The Psycho Is Innocent | ꪜ

Chapter 22: Dare Or Die

Present

           "DO YOU REALLY think he'll cover for you?" Larson asked in concern as he turned back to face the school. Annoyed by his concern for Ariel, Lewis kissed her teeth under her breath and tore her eyes away from the two. Ariel frowned in confusion. "What are you worried about? I don't get it. If I get caught and suspended longer, that's that. I'll be fine." Larson's mouth fell agape as he wondered why she was so nonchalant about it. "I-I just don't want you to get in trouble, that's all. I mean, this can wait until the weekend. Why do it today?"

          "Because I want to get it over with. I'm tired of sitting around, are you complaining, Larson? If you don't want to do this anymore, I understand." He threw his hands up in the air in surrender frantically and outstretched them towards Ariel, "no, no I wanna help." He grasped Ariel's hands in his and smiled reassuringly. Lewis cleared her throat, her brown eyes penetrating through Ariel's head and when the two finally made eye contact Lewis smiled, "We should get going. Larson, didn't you say it's a long ride."

          Despite Lewis' discomfort, Larson kept his hand tightly wrapped around Ariel's. He fought the urge to just ignore her but as his eyes flickered towards Ariel, he finally decided to reply through gritted teeth. "Hmm mmm, yeah it's one hour out of town so we'll probably get back home by seven, we need to leave now." Ariel leaned against the car, unmoving, hands still interlocked with Larson's as she peered up at him in awe, "one hour out of town? I thought he lived in Harleyville." Lewis scoffed under her breath, "how stupid could you be? The article was posted years ago, of course, there's a possibility he no longer lives here."

          "I knew you'd find the address. You'll make a great tech engineer one day, that's why I trusted you in finding it." Larson couldn't help the smile that crawled onto his lips at the compliment as it made him feel seen and somewhat validated. He never realized until now how much he craved her attention or how he thrived on the look she'd give him with her hazel eyes. He didn't know if he'd ever love someone as much as he loved her, "by the way, how did you do it?" She inquired, blatantly ignoring Lewis who had yet to peel her smouldering gaze away from the two hands latched onto one another.

          "Well it's a long story but since you guys wanna know I'll tell you. You both were right about there not being any information about Jack other than his articles. There were no photos, no addresses, no social media accounts. That's because it was all wiped out by someone who had the power to do so. So what I did was gather up all the articles Jack had ever published and searched through them all to see if I could find anything to use and I found an email address.

          I tried messaging it but there was no response so I did a reverse search on the address and only found one account. It was on something called MySpace and it linked to an account with the name Jayackson_Mor_ganston112. I figured this was simply an alias but I searched it up nonetheless. Nothing came up except that MySpace account so after some time I decided to search up Jackson Morganston. If his name is Jack I'm guessing it's short for Jackson which means Jay could be a nickname too. So I searched it up and many facebook accounts came up.

         I browsed through them all but they all seemed to be out of state so I took the risk of eliminating those and focused on finding anyone here in New Hampshire. That's when I found one account here and I clicked on it. The profile seemed active with mostly photos of outside, the sunset, woods, so forth. But there was one photo with a sign in the back. It read welcome to Harleyville and there's only one sign like that an hour away at the entrance of the town. So I looked through all the photos and realized they're all near the entrance of town.

         So with that, I searched up any properties near there and found one unlisted house. It wasn't on any real estate sights but I figured someone had taken a picture of it and posted it online. The only other houses are of course an hour away here. That land is just filled with trees and private properties for hunting so I took a wild guess and figured that this may be Jack Morison. To be extra careful I uh-hacked into the account and found the direct location of his place through some messages. I-I know that's bad but I had to be sure."