Chapter 5: The President
"Bus driver succumbs to his wounds," Joe read aloud from the online newspaper she had accessed on her laptop. It was a rare occassion that the household had breakfast together, but it did happen every once in a while. Scott had his head in a textbook for a class later that day and Aunt Mel was studying the contents of her coffee cup with acute interest. They all shared the not-a-morning-person-gene.
"Yeah, that's how my shift ended last night," Aunt Mel said tiredly and took a sip. Joe and Scott looked up from their respective distraction. Aunt Mel rarely talked about those parts of her job. Aunt Mel rolled her eyes at their concerned faces. "It happens, okay? Nothing we could have done."
Scott tensed up and Joe noticed his fists clenching.
"You okay, Scott?" she asked. He'd been acting strange lately.
"Yeah, it's just...I knew him, sort of. He drove the bus when I lived with da-"
He shut his mouth instantly at Joe's warning glare, and they both glanced at Aunt Mel. Talking about Scott's dad was usually a no-go in this house. She continued to drink coffee as if she hadn't heard him and Scott let out a shaky breath.
"It's just weird, you know. Stuff like that usually doesn't happen here," he continued lamely and Joe patted his surprisingly firm shoulder, the extent of what her lacking maternal instinct counted as comfort.
"How'd the bowling go last night?" Joe asked to change the subject. Scott's face cracked into this stupid grin and he admitted that it had went better than expected.
Joe shut the lid of her laptop. Save the gruesome details for later. She just knew that the online blog articles she was collecting for her paper was gonna be filled with all sorts of theories. The police files related to the Laura Hale-case had been helpful in that regard though. Some of the blogs were making all sorts of wild claims to her injuries and the evidence, while a few other were surprisingly spot on. She'd done some digging to see who ran these blogs, but most of the pen-names were just pseudonyms and led nowhere.
Most of them.
"You're going to Berkely today?" Aunt Mel asked when Joe got up from the table, stuffing her laptop and notebook into her backpack. Her aunt sounded surprised, which Joe could not blame her for seeing as those were the only times Joe actually left the house.
"No, I gotta do some research." Joe tried to keep her answers vague. She was not sure why, but she did not want to tell either of them that she was looking into this animal attacks-case. Maybe it was because that could lead to them finding out about her encounters with Derek Hale, which she still needed to figure out for herself first before she got them worried.
"Wanna ride to school?" she asked Scott, but he declined as he had work afterwards and needed his bike then. They had tried in the past to stuff his bike into the trunk of the Ford Fiesta. Not a chance. She made him promise to tell Dr. Deaton hello. She'd had the same part-time job a couple of summers before, back when she was still adamant on becoming a doctor.
Last night she had made a breakthrough. After some digging she'd discovered one of the most active bloggers - or websleuth as he referred to himself - was actually from Beacon Hills. He posted under the pen-name of Claudis Verity and ran the blog called "Truth Overload". This guy was dedicated to the cause - he posted several times a day, and had several thousands messages on the most popular online forums she'd found that dealt with unexplained mysteries like aliens, ghosts, werewolves...
Claudius' real name was Jimmy Carter (not the president) and he lived downtown in an apartment above a laundromat. Based on his post-history, he was adamant about keeping his identity secret. She got lucky when she found him, he had declined all attempts of direct contact through his blog.
Joe pushed the buttons on the front door of his building and was greeted with a crackled: "Who are you?"
"Mr. Carter?" she asked into the box. Unfortunately, due to the subject she studied, she had dealt with her fair share of conspiracy theorists and people who claimed that the truth was out there before. The intro-class that Professor Kane taught named only "Lore" attracted a variety of people, and a lot of them left disappointed when they realized Professor Kane's passion laid in debunking these kind of myths, not proving them.
"Mr. Carter?" she repeated when the person on the other side did not answer. Okay, let's try something else. "I'm here to talk about werewolves."
