by Jeff Abbott
“I don’t—” Kamala stopped herself, as if the third word was the magical remember. “Is it true?”
“If it was true, I would say so. I would dance down the hallway.”
This was the wrong thing to say, because of David. I knew it as soon as I said it. It’s like I’ve forgotten common sense.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s OK,” she said. “I know you’re not yourself.” Every time she was nice, it felt like a small, mean shove. No one but me seemed to notice.
So good of you, I saw a passing girl mouth to Kamala. She patted Kamala on the shoulder as if giving her strength. She didn’t even look at me.
“Why are you being my peer helper?” I asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous, of course I was going to help you. We’ve been friends forever, Jane.”
“Have we?”
“Yes.”
“Were we still friends the night of the accident?”
“Why? Are you remembering something?” She stopped, stared at me.
I stopped. “I heard maybe we weren’t as close as we once were.”
Kamala put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “We did have a disagreement when David and I broke up.”
“When…when did you break up?” This was news to me.
“A week before the crash.” With a gentle, understanding smile. It was like seeing a snake on the floor moments before the lights in the room went out.
And then I wondered if that was true. If she said they broke up and then she still acted like my friend, it made her look good. There were no e-mails or texts to me saying, “David and I broke up, Jane, I need ice cream and movie night with you.” I had not seen a single one of those. Weren’t we best friends?
“What did you and I fight about?” David? But we weren’t dating. I didn’t have a boyfriend, Mom and Adam had told me that.
Kamala hugged me, patted my back. “Does any of this matter? I just want you to get better.”
You were his girlfriend. Anyone else could have volunteered, maybe they did.
Here’s the later scene at the counselor’s office:
“Mrs. Coulter, did anyone else volunteer to be my peer helper?”
“Why do you ask? Is there a problem?” I made her nervous. I made everyone nervous. They didn’t know how to act. I was their first amnesiac. It was exhausting for them. I must have kept them searching through reference books and websites, trying to counsel me.
“Kamala is not really trying to help me.”
“But she’s so patient and understanding with you.”
“I think it might be an act.”
It was almost as if I had suggested Kamala was from Mars, or that she had privately shown me superpowers. Mrs. Coulter didn’t believe me but she said, “I’ll talk to her.”
“No. I will. I just wanted you to know my feelings about her. Did anyone else volunteer to help me other than Kamala?”
“Yes. Adam Kessler and Trevor Blinn. Would you like one of them to be your peer?”
I bit my lip. Trevor had stood up for me in a way no one else had. But Adam was a friend who wasn’t particularly close with Kamala and her crowd. She couldn’t exert any influence over him. The drawback was that I didn’t remember Adam before the accident. I had childhood memories of Trevor and Kamala. I knew I had been close to them once. Adam was a blank space. Maybe I needed that; someone who didn’t have years of expectations and history with me. And I could trust him. “Adam, please.”
“All right. I’ll speak to Kamala.”
“No. I will. I’ll tell her.”
Mrs. Coulter bit at her lip and I thought, Are you afraid of her? “It would be better if I could,” Mrs. Coulter said.
“Let me fire her,” I said. There is some social awkwardness tied to amnesia.
“Jane, ‘firing’ isn’t really the word I’d use…”
“I can talk to her. Please let me stand on my own feet.” (Counselors love that phrase.)
And she nodded. I didn’t wait. Everything was being done for me. I’d been led along, docile, trusting. So. Kamala was waiting for me at our first-period class, like I didn’t know how to find my way from the hallway into the room.
“I was worried about you,” she said. “You weren’t waiting for me at the entrance. You know I don’t like to be late.” And she gave me an admonishing kind of smile, the indulgent, patronizing smile that you give a wayward child.
“I no longer need your help,” I said by way of greeting. Her smile stilled and then, for just a moment, hardened into a cruel slash. Like a mask had fallen away for a second.
Then it returned with new energy, a recharged star.
