by Jeff Abbott
“Of course he did.” Cal’s voice nearly broke. “He loved you very much.”
“How did I find out?” Her mother had told her, but she wanted to hear his version.
“He didn’t show up for dinner. Your mom was back and was worried. He wasn’t answering his phone. So Perri and I went looking for him. He had mentioned he was running by his uncle’s house to do some work on it before putting it on the market. I found him there. In a back bedroom.”
“His uncle’s gun in his hand?”
“Yes.”
“And no note.”
“No note. He was handling the gun and it went off.”
“You and my mom aren’t keeping something bad from me, are you? That there was a suicide note? Because people talked. I know they did.”
“I swear, there was no note.”
“So what would David have learned that he would tell me that day about Dad?”
“I have no idea, Jane, I truly don’t. We weren’t business partners anymore. Obviously our business failing had been hard, but we were both going to land on our feet. And he was the most decent man I’ve ever known, integrity above reproach, and he was excited for his life and his family and his future.”
“Mom said once that when Dad died, she was too wrapped up in her own shock to be of much comfort to me.”
“You took it very hard. You were not yourself. Terribly depressed. You went kind of dark in your clothes, your hair, your whole look. I think your friends were not of much comfort because they didn’t seem to understand—so you thought—what you were going through. You were drinking. David was constantly worried about you.”
She thought of the video at Happy Taco, David trying to calm her.
Because she didn’t agree with Cal: She thought Trevor was telling her the truth. Even if her father’s death was an accident—and it had been investigated and found to be so—then maybe he still knew something, had something, that David had somehow found or learned or known and told her about the night of the crash.
Where did Dad and David’s lives overlap? she wondered. “I’m sorry David was so worried about me. Tell me what was important in David’s life before…the crash happened?”
Cal waited a moment to answer. “School. Football season, although he was hurt, so he wasn’t playing, he hated that. He wanted to get healthy again, so he was resting a lot, working on school projects.”
“Did he have a job?”
“No.”
“Did he ever get in trouble no one knew about? Did the police ever bring him home?”
“What a question, Jane.” For the first time Cal sounded irritated with her.
“I…” She changed her mind on showing him the note. “My memory…I sometimes see fragments. I don’t always know what they mean.” Liar, liar, pants on fire but so what, she thought. This man was being somewhat nice and helpful, but that didn’t mean she trusted him. He might run back to Perri and tell her everything she said. “And David passed me a note in class. He said he was in big trouble and needed my help. I don’t know why he didn’t ask you or Mrs. Hall or Trevor or Kamala, but he asked me.”
“How do you know?”
“My mother kept the note he’d passed me. Did she never tell you and Perri?”
He sighed. “No, she didn’t. If that was the last thing he ever wrote, I sure would like it back.”
“I understand,” she said. But she didn’t offer to give it to him.
He was silent for a long minute. She thought he wouldn’t speak. He finally said, “Most people have believed the simplest explanation for that night: he spent six hours trying to talk you out of suicide and failed.”
“Would David have gotten in a car with me or let me drive if that were true? He would have called you, called my mom.”
“Not if you begged him not to call. If you asked him to let it be the two of you, just talking. Because he would have been sure that he could save you.”
“Is that the kind of person I was?”
“I don’t know. You didn’t like to share him.” He said the last sentence like it was a painful admission. “In high school, you and David drifted a bit. Still friends, but not like how you’d been. He started dating Kamala. I wondered how you felt about it, because I sensed you cared for him. That he was more than a friend to you. But you adored Kamala and so you seemed OK with them being a couple. After your dad died, you withdrew. Dark clothes, dark fingernail polish.”
Such a man, Jane thought, to focus only on the exterior. “I withdrew.”
“From everyone. Except David could still talk to you. Kamala tried. She’d be at our house crying because you wouldn’t let her in the house, you wouldn’t talk to her. I think that was when she and David got much closer.”
Wasn’t that nice of me, Jane thought.