The door buzzed open almost instantly. She took two steps towards the stairs and a figure dressed in an open bathrobe and checkered pajama pants came bounding down towards her. Unkept hair, large overgrown beard and no shoes on - he fit the stereotype.
He waved a half-eaten toast at her. "Who sent you?"
"No-one sent me," Joe countered easily and dodged the wayward toast. "My name is Joe Delgado, I'm a TA for Professor Kane at-"
"That agnostic know-it-all?" he snarled and crumpled his toast into pieces. "She sent you? Hah! Is she scared I'll reveal the truth and expose her for the charlatan that she is? That I will destroy the very foundation she's built her career upon? That the so-called theories she announced as 'practically Medieval' are actually facts?"
Oh boy.
"No."
Maybe he didn't hear her and Joe watched him mutter about the Professor for a bit. It was hard to tell with the beard, but he was supposedly the same age as her, and according to what she could find out online, he'd lived in Beacon Hills all his life. "I'm writing a paper on the animal attacks in Beacon Hills."
That shut him up and he scratched his beard thoughtfully. His eyes were bright and attentive, a stark contrast to his otherwise hobo-appearance. "What's your angle?"
"The similarities to Bedburg," she said, which was not a direct lie, and he nodded fervently. He opened his mouth to say something more, but apparently remembered they were in the hallway of his apartment building.
"Not here, come on," he said and gestured for her to follow. She did, but only because she had a taser in her backpack if shit hit the fan.
Not surprisingly, he had multiple locks on his door and took some time to open all of them. She was let into a small two-bedroom apartment with a joint kitchen and living room. Very minimalistic, but actually quite clean. Joe's eyebrows rose, she had expected one of those walls with a myriad of photos and red yarn tying everything together. She had contemplated setting one of those up herself to gather all the loose ends.
Carter locked the door behind them and she put her hand onto the taser in her bag - just in case.
"Tea?" he asked, completely oblivious to her suspicious expression. Without waiting for an answer, he stalked to the kitchenette and began preparing two cups. Joe watched him the whole time, but he did not add anything but a tea bag.
"Did Kane tell you to come see me?" he demanded as he gestured for her to take a seat by the kitchen island that served as a bar towards the living room.
"No, I'm a fan of your blog-"
Joe shut her mouth as Carter put down the kettle with a bang. With his back to her, he explained through clenched teeth that: "Truth Overload is a news site. Not a blog."
"Right," Joe said hurriedly and nodded for emphasis. "I'm a fan of your site. And I follow you on reddit, , the rando-forums...in short, I'm a fan."
Carter said nothing as he poured the tea and placed a cup on each side of the counter.
"And I've been reading your stuff about what's going on in Beacon Hills. You references a lot of facts that haven't been released to the public."
"I'm not giving up my source!"
"I'm not asking for it!" Joe said with her hand raised to calm him. Now she at least confirmed that he had a source. "I'm just really impressed by your attention to detail, that's all."
"Thank you," Carter said tersely and sipped his tea with the same daintiness a 50's housewife would. "I pour my soul into every piece I publish. Not that those ignoramuses at the Beacon Post appreciates it."
"You write for the Beacon Post?"
"No," Carter snapped and spun his cup around on the counter. "I did. But they claimed I had to stick to the 'facts' - as if I don't always stick to the facts! It's not my fault the facts point in a direction they're too scared to investigate."
Joe discreetly put her phone to record and prompted. "Like?"
He did not take the bait. Instead he stared at her and noticed her untouched cup of tea. "How did you find my address? I am very particular about my identity, you know."
"You used your student e-mail when signing up for a forum in 2005, and a variant of the same pen-name you use today."
A long silence followed and Joe started to wonder if this was his breaking point.
"Oh God, you must think I'm a complete amateur," he finally muttered and finished his tea. "What forum?"
"We-are-real dot com," Joe admitted, figuring she already had the info and it did not matter if he covered his tracks now. "Not active since 2006."
