by Jeff Abbott
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Jeff Abbott
Cover design by Kaitlin Kall
Cover image of street © Tinker Street/Brenton Little/Gallery Stock; cover image of people © Getty Images
Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Abbott, Jeff, author.
Title: Never ask me / Jeff Abbott.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019049270 | ISBN 9781538733158 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781538733141 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3601.B366 N48 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049270
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-3315-8 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-3314-1 (ebook)
E3-20200504-DA-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: Julia
Chapter 2: Grant
Chapter 3: Iris
Chapter 4: Transcript from Interviews for A Death in Winding Creek by Elena Garcia
Chapter 5: Kyle
Chapter 6: Excerpt of Transcript of TCSO and LPD Interview with Edward Frimpong (Minor)
Chapter 7: Kyle
Chapter 8: Grant
Chapter 9: From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal
Chapter 10: Iris
Chapter 11: Iris and Kyle
Chapter 12: Grant
Chapter 13: From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal
Chapter 14: Julia
Chapter 15: Grant
Chapter 16: Iris
Chapter 17: From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal
Chapter 18: Grant
Chapter 19: Julia
Chapter 20: Iris
Chapter 21: Kyle
Chapter 22: Transcript from Interviews for A Death in Winding Creek by Elena Garcia
Chapter 23: Julia
Chapter 24: From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal
Chapter 25: Iris
Chapter 26: Grant
Chapter 27: Julia
Chapter 28: Iris
Chapter 29: From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal
Chapter 30: Iris
Chapter 31: Grant
Chapter 32: Iris
Chapter 33: From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal
Chapter 34: Iris
Chapter 35: Julia
Chapter 36: Grant
Chapter 37: From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal
Chapter 38: Kyle
Chapter 39: Julia
Chapter 40: Iris
Chapter 41: Excerpt of Transcript of TCSO and LPD Interview with Kyle Pollitt
Chapter 42: From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal
Chapter 43: Excerpt of Transcript of TCSO and LPD Interview with Kyle Pollitt
Chapter 44: Iris and Grant
Chapter 45: Iris
Chapter 46: From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal
Chapter 47: Iris and Julia
Chapter 48: Transcript from Interviews for A Death in Winding Creek by Elena Garcia
Chapter 49: Grant and Iris
Chapter 50: Iris
Chapter 51: Julia
Chapter 52: From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal
Chapter 53: Excerpt of Transcript of TCSO and LPD Interview with Kyle Pollitt
Chapter 54: Iris
Chapter 55: Julia
Chapter 56: From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal
Chapter 57: Iris
Chapter 58: Iris
Chapter 59: Grant
Chapter 60: From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal
Chapter 61: Transcript from Interviews for A Death in Winding Creek by Elena Garcia
Chapter 62: From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal
Chapter 63: Grant
Chapter 64: Iris
Chapter 65: Kyle
Chapter 66: Iris
Chapter 67: Grant
Chapter 68: Iris
Chapter 69: Grant
Chapter 70: Iris and Grant
Chapter 71: Afterword of A Death in Winding Creek by Elena Garcia
Chapter 72: The Pollitt Family
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
ALSO BY JEFF ABBOTT
For Vince and Chele Robinette
with admiration and thanks
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1
Julia
Ned Frimpong waits for Julia Pollitt on the porch, six minutes away from the terrible moment. They’re up earlier than teenagers normally are, the sun just rising above the hills of Lakehaven. When Julia walks up to his front porch from two houses over, Ned is frowning at his phone and flicking his finger across the screen, saying, “Oh, that Megabunny just cost me points.”
“Don’t you ever tell anyone we’re doing this,” she says. She gives him a smile.
He smiles back. “My lips are sealed. I have so much Megabunny shame.” He glances at the phone screen. “Oh, there’s a Shockersquirrel.”
“Those are good, right?” she says, pulling out her phone, opening the game, and frowning at her screen. “Lots of points?”
He opens the front door, leans in, calls, “Mom, Julia and I are heading out to play our game. Back in a bit.” He doesn’t wait for an answer but shuts the door. “Oh. Do you want coffee?”
She just started drinking coffee black, the same way Ned takes his, but she can’t play the game and carry a cup of coffee at the same time. Not gracefully, at least. “No thanks,” she says. She’s waiting for the game’s little digital creatures to appear on her screen so she can capture them with a flick of her thumb. She and Ned are up early, like fishermen, because with daylight the neighborhood will be full of little cartoon monsters appearing on their phone screens, and they’re both trying to move up a level in the game.
“There will be tons of them at the park,” Ned says. He turns that way; Julia follows.
