Chapter 95 – The Lurking Stray – Erica Henson

Jackie saw me outside the Society of Sisters clubroom and likely assumed that I was there as an unaffiliated observer like the other members of the crowd. There was still a substantial crowd standing outside the Society of Sisters clubroom. So when Officer Morelli dragged Sofi out by one of her arms it caused quite a stir. People already thought that Sofi was a bit of a loony weirdo. The fact she was being escorted away by an actual police officers was going to cause a new wave of rumors.

I was going to follow after Jackie to see if I could learn what was going on. I paused when I saw Val coming out of the room with an entourage of SCA members. She gave me a hard, contemplative look that seemed to be a mix of concern and resentment. She opened her mouth as if to say something to me, but decided against it in the last moment. She looked over at Naomi who was standing beside me.

"Look after Holly," She said without further explanation.

She continued walking away with the rest of the SCA members following behind. Naomi seemed to take that as her cue that she and her girlfriends could enter the room now. I followed in close behind them. Inside, Holly was sitting at the front of the room staring off at nothing in the distance. Sam was next to her, standing with her arms folded in front of her chest. Sam had a deeply troubled look on her face, similar to the look that Val had. A casual glance around the room proved that they weren't the only ones with these expressions.

"What's wrong?" I asked Sam.

"It's... complicated..." Sam said, "Maybe we should talk about this somewhere else."

"Come on," Naomi said. "Let's go back to the hideout."

Naomi's invitation apparently was extended to me as well. At first I wasn't sure she'd let me return to the Old Science Wing with them. They certaintly didn't like outsiders in their secret base and never responded well to me in the past. I supposed it was because of the fact that I was the one that alerted them to the situation with the SCA that warranted my presence. They'd probably want a retelling of what I saw before I came to the library.

Holly was unusually quiet and dejected on her way to Naomi's hideout. She hardly said a word the entire walk over, despite my numerous attempts at engaging her into conversation. When we finally made it to the Old Science Wing and she explained the situation I finally understood why she was taking things so personally. A small rift had formed between her and Val. They had disagreeing opinions on how to handle Sofi and Val took matters into her own hands, against Holly's wishes. The complicating factor was that Holly didn't blame Val for this as much as she blamed her lack of progress with Sofi.

All of Naomi's girlfriends had either gone home or left the old classroom that we were currently in. Naomi was propped up in Sam's lap for some reason, sitting in a chair across from me and Holly. We were trying to convince Holly not to be so hard on herself, but she probably suspected what the three of us were thinking. The three of us would've probably resorted to Val's method much earlier. I couldn't speak entirely for Naomi and Sam, but I imagined that they thought more like I did in this regard. Although I could see the logic in what Holly was trying to accomplish, it seemed unlikely to bear fruit on a subject like Sofi. I tried to convince Holly as much but that only seemed to make her more agitated.

"I'm trying to become a professional counselor that works at this school." Holly explained with some annoyance in her voice. "The fact that Sofi is difficult to handle isn't a valid excuse. I need to be able to handle situations like this better than I did."

"What more could you have done?" Sam asked honestly, "There is a such thing as too much patience, isn't there?"

"I should've been more involved with her." Holly suggested. "I should've tried to talk to her or meet up with her outside of school to work this out."

Naomi tilted her head sideways like a curious bird.

"Do you really think that would've helped?" Naomi asked in genuine curiosity. "If she didn't want to talk to you at school then pursuing her outside of it may not have helped. You should just let it go."

Holly sighed.

"I can't ‘just let it go’. I wanted to prove to Ms. Sampson that handling Sofi with a more sympathetic touch was the proper way we should be doing things at this school. I know it's a little egotistical to say, but my pride was wrapped up in this. Seeing everything come crashing down so suddenly has knocked my confidence down a notch."

We were all silent for a moment as we digested what she was saying. I reached out to put a hand on Holly's.

