Blame

by Jeff Abbott

  “Jane…” Two people started to come out onto the patio—Kamala Grayson and Amari Bowman. “Go back inside, please,” Trevor said.

  Kamala tilted her head in greeting. “Well. Jane. I guess you’re feeling a bit more social now. Did you steal your mother’s car to come over here?”

  “No,” Jane said. “Hi, Amari. Thanks again for talking with me.”

  “You’re welcome,” Amari said after a moment as Kamala glanced back at her in surprise.

  “Kamala. Go,” Trevor said.

  “Well, of course. I’ll give you two your privacy.” She and Amari retreated back into the house.

  “So, I mean, how serious were we?” Jane asked. “Were we sleeping together?”

  “No. You said you weren’t ready. But we kissed. A lot.” He blushed in the moonlight.

  She wondered if she could believe him, then she thought of him standing up for her, throwing that Parker jerk into a wall at school.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “Kamala wouldn’t tell me anything that happened at the lake house. I didn’t see her or her car, but I didn’t drive all the way down to the lake house. I turned after you pretty quick.”

  So why would she and David go from the lake house to High Oaks Road? They knew no one there. Maybe just trying to get away from Trevor? And then she saw it.

  “You thought we were ditching you and that was what caused the wreck. Me driving fast, trying to get away from you…”

  His face was pure pain. “I thought so…until they found the note. Then I didn’t know what to think. Were you trying to hurt yourself and get away from me, or did you just crash the car?…If I caused it, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” He reached for her. For a second she saw the boy who fake-married her in first grade, the boy she stood up for in fourth against the hair-bow meanie, the quietly dignified boy who had pushed the vile Parker away from her.

  Then she jerked away from him as if his touch burned. “Don’t. Don’t touch me. Don’t talk to me. You could have told me all this and you didn’t.”

  “Your mom told me to stay away from you. You remembered nothing about us. What was I supposed to do, say, ‘Oh hey, yeah, we were finally falling in love,’ when the version of me you remembered was three years out of date and I was just a friend? When you didn’t even know who you yourself were?”

  Looking at him made a hard twist in her chest. She hurried away from him, through the house, through the kitchen. Adam was gone. He’d left. Nana was in the kitchen and glanced up with concern for Jane.

  “Where is Adam?” she asked Nana.

  “He left, he said he’d be back for you in a while.”

  “When? Please?”

  “I saw him watching you all talk outside, and then he said he had to go.”

  What had Adam heard? Jane turned around, marched back up to Trevor, who was just coming in through the screen door. She pushed against his chest and walked him back out onto the patio. “Your truck keys. I need them. Right now.”

  He gave his truck keys to her. “You’re upset. Do you want me to drive you?”

  “No. I need to do this myself.”

  “Jane…”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Her voice was small. She kept her hand on his broad chest. If they were once a couple, they were a mismatched one. The football player and the creative, moody girl. He’d have to bend down to kiss her. He put his hand over the hand she kept on his chest.

  His voice was steady. “Your mother made it crystal clear she didn’t want me around you. I don’t know why. It was as if she didn’t want you remembering. It wasn’t my call to say more. And you had chosen David. Not me. I thought you didn’t care about me anymore. I didn’t know what to say or what to do.”

  “There’s something else you’re not telling me.” I lost Trevor, too. I didn’t even know I had him. I lost him. I don’t remember being close to him, but I know when he’s holding something back. I know him so well, yet I don’t.

  “Jane, it’s bad.”

  “Tell me!” she screamed. She pounded her small fists against his chest, his arms. “Tell me! Tell me!”

  “Ask your mom for your medical files,” he said tonelessly. “Ask her.”

  42

  YOU CAN’T BE here,” Perri said. Shiloh stood on her front porch, smiling.

  “Why not? We need to talk. I’ve had an idea…where’s the lovely Jane?”

  “I saw her leave. Dressed up nicely. I guess she’s moved back in with her mother and is attempting to have a social life.”