“I’m assigned to be your peer helper,” she said, prim as a grandmother. Now the smile was gentle, and then the bitch dusted my shoulder, like I was a disheveled toddler on the playground. “And that’s what I’m going to be. I’m here for you, every moment, until we get your memory back.” And then she tapped my forehead, still smiling.
I felt my skin blush terribly. I was still recovering. Physically and mentally. I was emotionally arrested—whatever leaps in maturity I’d made in high school were wiped free. Then I was mad at myself for telling her this at the start of the day rather than the end—it was Friday, the weekend could have been a needed break—and also for then not just saying that Adam would kindly take over, Kamala had already done so much, thank you, and been all diplomatic about it. I didn’t know how to do that. “Not anymore. I don’t need one.”
“I don’t think you’re quite yourself, Jane. I don’t think you realize what good friends we’ve been. You need your friends right now.” Her voice lowered. More serious. As if we were still negotiating. If David had broken up with her, had he faced this saccharine resistance? That mask that slipped and showed the snarl? “I’m all that’s keeping the wolves at bay.” She gestured, furtively, at the classrooms behind her. “Without me, they’ll turn on you. It won’t be just snide looks in the hall or people not speaking to you.” The half smile returned. “It will get ugly.”
“Are you threatening me?” And here’s the weird thing: I could hear a little hope in my voice. I wanted her to threaten me. I wanted all the innuendo that lay behind those sugared words and indulgent smiles to break free, like light through a long-shuttered window.
The bell rang. The hallway emptied. Neither of us moved.
She tilted her head slightly, watching me, the smile going into a tremble. “No, I’m not threatening you. Threats are for children.”
And she slammed her head back against the concrete block wall, hard, screaming, “JANE STOP JANE STOP JANE NOOOOOOOOOO!” And she screamed it like she was auditioning for a horror movie.
Need I go on? She collapsed to the floor, sobbing, while I watched her, saying, Oh please, but then it does turn out that when a girl everyone thinks is damaged goods gets accused of assault by the popular brainiac, they tend to believe the ever-smiling, ever-gentle-voiced Kamala.
Thanks to Mom’s epic deer lie and the suicide note, I was what my English teacher called an “unreliable narrator.”
The teacher took me to Mrs. Coulter, hustling me past dozens of staring and whispering students; they took a tearful Kamala to the nurse. Kamala kept crying out, “It’s not Jane’s fault. Is she OK? Is Jane all right? Did she hurt herself, too? Let me see her.” I could hear her plaintive yet calculated cries down the concrete-and-tile hallways, echoing off the shuttered classrooms. Every student and teacher heard my fall from grace, like the frightened animals in Eden.
Slow clap.
Kamala’s parents came. For some reason the Graysons came and talked at me. Yes, at.
“I don’t understand why you would do this, Jane. Kamala has always been your dearest friend. A sister, even, to you,” Dr. Grayson said. She had been a runner-up in a beauty pageant, whatever the big global one was with all the different countries and costumes. I only mention that because she was a very good doctor and much respected, but there was this giant pictu
re of her in her waiting room, in her evening gown and sash, stunning, and it was so unrelated to being a good doctor. I never knew why she needed that picture up in the waiting area, why she needed to remind us all. She was gorgeous and she was brilliant and she felt entitled to give me a lecture. She even took a deep breath before she began.
I tried. I did. I waited for another deep breath. “I didn’t lay a finger on her. She knocked her own head into the wall, she threw herself to the floor. Because she’s mad at me. I won’t let her control me.”
You can imagine how this sounded, in the hush of Mrs. Coulter’s office.
“How could you tell such a lie?” She actually kind of hissed this at me.
Some people, including Kamala’s parents, could not stand for their child to be criticized. Mr. Grayson left to go yell at Mrs. Coulter. I wondered where my mother was. She had been called. She hadn’t responded.
I looked Doctor Beauty right in the eye. “I’m not lying. I think about how she acted when we were kids and maybe I’m seeing it in a new light, all the high school years stripped away when it’s easier to be allied with someone like Kamala, when you’re under her protection. I lost that. I see her for what she is.”
