Blame

by Jeff Abbott

  “I know. I will,” she said, to placate Laurel. “I’m sorry I woke you. Go back to sleep.” She hugged her mother. She was furious with her, but she still loved her and so she banked the anger for when it would do the most good. Once Trevor and Kevin saw what had been done to her, what her mother was like around her, she could move forward. Facing Kamala and learning the truth about the note, talking to Trevor, being friends with him again, had given her a new strength.

  She went back to her room and closed the door. She did not see her own mother staring down the hall at her, trembling slightly. Laurel only went back to bed when Jane turned off her light.

  Jane lay in the darkness, thinking about what she would have to do. She had no choice. She’d have to make a temporary peace with Perri.

  48

  CAL HAD STOPPED by before Perri went to bed; he’d told her he had been in San Antonio explaining to an arson investigator the possible connection of the crash to the Brenda Hobson case. He looked exhausted and he poured himself a glass of wine without asking her if he could. She told herself she didn’t mind.

  “This video,” he said. “I’m talking to a lawyer. We could sue the ridesharing service, except that the driver is a contractor, not an employee, and we could sue Jane, although she didn’t post it first. But sue for what? It’s not libel, it actually happened.”

  “You didn’t hear from Shiloh Rooke again, did you?”

  “No,” she lied. Her lies to Cal during their marriage had all been of the quiet kind: Yes, that tie looks good on you; sure, Thai sounds great; oh baby you made me feel so good then. Never a substantial lie. Omissions, perhaps, but outright falsehoods she had avoided. “Matteo Vasquez came by. He is doing another article on Jane. I sent him packing.”

  “This video…”

  “I’m not talking about that.”

  “We have to. Look, you’re getting pummeled on Faceplace. So stay off social media. Don’t answer your phone. This, too, shall pass. Something new will outrage or anger or distract people in the next day or so. You’ll be yesterday’s news. Just bear down and get through this part of it.”

  “That’s so easy for you to say,” she said. “I don’t need you to tell me how to handle this.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “I don’t know what it’s like and I can’t imagine. But I did see some people were posting comments in support of you.”

  “Oh, great. Total strangers arguing about my worthiness as a person.”

  “Do you want me to stay tonight? I’ll crash in the guest room.”

  She felt she should say no, but she wanted the company. Cal knew her better than anyone. “Yes,” she said. “Sure.” She hoped Shiloh wouldn’t return tonight, but if he did, Cal’s presence would deter him from lingering. Or talking to her. She hoped.

  You might want to get your gun, she told herself. She’d been raised around guns—her mother, the maid, often paid in cash, kept one in her car—and her mom had taught her how to use them safely. And she’d kept the gun she’d owned when she first married Cal (he disliked guns), and after he moved out she cleaned and oiled it and went to the firing range and got her sureness of aim back. She had thought of going tonight, to blow off steam, but she didn’t feel like venturing out of the house.

  Cal made himself a sandwich and had another glass of wine and went to bed. Sometimes she thought she was the only one still tangled in David’s death; Cal seemed to move through the world more easily.

  She went and checked the gun and put it beneath her bed, on the side where she slept. Just in case. She wished fleetingly that Cal was in the bed next to her, and then fell into a fitful slumber.

  She had forgotten to silence her phone. The text chirped her awake, out of a hot, thick dream in which David ran through a field, laughing, always out of reach. She stared into the darkness, startled, then saw the light on the phone screen.

  A text in the middle of the night. From a number she didn’t recognize. Amari Bowman and Matteo Vasquez attacked. With a crowbar. You know anything about that?

  She had to blink away sleep. Amari. A classmate and friend of David’s. She had seen David and Jane at Happy Taco the night of the accident. No, she texted back. Who is this?

  Jane.

  Why are you telling me?

  Because I think you’re capable of a lot worse behavior than people realize but I don’t see you beating anyone into the hospital with a crowbar.