  “See, I’ve had an idea on how we can…accelerate things.” Perri didn’t like the tone of his voice. His scarred grin was smug. “I made a list of names and addresses…”

  And then another car pulled up, catching them in the headlights. Perri blinked, turned away. The lights dimmed. Maybe it was Cal and how on earth would she explain Shiloh Rooke being here…

  “Mrs. Hall?”

  Oh, no. Matteo Vasquez. “I still don’t really have anything to say, Mr. Vasquez.”

  “I wondered if you might give me a quote regarding that video. I tried your phone, but all I got was voice mail.”

  “I turned off my phone.”

  Matteo reached the porch stairs, blinking up at Shiloh. “Hello,” he said.

  “Hi there,” Shiloh answered. “I don’t think Mrs. Hall wants to talk to you.”

  “I know you, Mr. Rooke. I interviewed you for the articles on Jane Norton, about the crash itself. Do you remember me?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re leaving.”

  “It’s interesting the two of you are together,” Matteo said, not in an unfriendly way. “Has anything else happened to people tied to the crash?”

  “No,” Perri said.

  “You don’t need to write about that. It’s not really a story,” Shiloh said.

  “That’s not what Mrs. Hall thought. I’d like to talk to you about, what was it, a theft? What was stolen? The e-mail tip I received said it was of a personal nature.”

  “It’s a private matter, Mr. Vasquez.” Shiloh’s tone was cold. “I don’t have a comment.”

  “But something was stolen from you and this happened after Brenda Hobson’s house burned, correct?”

  “Like I said, a private matter.”

  “You had an engagement that ended?” He glanced at Perri.

  Perri wished that a hole would open in the ground and swallow Matteo Vasquez. Shiloh glanced at her. “Again, it’s private and I don’t wish to comment.”

  “Who do you think is behind these Liv Danger posts?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Anything you remember about the aftermath of the crash you want to share with me?”

  “No. Are you still living in your car?” He grinned at Matteo Vasquez. “You lost your job at the papers. These days anyone with a keyboard is writing stuff, often for free. Hard to make a living. Reporters are not the only people who can do research with a phone call or two.” He gestured toward the parked car. “You sleep in the back of your car.”

  Perri wondered why she hadn’t thought to do opposition research on Vasquez. Shiloh was smarter than he looked.

  “This isn’t about me,” Vasquez said, his voice tight.

  “It might be about your desperation to find a good story. Or make one up when there’s nothing to it.”

  Matteo Vasquez ignored him. “So, Mrs. Hall, your husband takes it on himself to go see Brenda Hobson and you’re hanging out with the other paramedic who was targeted.”

  “Why don’t you go talk to Jane Norton?” Shiloh asked. “According to Perri, she took off dressed to the nines like it was party time.”

  Vasquez watched them both for a moment, and said, “If you change your mind, you know how to reach me, Mrs. Hall.” He gave Shiloh a business card. “You, too, since you seem so well informed.”

  He got into his car but didn’t start it. Perri could see him on his phone, looking down at his lap. Reading something, she thought. Makin
g phone calls. He’s on this. He’ll be talking to other people. He’d said he’d talk to the other people whose lives were touched by the crash.

  “You should not have come here,” she said, not looking at Shiloh. “Now he’s suspicious.”

  “What did you tell him about me?”

  “Hardly anything. I was trying to get him to write about the Nortons. But someone had e-mailed him about everything that’s going on—you, Brenda Hobson, Randy Franklin. It must have been Jane or Laurel.”

  “I can’t do what I need to do with a reporter blabbering about me.” A hard threat lay under the words.

  A flash of coldness went across her chest. “He’s not blabbering. He hasn’t written anything yet.” The words spilled out of her in a rush and she steeled herself. She couldn’t show a moment’s weakness in front of Shiloh. He fed on that.

  Vasquez got off his phone, started his car, and drove away.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” Shiloh said. “I got to go. Things to do.” He kept his gaze locked on Vasquez’s departing car.

