CHARLIE HAD SLEPT OVER AT CAROLINE'S HOUSE. After the blonde girl sang at The Grill the night before, Jonas Martin had showed up at the Grill, wanting revenge on Elena for his son's death. Stefan had gotten his girlfriend out of there, but Matt had gotten caught in the crossfire. Caroline had to save her boyfriend with her blood and was about to either explain to him or wipe his memory when Sheriff Forbes walked in, and he freaked out and ran away.
So, the Forbes girl needed someone to stay with her and hold her while she cried that night since she had just gotten him to forgive her for an hour before he hated her again. The two girls were about to climb into the car to head to the Historical Society Luncheon at the brunette girl's house, and they were on speaker phone with Stefan. Caroline told him, "I can't find him anywhere. He's not at home. He's not answering his phone."
"How could you let him go?" the Salvatore man questioned angrily.
"My mom walked in. He took off," she explained as her best friend climbed into the passenger seat of hr car and she walked down to the other side. "I didn't know what to do."
Stefan sighed, and both girls could practically see him rolling his eyes at them in frustration. He asked, "Did your mom hear anything?"
"No. She just thinks we're fighting," the blonde girl answered, leaning her head back against the seat. She was really freaking out, and Stefan getting mad at her was not helping.
Charlie jumped in, leaning into the phone even though the vampire would be able to hear her if she was yards away from the device. "But he knows about Caroline, and he's freaking out about Vicki."
"All right. Listen. You have to find him. You have to calm him down. Compel him if you have to. Is he still on vervain?" the man ordered before asking the question.
"I slip it into his soda when he's at work, but I didn't get to last night, so it's out of his system. He has a catering shift at the Lockwood's today. We're gonna try there," the blonde girl informed him before hanging up. She then tapped a button on the computer that was built into the car. "Call Matt."
"Calling Matt..." the computer responded, and it started to ring.
After ringing for a moment, Matt's voicemail picked up. "You've reached Matt. Leave a message." She did not leave and message and just started driving angrily.
"Mrs. Lockwood, uh, have you seen Matt?" Caroline quizzed when they arrived at the Lockwood mansion for the luncheon. Carol had been talking to Sheriff Forbes about something that probably had to do with the supernatural, but they shut up when their daughters came up to them. "I thought he was working a catering shift at today's luncheon."
The Lockwood woman shook her head with a frown, glancing between the two girls. "No, I haven't, girls. Sorry. But if you see him, could you ask if he's heard from Tyler? The note he left said he needed time to figure some things out, but I wish I knew where he was."
"Um, excuse me," the Forbes girl told Carol when she spotted Stefan and Elena. Charlie waved at her mother with a smile before following the girl over to the couple.
The Salvatore man raised his eyebrows at her. "Hey. Any luck finding Matt?"
"None. What if he tells somebody? What if he tells everybody?" the Forbes girl answered after shaking her head. Her leg was bouncing as she stood, and the werewolf rubbed her shoulder in an attempt to comfort her because she could tell that she was really freaking out.
"No, we just gotta find him and make sure that doesn't happen," Stefan told her before turning to Elena with a questioning expression since she had known Matt for a very very long time. Maybe she kenw where he might go. "Do you have any idea where he would be?"
She shook her head with a sigh. "I wish I did, but he wasn't really one to run."
"You know, this wasn't how it was supposed to happen. You know, I was supposed to tell him at the right moment in the right way, and he was supposed to be okay with it because he loves me," the blonde girl groaned out, running a hand through her hair as she leaned into her best friend's palm.
"We'll help you find him," Elena assured her before looking up at the stage that she would have to be on in just a couple of moments. "I just have to accept this thing for Jenna."
Caroline nodded at her, checking her phone once again to see if the blonde boy had called her or texted her or left anything for her at all. "All right. Well, call me when you're done, and I'll be out looking for him."
"The Historical Society was my mom's baby," Elena announced later. She was on the stage, accepting the award from the Historical Society in honor of her mother. "She considered all of you family and would be honored and touched by this gift."
