you getting frustrated and messing things up.”

“Can you make a thing—whatever you said, Trojan horse or secret passage or whatever—can you make one on your computer and then show me how to get into it?”

She nodded. “I can. But listen, I don’t want any more part of whatever weird shit is going on with this kid. I’m pissed at him, but honestly, Tate, I’m scared of him. I’m scared of him and then sometimes I think he really is one of our friends and we should try to understand him and make him stop doing weird things. I mean, you know how it is. You’re super weird and we love you. Declan’s some kind of freaky Buddhist nerd who still studies up in his tree house. Graham’s just a little further on the fucked-up scale than we are. I don’t think we can figure all this out on our own. I don’t think this is something we can do.”

“NO?” I shouted. “Then who is going to do it? This guy sold movies of you and Brian and God knows who else to pedophiles! He has weird movies of all of us probably.”

“Yeah, but that’s not what he was
trying
to do. He thought people just loved his art. He was just stupid.”

“Becky! Listen to what you’re saying. I don’t know if
that’s even true, and think about this carefully. When you get right down to it, is there any real difference between stupid and dangerous?”

She sighed. The days of us hanging out and getting high and listening to music and walking around in the woods were over. She was doing full-time computer programming and code writing and making jewelry out of sea glass. What happened to Brian was sobering, except to Declan of course who was never really sober and never really slowed down for anything. All the terrible events didn’t make him pause and go back to doing homey things like it had Becky. It made him get high more and study more; he bought Rosetta Stone language courses for Swahili and Cantonese. When I asked him why he said the world was a strange place and knowing how to communicate better meant you had more options to go become a hermit somewhere. So I guess maybe he was kind of affected too in his own way. Had some long-term escape plan going on. But Declan was easy to interest in any kind of investigation.

The problem was I wanted to see the films Graham was hiding but I did not want to discover them with Declan. I was afraid of what we might find. Afraid that there would be worse things or that he had movies of me and my sister that no one should see.

And I wanted to find out what he meant by all this stuff about making movies like he did with Eric—how he was involving my sister in something he had been in serious
trouble for. He wanted her to be the new Eric, that was for sure.

I needed to see what else he had. To learn what Becky knew and do it myself.

“Please, Becky, just show me how to do it. I won’t involve you in any way. You’re not responsible for anything. Besides, you know it’s the right thing to do.”

She sighed and looked at me again, incredibly sad. Then she reached over and held my hand, saying, “Be careful, Tate.”

I
got back into the house with no problem. The Copelands for all their wealth and art never locked their windows or had alarms. That’s because they were always home. But I was fortunate enough to live next door and be able to see when they all left—to talk to them about where they were going.

I had my chance on Sunday when they all went out to some advance screening of a film Kim’s friend had made. They were dressed up and I stood in the driveway talking to them for a few minutes. Graham came out to the car last and he looked high as a kite. I don’t know why his parents were so naive and unable to tell he was on drugs but they were. Maybe they just figured that’s how people look when they’re on Adderall. In any case we talked for some time and then they drove off. I waited for fifteen minutes and then let myself into the house from an open basement
window near the back garden. Then quickly made my way back to Graham’s room.

I turned on the computer and went back to the main menu of all his movie files. There were so many marked “Allyson” it freaked me out to even think of what he had there. I called up his website, Copeland Productions, and began applying the things Becky told me about so I could break in and see what was behind the shiny arty veneer, what secret movies he might have.

Suddenly, a pop-up appeared asking for an authorization code. I did what Becky showed me and sure enough a whole new page appeared with a much different list and prices written next to each film description. The films were titled “The Girl Next Door” and they all had a number following them; there were “The Girl Next Door” videos volumes 1–70.

The first one I clicked on was of Ally lying in Graham’s backyard naked. I gasped. I felt sick. It was terrible to see. It was hard to make out her face in the dark but it was clearly her. We have the same freckles on our chest and a birthmark in the same spot. It was clear she had no idea she was being filmed. I knew I had to get rid of these videos, but I was getting angrier and angrier and felt like I should just get rid of Graham instead.

I logged out of the secret site and made a note of the things I saw there so I could go to the police.

I was about to go but then I thought I should look for
the video he told Ally about. The one of Eric that he said he had hidden. He had a wall of old albums—vinyl—they must have been from his dad’s collection like back in the eighties—and a turntable. I don’t know why it suddenly hit me but if he was going to hide something he’d hide it in plain sight—a thin little disk slipped into an album would be the perfect hiding spot. It was like I could feel something there calling out to me or maybe I just suspected.