Blame

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 © 2017 by Jeff Abbott

  Jacket design by Blanca Aulet. Jacket photograph by Nivek Neslo/Getty Images. Jacket copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

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  First ebook edition: July 2017

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  ISBNs: 978-1-4555-5845-2

  E3 20170531_DANF

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY JEFF ABBOTT

  Newsletter

  For Holly Frederick

  1

  Two Years Ago

  WHAT SHE WOULD never remember: their broken screams starting with I love… and I hate…, the sudden wrenching pull, the oh-no-this-is-happening-this-can’t-be-happening feeling of falling as the SUV rocketed off the road, the horrifying downward slope of the hillside in the headlights, his hands tight over hers on the steering wheel, the smashing thunder of impact, the driver’s-side airbag exploding in her face, the rolling, the lights dying, the unforgiving rock, and then the blow to the head that undid her and wiped her clean and made her new.

  The old Jane died; every version of David died. The new Jane, product of a dark night’s fury and tragedy, knew nothing more until she woke up four days later, remembering nothing, not her name, her mother’s face, the crash, what had happened to her in that hospital bed, or any of her past seventeen years. Slowly the memories began to seep back: her birthdays when she was a child, cake sweet and soft on her lips; the smoky, rich aroma of her grandfather’s pipe matched with the woolly smell of his tweed jacket with leather elbow patches; her mother’s favorite lavender soap; the notebook she’d filled with short, odd adventure stories one summer and proudly read to her dad; the faces of her teachers; the smile of the librarian who’d give her stickers during the summer reading program; the feel of her hand in her father’s palm; the faces and the laughter of her friends when they were kids.

  Sometimes the memories felt immediate; sometimes they felt like something she’d seen in a film, present but distant, nothing to do with the person she was now.

  Except for the past three years.

  Jane was seventeen, but as the memories surged back, she was stuck at fourteen. Those last three years were gone, all the joy and all the drama of her high school life, lost in the damage and the trauma. Including those mysterious, unexplainable final hours, when she was with a boy she wasn’t supposed to be with, when she was out doing no one knows what. The girl lived and eventually limped back into the bright sunshine, and the boy died and went into the cold ground, a secret sleeping with him.

  And so the world she knew turned against her.

  Except someone watched, and waited, and wondered how much of that night Jane Norton really remembered.

  2

  JANE NORTON WONDERED what it would be like to remember a single detail of the biggest moment in her life. Today was the second anniversary of the crash. She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, as if waiting for pictures to appear. But the ceiling above her was only a screen empty of images.

  She got up at six fourteen, alone, glancing at the other unoccupied bed in the dorm room—Adam had once again spent the night at his girlfriend’s. It was best to get ready before the dorm’s residents did. She put on a robe and gathered a bag of toiletries and opened the door a crack, peering down the empty hallway. She walked down to the dormitory showers in her robe, like she belonged, stood under the hot spray, and brushed her teeth. The bathroom was empty, so no odd looks from the other girls in the mirrors. Done and back in the room, she changed into the last clean set of clothes in her backpack. She would have to figure out where to wash clothes soon; too many students lingered by the machines in the basement here, trying to make conversation. She didn’t like conversation.

  She went down to breakfast, selected her items, and made sure she went to the older cashier, who recognized her and smiled. She used her old student ID Adam had hacked for her to pay for the meal—it withdrew money now from his account, making it look like he was steadily burning through his meal plan. Other college students sat together, chatting amiably at the round tables. She sat alone in a corner with her scrambled eggs and bacon and coffee. Other early-rising kids who sat alone stared into their smartphones as if the answers to the world’s riddles lay there. She didn’t; she didn’t want to fill her unsteady brain with memories from looking at a screen. She looked out the window, at life, at St. Michael’s professors and students walking by, at the warming sky, at the tree branches swaying in the November breeze. She ate in silence, trying to push back the emotions of the day, then went back to Adam’s room. When the bells of St. Michael’s began to sound, she opened a window and slid out through it, leaving the window unlocked, lowering it so it was barely open.

  You could go to his grave, she thought. You could take flowers.

  It was a mild fall morning in Austin, the sky dotted with clouds against a bright-blue vault. She walked to an American history class where the professor never seemed to notice her erratic attendance. She’d taken the same class last year, but with a different professor.