“You started to get back to normal…I mean, not normal, but back to being, you know, happier. Adjusting. Being the Jane we knew.”
“You don’t adjust,” she said. “There is no closure. There’s only learning to live with the loss.”
“That’s true,” he said. “So true.”
“Your wife attacked me at David’s grave. I have a video of it. She’s proof you never adjust.” Now she watched him. “Why are you helping me?”
“Because if someone is posting about knowing something about my son, I want to know. And ALL WILL PAY sounds like a threat.”
She said nothing further about suspecting Kamala. No one believed Kamala could burn down a house. But Jane did.
22
PERRI’S DINNER WITH Mike had not gone well. She was distracted by Maggie’s news that Liv Danger had somehow accessed her computer, and Mike was trying to be more than a friend, more than a boss. She could see it in his smile, his tender solicitude, an unsettling hope in his gaze. At the car she was afraid he would try and kiss her and she couldn’t handle that right now. But he only walked her to her car, thanked her for a nice time at dinner, and told her he’d see her tomorrow.
Her phone vibrated. She’d set her mobile Faceplace app to alert her if there was a posting from Liv Danger. She pulled out the phone.
The new posting read, LOOK IN DAVID’S ROOM FOR THE ANSWER YOU SEEK.
She felt faint. Was this person already coming into her house to use the computer or to plant evidence in David’s room? Or while she had been out at dinner with Mike?
Maybe Liv Danger was in her home right now.
She drove straight home. The lights she’d left on downstairs and upstairs were aglow. She parked and walked across to a neighbor’s house. She told her neighbor, John, that she was worried someone had gotten into the house. He agreed to walk in with her and search the rooms to make sure they were empty. The house was fine; no intruders. She thanked him and he left. In the backyard she found the spare key. She pocketed it.
Look in David’s room.
Fine, Liv Danger, I will.
Perri started with David’s desk. She found a handful of flash drives, a couple with tiny labels of symbols: books for homework, a treble clef for music. She remembered he was always losing these when he used them for backup for his schoolwork. She slid an unlabeled one into the port but it was blank. So were the others. She tried the music one. It was locked with a password. She always kept her passwords on sticky notes in her desk drawer, but there were no notes in the drawer. She tried the school one. There were folders for math, English, entrepreneurship, physics. She opened each folder, feeling a bit foolish. Nothing suspicious jumped out at her. It was all assignments and notes he felt important enough to back up onto this drive. He had been writing a paper on John Milton; had notes for calculus, along with links to study guides (math was his least favorite subject); in government he’d been working on a paper about James Madison; in entrepreneurship he had what looked like a first-draft business proposal for a video-game company, with a placeholder for the company name of D+J DESIGN.
She went through the other drawers. A stack of sketchbooks. He was such a good artist, and sh
e felt a pang in her chest again as she thought of the hours she and Cal had pushed him in sports and academics, instead of art. This was something he’d loved. She looked through the sketches. He’d drawn Jane a few times: frowning, angry, shrugging with indifference. Not posed, remembered. A picture of his father, staring out the living room window on the east side of their second house on Lake Austin; she recognized the curtains. David nearly drowned there, on the lake, as a child, and she hated going to the house and rarely did, but David and Cal loved it, so she let it be their retreat for father-son fishing and boating. She studied the picture of Cal; the next one was of him on the pier at the lake house, smiling and waving, a wonderful rendition. A drawing of herself, caught with laughter, happier than she’d looked, well, in forever. She had to close the sketchbooks. No more.
She put them aside. Below them lay a few loose papers and notes. One, titled “Pro and Con,” said, “Be direct. Tell her how you feel. Tell her it will be OK. Not telling her is worse. Life will go on. She needs to know the truth.” All these were on the pro side. Nothing on the con.
Was this something he’d written about Jane? If she had loved him and he hadn’t felt the same about her. It had been the reason supposed by Kamala and others that she might attempt the murder/suicide.
Had he followed this list and died?
The other drawers were empty.
