by Jeff Abbott
“I’m sorry,” I said to the girl. I would later decide I needed a button to wear, pinned to my shirt, because the answer would become so rote. No, I don’t remember you.
But many kids did not even look at me beyond a first awkward, painful stare. No, not a stare, a glare. An actual glare.
“I’m not very popular,” I said after she and Kamala sat down in class. This was a shock to think about; I had not really considered the possibility of open hostility and physical threats.
“People are upset about David.”
“I get that,” I said, and my voice trembled. “Is anyone happy I survived?”
“Oh, Jane,” she said, giving me a mournful smile, “of course we are.”
16
JANE RECONSIDERED HER plan: San Antonio, and interviewing Brenda Hobson face-to-face, would have to wait until she could find transportation. She should start with people she could find on her list. So she picked Trevor Blinn, although other than his one visit to her in the hospital—where she did not remember him at all—he had mostly avoided her. She had found his Faceplace page on her phone; he was attending Travis Community College, probably trying to get basic courses knocked out and a GPA high enough to transfer to the University of Texas or St. Michael’s or Texas State. It was a common strategy. She could probably get readmitted to St. Michael’s if she got her head straight, but it might be less stress to try starting again at Travis CC. That could be her gambit in talking to him if he was reluctant.
Because they weren’t still real friends.
His Faceplace page told her Trevor was working part time as a barista at a locally owned coffee shop in Lakehaven called Lava Java. It was in a big shopping center, anchored by a large Italian chain restaurant and an organic grocery. She’d seen it when she’d walked to her house this morning. She saw a big black truck parked near the coffee shop and she remembered she’d seen Trevor driving it after she returned to school.
When Jane stepped inside, it wasn’t very busy with the early-afternoon crowd: an older woman typing on a laptop in a big leather chair, two young women talking at a table, another man, frowning at his tablet screen. Trevor was hard to miss: a big blond guy, wide shoulders, big arms, military buzz cut. He towered over the other barista, who was a small woman who looked to be in her forties. She was clearly in charge and she barked out a couple of annoyed orders to Trevor, who was staring at Jane and seemed not to hear. Then he nodded, and vanished into the back of the store.
Jane stepped up to the counter. The woman’s demeanor instantly changed from irritated to a warm, welcoming smile. “Welcome to Lava Java, what may I get you?”
Jane asked for drip coffee, decaf, with room for cream. Jane paid and the woman handed her the coffee with a smile.
“Is that Trevor Blinn who just went into the back?” Jane asked.
“Yes.” The woman’s smile didn’t waver.
“I went to high school with him, but I was in a very bad car accident and I had amnesia. I haven’t really talked to Trevor much since the accident. I would love to say hi to him.”
An admission of amnesia usually brought a nervous laugh, or a blink of disbelief, or a look of immediate pity. She got the last from the barista. “Oh, OK.” She didn’t say more and she didn’t move to summon Trevor. Jane sat down with her coffee and pretended to check her phone. But she decided she was not going to just sit here and meekly drink her coffee and not talk to him. She had to get him to agree to talk to her, later if not now.
Trevor reappeared and the barista stopped him in the doorway. She whispered to him, and Trevor’s gaze went to Jane.
Jane raised a hand in a shy wave. The barista whispered to him again and Trevor shook his head. The older woman said something again to him and his mouth tightened, but he came over toward her table.
“Hey, Jane,” he said.
“Hi, Trevor.”
“Um, did you get more of your memory back?” He had a deep voice, a little scratchy, with a Southern drawl.
She shook her head. “But I still remember you when we were younger. In elementary school.” She thought, He knows that; I don’t need to tell him. I can’t be this nervous. I can do this.
“My aunt says I can talk to you, but if we get busy again…” He was giving himself an escape route.
“Sure. Thanks.” She forced a smile, steadied her voice.
“Do you want a refill?” He nodded toward her cup.
“No, thank you.” He sat down.
“What can I do for you?” Jane thought he had a nice face; plain but strong, his mouth firm, his eyes a light blue. He needed a shave; the bristle on his chin was reddish-gold. She tried to think of him in a Lakehaven Roadrunners football uniform, like David had worn, but no picture came to mind.
“I want to ask you about the day of the crash.”
“Jane. I really don’t have anything to say to you about it.”
“You stood up for me that day in school.”
“What, Parker? I would have done that for anyone. I don’t like Parker.”
“What’s he doing now? Going to charm school?”
“He got a football scholarship at Tulane,” Trevor said tonelessly. “Look, I don’t have long to talk.” His voice was low, like he didn’t want the other customers to hear. “What do you want from me?”
“If everyone could stop hating me, maybe just for a minute, it would be so great.”
He looked away, back toward the coffee counter. “I don’t hate you, Jane. I just have nothing to say to you. Why would you even come here?”
“It was an accident. I swear it was. I couldn’t have hurt him.”
A hardness came into Trevor’s kind, plain face. “David was my friend. My best friend. And you…” He looked at her, the years behind them, and she thought, He lost me, he lost David, I wasn’t always good at thinking about other people’s pain.
