Chapter 5: She Just Took a Fall

Jackie waited impatiently as her pictures loaded onto her computer. Since she had taken numerous shots of her real friends to cover the fact that she was really trying to dig up info on Edie, the number of files on her camera card was a huge amount. Picture 124, Picture 125, come on already! She drummed her fingers impatiently on her desk and started scanning her room. The walls were painted a medium shade of purple with white trim on the crown molding. Pictures of her friends hanging out covered the walls by her bed. The bulletin board over her desk held many trinkets from specific memories. Like the necklace K.C. gave her when she went away on vacation to Hawaii and the Bahamas and the ticket stub from the LMAO concert she went to with Sam just recently. She smiled faintly at those memories and was startled out of her reverie by her computer's message that the pictures had been loaded to her desktop.

Finally, she absently thought as she clicked on the brand new file folder on her desktop. The complete set of 130 pictures popped up in a new window and Jackie heaved a sigh as she started organizing them into separate folders. One for e-mail pictures, the others for her walls, and the evidence photos of Edie. 15 minutes dragged by when she finished the organizing task. She opened the folder she created with photos of Edie. The first photo she pulled up was blurry and poorly taken which made it impossible for one to see anything out of the ordinary. She clicked on the second photo and studied it closely. Sam stood out very clearly in the shot since she had used the flash but Edie looked washed out and pale. Almost translucent. Her hand shook a little as she pulled up photo number 3. Edie's hair had been blowing in the wind with this shot, which meant that the photo had a slight blur to it. But it wasn't the fact that the camera had captured motion that sent chills down Jackie's back. Edie's hair close to her scalp started black but became fainter the farther down. The ends of her hair were completely non-existent and Jackie had clearly remembered that Edie's hair fell to her waist. Edie had been disappearing slowly under the camera lens.

Jackie sat there in silence, completely in awe of her observations. This was it. This had to be hardcore proof. The only problem was, why was Edie still haunting? Where did she die? What happened to her that lead her to her death? Her hand gripped the mouse tighter as she logged onto her Internet provider and typed into Google, "2000s California Deaths and Hauntings."

215 responses came up and Jackie began weeding out the useless ones. Much of her search had spit out the shooting at Santana High school which was 2001. Although Edie had mentioned Southern California as her home, she had not said that she was in Santee area. Aside from that, no records of a Kennedy popped up as one of the victims. Jackie started to get discouraged as time dragged by as she was getting no where. Nothing seemed to match Edie description wise or even seemed to fit. She looked at the clock on her computer and realized that she had spent 2 hours straight without taking a break, to look up plausible stories. She could hear her cell phone ringing, probably K.C. asking what she was up to at that point.

I'll just look at one more page, Jackie told herself as she clicked on the 69th link. A newspaper story from 2006 popped up and Jackie studied it closer. The headline blared "Young Freshman Shot in Courtyard of High School." Jackie raised an eyebrow slightly since Edie claimed that she had just turned 18. But then again, she could have continued to add another year to her age even as a spirit. The story briefly mentioned that a freshman girl had been found lying face down in the school courtyard before a set-up easel with brushes and paint tubes. The soccer coach had seen her body and assumed that the girl was sleeping until she came closer and saw the pool of blood the body was lying in. No gun or dropped clues had been found at the crime scene but there had been two strange things. The set-up had everything but a canvas there and it had been assumed that the victim had been painting when she was killed. But the canvas had gone missing and the police eventually gave up looking for it since no one knew what she had even painted. The second thing was that the girl's cell phone had been found near her with the message, "Tired of being what you want me to be. Feeling so faithless, lost under the surface" typed into a pending text message. No name had been released to protect the victim since she was a minor.

Jackie sat there stunned, completely frozen in place. The picture of the phone showed matched Edie's cell and incident took place in Southern California. They described the victim as 5'3" with black, waist-length hair, and of Asian descent. Could this be Edie? But why wouldn't she haunt the school? Did she just happen to be a wandering ghost?