by Simon Rose
Julia wore a very serious expression as she focused on Max’s face. He had an odd feeling in his head for an instant then it was gone.
“You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?” she said, smiling. “So I guess you’re not ashamed to be seen with me after all.”
“What do you mean?” asked Max.
“The other day in the school cafeteria. You left pretty quickly when you saw your friends come in. Then again, I’m used to that. People avoid me all the time.”
“I’m sorry about that,” said Max. “I admit I didn’t want my friends to see me with you but mostly because I didn’t want to tell them anything about my mom. You freaked me out when you said you’d seen ghosts at the school.”
Julia nodded.
“Well, it can be a shock for some people, but you’ve seen one too now.”
She led Max into the sitting room. Beside the window was a pile of plastic real estate signs bearing the name Linda Woodman.
“My mom’s a realtor,” Julia explained. “She just had some new signs made. She’s always working somewhere or other. Do you want a snack or a drink? I think we have some chips and a few cookies.”
“Sure,” said Max. “I’m not that hungry, but maybe some chips and water, thanks.”
“Okay, have a seat.”
Julia walked over toward the kitchen. She was wearing her usual tee shirt and torn jeans, but her worn leather jacket was thrown casually across one of the armchairs. Max put down his backpack and was about to sit down on the couch when he noticed some framed photographs on a shelf on the wall beside the TV. He went over to examine the photographs in more detail. Julia was pictured with her mom or on her own. She looked a little younger but her brilliant green eyes were still very recognizable. Her hair was light brown in the picture, almost the same colour as Max’s. There weren’t any pictures of Julia’s dad but Max recalled the principal saying that her father lived in a different part of the city.
“Those were taken a couple of years ago,” said Julia, as she came back into the sitting room.
She handed Max a glass of water, a few cookies, and two small bags of chips. They then sat down at opposite ends of the couch.
“No, this isn’t my normal colour, in case you’re wondering,” said Julia, smiling as she ran her fingers through her hair. “I’ve kind of got used to this though. I went through a rebellious period, although my mom might say I’m still in it.”
“Is that why you got the tattoo?”
“Yeah,” she replied, looking down at her arm. “Mostly to annoy my mom really. It’s just a small tattoo of an angel. Sometimes the tee shirts I wear with the logos of metal bands or something else are for pure shock value.”
“Don’t you and your mom get along?” Max asked.
“Not really. I’m pretty laid back but she’s so driven by work and money. We argue a lot these days, usually about nothing important, to be honest.”
“And your dad?”
“My mom and dad split up when I was twelve. He sends birthday cards and presents, and we email sometimes, but I don’t really see him, except a couple of times a year. What about you? Obviously, I know your mom passed away.”
“I live with my dad,” Max replied. “We get on okay most of the time, except for the usual parent and kid stuff. My grandma lives very close by too, so I see her a lot.”
He paused and took a sip of his water before he asked Julia a question.
“On your blog you said that you’d seen your mother’s ghost. I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I’m adopted,” Julia replied, calmly.
“I’m sorry,” said Max. “I didn’t know.”
“Nothing to be sorry about, don’t worry about it. I was only a baby when I was adopted. My mom might not be my birth mom, but she’s the only mother I’ve known. When my parents split up, my mom told me about the adoption. She figured I had a right to know.”
“So do you know about your real mom?”
“I was able to find a few things out in the last year or so. She was only twenty-one when she died and I was only a year old. She went wandering out in the snow on a very cold winter day and basically froze to death. It was in the archives of the local newspaper. I don’t know anything about my birth dad. I figure he wasn’t around back then.”
“That’s terrible,” said Max. “Why would anyone do anything like that?”
“She was sick, or at least that’s what the report said. My mom didn’t know anything about my birth mom’s history but encouraged me to find out if I was interested. I first saw her ghost when I started learning more about her. It’s not happened recently but at one point I saw her quite often and even talked to her.”
“What did she say?”
“Mostly that she loved me and was watching over me, stuff like that,” said Julia. “She was also pleased that I was learning more about her life. Then when I searched for more information that’s when I noticed the link to Jesse’s website. Her photograph’s included in the supposed victims of Kovac’s experiments.”
Chapter Ten
Family Affairs
MAX COULD HARDLY believe what he was hearing.
“What?” said Max. “Your mom’s photograph is on the SecretConspiracyXpose site too?”
“Yes,” Julia replied. “Her name was April Taylor. She was supposed to have had a history of mental illness. She was found wandering in the woods when she was around fifteen or sixteen and couldn’t remember where she’d been.”
Max shuddered as he recalled that the same thing had apparently happened to his mother.
“How did you find out about that?” asked Max.
“Jesse told me. He’d linked that strange disappearance to her later death in the cold, not long after I was born. Why do you think your mom’s on that site, Max? What did Jesse tell you?”
She stared at him intently, looking directly into his eyes. Max briefly felt a slight tension in the back of his head.
