The Ghost Files

Chapter Twelve

Dan's room is exactly what I expected. The bed is a crumpled mess, posters of his favorite bands line the wall, a desk with clutter over what I think is a laptop, and clothes lay in piles strewn across the floor. The walls are done in a soft earthy brown and darker hard woods covers the floor, at least what you can see of the floor. A flat screen is mounted to one wall with a PS3 on the entertainment stand underneath. A guy's room all right. It smells just like him too—woodsy and clean.

Well, a guy's room, with one exception. There are white boards spread everywhere with my drawings tacked up beside the actual photo of the missing kids they correspond to. He's got maps with places marked on them with thumbtacks and notes written everywhere on the boards and on Post-Its. The boy's been busier than I gave him credit for. Brownie points to Officer Dan!

"Sorry for the mess," he mumbles and clears off a spot on the bed. "Have a seat."

Instead of sitting, I step over to examine the boards more closely. My sketches had been pretty accurate. It's so strange to see the missing kids smiling out of normal looking pictures, the damage gone and no ugly bullet holes anywhere.

Janey Morris, age twelve, read the first picture. Missing June 2009 from the Rowan County fair. Blonde hair, blue eyes, 5'1.

Emma Johnson, age ten: missing March 2007 from the Rowan County fair. Blonde hair, blue eyes, 4'7.

Michael Sutter age eight: missing December 2009 from the Hickory Mall. Brown hair, brown eyes, 4'9.

Melissa Jenkins age seven: missing October 2010 from the Concord Mills Mall. Red hair, blue eyes, 4'3.

Eric Cameron age seventeen: missing March 2006 after a Statesville high school basketball game.  Black hair, blue eyes, 6'1.

Mary Roberts age sixteen: missing January 2013 from her home in Charlotte. Blonde hair, brown eyes, 5'6.

Sally Myers age fifteen: missing from her home in Charlotte. Blonde hair, gray eyes, 5'5.

There was nothing really connecting them together. It all just looked so random. They had been taken from different locations at different times. Busy places mind you, but still completely random. No distinguishing features, at least not that I can see, made them look similar in any way, except for the bullet holes in my sketches.

"Your drawings helped a lot," Dan says from behind me. "I was able to run them through our database of missing kids and come up with almost perfect matches for most of them. Your mirror boy there was the hardest. I could only get an eighty seven percent match. There wasn't a lot to go on."

My eyes stray back to Eric Cameron, aka Mirror Boy. It might or might not be him. The face is the same shape and the eyes the same color, but aside from that, I just can't tell. His face was pretty mangled last I'd seen it and that's how I'd drawn him.

He's actually really cute, or he was. His black hair is slightly curly at the bottom and those blue eyes of his are actually quite striking. They are full of laughter too. Quite a difference from the ghost I'd met, but then again, being tortured and murdered might put a damper on anyone's personality. I'd be angry too. I gave myself a mental shake. Mirror Boy was the enemy and a ghost. No need to get all doe eyed over a ghost.

"At least you know I'm not as crazy as you suspected," I say lightly while reading through his notes. All had been taken in the open. There one minute, gone the next. None of them knew each other. Mary went missing the night before Sally did. So does that mean Sally saw something she shouldn't have? If that's true, then she'd have to have seen it at the house and we'd already ruled out Mr. Olson. So that left me...nowhere.

"Well, I wouldn't go that far," he grins at me. "You are one weird chick, Mattie Louise Hathaway."

"Flattery will get you nowhere, Officer Dan." His map has my attention now. It looks like all the kidnappings had taken place in three counties: Rowan, Mecklenburg, and Iredell. It's a fairly small area. Why had no one picked up on this? I ask Dan just that.