  Her first impulse was to text back, Go away. Instead, after a deep breath, she wrote, Are they OK?

  I don’t know.

  How do you know what happened to them?

  I saw Amari tonight. I saw her earlier today, too, along with Kamala and this Shiloh nut. He approached me after I talked with Amari. I thought he was stalking me. Maybe he was stalking her?

  Perri’s throat went dry. She turned on the light. I don’t know anything about this. Please leave me alone. Haven’t you done enough to me?

  I think we should talk.

  I have nothing to say to you.

  And the phone didn’t ping for two minutes. She’s done, Perri thought. Then the text came:

  I’m going to ask you two questions. If I feel you’ve answered them honestly, then I’ll share something with you that will change everything you think about me.

  Perri almost didn’t answer. Then she sent All right.

  Can you come outside? Let’s talk on your porch. I’m at my mother’s house. If you want, we can tape me saying that I forgive you for attacking me and then that can go viral, too.

  Face-to-face. The last two meetings had not gone well. Her striking and dragging Jane, Jane knocking hot coffee out of her hands and throwing her out of the house. She could wake up Cal and get him to go with her. This could be a trap. What if she was the crowbar attacker?

  She decided. Meet me on my porch in ten minutes.

  She went to Cal’s door and listened. She heard a soft snoring. She went downstairs and loaded her Keurig with the first cup of coffee and turned on the porch light.

  49

  PERRI SAT ON the porch, two steaming mugs of coffee at her side. Jane walked up the steps; Perri had watched her come out of the Norton house, not turning on the outside lights, closing the door very quietly.

  She held something in her hand, but it wasn’t a crowbar, to Perri’s relief. It was a piece of paper.

  Perri offered her the coffee, hoping Jane wouldn’t slap the mug out of her hand this time. Jane took the coffee and sat across from her.

  “Cal’s inside. I asked him to stay.” Perri kept her voice low.

  “I’m not here to fight with you. I’m here to ask you two questions and show you something. And it’s going to cost us both a lot, but we need to know.”

  “You’ve gotten me out of bed, this better be good.”

  “Is my copy of A Wrinkle in Time on David’s bookshelf?”

  It was the most unexpected question. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “I just noticed it was there the other day. I didn’t know why he would have it, unless you had loaned it to him.”

  “I didn’t. Kamala stole it.” And she told her about how Kamala had planted the note, what her once-best friend had done that fateful night, her seeing them at the lake house, her planting the note Jane had written in the aftermath of her father’s loss, and then leaving the book in David’s room.

  “She texted someone else. A boy who cared about me. It doesn’t matter who it is; this isn’t his fault. David and I were trying to get away from him, he was following us from the lake house. We lost him and turned onto that road. And then the crash.”

  Perri stared at her, as if trying to reconcile the fact that she was finally being given a partial story of those missing hours. “It’s still your fault.”

  “If that was all there was to the crash, if it was simply my fault, why is someone targeting people now?”

  Perri didn’t say anything for a long time; it is a hard thing to have a pillar of why you hate someone suddenly strippe
d away. “She saw you at the lake house kissing my son? You and David…”

  “Did you and my mom know about us? Adam said he saw the two of you arguing that night.”

  Perri cupped her hands around her mug. “It wasn’t about you, no.”

  “What, then?”

  “I had seen her eyeing Cal. She was a widow; she was distraught and she was lonely. I didn’t like the attention she was giving him. I knew she wasn’t thinking clearly and wouldn’t have betrayed our friendship and so I told her to stop with the looks. Cal’s so wrapped up in his own thoughts he never noticed. She was angry with me, denying she was after him, hurt at the accusation. Finally, I believed her. She left.”

  Jane whispered to herself, and later Perri would realize she’d said, “Which anvil do I drop on you first?”

  Then Jane said, “I was pregnant. I miscarried during the coma.”

  Perri rocked in her chair, nearly spilling the coffee as she set it down, a cold agony clawing at her heart and her guts. “David?” she finally said.