  “Where are you going?” Her voice rose.

  “I told you, I had an idea on how to accelerate all this.” He got into his car and roared off.

  Accelerate? You have to control him.

  He said he had a list. Names and addresses. The chill she felt burrowed into her.

  She had to stop him. But she didn’t even know what he was doing. If she called the police, it would be so uncomfortable. So she stood frozen, watching his taillights vanish into the night, following Matteo Vasquez, and she thought, You’re a coward.

  She sank to the curb.

  43

  JANE GOT INTO Trevor’s truck. Started it. She hadn’t driven since the wreck. She wasn’t sure she even remembered how.

  Ask your mother about your medical records.

  She could either go find Adam or go home. She decided to go home first; it was closest, and she had an idea Adam didn’t like the conversation she’d had with Trevor. Why would he have bolted from the party?

  What kind of person was I before this? she wondered. A secret boyfriend. Running around with her neighbor’s son, betraying her oldest friend. A mother who didn’t want her to remember. Why? Was I so awful?

  Today alone: her mother’s affair, the fact that her father was likely spying on her mother’s infidelities and might have turned to suicide, and now this. She had wanted to remember, and now ugly truths were showing their hideous bones, their tattered skins.

  She put the truck into reverse and backed out of the driveway, slowly. She didn’t remember taking driver’s education, but the muscle memory remained…she could drive. Slowly she backed out and she saw Trevor Blinn standing on the porch, watching her.

  You don’t know him. You don’t know what he was like. You don’t know what you were like. But he lent you a truck, she thought. He finally told you. That has to count for something.

  She drove home, sweat dripping down her ribs. She saw one light on in the house. She wondered if her mother was at home. She wasn’t. Mom, gone again.

  Where was Mom spending her hours? What if she was setting fires, breaking up engagements, making private investigators disappear? You didn’t want to believe this of anyone, but her mother had a single-mindedness at times that could be frightening.

  The file for the accident—which she thought at first was a gold mine, and now realized told only the barest of tales—had been in the back of her mom’s file drawer. She hadn’t seen a separate medical file on herself. She went straight to the file cabinet. She flipped through the collected paperwork of her family’s life. Nothing on her medical records, except for a file that held the everyday receipts from doctor’s visits and prescriptions, from before the accident.

  Nothing relating to the crash. She closed the file cabinet.

  Where would Mom put such a file?

  The safe. She went upstairs to her mother’s closet. There was a safe behind a false cabinet panel; she had seen her mother take particularly precious jewelry out of it once, when she was still trying to hold on to her place in Lakehaven society and she still attended functions, before the invitations dried up. It was a keypad lock. She entered in the same code as the house alarm system, which was her parents’ anniversary date; it didn’t work. She entered in her birthday. No. Her mom’s birthday. No. Her father’s. No.

  There was more than jewelry here. There had to be.

  What else was an important date?

  The crash. She entered in the crash date. The door opened, ever so slightly.

  It was not the Open Sesame she would have initially guessed. But it made sense, didn’t it? The defining moment of all their lives. Her hand shook as she opened the safe.

  Inside lay small boxes of jewelry, very fine stuff, but less of it than she remembered. Papers, photos.

  And in the back there was a gun. She took it out carefully. She wasn’t used to guns. She didn’t know how to check whether it was loaded or the safety was on. She had never known that her mother kept a gun in the house. And behind the gun, and a—what would you call it?—a full magazine of ammunition, there lay a thick envelope, shoved into the far back as if it were unwelcome thoughts shoved into the back of a mind, best forgotten. Pulling it free from the safe, she felt dread worm its way into her chest.

  It was a medical file, a thick one. She opened it and began to page through it. It was in chronological order, from the initial ambulance report to the hospital file for her coma, her awakening, and her recovery. She flipped through. The pages were filled with lists of diagnoses and observations, with lists of medications she had been given. Brain scans and neurological assessments, insurance forms and paperwork. She read about her brain damage, her coma, the pronouncements of the doctors in crabbed handwriting and notes about her chances for recovery.