I thought she was going to slap me. She sure thought about it, I could see the decision practically inching across her brain. Please, I thought, do it. Hit me. Then for a moment maybe I’ll be pitied.
But she didn’t.
“We won’t file charges,” Dr. Grayson said. She and Kamala had the same harsh line of mouth that curled into an oh-so-kind smile.
“I would hope not, so she doesn’t end up committing perjury”—well, that was what I thought of saying two hours later. In the office I just stared at my feet and wished I’d died in the crash. It would have been easier, wouldn’t it? She started repeating herself in her outraged lecturing of me, so I interrupted:
“Well, it would be my word against hers. I still have a word, you know.”
She looked at me like I was dirt, and since we were alone, the smile vanished. “A girl who kills a friend when she wants to kill herself.”
“I wasn’t suicidal!”
“How do you even know? You don’t remember.” And that is how you play the trump card, the unanswerable charge, the crime I can never deny. So I was the girl who killed David and attacked Kamala.
They didn’t expel me; the Graysons made this huge show of pleading for mercy for me. Kamala, too. She wrote an editorial to the paper. I bet someone sent it to the Pope, to speed along her sainthood paperwork. It made them look so angelic and wonderful. I didn’t have to bear the stares anymore, the sneers, the dumb questions of did I remember someone or had my memories come back. I finished my last few months working alone with a special-needs teacher, the whole day in an unused classroom. I was done at Lakehaven. I was done.
32
ADAM SAID, “I don’t like leaving you here.”
“You’ve got classes. Go. I just need to think and I want to be outside. Thanks for the help.”
He could not look less convinced. “What did you find?”
After he’d kept his big secret? No, she wouldn’t share this information. Not yet. She closed the car door and walked to the park bench. After a full minute of just staring at her and waiting, Adam gave her a tentative wave. She waved back, like it was all right. He drove off. The park had a Playscape, and a few preschoolers cavorted around the swings and the slides, watched by careful moms and nannies. She went to a deserted swing and sat down.
Her father had brought her to this park when she was little. She remembered him pushing her in this very swing, her scared to go up too high, him pushing her up toward the limitless sky, her laughter bubbling out of her, her feet kicking toward the clouds, which the swing seemed to put within her reach. He was a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, quiet, much quieter than her mother. He would catch the swing and lower her when she yelled, “Enough, Daddy!” letting her know she was safe.
She didn’t remember losing him: the agony, the sheer pain of it. How horrible and wrenching it must have been. That was harder than not remembering the crash, in some ways. The pain of knowing she had lost him and not remembering the grief. The grief mattered: now he was simply gone, and she’d had to go through the mourning all over again, and she was sure it was a dim echo of what she had felt the first time. In a way she felt she had failed him.
She pulled the files out of the backpack. Dad or David first? She opened the file on her father with trembling hands. First she looked at a summary sheet; Brent Norton had been investigated by Franklin for a few months before he died.
First she paged through the material quickly, looking for an indication of who had hired Franklin. Nothing. If there was a client record, it was gone.
Had Franklin just done this himself? That made no sense. She paged through the reports. Franklin followed her father, writing about where he went (mostly the office and Jane’s school), compiling a list of people that he had called—how had Franklin managed to get that? According to Franklin’s notes, it was mostly business associates from his days as a chief financial officer for two start-up companies, including the one he’d founded with his neighbor and friend, Cal Hall.
There were certain phone numbers highlighted on the printout of his phone log. She got out her phone and Internet-searched them. One was a number tied to the Austin FBI office. Another was to the US Secret Service office in Washington, a general-inquiries number.
Why had her father been calling law enforcement, and what was the result? Nothing.
It was only one call each time, a day apart, weeks before he died. The other phone numbers were home, Jane’s phone, Cal Hall, the school, his college friends. Normal stuff.