  “Yes. I wasn’t with anyone else. I was seeing this other boy, but we hadn’t slept together.”

  “You and David.” She turned away for a moment. “Jane, when you were little, your mom and I used to joke that you and David would marry. Or date. Just joking, but you sort of hope. You were always so cute together. Inseparable. But you just say things like that…you don’t really mean them.” Her voice drifted off.

  Jane sipped the coffee. She didn’t look at Perri. “You were like a second mom to me. There’s always one of your parents’ friends you think, yeah, you could turn to her if you needed to. You could trust her. She would help you. You were that person for me. I thought you knew that.”

  Perri couldn’t speak.

  “I loved you. And Mr. Hall. Not just David. I lost him and I lost you both, too. Maybe you didn’t care about losing me. Not a bit. I’m not your kid. David was special and I’m a screwup.”

  “Jane…”

  “I know you had your grief. I just thought you would have sympathy or empathy or some kind of ‘pathy’ for me. I mean, not right away. My brain got broken and I lost the whole sense of who I was, and now I know I lost the baby…” She stopped. She took refuge in another sip of coffee.

  “Why didn’t you or your mother tell us?”

  “She never told me. I found notes about the miscarriage in a copy of my medical file she had; she had never shown it to me. And if I knew I was pregnant, I don’t remember it. I didn’t tell anyone. I don’t even know if I told David. But we had talked about running away to Canada. Maybe he wanted to get me away from here.”

  “If you had told him, he would have told me and Cal.”

  “Would he? Lakehaven isn’t exactly a hotbed of teen pregnancy. It can change plans. And Lakehaven kids have big plans.”

  That truth was like a knife in the air between them.

  “But he and Kamala…” She didn’t finish. “I’m afraid to ask what the second question is.”

  “Did you ever find, in David’s stuff, a flash drive with a musical-note label?”

  Perri sipped the coffee; she could hardly taste it, wrapping her head around the miscarriage. David’s child. Jane carried David’s child. Jane cost me a grandchild, too—the thought leapt up, unbidden, and she pushed it away. She could not go there. Jane had lost as well. So she forced herself to think, and the memory came back, sharp and sudden. “Yes. A flash drive with a musical-note label. It was in a paper bag of stuff that Randy Franklin gave me. Some of David’s belongings that were in his backpack or his pockets when he died. That, his phone, some cash, his keys. It was attached to his keys that were in his pocket. The police gave it to Randy Franklin when he was meeting with them; then Randy gave it back to me.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “I think so.” She in fact remembered clearly: she’d seen it again recently while going through his desk drawers when she’d ended up finding the Liv Danger notebook.

  “Would you please give it to me?”

  “What kind of music is on it?”

  “It actually belonged to my dad. My mom gave a bunch of my dad’s computer odds and ends to David after he died. I’d like it back. Yeah, it’s just music that belonged to Dad.”

  She didn’t believe Jane. “Why is this suddenly important?” Perri asked.

  “It just is,” Jane said. “It was my father’s. You let me have it, I’ll make a video and post it saying that you weren’t at fault for what happened at the cemetery.”

  “I’m not sure I know where it is.”

  “I’ll come with you to look.”

  “No. You stay here. I’ll bring you back your book, too.”

  She went inside, moved silently to David’s room. She found the copy of A Wrinkle in Time and tucked it under her arm; now glad she hadn’t thrown it away. She opened the desk drawer and found the green drive in the pile of leftover red ones; she remembered he needed them for school and was often losing them. The musical note was on it.

  She awoke his computer and slid the drive into the port.

  It definitely wasn’t music. It was a series of programs. KeyBreaker. KeystrokeMonitor. PasswordCracker. HackingLog.

  This was stuff to help you break into a computer. Why would David have this? If it had been her father’s, why did Brent have it?