She thinks that if they didn’t both have their phones out they could walk to the park holding hands. Ned walks slightly ahead of her, staring at his screen.
“This is a slightly embarrassing addiction,” Julia says. “We’re too old for this.”
“I was at the mall last week and I saw grandmothers playing Critterscape,” he said. “Bonding with their grandchildren. Nothing to be embarrassed about.”
“Telling me grandmas are playing this is not upping the cool factor,” Julia said. She sees a rare Critter wander onto the neighborhood map; a flick of her finger on the screen launches a cartoon net, and the little digital animal is hers. Hundreds of points added to her total, sparkling animation playing across her screen; she smiles.
“Hey,” he says. She turns to him and he’s holding a key. She looks at him again, and there’s that shy-yet-knowing smile that has been part of the change in looking at him, from childhood friend to something more.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“Privacy,” he says. “Someplace where we can go when we’re ready.”
She opens her palm and he drops the key into her hand. She puts it into her pocket. He keeps his smile in place, then turns his gaze to the phone like it’s no big deal that he gave her that key, and she walks alongside him, playing it cool as well.
They walk in starts and stops—stopping to attempt to capture the prizes that Critterscape lays over the digitized homes and yards of Winding Creek Estates. A jogger plods past, then an older neighbor walking her two retrievers. Julia wishes she’d taken Ned up on his offer of coffee. She wouldn’t have to feel she was focusing on the game and maybe they could talk. About everything that was—and wasn’t—happening between them. She watches him stop in front of a house, fingers moving across the screen’s keyboard.
“What are you doing?” she asks. Tensing. “You’re not…?”
“No. I’m just sending a message to someone else in the game.” His gaze is steady on her.
She forces herself to relax. “I just want to catch Critters.” She starts walking ahead of him. After a few moments, he catches up to her with an apologetic smile.
They walk down Winding Creek Trail, the main street in the subdivision; it dead-ends into a park, one with a sprawling playscape for little kids and a large pool, home of the Winding Creek Salamanders, the neighborhood youth swim team.
Julia sees someone sitting on a bench, the person’s back to them as they enter the park, heading toward the pool. A woman. Long hair, stirred by the wind. Even from behind she seems familiar.
“Frustrating,” Ned says, staring at his screen. “My last two Critters have run away. Life is cruel. I swear some algorithm kicks in right when you’re about to level up.”
The woman on the bench isn’t moving. Just sitting there. Julia thinks she recognizes the coat.
“Is that your mom?” Julia asks.
“No. Mom was at home. I mean, I think she was.” Ned stops for a second, as if he doesn’t want to continue. He’s staring at the figure on the bench.
Julia keeps walking. “Ms. Roberts?” she calls. “Hey.”
The woman doesn’t turn around at her voice.
“Mom, are you trying to steal all our Critters?” Ned calls to her. He comes up behind her, touches her shoulder. She slumps to the side. Ned freezes, but Julia keeps walking and rounds the bench. And then she sees Danielle Roberts’s face, purpled, dead, dried blood on her lips and her chin. At her expression Ned pushes past her to his mother.
Ned screams first, the sound raw and broken, grabbing his mother and shaking her like he could will her back to life. Julia pulls him off; he shoves her to the ground and collapses next to her. He sobs, starts screaming the word “Mom” over and over again. Julia reaches over to touch the woman’s throat, but it’s terrible, discolored, and instead Julia searches for a pulse on the cold wrist.
Nothing.
It takes Julia three shaky jabs at her phone screen to exit the game, and she forgets to breathe as she texts her mother.
NEDS MOM IS DEAD IN PARK
2
Grant
Grant Pollitt stands in front of the tree on the greenbelt that leads down to the creek, beyond his backyard. When he was little, he used to hide his treasures in a small hollow near the tree’s roots, until his mother worried that same hole might harbor copperheads or water moccasins.
He stands there, trembling, a little scared, and not sure why.
It’s been a very weird morning.
First the email arrives, sent to him from a friend. The email contains a picture of his favorite football player, arms lifted in triumph after a win. The email reads trust me, Grant, you want to click on this. It makes him suspicious, because a virus could hide inside a picture or a link, right? But it has his name in the caption and the email wasn’t from some unknown person; it was his friend Drew’s address. He bites his lip. He has heard other pictures could be hidden inside digital photos. Maybe this is Drew’s way of sending him the kind of pictures your parents don’t like you to have. He feels guilty, but Drew would know if he doesn’t click it because he couldn’t fake his way out of not knowing. He clicks it.