“Wasn’t I your friend, too?” Jane asked quietly.
He looked down at the table.
She tried to offer a cute memory like it was a gift. “I mean, we ‘got married’ in first grade. And I beat up that mean girl for you in fourth.”
Cute memories did not work. “Jane. Everything changed.” He looked at her and then looked away. Miserable.
“What happened, Trevor? You come once to the hospital to see me. You stop a guy who’s threatening me. But you don’t talk to me, you keep your distance from me. When I needed my friends so badly.”
“I was your friend, Jane. You don’t have to ask. But I can’t be now.”
Seeing him was so much harder than she thought it would be. The thought that everyone from her childhood—the time she did remember—could think so poorly of her was hard to bear. This is why you stayed away from them all, she thought. You were afraid of total rejection. It was easier when you turned away from them.
“Look at this,” she said. She pulled the note from her backpack, still in its clear plastic envelope.
Trevor read it through the plastic. “What is this? Is that blood?”
“Yes. Mine. It was in my jeans pocket when the crash happened. It’s David’s handwriting, isn’t it?”
He read it aloud. “Meet me after school in the main parking lot. Don’t tell anyone. I need your help but it concerns us both. I’m in bad trouble. Will you help me?”
“Is that his handwriting or not?”
He studied the note. “Yes, it looks like it.”
“None of us know the truth about that night. There is a big secret here and I’m going to find it out.”
“Jane, this isn’t a movie. If he was in trouble, he would have asked me or Kamala. He didn’t have a lot to do with you in those days.”
“We grew up next door to each other. We were like brother and sister.”
“I don’t think that’s quite accurate,” he said in a flat tone.
“He wrote, ‘It concerns us both.’ So what were he and I involved in before the accident?”
“I don’t know.” But she thought h
e was lying. She lied her way through her days and she knew the betraying quick flick of the gaze.
“He didn’t want you or Kamala or Adam or anyone else to know. Just me. Something affecting me as well.”
“If he was really in trouble, David would tell me.”
“He gives me this, and then that night he dies? Trevor, please, maybe someone ran us off the road. Why would we even be on that road? Or maybe we were chasing someone, or someone chasing us…”
He leaned back suddenly, pale, his mouth twisting into a frown. He rubbed his hand along his unshaven chin, like an old man. “This is an awful big jump, Jane,” he said. “This is crazy.”
“Tell me about the last time you saw us.”
For a moment he didn’t answer. She glanced over toward the coffee counter and saw a young woman idly watching them; no, watching Trevor. An odd little bolt of anger surged in Jane’s chest. Finally, he spoke: “You were walking to his car together in the school parking lot. I started to say hi, because you both went past me, about twenty yards away, and I called hey, but neither of you looked at me. You were arguing, I think.”
“He was upset?”
He looked at her. “No, you were. He was calm.”
“But he was the one in trouble.”
“He stopped you and I started to walk toward you to see what was wrong, I wasn’t trying to be nosy, but I thought, hey, something’s wrong with my friends…and I heard him say to you, ‘This concerns more your dad.’”
The words were a slap in her face. “My dad? Why would he and I be talking about my dad?” She blinked. “Did I talk about my dad a lot?”
“No. Never. It was clearly painful for you. I lost my mom, too, cancer, a year before your dad died.” He cleared his throat. “We knew how much it sucks. It made us closer.” And his face went a little red. “Everyone thinks they know what it would be like to lose a parent. Everyone is wrong. Until it happens—”
“Trevor!” The other barista—his aunt—called.
“Stay here.” He got up, worked the line that had formed, smiling, making change, dispensing coffee. Jane sat, wondering, What would David have possibly known about my dad? When the line was served, Trevor hurried back and sat down.
She told him, then, about Liv Danger.
He shook his head and lowered his voice. “It’s someone jerking you. Delete and forget it.”
“I’m going to figure out who it is.” She wondered if he would suggest the obvious, that it was Kamala.
“It’s a misguided friend of David’s. Just a kid holding a grudge.”
She looked at him.
“It’s not me,” he said quickly.
“You’d be surprised how quickly people believe the worst of you.”
“I don’t have time to torment you online, Jane. I work, I go to community college.”
“I guess you weren’t going to play in college.” As soon as she said it, she regretted the words. The stress, and having not dealt with anyone but Adam and her mother and people who hated her, was making her thoughtless. She told herself to do better.
His expression went blank. “The week after your crash, I hurt my knee. Was out for the season. No college stayed interested in me.”
She remembered the brace on his leg when he’d stopped Parker from bullying her. In that awful daze of running the school gauntlet, she never asked him about it. The accident eclipsed everything else in her life. She had been a bad friend. Football had always meant so much to him. She wanted to reach out and take his hand. But she thought he would pull away. He didn’t want to be her friend.
“It was that week of the accident. I was distracted from the game with thoughts of you. And David. Whole team was. I didn’t pay attention and I got hurt.” His mouth narrowed. “It’s no one’s fault but my own.”
“I’m really sorry.”
He shrugged.