"For what it's worth, your counseling has meant a lot to me. I'm sure it meant a lot to Ms. Logan too before she died."

Holly winced at this and suddenly I felt like an idiot. I forgot that Holly wished she could've done more for her also.

"Wait, I'm sorry. That came out wrong, I-..."

Holly sighed again.

"It's fine. Really," Holly said. "I'm not going to be the master counselor I want to be after just a few months of trial and error. I think this means that I need to dedicate myself to this more seriously. I've been learning this from a limited angle. I think what I need to do is read more books on the subject and reach out to experts that can guide me."

"Like Mrs. Douglass...?" Naomi asked with a disgusted sound, "Forget that, I think you're better than that 'expert' right now as you currently are."

"Not like her," Holly quickly noted, "There was one woman that helped me figure some things out for myself. She was quite the role model to me. Maybe I should reach out to her sometime..."

"The fact that you're willing to try improving yourself in this regard means a lot." Sam said. "If Mrs. Douglass is as terrible as everyone says she is then you'll be a massive upgrade from her. The school will be better off with you as an official counselor."

"Thanks," Holly said, finally sounding more positive. "Although, I'm a little worried about how I'm going to talk to Alyssa about all this. She's going to be devastated."

From there, our conversation together died down and we went our separate ways. The rest of the school week went on surprisingly normally. After their grand plan was foiled, and their mastermind was suspended, the Society of Sisters more or less fizzled out. Although they were talking up a storm in ChatCat, they didn't dare to meet in public anymore. Furthermore, Sofi was clearly distancing herself from the organization in their ChatCat group. From what I saw she had yet to make any sort of reappearance there all week.

They turned into a school laughing stock as people ridiculed Sofi for getting suspended over what was essentially a new occult club. Some of the supernatural theories about the school were being revisited with more grounded speculation. Sofi and her occultism being hamstrung so heavily had everyone thinking twice about the associated ideas. Were these paranormal ideas that people had realistic to begin with? Or were they a bad joke taken too far? People were starting to ask themselves these questions more seriously now that the whispers of paranormal activity had been so thoroughly crushed.

This had the double effect of undermining the Matriarch's original plans, but also reigniting the question surrounding Ms. Logan's death. If people were going to sideline their paranormal ideas then they needed a theory to fill the void. Unfortunately for her, this still meant that Jackie was the prime suspect in the eyes of a lot of students. This new wave of rumors being spread by the rumor mill wasn't very strong. All this was essentially just background noise in comparison to the upcoming spirit week. People were legitimately excited.

Not everyone was in high spirits, however. Alyssa turned out to take Sofi's suspension incredibly poorly. She had simply just stopped attending school. It wasn’t like she was suspended along with Sofi. When the school tried to reach out to her parents they never got a call back. The way that the Society of Sister's was dealt with left the student council somewhat split. To my knowledge, they didn't have a single student council meeting for the remainder of the week.

It could've been because of the upcoming spirit week, but they seemed to be taking a break. Val and Jay became more involved with securing the event with the help of the SCA. Holly, Lilith, and Sam spent more time on the event committee. There were perfectly valid reasons for them to be more concerned with the activities of these two associated groups in preparation for the spirit week event. In the light of recent events this looked like an internal split. Holly explained to me that things weren’t that serious, but I could sense that she was under a bit of strain even as she was trying to convince me otherwise.

The school made it to Friday afternoon without any more hiccups. It felt like things were finally beginning to normalize for the first time since Vivian Hale and Dianna Hoffman died. Things for me were starting to go well also. Recently I was able to publish my first solo article for the school website. It was a small informative piece on the reason why Sofi was suspended from school. It was meant to help inform students rather than leaving them to speculate about things like usual. Zoe said it was a small article, but still an important accomplishment for a member of the newspaper club.

