That had been the end of it, and it had never been mentioned again.
Until now.
“It’s him,” Jeanette whispered. “Oh, God, Chet, it is!”
Chefs expression hardened. “It’s not, Jeanette! It’s Jeff, goddamn it! I don’t know how he’s doing this, but you can bet I’m going to find out! And I’m not listening to any more of his crap, either!”
“I just wanted you to know I’m okay, Mom,” Adam was saying again. “I’m not dead. Really, I’m not. I’m—”
The screen went dark as Chet snapped off the set. A moment later he took the cassette out of the video recorder and put it into the battered briefcase in which he carried his papers and lecture notes. “First thing in the morning, I’m going to find out why they let Jeff do that,” he said. “And if I discover that he had help from some of the college kids, there are going to be a few expulsions at Barrington. I’ve heard of some cruel pranks, but this one beats them all!”
Jeanette stared at the darkened television set.
Chet was right, of course. It had to be a prank.
And yet, all the time she’d watched him, and listened to him, she’d had the strangest feeling that it wasn’t a prank at all.
She’d felt that she’d been watching a shadow.
A shadow of the dead.
24
Jeanette Aldrich hesitated in front of George Engersol’s office. “Are you sure we should be doing this?” she asked Chet for at least the fourth time that morning. “Maybe we should talk to Jeff first—”
“I’m not talking to him until I know how something like this could have happened,” Chet replied, remnants of last night’s fury still evident in his voice. “If Engersol can’t tell me, then I think we both know what has to happen.” Without giving Jeanette time to argue, he pulled the door open and led her inside.
Half an hour later, George Engersol sat behind his desk watching the tape for the second time. When the Aldriches had arrived — unannounced, and interrupting a discussion neither he nor Hildie had been happy to postpone — he’d listened patiently to them as they explained what had happened early that morning. At first he had assumed it would take no more than a few minutes to brush off what had happened last night as another of Jeff’s pranks. After watching the tape and instantly realizing what Adam had done, he turned to Chet and Jeanette. “I can’t imagine what Jeff was thinking of,” he said smoothly, his face a seamless mask of concern. “I know our youngsters have thought up some pretty sophisticated stunts, but this…” He let his voice trail off into a disapproving hiss, then turned to Hildie. “I think you’d better bring young Jeff up here,” he told her.
“The faster we deal with this, the better for all of us, don’t you think?”
Hildie had hesitated for a split second, but the look in Engersol’s eyes had told her not to argue with him, and she’d started out of his office. Even before she’d passed through the doorway, he stopped her. “And Hildie, I think you’d probably better tell the rest of my seminar that we won’t be meeting this morning. Tell them they may have the hour off, and then bring Jeff up here.”
Though her face had flushed when he’d spoken to her as if she were no more than one of his staff — and not a particularly important one, at that — Hildie had nonetheless accepted his orders in silence.
She hadn’t been gone long, since the seminar was meeting just a floor below his office, and when she came back with Jeff Aldrich in tow, the boy looked angry.
“How come you’re mad at me?” he’d demanded as soon as Hildie had brought him into the office. He’d planted himself just inside the door and glared at his father. “I didn’t do anything!”
“Don’t lie to me, Jeff,” Chet had replied, his voice sharp enough that the boy had taken an uncertain step backward. “Play the tape again, Dr. Engersol. He might as well see that this time he’s been caught.”
Wordlessly, George Engersol had rewound the tape and started playing it again. This time, as he played the tape, he watched Jeff Aldrich’s face. No more than a few seconds into the tape, Jeff’s eyes had darted toward him and an unspoken message had passed between them.
Jeff, too, had immediately understood what had happened. But how would he handle it?
The tape came to an end. A heavy silence hung over the room, a silence that Chet finally broke.
“Well?”
The word made Jeff turn to look at his father. His eyes narrowed. “Where’d that come from?” he asked.
Though his face remained impassive, George Engersol felt himself relax. There was just the right amount of defensiveness in Jeff’s voice, just the right amount of guilt. And Chet Aldrich had heard it, too.
“You know damned well where it came from. Jeff,” Chet said. “The question is, how did you do it?”
Jeff hesitated just long enough before he replied. “Do what? I don’t know anything about that. It looked like Mam, didn’t it?”
Jeanette, sitting on a sofa opposite Jeff, shrank away from her son’s words. “Jeff, why are you doing this to me?” she asked, her voice trembling.
“Aw, come on, Mom,” Jeff groaned. “How am I going to do something like that? What do you think I did? Got dressed up in Adam’s clothes and sat in front of a video camera or something?”
“I think that’s exactly what you did, Jeff,” Chet replied before Jeanette could say anything. “We all know you’re an expert computer hacker. And you’re going to tell us exactly how you managed to get that tape onto the cable coming into our house.”
Now Jeff’s expression turned belligerent. “What if I don’t?” he demanded. “What if I don’t know anything about it at all?”
“But you do,” Chet said. “And since you’ve asked the question, I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m going to do. You’re going to go home, Jeff. You’re going to be taken out of school right now. Not this afternoon, not tomorrow. Right now. You’re going home, and you’ll stay there — totally grounded — until you decide to tell us how you did this.”
“Aw, Jeez, Dad,” Jeff groaned. “That’s not fair! I didn’t do anything!”
Chet stood up abruptly. “All right, Jeff, that’s it. Come on.” Jeff’s mouth opened, but before he could speak, Chet silenced him with a gesture. “And I don’t want to hear any veiled threats of suicide, either. You hurt your mother with that line yesterday, but it won’t work with me. I know you, Jeff. You’re just not like Mam. Mam kept everything in, and never felt like he was pleasing anyone. But you’re just the opposite. You think you’ve got the world by the tail and everyone’s crazy about you. Well, right now, I’m not crazy about you at all. Got that?”
Jeff’s face tightened into a mask of fury. He turned to George Engersol, his back to his parents. “Are you going to let them do that?” he demanded. “Are you just going to let them pull me out of school?”
Engersol shrugged helplessly. “They’re your parents, Jeff. They have the right to take you home. And you might have thought of that before you decided to pull that stunt last night. I’m sorry,” he said, standing up. “I think it might be a good thing for you to go home for a while and think about what you’ve done. And think about what you want to do next.”
Jeff stood still for a moment, his face still contorted with anger. But just before he turned away from Engersol, he winked.
It was a wink that Chet and Jeanette Aldrich couldn’t see, but George Engersol understood the gesture perfectly.