“I knew that my mom took her own life at a train station when I was about a year old,” Max began. “Like your mom, she was supposed to have been ill and disappeared once for a few days without any explanation. Her death was a news story back then, but I also found a link to the SecretConspiracyXpose site. Jesse knew everything about her and the details he’s posted are all correct. But when I talked to him he also claimed that he has proof that she was murdered.”
“What kind of proof?” asked Julia.
“He said there was film of what happened when she died, from the security cameras at the station. It proved that she’d been pushed under the train. The police had taken the film and it was supposed to have disappeared but he’d seen it.”
“And you believed him?”
“I know it could be true, although I didn’t tell Jesse how I know that.”
Max hesitated before continuing.
“In one of my dreams I saw what happened at the train station, but I saw it through my mom’s eyes. Everything happened so quickly but I know someone pushed her.”
“That’s odd,” said Julia. “I’ve never had a dream where I saw things through someone else’s eyes, but I started having strange experiences when I was younger. I thought everyone could see ghosts, but of course they can’t, so naturally that got me into a lot of trouble sometimes. My parents were very worried and took me to a few different shrinks. Eventually I was having therapy sessions with Dr. Hammond.”
“Hammond?” said Max, in astonishment.
“You know him?”
“Yeah, I think he must have been the local specialist with kids back then. My dad was worried about me as well when I was in elementary school.”
“Why was your dad worried?”
Max hesitated. He wasn’t sure if he should tell Julia everything. He hardly knew her. Yet for some reason that he couldn’t explain he trusted her completely.
“When I was growing up, I had an imaginary friend. I only saw him when I was alone in my room or just before I fell asleep. Just
after my fifth birthday party, I was playing with my new toys in my room and my imaginary friend was there. It seemed like he was shimmering, fading in and out. He tried to speak to me then reached out and touched my hand. It was as cold as ice and I screamed. I never saw my imaginary friend again but I started having nightmares on a regular basis. I went to Dr. Hammond for a couple of years until the nightmares stopped just after I turned seven.”
Julia nodded.
“Yeah, after my parents split my mom was really busy with work so I stopped going to therapy too. I think she just accepted that I was a loner and thought that I’d eventually grow out of it. I still think my mom’s worried that I might be crazy. Naturally I haven’t mentioned seeing ghosts to her in recent years. She knows about the blog but I don’t know if she reads it that often.”
“I’ve never seen you with any friends at school,” said Max. “I always assumed that you might have friends elsewhere.”
“I have lots of friends online,” Julia continued. “They’re so much easier to deal with. I don’t mix with anyone at school. They’ve always thought I’m strange and avoided me, and I just want to be left alone, to be honest. I don’t usually even talk to the teachers unless I have to, but the principal called me into the office on Tuesday. That’s why I’ve been staying away from school. There were two guys in the office with him. They said they were from the police but neither of them mentioned a department or a rank.”
“Were their names Connor and Drake?”
“How do you know that?”
“They talked to me too, just now after school,” Max replied.
Julia gasped.
“What did they want?”
“They mostly asked about you and if I knew where you were. The principal said that you’re often away from school and that your mom was worried and had contacted the police. They mentioned your blog as well, but only to ask if I’d heard of it.”
“I usually stay at home,” said Julia. “My mom’s so busy she doesn’t even notice sometimes. But I don’t stay out overnight.”
“Where have you been?”
“My mom has the keys to houses that are for sale in different parts of the city,” Julia explained. “I’ve been staying at one of those. I come back here when she goes to work so I can get food. I figure if they believe I’m missing they won’t think to look here, but I don’t stay here for long. I’ve texted my mom a few times to tell her I’m okay and not to worry.”
“How long do you plan to keep this up?”
“I have no idea. I don’t know what those guys want or why they’re so interested in me, and now you.”
“What did they talk to you about in the school office?” Max asked.
“Obviously about the absences from school and my mom contacting them but those two guys asked me about the blog too. They seemed interested in some of the sites I linked to. They didn’t specifically mention Jesse’s site but now I’m starting to wonder. If it’s something to do with the Kovac operation we could end up dead, and I don’t like the idea of that.”
“I know those guys,” said Max. “I’ve dealt with them before.”
“When?”
Max took a deep breath.
“It’s very hard to explain, but will you listen?”
“Sure.”
“Okay,” Max began. “This is going to sound crazy but you’re familiar with the Kovac operation after studying Jesse’s website and everything. So do you know who David Dexter is?”
“Yes, I think so,” said Julia. “His dad was involved in the government departments that were connected to Kovac and his work, wasn’t he?”
“That’s right,” said Max. “These days David’s in charge of the business that his dad founded after he stopped working for the government. When David was a boy, around our age, there was a different timeline. David helped to expose Kovac’s experiments and he was murdered.”
Julia shook her head.
“A different timeline? And what do you mean he was murdered? You just said that he’s in charge of his dad’s former business.”