  She could always
find a seat in the front row, and it was daring and bold to sit right under the professor’s nose. The actual students brought sleek laptops, but Jane took notes in a thick sketchbook designed for drawing, not writing. But she liked it. Once, the notebook had been the journal she was supposed to fill with her recovered memories and the events people had told her about that she didn’t remember. Her Book of Memory. It had been Dr. K’s idea, and she’d abandoned it, except for when she went to a class. Sometimes during the lectures, she doodled on the new pages. Often she drew endless mazes and ornate Gaelic patterns, labyrinths impossible to escape, and she would think of stories where interesting characters were trying to escape the mazes she’d lay out, like heroes trapped in a video game. Today she did not draw; her mind was full of David. Her hand shook a little.

  The lecture today was on early New England funerary customs; she didn’t have a syllabus, of course, and she thought, Thanks, fate, and she bit her lip as the professor began a slideshow of worn tombstones from Massachusetts. So often they were for children or those who died as teenagers, angels’ wings attached to skulls. Gruesome and lovely, all at once. Twice she saw David’s name on the engravings. Her heart tightened in her chest. She blinked and David’s name was gone from the picture of the tombstone on the screen. She started to feel like she couldn’t breathe. She left halfway through the lecture, ignoring the glances and the one stray laugh that accompanied her out the door. The professor paid her no mind.

  She stopped outside the building, blinking in the bright sunlight, breathing in the fresh, cool air. She fumbled in her backpack and slipped on the sunglasses her mother had given her. They had round lenses, with metal edging, ugly, but they kept out the light that sliced hard into her eyes and her brain. The sunlight was harsh today, like a judgment.

  She could go back to Adam’s room, pull the curtains closed, and sleep off the rest of the day. She had some pills hidden under the mattress, pills she’d stolen from her mother when she’d left home. You couldn’t take sedatives while living on the streets, it was too dangerous to be that vulnerable. And amnesiacs often had insomnia, as if kept awake by what they couldn’t recall. But she was safe here. Pills it was.

  Back at the dorm Jane walked past the front door, around the side of the building and to the window she’d left cracked, which faced onto a small, grassy area. She pulled herself into the room and fell onto the floor.

  Adam walked in, freshly showered, wearing a robe. “Hey, graceful,” he said. He shut the door quickly behind him.

  “Hey.” She pulled herself to her feet and turned away from him as he dressed, the way she would for a brother if she’d had one. She busied herself lowering the window shade.

  “How’s Bettina?” Jane asked. She was his German graduate-student girlfriend at the University of Texas, a few miles to the north. Adam often spent the night at her apartment, which made it easier for Jane to hide out in his dorm room.

  “Fine. Hey, I didn’t realize today was, you know, today. I should have been here this morning.”

  “Adam, I don’t need coddling.”

  “Good, as I’m hardly a coddler.”

  But you let me stay here and you pay for my food and you’ve never asked for anything in return…except that I put my life back together. “I’m totally cool.”

  She avoided looking at him by checking her phone, as if she regularly received calls from anyone other than Adam. One message from Mom: Are you all right today? I don’t know why I pay for this phone, you never call me. I love you, sweetheart. Let me help you. At least let me know how you are.

  Jane deleted the text and collapsed on the spare bed. She wanted to go to his grave, suddenly. She had never been because she could not face it. But she missed him.

  “I’m decent now,” Adam said. He collected his gear for class. He’d pulled on jeans and a T-shirt that promoted the St. Michael’s robotics team—he wrote software for the robots. “You know it’s OK not to be OK today.”

  “Gag, you sound like a therapist.” Jane hated therapists. They wanted to crowbar open your brain and peer around inside, giving you false hope.

  He sat next to her and he hugged her. Gently. She didn’t like that at first, but it was Adam, her pretend brother, and so she let him and then the hug felt reassuring, like she wasn’t so alone in the world. He hugged her a moment longer than she liked, his face closer to hers, and she scooted back. Then he went all brotherly tough love.

  “You have to get reenrolled. If you can sit through one class, you can make it through five. But if the administration realizes you’re camping out here, they could deny you readmission forever. Not to mention the trouble I’d be in.”

  “Are you kicking me out of your room?” She would have nowhere to go. Except home. That was not an option.

  “I don’t mean to sound harsh, Jane.” His voice softened. “You know I only want what’s best for you.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this today.” And she knew the way to shut him up was to focus on the accident. It was pure magic, the way it silenced everyone. Jane got up and went to the iPad he kept on the desk.