She looked at the spreadsheets. In one column were the names of what must be people or companies, but just initials: IGL was the most common one, listed several times. None of the names were companies she recognized: GM2, Alpha, HFK. In the next column were amounts of money ranging from $20,000 to $100,000. Pages and pages. A lot of money. There were no dates on the entries.
Paper-clipped to the bottom of the spreadsheet printouts was a piece of paper, with a field of flowers printed in faded colors on the background. The stationery looked vaguely familiar: written across it, printed in block printing, was a meaningless string of numbers: R34D2FT97S, and then u: LDN001 p: BFH@78832.
The numbers and letters meant nothing to her. But they had to mean something with these spreadsheets. She studied them. LDN001. She realized with a jolt those were her mother’s initials: Laurel Dumont Norton.
Was this a way to access these spreadsheets?
Behind the spreadsheets were a number of PowerPoint slides that, she realized, were the investor pitch for Norton Financial. This was the company he wanted to start after he’d had a business failure with Cal. He had originally been an accountant specializing in start-up and new companies. There was a business proposal in the file for Norton Financial. The plan was to open up a network of CPA offices in lesser-served areas, with discount fees for tax preparation and basic accounting services to help small businesses start and grow, and help cash-reliant businesses with their particular challenges. There was an analysis of neighborhoods in Austin, San Antonio, Brownsville, New Orleans, Dallas, Laredo, Houston, and more, where his network would grow. She closed the proposal and looked through the other papers.
She realized, after a moment, the file was incomplete. There was no written report from Randy Franklin, no summary of the investigation to say what the whole point was. No client, no report. Just phone numbers, meaningless spreadsheets with unrecognizable names in them, and a business plan that never came to fruition because her father died.
At the back of the file were surveillance photos of her father: at his office he’d rented in Lakehaven while he worked on his new venture, leaving his office, leaving his home. One of the photos was of Brent and Jane out shopping, judging from a department store bag that Jane was carrying. Her hair was long then;
she only wore it chopped short after the accident. She did not look happy, but disappointed, and Brent had an arm around her, trying to talk to her. Jane was leaning away from him. She was being awful to her dad, typical teenager stuff, and she didn’t even remember why, but she felt as though she’d just been stabbed in the chest. Franklin had followed them. And then later, investigated her.
The next sheet jolted her. A photo sheet of pictures, taken in rapid sequence. She and her dad…and Adam Kessler, sitting on the patio of a favorite Tex-Mex restaurant, having lunch. Laughing. Dad joking, Adam smiling politely. Jane excused herself. Adam and Dad still talking.
Adam handing something to Dad. Dad nodding and putting it in his pocket. Jane returning to the table, unaware.
What was this? She checked the dates written on the back of the pictures. A few weeks before Dad died.
There were other photo sheets. Her father traveling, going into his business, coming home, dinners out with Mom. Laurel looking worried, tired, holding her father’s hand, leaning toward him. And looking unhappy. Her father looked tired.
“You’re too big for the swing,” a small voice behind Jane said. She turned and saw a little girl frowning at her. “It’s for kids.”
“I guess you’re right.” Jane stood up and she walked to the park bench and sat back down. The little girl watched her, as if surprised that Jane had moved. She took the swing that Jane had vacated, empty now like all the rest, and knelt on the seat, moving gently in rhythm.
Nothing in her life seemed to be what she thought. She put away the perplexing file on her father and opened the file on David.
It was much more detailed than the file she’d found in her mom’s file cabinet. She supposed that one was shared with her mother’s attorney, and this was the one produced for the Halls’ lawyer, Kip Evander.
There were photos, reports, and interviews with Amari (she who passed the note to Jane in class and then texted Kamala at Happy Taco), Trevor, Kamala, and others who’d had contact with her and David in the course of the evening. The time line was nearly the same as hers, with one additional fact: that Kamala had called the Halls earlier in the evening and spoken with Cal Hall. Nothing was noted as to the content of that conversation.