“I told you this would sound crazy,” said Max.
Yet to his relief Julia simply smiled. He then felt the same slight tension in his head as she focused on his face.
“Okay,” she said, slowly. “So what else do have to tell me?”
Max drank the rest of his water before continuing.
“It all started at the cemetery last summer.”
Max told Julia everything that had happened to him. He explained how he’d learned that David had been his imaginary friend years earlier and had contacted him for help in changing the previous course of events. As Max recounted his incredible adventure in the past in the role of David Dexter, Julia listened attentively to everything Max had to say and never interrupted once.
“So with Deanna’s help,” Max concluded, “I was able to go back into David’s life and prevent his death. David was at the waterfront when the police arrived. When I came back to my own life, Kovac’s operation was over and everything else was different.”
“And David Dexter was alive,” said Julia. “As an adult.”
“Yes,” Max replied. “He’d obviously not died as a kid, his father never died in a fire, and his mother was never placed in a hospital. Everything had changed for the better.”
“So it all worked out okay,” said Julia, smiling.
“Well, there was one little complication,” Max added. “And that was Kane.”
“What about him?” asked Julia.
“For some reason even Deanna couldn’t understand, Kane continued to exist outside the revised timeline. It was probably something to do with his mental powers. He broke into David’s house when we were there and tried to kill us all. Deanna managed to defeat him, and after we left, David called the police. Kane was most likely arrested although we never heard about him again.”
Julia looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Do you really think your mom and mine are connected to this? Jesse seems pretty genuine but I just don’t know if I should trust him.”
“The visions of my mom’s death aren’t the only ones I’ve had recently,” said Max. “I’ve also seen two different laboratories. One is definitely the one that I saw when I was in David’s body. The other lab seemed to be in Europe, perhaps where Kovac began his work with psychics. People were speaking in a foreign language and the alphabet was different on any signs that I saw. I remember checking it before and it was similar to the language in Yugoslavia, where Kovac came from. I think my mom might have been experimented on there too, before her family came here when she was a teenager. All my mom’s details are shown correctly on Jesse’s site. There’s also a man on there that I recognized. Kane attacked him when I was at the waterfront. Your mom might have been one of Kovac’s victims too, but we have to be sure. We need to verify the details on the website. We have to prove that they’re real people and not just part of Jesse’s wild conspiracy theory.”
“And how are you going to do that?” asked Julia.
Max shrugged.
“I don’t know. We’d need to look at official documents, try and track these people down.”
Then he had an idea.
“Of course,” he said. “My friend’s mom works in the Records department at the hospital where they keep all the registration of births and deaths. I’ve got my laptop with me. We’ll use it to cross-reference the list on Jesse’s site with the official records. We should be able to find out more about your mom too. We might even be able to find out more about your real dad.”
“But how are we going to get into that department at the hospital?” Julia asked. “Isn’t there security in those sorts of places?”
“Don’t worry,” said Max, standing up and grabbing his backpack. “My friend’s on holiday with his family and his mom always leaves her security pass at home. I know where they keep the spare house key so we just go there, get the pass then head to the hospital.”
“Are you
sure about this, Max?”
“Not really, but do you have any better ideas if we’re going to get to the bottom of this?”
Julia nodded.
“Okay, I just need to quickly tidy up so my mom doesn’t know I’ve been here. I’ll get some keys to one of the other houses she’s selling. We can go to one of those after we’ve been to the hospital.”
Chapter Eleven
Key Factors
IT DIDN’T TAKE long to reach the neighbourhood where Max, Jeff, and Jason all lived. As they turned the corner, Max noticed that the old blue car was missing from the driveway next to Jeff’s house.
“Looks like Mrs. Flynn’s not here.”
“Who’s Mrs. Flynn?” asked Julia.
“Jeff’s neighbour. She thinks that teenagers are always up to no good,” Max replied, with a smile. “If she’s at home when I come round here she always seems to be watching me through the curtains. We need to use the back door.”
They went into the alley that ran by the side of Mrs. Flynn’s house then along the fence leading to the gate into the backyard of Jeff’s house. When they arrived at the door, Max grabbed the key from under the rock in the flowerbed. He slid the key in the lock, opened the door, and he and Julia stepped inside.
Max immediately noticed that the kitchen looked tidy for a change. He figured it was because the family was going to be away for a few days. There were no dishes in the sink and the kitchen table was empty, although some bills and other papers remained on the counter beside the wooden bowl. Max reached over, pulled out the name badge, and showed it to Julia.
“That’s it?” said Julia, studying the photograph of Jeff’s mom displayed above the bar code.
“Yes, this should get us into the Records department.”
“What about passwords?”
Max turned the pass over to reveal a handwritten nine-digit number.
“Jeff told me once that his mom always writes down her passwords, even though she knows she’s not supposed to. I’m betting this is the code for her computer.”
“Aren’t you worried about breaking into this place?” asked Julia.