  She opened up an Internet browser and typed in the address for Faceplace, a social-media site she’d used before the accident, and briefly afterward, as she tried to remember and understand the lives of her classmates at Lakehaven High School. People whose faces she saw every day but didn’t really know.

  “What are you doing?” Adam said, watching the screen, realizing. “Let it alone.”

  She signed in to Faceplace, pausing to remember her password—which was password. She had an unfounded terror of her amnesia suddenly robbing her of current memories, her damaged temporal lobe sabotaging her, so she went with the obvious. She had not signed in to her page for ten months. Jane’s page appeared, with its old profile picture, smiling at a Lakehaven High School football game. A few days before the accident. The last good picture of her. Her mother had claimed if she replaced it with a picture of her in the hospital, fresh from the coma, people would be nicer to her.

  She had no new friend requests. Adam was pretty much it on the friend front. She went to the search field and typed in “David Hall.” The first result gave her David’s page. His parents hadn’t taken it down.

  “Jane, don’t do it.” Adam leaned over her shoulder. She clicked on the result.

  Many new posts were already on his page today. Flowers, photos of David throughout his life, an animated banner ribbon that read, “We Will Never Forget You.” Hundreds of likes. Posts from names she knew—people who were once her friends.

  David, we will never forget you. Will love you always.

  David, bro, missing you still. Thinking about you and all the good times.

  The world is emptier without you, David.

  Cannot believe it has been two years. Know you are at peace in the company of Our Lord.

  “Don’t,” Adam repeated. But he didn’t move to shut down the iPad or take it from her.

  Jane read the rest of the kind tributes to David, and was relieved no one mentioned her by name. Adam leaned into her shoulder. Then she went back to her own page. At the top was a new posting, from today, from a user name she didn’t recognize: Liv Danger. A tickle in her brain. Was that a person’s real name? On the posting it read,

  I know what you claim you don’t remember, Jane. I know what happened that night. And I’m going to tell. All will pay.

  “Is this a joke?”

  “Who is Liv Danger?” Adam asked. “Is she someone you know?”

  “I have no idea.” A thought, unformed, danced at the edge of her mind. Like a memory that could never take form. Jane’s hands started to tremble. Suddenly her guts twisted. She bolted down the hallway to the bathroom. She was sick, twice. She washed her face, staring into her dark-circled eyes in the mirror. She brushed her teeth and came back to the room. Adam looked up from the iPad.

  “This Liv Danger looks like a fake user. Account set up last month, friends with mostly other accounts t
hat have huge friend numbers.”

  “I haven’t approved any new friends.”

  “Then someone hacked your page and approved her.”

  “Hacked me?”

  “Your password is password, Jane.” He rolled his eyes, but his voice was calm. “But they could also buy your password off a hacker website. They get account information on thousands of users when there’s a breach on one site, so they’ll just try the same passwords on all your sites: banking, social media, online stores, and so on. Is your password ‘password’ everywhere?”

  “Yes. It’s easy for me to remember,” she said defensively. “I don’t have to worry if my memory slips again.”

  He softened his voice. “This is just someone trolling you, Jane. Unfriend and delete.”

  She didn’t; instead she read the message again. There were people, Jane knew, who thought she should be punished for the accident. “Liv Danger,” she said. “It sounds like a joke name.”

  “Google it,” Adam said.

  Jane did. There were two other social-media accounts using that name—she guessed it was a play on words for “live dangerously.” These all had the feel of pseudonyms, not real names. She clicked on the “about” tab for the various accounts. One lived in California, another in New York. No one she knew here in Austin.

  Jane inched down her own Faceplace page. No postings to her page from anyone for months. Then, two years ago, many posts that started with Thinking of you, Praying for you, Jane, and Get well soon, but soon devolving into memorable tidings such as YOU’RE A LIAR AND MURDERER. Written by someone she didn’t even remember from high school, because she didn’t remember high school before the crash. The accident had taken care of that.

  That was when she’d left Faceplace. Jane hadn’t deleted that post when she saw it, not because she thought she shouldn’t but because she thought her friends would rally. A couple of people had said, in the comments below, that nothing was proven, expressing concern for Jane. The final comment, from Adam, read, Say it to her face. Or to mine. Leave her alone.

  Adam touched her shoulder. “You should delete this account. There’s nothing to be gained from keeping it except to paint a target on your back.”