She searched the shelves. A long row of video games: everything from gentle games like Animal Crossing and Pokémon to shoot-ups like Call of Duty to fantasy epics like Assassin’s Creed. Below them, a few books. She ran her finger along the spines, leaning close to take them out to see if anything was hidden behind them. The Ranger’s Apprentice series, The Hunger Games trilogy, all the Harry Potters, The Maze Runner books, A Wrinkle in Time. She remembered that had been Jane’s favorite book—she’d broken the spine of multiple copies and her devotion to the book was a running joke among their circle of friends, Laurel called it “Wrinkles Come in Time”—but she couldn’t remember ever buying the book for David, especially in a hardcover edition. He liked action stories, and A Wrinkle in Time, which she had read and loved as a teacher, was a bit more philosophical. She opened it.
Jane’s name, carefully written in pencil on the inside cover. This was Jane’s book, why was it on David’s shelf? Had she loaned it to him and never gotten it back? She didn’t want anything of Jane’s in the house. She set the book down on his desk, slamming it, thinking she’d take it downstairs in a few minutes. She didn’t want to see Laurel but she could return the book. Or just throw it away.
Or maybe it had been left here. For her to find. A taunt, that Jane or Laurel had been in her house. Accessing her computer, leaving something in his room. The thought made her ill.
She picked it up and thumbed through it. It opened to page ninety, where a deep fragment of blank paper was lodged in the spine. Maybe a bookmark? She pulled the paper free and held up the torn edge to look at it. It was like the paper had been violently wedged into the book and then torn. The torn edge wasn’t a straight line, it was jagged at one end, slightly, like the outline of a mountain. A stray thread of ink at the bottom.
She put the book, and the slip of paper still inside it, back on the shelf.
She searched the closets. Clothes: She remembered buying each item for him. She spent a few moments looking at the shirts, leaning into the fabric. They didn’t smell of David—the soap he used, the regrettable body sprays, his shampoo—only now of dust. The top shelf in the closet held forgotten trophies and ribbons from youth sports, a deflated football, and a stack of board games, worn with use. She pulled down the trophy box. She hadn’t touched this after he died. Her heart swelled in sorrow as she looked down at the wrinkled ribbons and the dusty athletic figures on the trophies, frozen in timeless runs and jumps. The hours he’d spent. The joy he’d had in sports.
She set the trophies down. What would happen to his stuff when she and Cal were gone? There was no one else who would want his memories. They’d go into a trash fill, she supposed, and it was silly to be upset, but she felt a chasm open in her chest.
She looked up. Bringing down the trophy box had left a vacant stretch on the shelf. Peeking out from behind the stack of board games—Life, Monopoly, Stratego—she saw the edge of a notebook. She pulled down the board games, fighting back memories of the hours she and Jane and David had played them—Cal was gone so often on business—and stacked them on the floor. She pulled down the notebook. It was thin, with fine paper, stamped with a Japanese logo. She’d never seen it before.
She opened it. Inside were more of her son’s sketches. These featured detailed drawings of a young woman in a form-fitting red jumpsuit, as if ready for action, with a bobbed haircut of white hair and purple eyes. She turned the page. The next drawing was a close-up of the young woman’s face, and her cartoonish eyes were enlarged. Perri could see that the black pupil was oddly shaped, not a circle but a raised fist.
She turned the page. The next had huge, stylized letters above the same figure:
LIV DANGER!
SHE NEVER RUNS FROM A FIGHT!
THIRSTY FOR ADVENTURE AND INTRIGUE!
(Artistic Concept by David Hall, Game Story by Jane Norton, Game Prototype by D+J Design. All rights reserved. Do not steal this idea, Jane will cut you!)
23
JANE AND CAL drove to Brenda’s sister’s house on the north side of San Antonio. A woman in her late forties stood in the driveway, in jeans and a UTSA sweatshirt with a roadrunner’s profile above the letters, her hair pulled back in a ponytail.
