What Lies Beneath

Fourteen

Mrs. Carol was probably tired of seeing my face in the library, and I wouldn't have faulted her for it. I was becoming a regular at this point. An annoying regular, probably. Nonetheless, she never asked me more than I was comfortable answering. I liked that about her. She also didn't pry when I gave her half-ass answers that were obviously lies. I liked that about her too.

Even then, I couldn't figure out if her lack of suspicion was a good thing or a bad thing. It struck me as good at first. Then I'd thought, what are the odds of someone opening up to a stranger asking personal questions about a girl he claimed he didn't know well? Not likely. And I didn't like that about her. Because of that, I couldn't let my guard down around her or Cecilia.

It was also the reason why I kept looking back over my shoulder. Cecilia was somewhere in the area. She had a habit of appearing out of nowhere. Part of me was starting to think she made it her mission to watch over us whenever we were around. The last thing Patty and I needed was her snooping, then reporting back to her mother about what we were doing.

"Okay, we're at the computers," Patty said, throwing her bookbag down in one of the open seats, "now what the heck are we doing here? And um, what are you doing?"

"Give me a second, I'm"—I maneuvered to the side, slowly dragging my hands along the keys of each computer's keyboard—"checking for something."

"Checking for something?" She frowned.

"Mhm-hmm. Turns out Emerald's phone was found not too far from the crime scene—broken. So, it'll probably take a few days for the police to gather anything from it. But she had access to the computers here so I wouldn't be surprised if she used them sometimes."

"Okay," she dragged the word out. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Well, it got me thinking. . . I think we should take a look at Emerald's social media."

"What? How? Why? What if she doesn't have any?" question after question, she asked.

I bit my lip and shrugged. "Then, that's that. But it doesn't hurt to try. It might benefit us to see who Emerald was in contact with, and make our own suspect list if she does have any."

"What about your brother? Shouldn't he have done this already?" Patty's observance was going to be the death of me. She wasn't like the rest of my family, I had to remember. I'd never had someone there to point out the flaws in my lies, let alone challenge those flaws—and it was already proving to be a huge problem. Could I continue like this with her? Damn, I didn't know.

Sure, Christian and Logan might've gotten wind of Emerald's social media already. It'd have been one of the first things they searched for. Yet they didn't have a concrete suspect list to prove it. Like Patty said, she might not have had any social media accounts. If she did, all of her contacts might have been clean then. Still, I needed to see all of this for myself. I just needed to.

"Do you really think they'll make that suspect list public?" I said, my eyebrows shooting up.

"I guess not. I just don't understand why we had to come here to do that. I could've done this for you at home. On my own computer. We don't even know her social media handles! How are you going to find her!?" Patty wasted no time listing every significant hole in my plan.

Again, her suspicions were not a good sign for me.

"Leave her handles to me," I said, interrupting her before she could say anything else.

"Huh? You know them?" Patty asked, her face screwed.

Truth was, I didn't. But Patty didn't need to know that. Me not knowing them also wasn't going to stop me from figuring them out. It was the whole point of us coming here.