All of a sudden, a loud noise interrupted her speech. It sounded like someone was tumbling down the stairs. All of the guests rushed toward where the noise came from to see that that was exactly what happened. Charlie gasped when she saw John Gilbert lying motionless at the bottom of her stairs. Stefan and her mom joined her side as Sheriff Forbes kneeled next to the man.
Charlie noticed the blood dripping from John's neck, and she looked the the Salvatore boy beside her in shock. Whatever happened to John, a vampire had something to do with it. Carol tried to control the crowd as the Forbes woman examined the body. "Please, let the sheriff do her job."
"He's bleeding. Is he okay?" Stefan pointed out and questioned.
"Yeah, I got it. I got it," the woman responded before turning around and addressing the crowd. "You know what? Let's all back off. He just needs some air. Everything's fine."
As she ushered everyone out of the house, Carol made her daughter go upstairs while they dealt with the man that was clearly dead in their house. She told all of the exiting people, "I'm sorry for the scare. It was just a bad fall. Paramedics are on their way."
"Hey. How is he?" Damon questioned as he entered the house. Someone, Charlie assumed Stefan, had called him and made him come over and explain to the women why John was not actually dead, at least not for long. He had some magic old Gilbert ring that protected him from death by supernatural means.
Sheriff Forbes sighed, "He's dead." Damon crouched down and looked at the body below him glancing up at the Lockwood girl that was eavesdropping from the top of the stairs. He smirked slightly as he picked up John's arm that had the ring on it and casually threw it back onto his body.
"He'll be fine in a couple hours," he informed them, and he sounded almost disappointed. He obviously was because John was annoying as hell, but he could not let the women know that.
"What are you talking about?" Carol questioned with furrowed eyebrows because the man in front of her was making absolutely no sense. She pointed out, even though it was obvious. "Damon, he's dead."
Damon gestured to the obnoxious ring on the dead man's finger. "Well...here's the thing. John's ring, it's an old Gilbert family heirloom that protects its owner from death by a supernatural entity."
"But he's not breathing. He has no pulse," the Lockwood woman protested, and Charlie was starting to think that her mother wanted John to be dead. She was really convinced that the ring thing did not work when she knew that there were vampires running around town.
"He will be. Trust me," Damon let them know as he grabbed the corpse by the armpits and started dragging him out of the house. "We're gonna need a cover story...epileptic fit, alcohol binge, banana peel, whatever works. But right now I just have to get him out of here."
He left with the body, and Charlie crept quietly back to her room. She was about to plop down on her bed when she noticed Sheriff Forbes walking back to her car. That was not what caught her attention, though. What did that was the fact that Matt Donovan was standing at her car, waiting for her. She rushed to the window and opened it, her ears twitching as she strained them to listen to the conversation. It was a pretty long ways away, so she had to listen very carefully.
"Matt, what's wrong?" Sheriff Forbes questioned with furrowed eyebrows when she saw the boy waiting for her at her car.
The Donovan boy did not skip a beat before demanding, "I wanna see Vicki's file."
"What?" Liz asked in confusion. That case had been dropped a while ago, and she had thought that they were done with it until then. Charlie's stomach dropped because she knew what he was looking for. He wanted to know if a vampire had anything to do with her death. He would not like what he found.
"My sister, I want to see her file," he repeated sternly. The next thing he said completely shocked the woman in front of her. "I want to see how you covered up that she was killed by a vampire."
Sheriff Forbes put up her hands in an attempt to calm the boy down. "Matt, you need to calm down. You're upset. You don't know..." She gasped when he grabbed her shoulders firmly and looked her straight in the eye.
"Don't lie to me," he insisted, and the Lockwood girl was kind of worried that he was going to injure the Sheriff that also happened to be his probably-not-still-girlfriend's mother.
The woman grabbed him and flipped him against the hood of her car because of how he kind of attacked her. She told him, "Matt, you need to calm down now."
Charlie scrambled for her phone to call Caroline because that was not good. The last thing they needed was Matt spilling all of his guts and secrets to the vampire's mother. She needed to let her best friend know that there was a good chance that they were coming.