They made quick introductions. They followed her through a small and neatly kept house. She had made a pot of decaf and they accepted her offer of a cup. They sat out in the quiet of the patio and kept their voices soft. The night breeze felt good against Jane’s face.
“I’m sorry to bother you so late,” Jane said. “Is your son going to be OK?”
“Yes, he’ll be fine. I wanted to spend the night with him at the hospital, but he’d said he’d rest better if I came home.” She knotted a napkin, unknotted it.
“I’m glad he’ll be all right,” Jane said.
Brenda said, “I haven’t told the arson investigator that you called. This better not be some kind of prank.”
“It’s not. And I’ll be happy to talk to them,” Cal said. “But we’re not at all sure these two incidents are related.”
“The investigators haven’t told me much.” Brenda knotted one of the napkins. “They think the fires have to do with my financial situation.”
Cal and Jane glanced at each other; better to let her talk.
“Why, when your own son was hurt?” Jane asked.
“My husband died several months ago. He left a lot of debts. I’ve been slowly paying them off. Some were gambling debts. The house was fully insured, I made sure of that. They think that I did it for the insurance, to pay off the gambling debts. Which is crazy.” She glanced again at Jane, as if recognizing something in her face. “It’s like whoever did this knew how much this house meant to me, that it’s a fresh start, and they took it away.”
“Do you know someone named Liv Danger?”
“No.”
“Mr. Hall’s son and I were involved in a car accident two years ago. The anniversary was yesterday. He died and I lost my memory of the previous three years, including the night of the accident and what specifically happened to us. Someone posted on my Faceplace page, using this Liv Danger name, a message to me, that they knew what I didn’t remember and that they were going to tell—that ‘all will pay.’ I took it as a threat. You were one of the paramedics who worked the crash.”
“How weird.” Brenda Hobson shifted in her seat.
“The accident was in Lakehaven. On High Oaks Road,” Cal said.
Her gaze jerked over to Jane. “You. You’re the ‘memory’ girl.”
“You remember her?” Cal asked.
She nodded. “I mean, we work so many emergencies, but you were in
the paper, and they wrote about your amnesia.” She paled. “What does this have to do with me? I did nothing wrong. Why would someone try to hurt me?” Her voice rose in the quiet of the patio. She stood. “My son is in the hospital because of that fire.”
“Look, whoever did this, they’re crazy,” Jane said. “They targeted you. They targeted me. They wrote this ‘ALL WILL PAY’ threat on Mr. Hall’s son’s headstone. So please, try to remember. Did you see anything unusual at the crash site? Was there another witness, maybe? Someone on the road, or someone close to the wreck who might have seen it?”
“It was”—Brenda hesitated, looking at them both—“bad. It was a miracle the car didn’t go over the edge. Your son died a minute or so after we arrived, Mr. Hall. There was nothing that could have been done, and I’m sorry.”
“I know you did everything you could for him,” Cal said, his voice soft as a whisper. “Thank you.”
“Please try to remember,” Jane said. “What did you do, step by step?”
“The call came in, we headed toward High Oaks. I don’t think I’d ever responded to a wreck there. I guess it’s not a busy street. Saw the car, down the hill. You couldn’t have seen it from the road if there hadn’t been flashlights, it was pitch-black, I guess whoever called it in was there with a flashlight for the police and the emergency crews so they could find it. I remember. He lived on the street.”
James Marcolin, Jane thought.
“I went to the passenger side, my partner went to the driver. I remember because I hurt my knee, kneeling on a cell phone that had been thrown from the car, I guess. I kicked it aside and we got him out. He passed. We then focused on you, you were still alive and not as gravely injured.”
Jane closed her eyes. She could feel the tension coming off Cal, sitting next to her, hearing David’s death described in a clinical, two-word sentence. “A cell phone? Thrown from the car?”
“Yes. I remember it because it had an orange plastic case, like something a child would pick. And plus, we’re not supposed to move anything that could be evidence. I mean, obviously to save someone, we do. I just moved it out of the way with my foot so we could get your son out of the car.”
