by Jeff Abbott
“Mom!” she screamed. “Trevor!”
“Your mom’s hurt bad, we need an ambulance,” Trevor called out.
Jane went back to Marcolin’s moaning form and took an orange phone from his pocket. She dialed 9-1-1, and for the second time teams rushed to the isolated cliffside on High Oaks.
Jane crawled back to the cliff’s edge. Trevor ran to the truck’s cab, peering inside, trying to see if Perri was still alive. Jane watched, gasping, listening to the emergency operator tell her that help was on the way. Please don’t be dead. Please, Mom. Please, Perri. Please. Please.
65
SO YOU’RE GOING back to school?” the therapist said. “You shouldn’t push yourself too hard after such an ordeal.” The therapist was an older woman, wearing a smart suit and very fashionable eyewear. Jane thought she was secretly pleased to have a notorious client.
Jane nodded. “After the trials. I want to get back to life. Back to normalcy. Whatever that’s going to be now.”
“You said you’re going to sell your house.”
“Yes. A nice family made an offer. And my mother, she doesn’t want to stay in Austin. San Antonio’s not so far.” They talked for several minutes about her living arrangements, then the therapist asked about the people she read about in the news. Like she had a list in her mind.
“Your mother…”
“The FBI is letting her cooperate so they can trace more of the money Cal Hall cleaned through her charity for Marcolin and the Babylon website. There are lots of overseas payments, lots of banks and other law enforcement involved.”
“You must have complicated feelings about your mom.”
“She says she didn’t know for certain that Cal had killed my father.” She made her next words measured. “She said that when Dad and Cal’s business failed, Cal offered to help her expand her charity, at a salary where she could keep our house, and he just asked her to ‘handle’ money transactions and she didn’t ask questions—she says she didn’t realize she was cleaning money used in buying drugs and sex slaves and weapons. Not even when my father might have found out she was cleaning money and then died. She bought the idea that he was depressed and killed himself, and she convinced herself that Cal was saving us from losing everything.” Jane looked away. “She’s my mom. I love her. But I don’t like her a lot right now, and I’m not a big enough person to forgive her yet. Her image matters too much to her: the perfect mom, the perfect blogger, the perfect fund-raiser…just no. That image is gone. She’ll have to make herself a new one.”
“Will she walk again?”
“Time will tell if she recovers enough. She seems to be adjusting to the wheelchair.”
“And you take care of her.”
“Yes. I do.” She made her hands into fists. “I will. She will have to make some adjustments in her life, though. I might have to put her in a facility for a while.” She kept the edge out of her voice; the doctor might not appreciate the irony.
“And Trevor Blinn?”
She took a few seconds to answer. “We’re friends. I don’t think I’m quite ready for a relationship. I’d like to stand on my own and not worry about who’s propping me up.” And maybe more than friends, later, once she felt stronger. She felt no need to rush, and he was giving her space and time for the ordeal of the trials that lay ahead as a key witness against Marcolin’s dark-market website, which had made millions in illicit profits, and against Shiloh Rooke for his attacks on three people.
“Let’s talk about your dad. And David.”
And they did. But she could talk more easily about them, and her mother now. She was on firmer ground. She knew it wasn’t her fault. The blame and the guilt—didn’t feel like it coated her flesh, burned her bones.
“You know, you should forgive,” the therapist said.
“My mom?”
“Well, eventually, but I was…”
“Cal?” That was beyond her. And he was dead.
“No. Perri Hall. All that anger you carried for so long toward each other.”
Jane said nothing.
“May I ask, did she really save you? She really ran her husband down in that truck, knowing it would likely veer over the edge? A woman who had hated you and attacked you at David’s grave?”
“Yes. She did.”
* * *
It wasn’t like they were suddenly going to be best friends. Not at all. But Perri was glad Jane would soon meet her here. In this sacred place.
Perri stood in the bright sunlight above David’s grave, leaning on her cane. The truck’s cab had protected her, but she’d had a broken leg and arm, and back injuries, a collapsed lung. The recovery had taken time. The news stories had been exploding about a respectable pair of Lakehaven entrepreneurs operating an international illicit marketplace, to the tune of millions. Laurel had told all: hiring Kevin Ngota to fake commitment papers, helping Cal frame Perri as Liv Danger. Cal had found the characters notebook the kids had made and thought it would frame Perri effectively. He had set the fires in San Antonio, he had researched Shiloh Rooke and found his weakness and stolen the sex tapes, he had framed Perri by sending the Liv Danger postings from her computer, he had used another sophisticated hacking scheme to access her computer that Maggie hadn’t spotted. All to set up a scheme where he could get rid of Perri and Jane, one blamed for torturing the other, the other blamed for a murder-suicide. He had clearly not disclosed all his plans to Laurel; and whether he had planned to let Laurel survive this process as well was unknown. Laurel had said she wanted Jane in a psychiatric facility so she would be safe. Her mother’s instinct, no matter how stunted, had tried to shield Jane from Cal’s machinations against his soon-to-be ex-wife.
Perri had confessed her role in withholding information from the police regarding Shiloh Rooke’s activities; she had paid a hefty fine and was sentenced to a thousand hours of community service. The Bowman and Vasquez families had sued, and she had paid for their medical bills and suffering out of her own money. Cal’s money was all frozen. Shiloh was charged with three counts of attempted murder and was in jail awaiting trial, and awaiting a visit from Mimi that would never come.
The world Perri had known had been swept away, except for the quiet of her home, and the comfort she got from sitting in David’s room.