Jackie was in a far better mood also. The breakfast she made on Saturday morning represented more cooking than she usually did. She normally left handling breakfast to me unless she was in the mood to do it herself. It was nice to see that she was upbeat. I was beginning to get increasingly worried about her negative state of mind when she was moping around the house for so long.

I felt like that was a good excuse for me to spend that Saturday evening lazing around and not focusing on my stack of homework. It took some time, but I was starting to recover from the things that I saw and heard on the night that I saw the Killing Cat again. I could think about Vivian now without feeling too guilty about the fact that I left her behind. I still wanted to learn the identity of the Killing Cat, of course, but now my feelings of guilt and shame weren't wrapped up in it. If I was going to find out the truth behind the Killing Cat then I needed to do so with a level head.

My investigation into the 'Emily' girl didn't turn up much. I talked to some of her friends directly when I felt I could do so without being recognized by any of them. It helped that she was actually in a grade beneath me. I was a stranger to most of these girls. From what I could tell, Emily was a decent girl that just happened to be wrapped up in the Matriarch's plans, sort of like Sofi. While she showed no obvious signs of delinquency, her friends did say that she had a habit for spreading rumors.

Unless this girl was some sort of master actress then I got the feeling that she wasn't the real Killing Cat. The idea that the Killing Cat purposely left the mask behind to be found and worn by someone else seemed like something Nyx would do. In fact, Nyx probably left it behind just for the very sake of throwing me off her tail. I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiples of the same mask just lying around our school somewhere, ready to be picked up by some unknown individual.

I sighed and sat down at the small computer desk in my room. I logged into ChatCat on my computer to give the Society of Sister ChatCat server another look. Maybe it was totally unnecessary, but I wanted to see how they were coping with the loss of Sofi. From what I could eke out from the few people willing to direct message my anonymous ChatCat ID, Sofi was grounded. Her parents were outraged to hear about what she had taken part in and punished her accordingly. On top of taking away her phone and computer, they had her delete her ChatCat account permanently.

That wasn't something I was expecting to hear, but it wasn't a huge surprise either. It sounded like something my parents would've done back when I lived with them. Only recently did I manage to get back into contact with them. They were angry over me getting kicked out of school before. Now they felt they had overreacted and pushed me away. They were no longer planning on getting divorced and told me that they wanted to be a normal family again. After remembering all the arguements with them, I told them that I'd have to think on it some more. It wasn't like all the animosity between us was going to be cleared up without working on it first.

I noticed that the Society of Sisters was planning to have a video meeting soon. I wondered what they would talk about now that Sofi was removed from the picture. Would the Matriarch really be bold enough to take direct control of the video chat? They were planning to use masks for the video chat of course, but the Matriarch had a distinctive voice. I decided I'd participate in this little video of theirs by using a static image of a black cat rather than a video. It'd be benign and inconspicuous enough not to cause trouble. As long as I didn't speak out then it should be enough to allow me to listen in on the meeting.

It didn't take long for me to make my preparations. The meeting began and I was happy to see that I wasn't the only one using a static image. This meant that the fact that I wasn't using a web camera like so many others in the meeting wouldn't cause me to stand out. I was greeted by someone in the video meeting as I joined. I responded politely with a text based message in the 'General' section of the ChatCat server and that appeared to be enough for them to move on. It looked like they didn't expect everyone to have a microphone or webcam.

I was relatively early to join the meeting. I watched as new people entered the meeting, some of them with webcams, some without. A few girls started chatting even as people were still joining. For a while this entire meeting was incredibly mundane. It felt like they had really thrown in the towel. Just as I was going to log out of ChatCat to go take a shower, a familiar face joined the meeting. The image of the Nyx doll appeared as one of the new members joining the video chat. The associated username was just the word 'Nyx' followed by a randomized string of letters. A few of the people in the meeting greeted Nyx in complete obliviousness.

"Hello," Nyx said in its usual arrogantly smug voice, "I've got some ideas for the upcoming school event that I think you girls will like."