"Oh no, all those people pretending to be 'real' vampires and werewolves as a way of expressing themselves?" He made a face, his beard standing out like the pins of a hedgehog. "The amount of images of infected bites as they had tried to 'turn' their friends... disturbed individuals."
"Uh, yeah."
"I knew when I signed up there that 90% would be these weirdos who never grew out of their high school depression, but I figured there might be a couple of Omegas who were desperate enough to search for a pack online." Carter stared into the air as a battle-weary veteran. "Turns out the weirdos were 100% represented."
"So you've researched werewolves for a while now?" Joe asked, because that had been a recurring theme on his 'news site'. He seemed skeptic to UFOs, a bit dismissive about vampires, and very very interested in werewolves.
"Yeah, I mean, ever since I saw my classmate change I-" he started and then snapped his mouth shut. "I'm sorry, I'm rambling, I forgot to ask you the most important question: you do believe in werewolves, don't you?"
Joe tried to keep her polite smile intact. Shit. She hated lying. "I wouldn't use the word 'believe'..."
"But you know werewolves are real, right?"
"I - uh - I know there are people who genuinly believe they are shapeshifters, and among them werewolves." Joe took a sip of her now cold tea. She was afraid to look at his face and see his expression. "And I know lycanthropy is a real and serious mental condition."
"But not the actual supernatural phenomena of certain people changing into wolves?" To her surprise, he smiled. He sighed happily and hung his head forwards. "Oh well, I should have realized that when you said you were a TA for Professor Kane. You are of course a supporter of her work, yes, otherwise she wouldn't have hired you? And while you claim to be a fan of my writing, I guess it is more a thinking exercise, quite possibly a source of entertainment and possibly research, no?"
"Mr. Carter-"
"No, no," he held up a hand to silence her, a dainty movement coming from an otherwise awkward man. "It is my fault, I forgot I was dealing with a Skeptic. I don't get a lot of visitors and have been terribly spoiled in only conversing with Realists lately. Thank you for your visit, Miss Delgado." He rose from his chair, prompting Joe to follow suit. He used his arm to guide her to the door. "If you ever feel brave enough to embrace the truth, feel free to send me an e-mail."
"But Mr. Carter, I real-" She was forced outside and he shut the door in her face. She heard all the clicks of the locks falling back into position. Apparently name-dropping Professor Kane had been a mistake. Oh well, he had given her several clues at least. Looks like she was heading for the Beacon Post.
"Oh, that nutjob?" was the initial response when she asked to see some of Jimmy Carter's rejected work. The Beacon Post was a classical small-town newpaper with only one photographer, a couple of reporters, and the assistant editor Joe was talking to also did a lot of legwork as a reporter. Kim Wu - as her name was - was busy editing the obituaries when Joe walked into the small downtown office of the Post.
"Don't get me wrong, brilliant writer," Kim said while her eyes never left the screen. Deadline must be approaching soon. "But we spent more time editing his pieces than it would have taken to write them ourselves. I never got it. He spent all of his time researching and then he managed to come to the most ludicrous conclusions."
She clicked multiple times in a row and Joe watched the cursor change into an hourglass. Kim sighed and pushed the thick-rimmed glasses up to her forehead. "Piece of shit." Waiting for the computer to catch up, she leaned back in her office chair to look at Joe who perched on the desk.
"We tried telling him over and over again that it wasn't his job to make the conclusions anyway. Report the facts, let the public make an opinion, you know? And he kept pissing off the Sheriff's department. Every time they made a statement, he put all his energy into proving them wrong. So they clammed up! Of course they did!" She shook her long black hair and redirected her attention to the screen again. "It was him or them, in the end. And a local newspaper without getting statements from the cops? Hah."
"What exactly was he writing about?" Joe asked, now intrigued more than she had anticipated. His blog was pretty far out there, she wondered how much he got censored when writing for mainstream media.