“Hello, baby,” she said to the grave, sitting down on the cool grass. His death was not at all what I thought it was. She could never let her grief go, but she had to find a way to move on, to try for joy again and to not be caught in the prison Cal’s lies had made for her. “I miss you. I can’t imagine what you carried, knowing about your dad and what he’d done…and oh, I wish you could have told me. It might have been so different. But I don’t blame you. I love you.”
A truck pulled up. New. She’d paid for that too, even though that nice boy hadn’t asked. Trevor Blinn was at the wheel, and then on the passenger side Jane got out. Jane said something to him and shut the door. Trevor stayed in the truck, but nodded and waved at Perri, and she nodded back.
Jane was holding two bunches of flowers. She didn’t walk toward David’s grave; first she walked toward her father’s, several rows away, and laid down the first batch of flowers. She touched Brent Norton’s headstone. She turned and headed back toward the truck, and there was a tentative moment when Perri thought she might not approach. The last time they’d both been here they’d fought over David’s grave. A low, bitter moment. But Jane walked past the truck and toward Perri.
Perri opened her arms. They embraced. Jane knelt on the grass beside her.
“Those are lovely,” Perri said.
Jane put the bouquet on the grave. “Thanks.” They were silent for several seconds, then Jane said, “I saw the For Sale sign in your yard.”
“Oh, I can’t stay in that house.”
“But David’s room…”
“That house is an anchor to me. Cal did everything to give it to us and then give us more, more, and more, and I don’t need it. He paid it off
with money earned on the pain of others. No. David’s with me always. Room or no room.” Perri cleared her throat. “I wish David had told me about the two of you.”
“I wish I remembered why we hadn’t. I guess he was ashamed we’d cheated on Kamala. He probably didn’t want you to think less of him. And maybe I didn’t let him, because I was cheating on Trevor, and I was ashamed of that.”
“Trevor is a great kid, Jane.”
“Well, he’s been sweet on me since first grade. You have to admire his loyalty.”
“And how do you feel about him?” It was, Perri realized, the kind of conversation she and Jane might have had if the families had never fallen into their tragedy. The second mom, the trusted friend, giving life advice.
“He’s everything I could want. I am just such a lot to take on. It’s hard to let someone try. Because he might give up.”
“That boy doesn’t have any idea of how to give up in that brain of his. And neither do you. Not a bit.” She touched her shoulder. “If you want to be with him, be with him. Build the life you want, Jane, free of all this mess,” Perri said, nodding toward the truck and Trevor. “You deserve whatever makes you happy, after all this.”
“So do you, Perri.”
She tried to nod. Happiness, maybe, one day. Right now she’d just take being grateful for her memories of David, for being alive. For being free of the blame, of the hate she’d felt.
“Here,” Perri said. “David would have wanted you to have this.” And she handed her a notebook. “It’s where Liv Danger—the good version, the wonderful idea you and David had—lived.” Jane paged through the stories and the drawing. She looked at the back of the notebook. Tayami, the Japanese brand. Where her suicide note, written in fury, had been torn free from. The paper was luxurious and David’s drawings were wonderful.
“Finish it,” Perri said. “Find an artist who can share David’s vision. Write Liv Danger’s story. I think you know about being a hero now.”
Jane closed the notebook. Maybe work could be good, and she could reclaim her and David’s creation from how it had been badly used.
“Perri?”
“Yes?”
“I remember something. A lot more. Not all of it. But…when we found out about all this awfulness that night, it was so much to carry, but…David didn’t know how to tell you. Neither did I. We wanted to get you away from it. From Cal. We wanted to protect you. I remember that.”
The tears welled up in Perri’s eyes. “Oh.”
“David loved you so much. So much.”
Perri wiped the damp from her eyes and took a deep breath, and she took Jane’s hand. Jane glanced up in surprise. “It’s going to be all right. It really will be better. That’s life. It does go on. We have to go on with it. Forward.”
She would never remember the parts of her life she had lost, but she knew who she was now. Who she had been, who she might become. And that would be enough.
“I’ll remember that,” Jane said. “I will.”
Acknowledgments
For their support in writing this book I’d like to thank: Jamie Raab, David Shelley, Lindsey Rose, Ed Wood, Peter Ginsberg, Shirley Stewart, Holly Frederick, Jonathan Lyons, Sarah Perillo, Eliane Benisti, John Q. Smith, Kelly Coulter, Chip Evans, Melissa Greenwell, Matthew Praisner, Todd Praisner, and Steve Basile. As always, deepest thanks to Leslie, Charles, and William for their love and support.
You will not find Lakehaven on a map; nor will you find St. Michael’s University in Austin. You also won’t find “Faceplace” as a widely used social networking site.
Any errors or manipulations of fact for dramatic purposes are all on me.
About the Author
Jeff Abbott is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of seventeen novels. His books include the Sam Capra thrillers Adrenaline, The Last Minute, Downfall, Inside Man, and The First Order as well as the stand-alone novels Panic, Fear, Collision, and Trust Me. The Last Minute won an International Thriller Writers Award, and Jeff is also a three-time nominee for the Edgar Award. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family. You can visit his website at JeffAbbott.com.
ALSO BY JEFF ABBOTT
Sam Capra series
Adrenaline
The Last Minute
Downfall
Inside Man
The First Order
Whit Mosley series
A Kiss Gone Bad
Black Jack Point
Cut and Run
Other fiction
Panic
Fear
Collision
Trust Me
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