His browser opens. A new picture appears. It’s a photograph of a woman caught whirling in the misty rain; behind her stands the Eiffel Tower. She’s wearing an expensive raincoat and laughing. People around her are clapping and watching in admiration. At the bottom of the photo are the words:
Some days lies fall like the rain. Go look in your tree.
That’s…incredibly odd, he thinks.
He texts Drew. Did you send me an email with a picture of JJ Watt?
The answer: Uh no why would I do that and I was asleep thanks for waking me up
Never mind, Grant texts back. This wasn’t the kind of joke that his buddies Drew or Landon or Connor typically pulled on another friend. He scans the computer for viruses. None.
Go look in your tree.
It can mean only one tree. Maybe it’s Julia, pulling a prank on him. Julia isn’t interested in computers, though, and hiding a picture inside a picture—she wouldn’t know how to do that. It wasn’t the kind of joke his parents played, either, trying to turn everything into a learning opportunity or a challenge he could write about on his college essays.
He goes downstairs and into the kitchen. Mom is making coffee, tapping her foot as if the coffee maker were delaying her.
“Good morning,” she says. She runs a hand through the mess of his bedhead hair. She’s always trying to fix his hair. He loves her, but he wishes she wouldn’t do that. Sometimes Mom looks at him as though surprised he’s there.
“Hey,” he says, giving her a quick hug and thinking: This is silly. I should tell her about this email. But then, it’s so odd, so strange, that it’s like having a special secret. So he doesn’t, and she says: “I think your sister went out playing that Creaturescape game with Ned.”
“Critterscape,” he says. He gets orange juice from the fridge, pours a large glass.
“Whatever. Do they just walk around the neighborhood?”
“It’s exercise,” he says, not looking at her.
“That’s what her dance class is for. Do you know what’s going on between them?” Mom asks.
It’s like she can’t help herself, Grant thinks. Like if Julia confides in him he will break that confidence just because Mom asks. “I don’t know,” he says.
Mom bites at her lip, unsatisfied.
“I have to go down into the greenbelt,” he says.
“Why?” Mom is always a little suspicious of the greenbelt. Kids go down there into the heavy growth of oaks and cedars and swim in the wide creek and walk the convoluted trails and sometimes smoke weed or drink. He hasn’t done the forbidden activities. But he knows other kids who have.
He realizes then he should have waited until she wasn’t around or had gone upstairs
and then just gone to his tree. Now she is interested, in that Mom way.
“Biology class specimens,” he says. He’s a freshman and biology is the bane of his existence.
“In winter?”
“Yes, Mom, in winter, biology still goes on.”
Her phone buzzes with a specific ringtone that indicates Julia is calling. The ringtone’s melody is that of a song Mom wrote about Julia when she was very young and fighting cancer—a neuroblastoma—and Julia hates that it’s a ringtone but doesn’t want to hurt Mom’s feelings. Grant keeps meaning to tell Mom to change it. Mom picks up the phone, stares at the screen.
Her face goes pale. She makes an odd little noise, like a gasp or a cough interrupted.
“Mom?”
She keeps staring at the screen; it’s like he isn’t there. “Mom?” he repeats.
“Stay here. Stay here. Keep your phone close.”
“What is it? Is Julia all right?”
“Yeah. No. I’ve got to go to her. Stay here.”
Mom grabs her coat from the mudroom and hurries out to the garage. He hears her car start and then silence for several seconds, as if she’s forgotten how to drive, and then the garage door powering up. He stands at the kitchen window, sees her Mercedes SUV jerk down the driveway, going way too fast. Julia’s done something stupid, he supposes, and she’s gotten into trouble. Last year she was Little Miss Perfect; now she’s in some vague rebellion that makes no sense to him. He wishes she would make up her mind.
He wonders where Dad is. He goes to his parents’ room. His father is lying under the covers, snoring softly. Another late night working, Grant figures. He closes the door softly.
Go look in your tree.
He goes out the patio door, crosses the backyard, and opens the gate. The greenbelt is just beyond. It’s fed by Winding Creek, a middling tributary of Barton Creek in West Austin, which runs across a slice of Lakehaven. There’s a hiking path by the creek. He walks off the trail, listening to the hiss of water as he heads down toward the creek, and his old tree is to the left.
A rock covers the cleft near the tree’s roots. The cleft was his hiding place: small, cozy. Grant would put pretend treasure maps there, or Legos, or hide little objects he had stolen from his parents—a penknife, coins, his father’s car keys once when Kyle had an endless succession of overseas business trips. He wasn’t even sure why he took small, worthless things and hid them away: he always brought them back home, put them in plain sight, and sometimes smiled to himself when Dad or Mom would find the missing item and say, How did I miss seeing that?