"Okay, take that housefire a couple of years back. Five or six years, I think," Kim said as an example, gesturing with her hand on the give-or-take year estimate.
"The Hale fire?"
"Yeah, yeah, that one. Tragic story, eight dead, the surviving kids left the town. And the fire department concludes that it's electrical malfunction. And then the police rules out foul play. The insurance company makes their own investigation - because they always do - and they also ends up saying it's just a tragic mishap. And what does Jimmy do? Oh yeah, he goes on a rampage, trying to come up with theories that contradicts all of these experts and writes pages upon pages on how it was definitely arson."
A tingle went down Joe's spine. It was just a few days ago since she'd seen the tragic remains for herself. She could understand the human desire to have someone to blame for something like that. "Could it have been? Arson, I mean."
Kim shrugged. "I doubt it. If the insurance company, who had the most to lose, could not find even a shred of evidence that it was a crime and not a malfunction..." She trailed off, lost in readjusting the cross over poor Agatha Ferris' obituary. "Anyway, Jimmy almost was let go then, but since he was just interning we gave him a second chance. I guess Harry, that's the editor, cut him some slack because he went to school with some of the Hale kids. He managed to keep it together a few years, then...you know the guy believes in werewolves, right?"
"Right," Joe said and laughed along with Kim. "So, do you have any of his old writing? I'm not gonna publish anything, at worst I'll paraphrase a few quotes for an article, but I will send it to you for approval first if that happens."
"Uhmm, I think we might have some of the original stuff on storage." Kim saved her work and shut down the computer. She and Joe walked down a hall to a crowded room with boxes. "The published articles you can get at the library." Kim gave her a wry smile. "I know it's probably bad of me, but we use some of his rejected writing to show new guys what not to do. It's very explanatory." She took down a box marked J.C. "Here we go, I'll make you some copies."
While the printer worked, Kim asked her more about her academic paper and Joe tried to explain, but could see Kim's eyes daze over. The psychological marks unexplained happenings leave upon a society was not everyone's cup of tea. In the end, she left with a wad of Jimmy Carter's old writing, all marked heavily with red where the editor had disapproved.
She stopped by a coffee-shop and began reading, making notes on her laptop. Some of the really early stuff, he must have still been in high-school at the time, was devoid of anything crazy. It all started when he was a Senior, by the looks of it. Not that long before the Hale house fire.
And then he had really gone all in. Several of the articles were referencing old attacks. The editor had added a comment that said: "This is olds, not news!" in capital letters about an animal attack that allegedly happened almost a year prior to Jimmy writing the article. It was like he was gathering evidence for his theories about werewolves. One of the papers had a large "NO!" written so large it covered the whole page. In it, Jimmy Carter claimed that the motive behind the Hale arson was because the Hales were werewolves.
"Sheesh," Joe muttered and figured Jimmy-boy must have been a really good writer otherwise to still have a position after that. It fit with Jimmy's own statement about having seen his classmate change - Kim had said Jimmy went to school with the Hales. She really wondered what he thought he had seen.
It was not just werewolves though. All sorts of mysterious stuff happened that would not have made any headlines unless a reporter was actively looking for this kind of thing. Livestock went missing, remains of possibly occult rituals in the forest, strange wails waking people up, ley lines intersecting on body dump sites...this guy reported all of it.
She wondered how much she could use the part that he had known some of the victims of a gruesome tragedy. The Hales. It fit with the pattern that humans invented fairytale monsters to cope. They had to have someone to blame, even if the traditional evidence did not support such a theory. If your loved one is found torn to shreds in the forest, it makes more sense for the human brain that the killer did it intentionally. Something so horrible could not have just been a coincidence. All evidence points to a wolf, an animal that only acts on instinct. That's not good enough. It might be a wolf's body, they say, but a human mind. They need a culprit.
Just like Jimmy.