  And David and Brent, both dead from accidents. She looked in the operations log. It made no sense to her, numbers and ports and words she didn’t understand. She ejected the drive from the computer and turned it off, and Cal said, “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” she said, slipping the drive into her robe pocket. “I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to see what the Internet was saying about me.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a good way to go back to sleep.”

  “It’s not. It’s a terrible idea, like you said.”

  “On David’s computer? Your laptop is downstairs.”

  “I know.” Why are you lying to him? She decided, in a flash, that her dealings with Jane were hers alone. Cal would come in, take over. No. This was hers.

  “Go back to bed,” she said. “I’m going myself.” Please, Jane, don’t come in. Don’t knock at the door. Just wait.

  “You’re sure you’re all right?”

  “I am. Like you said, best not to look. I think Jane might be willing to help me make a public apology.”

  “Jane helping you? I think you should stay away from her.”

  “I didn’t expect you to say that. Don’t you want us to make peace?”

  “I guess so. We’ll talk in the morning.” He went back to the guest room and she said, “I’m just getting a drink of water.” He made a noise of sleepy acknowledgment and closed the door.

  She hurried down the steps and went out the front door as quietly as she could. Jane still sat in her chair, the piece of paper on her lap where Perri couldn’t see what was on the other side.

  “I found it. You lied to me. It has programs on it.”

  “Programs to hack a computer. Adam Kessler gave it to my dad shortly before he died.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Randy Franklin was following my father around in the weeks before his death. He had a picture of Adam giving this to my dad. Adam said my dad bought it from him. He said he had a computer an employee left behind that he wanted to hack. But I think that was a lie.”

  “Why?” She could barely breathe.

  Jane hesitated. “I…I’m trying to figure that out. It all ties back to why people connected to the crash have been targeted.” She held her hand out for the drive and after a moment Perri dropped it into her hand. “I’ve been investigating that night.” And she told Perri what she’d learned: from her taking the files from Randy’s office to what she had heard from Kamala and Amari and Adam and Trevor and Billy Sing at Happy Taco, in piecing together that night. She told her everything, except about the photo of Cal and Laurel kissing—she decided to talk to her mother first about that.
Perri listened, a stunned look on her face.

  “So, I have more things to find out,” Jane said. She stood.

  “What’s that you wanted to show me? Is that it?” Perri pointed to the paper. It looked like the back of a photo.

  “I think I’ve dropped enough anvils on you tonight. Thanks for the coffee. I’ll post a video on my Faceplace page tonight. I think if you share it, since people are leaving mean comments on your page, it will put a stop to the attacks against you.”

  “Thank you.” Two words she never would have imagined saying to Jane Norton.

  Jane stood up and left without another word.

  50

  SO WHAT ARE your plans for today, Mom?” Jane asked. She hadn’t slept well and her mother was up early, brewing coffee, and bustling around.

  “Um. I have some meetings at the charity office.”

  “On Sunday?” She kept her voice neutral. The meeting, she knew, was with Kevin.

  “Yes, well, that’s when people could meet,” she said vaguely. “My donors tend to be extremely busy. How about you?”

  “I’m going to make a video forgiving Mrs. Hall and post it to Faceplace.”

  “Oh, I think that’s a bad idea, darling.”

  “Forgiveness is a bad idea?”

  “Look, she’s finally getting a taste of what real blame feels like. Let her taste it. Have you read the comments on her page? I wonder sometimes who these people are, who have all the spare time to hate on a stranger. We know that feeling.” She bit into her toast.

  Jane stared at her. “I think you wrote several times about forgiveness on the mom blog.”

  “I did, but that was more about forgiving one’s self.”

  “You’re good at that.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Nothing, Mom.”

  “I’m so glad you’re home.” She tried a smile.

  “Adam has a roommate now. So I might be back on the street.”

  “No, you’ll stay here.”

  She tested her mother. “I don’t like being next door to the Halls.”

  “You are not going back on the streets, Jane. We’ll find a different solution. I’ll get you an apartment.”