  What was here? The initial diagnoses, the battery of tests, the outline of her physical injuries (broken arm, fractured wrist, two broken fingers, concussion)…

  Then on the third day…there was a report labeled Miscarriage.

  The doctor noted an indication of vaginal bleeding on day two of the coma, and a pelvic exam. Her cervix was open; it was inevitable. Blood tests the previous day had indicated that she was pregnant…she flipped back to a blood analysis and found it, with a circle around a “Y” next to the word “pregnant,” in small type. A further note indicated that the pregnancy was not far advanced, perhaps a month.

  Had she known?

  She felt very cold. Were we sleeping together? No, Trevor had said, you weren’t ready.

  The report outlined the presence of clotted material. The bleeding was stopped; she was already on antibiotics; they did not need to increase the dosage. There was no DNA analysis to tell her who the father was.

  She was seeing Trevor. Had he lied about intimacy? What was the point?

  But you were out with a boy who’d just broken up with his longtime girlfriend. A boy you’d been close to your entire life. A boy who had his arm around you in public, comforting you. A boy you always loved in a back corner of your heart, even if you wouldn’t say it out loud.

  I didn’t even know I’d lost you, baby, she thought. She felt a wrenching pain in her chest, in her stomach. No one had told her.

  Her mother had kept this from her.

  And why…why keep this quiet? Would public opinion think she was more likely to be suicidal if she was pregnant by David or by Trevor? It seemed an old-fashioned notion—but teenagers in trouble did desperate, thoughtless things. Maybe she knew. Maybe she didn’t want the nobly patient Trevor or her best friend, Kamala, to know. Maybe her mother just didn’t want another angle to this already tragic story.

  After a moment’s consideration, she returned the file to the safe. She kept the gun.

  She texted Trevor: OK now I know. Found the records. Why didn’t you tell me?

  Lots of reasons. I’m deeply sorry. Are you all right? I know you don’t want to talk to me but if you need me, I’m here. I’ll
stay out of your way if that’s what you want.

  She didn’t text him back for ten minutes, sitting on the edge of the bed. She took deep breaths and calmed herself. She needed to be smart right now, not emotional, not reacting to the increasing flood of unhappy news about her life in the days around the accident.

  If Mom kept this from you, there is literally nothing else she wouldn’t keep from you as well. Mom is not exactly who you thought she was. There is more there.

  She gathered her thoughts and then she texted Trevor: I need your help tomorrow. My shrink lied to me and my mother is paying him to help have me committed. You want to make up for this? Be there with me when I confront them. I think my mother wants to drag me off to a mental hospital and she won’t if you’re there. Will you?

  He wrote back: Yes. Bring back my truck tonight when you’re done and we’ll talk. I’ll give you a ride home.

  I’m not up for seeing anyone, she wrote. But that was a lie. She went back downstairs and although part of her only wanted to curl up in her bed and shut out the world, she drove Trevor’s truck to St. Michael’s.

  The gun came with her.

  44

  FRIENDS, STANDING ON a porch, disagreeing.

  Amari said, “Let’s go. I’m done with this party.”

  Kamala said, “No, not yet.”

  “I’m tired,” Amari said. Also her boyfriend, Derek, had gotten sick at the last minute and decided to stay home. She was feeling tired and spent herself, and only half of that was from dealing with Kamala’s attitude.

  “Then you go. I’ll catch a car home.”

  Amari said, “You’re mad at me for having talked to Jane.”

  “It’s not the best look on you,” Kamala said.

  “Whatever.”

  “Just don’t do it again.”

  “Kamala. Let’s get one thing straight. I’ll talk to anyone I decide to talk to. I don’t like Jane. I think she’s a loser. But if I want to talk to her, I will, and you’ll keep your big mouth shut about it.”

  “It’s great how college has given you that independence you crave,” Kamala said. “You might get so independent you won’t have friends left.”