And to Jimmy's defence, out of anyone in this town, she would also pick Derek Hale to be a suspected werewolf. He had a weird vibe about him. According to Derek's birth date from the police records, he and Jimmy were the same age so that had to be the classmate Jimmy referenced. She doubted Derek Hale suffered from lycanthropy though. It was a real mental illness, complete with delusions and visions and psychotic episodes. He might be weird, but not psycho weird.
Psycho hot though.
Joe glanced guiltily around the coffee shop in case any of the other patrons happened to be mind readers. It was easier to think about when she wasn't looking at him. If she allowed herself to entertain any of those thoughts in his presence, she would be reduced to a melted puddle of lust and awkwardness. Not that she had any reason to think she would run into him again. She still had no idea what kind of connection he had to Scott, who swiftly changed the subject every time she tried to ask.
Speaking of Scott, she'd promised help him study for tomorrow's test, so she had to get back home. There was also a deft pile of ungraded assignments from Professor Kane's students, so it looked to be another late night.
Aunt Mel had also arrived home for a mid-day nap between two shifts. The day she transitioned between early and late shifts was always a bit awkward. By the looks of it, she had given up trying to sleep and was nestled in a bunch of blankets on the couch watching a hospital drama show.
"Hey," she greeted Joe when she came in the door. Aunt Mel paused her show, which was her way of saying she wanted to talk. Joe obediently sat down when Aunt Mel patted the seat next to her on the couch and tried to figure out what kind of talk this was. It felt eerily reminiscent of her middle-school mishap- she had burnt her neck with a flat iron and had to spend considerable time explaining it had been an accident and not a hickey.
Aunt Mel smiled serenely at her. It seemed she was going for the tactic of fill-the-gaps-interrogation, where she created so much uncomfortable silence that Joe started to talk just to escape it. Joe just raised her eyebrows and gave a tight smile back.
"So, uh, is there something you want to tell me?" Aunt Mel asked after a while, smile never faltering. Joe tried to think - no way would she act so calmly if she had found the photocopied police files. It had to be something else, but what? For some reason, Aunt Mel almost looked pleased.
Joe shrugged and tried to keep her cool. "No?"
"You sure?"
"Yeah?"
"Okay, but you know you can talk to me about anything, right? An-y-thing. I mean it. I'm a registered nurse, there is not a tale I have not heard before." They continued to stare at each other and Aunt Mel sighed. "I found a grocery bag in the hall that I thought you had just forgotten to unpack."
Realization dawned on Joe and she felt the heat spread.
"And you know I support consensual and even casual sex as long as it is safe-"
Joe groaned and tried to bury her head in the arms of her sweatshirt. "Oh no."
"-but three packs? I mean, that's a lot of casual sex! If it is casual, of course, or is there a young man I haven't been introduced to?"
"It's neither," Joe muttered into her arms. She had forgotten all about that stupid bag. "It's - uh - they're not mine, not really."
This was a mistake as Aunt Mel's jaw dropped open. "They're Scott's?"
"No!" Joe shouted and jumped up from the couch, waving her hands in denial. "No, no, no, nothing like that! I bought them for someone else!"
"You bought them for Scott?"
"No! I - uh - bought them for this other guy."
"But you just said-"
"Yeah, no, I lied." Joe's voice was flat as she tried to not stumble in her words. "There was a young man. It didn't work out."
"You bought three packs of condoms and he...?" Aunt Mel asked, waving her hands vaguely to indicate that he had left her.
Joe nodded gravely. "He split."
More hand motions. "Was he...?"
Joe shook her head. "Don't know."
"Huh." Aunt Mel looked unsure, but shrugged. "Okay. I put them in your room, if you...in case you...you know what, I'm gonna go back to my show before I leave for work, how about that?"
"That would be awesome," Joe conceded and trudged back to her room, where indeed three packs of condoms laid on her desk. One of them was strawberry flavored.
Thank you for reading! Please leave a review if possible. This site finally fixed some kind of bug so now I'm able to see your reviews and they of course make me very happy! :)