“I’m going to find out what was going on with David. Especially since you told me he said this somehow involved my dad. You can help me or you don’t have to. I really wish you would.”
He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no. “You still have your old cell phone number?”
“Yes.”
“You’re at Saint Michael’s, I heard?” Like it was unfair that a brain-damaged amnesiac was there at an expensive, selective school and he was grinding it out at a community college.
“I flunked out. I couldn’t handle it, academically. But I live on campus. In Adam Kessler’s room, so I don’t sleep on the streets. I sometimes go to classes; the bigger ones, where I won’t be noticed.” She had not confessed this to anyone. Only Adam knew. “I am pretending to have a life. So finding out the truth matters to me, OK, I need this. Mock it all you want.”
Trevor stared. “I am not mocking you. I never would.” She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.
She stood up. “Thanks for talking to me.”
“Sure. Jane?”
“Yeah?”
He swallowed. “I’m just sorry about everything.”
She turned and left before anything else could be said. She walked down Old Travis, the traffic thick, heading to the next name on her list.
17
PERRI?” MAGGIE SAID. “We need to talk. Um, about that trace you wanted me to do.”
Perri glanced up from her desk. “Already?”
Maggie was giving Perri a look that she didn’t quite care for. “Mike made me go to this superboring meeting, so I turned my attention to your problem. Liv approved your friend request about two a.m. So as you, I posted a link on her page to a quick memorial I created about your son. Liv clicked on it. But I added in trap code that would give us Liv’s IP address, and then I called the ISP and found out the billing address. We’ve been working with a few of the big service providers on security issues and one of my buddies there was willing to share.”
“So who does the account belong to?”
Maggie said, “You.”
“What?”
“It was posted from your computer.” Maggie stared at her. “So, either you wasted my time because you thought you could get away with this or someone has access to your computer that you don’t know about.”
Perri was stunned. “That can’t be. I wouldn’t have asked you to trace it if I’d written it.”
Maggie kept a neutral expression on her face. “I’m going to assume you’re not harassing yourself. Does anyone else have a key to your house? What about your ex-husband?”
“He’s not my ex, the divorce isn’t final. But he gave me back his keys when he moved out and I changed the locks. But Cal would never do anything like this.”
“A neighbor?”
“No. But I leave a key under a potted plant in the backyard in case I get locked out.”
“Who would know it was there?”
“No one.” She realized it was the same hiding place where she’d kept a key when David and Jane were little, and she and Laurel had both told each other where the emergency key was. Laurel’s was in one of those fake rocks. Laurel.
“Wait, are you saying that someone was in my house at two this morning?” A sick panic rose in her chest.
“Or your system could have been hacked and someone is accessing it remotely. You could bring it to me and I could check.” But Maggie’s voice, never warm, was strangely flat.
“Oh, I will. Thank you.” Maggie nodded and left. And Perri realized, with a jolt, that Maggie was wondering if Perri was capable of posting that awful garbage on the Faceplace page of a girl who’d killed her son.
18
JANE’S NEXT STOP was an open-air office park built of limestone, sprawling across a half acre. Freelance investigator Randy Franklin had an office nestled in among several real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and clinical psychologists. There were so many counselors on the wealthier side of Austin, it made Jane wonder—in a way she never had before—if money could not buy happiness.
She thought of knocking but instead she decided to try the do
or. It was unlocked. There was a reception desk with no one sitting at it, but she could hear the steady clack of typing in the inner office.
“Hello?” a deep male voice called to her.
“Mr. Franklin?”
He stepped out of the inner office. He was a big, broad man, with short, thinning hair and the solid, no-nonsense look of a former police officer. He wore a good-quality suit, no tie.
“May I help you?” he asked, friendly at the possibility of a client.
“My name is Jane Norton,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. Maybe he hadn’t recognized her face at first. But she heard the reaction to her name in that one syllable.
“I was hoping I could talk to you about a case from two years ago. I was involved. You were the investigator for an attorney named Kip Evander.”
“Yes. I remember it. You crashed a car and killed a young man.” His voice now was flat.
She decided to be as blunt as he was. “You found a so-called suicide note the day after the wreck? And gave it to the police?”
“I don’t think it’s appropriate I speak with you about this.”
“Please,” she said.
“Since you and your mother refused to talk to the police about it,” he said, “I don’t see why I should talk with you. The door’s behind you, use it. Good day.”
“I would like to hire you,” she said. She had gotten better at lying when she’d lived on the streets. No, I’m not homeless. No, I wasn’t sleeping behind that Dumpster, I was just looking for shade. I have a razor in my sock and if you don’t leave me alone, I’ll cut you.
He blinked, and then he smiled. “Hire me for what, Ms. Norton?”
“Someone has been harassing me online. Claiming they know what I don’t remember, and that I’m going to ‘pay.’ I would like to hire you to find out who it is.”
“You’re hiring me, or your mother?” He remembered Laurel. Well, Jane thought, Mom is hard to forget.
“Does it matter who is paying?” She had no idea where she would get the money, but maybe, if he thought there was a job in it, he would talk to her. Tell her something useful. “You’d be paid.”
