I should have written an apology to the Halls for the accident. But I didn’t. So the first public statement I gave the world was an excuse, a cheap lie told by my mother.
Of course Mom didn’t consider that the investigator working for the Halls’ lawyers, Mr. Franklin, and the sheriff’s accident investigation team would look at the damp earth around the crash site and not see a single trace of deer prints. She didn’t realize it was standard operating procedure, for a one-car accident in the hills, to look for signs it was a DVC. There was no sign any deer had been through there that day on either side of the road. Not to mention that their consulting neurologist discounted my magically intact single memory.
But then, once the investigator’s report disallowing the presence of deer got to the Halls, I wasn’t just a loser who had wrecked her car and killed David Hall, I was a liar. Nail me up.
They told everyone that we had lied.
12
PERRI HAD PUT “Office Mom” on her business cards because she didn’t care about titles, and there was a certain pervasive wry humor at Hylist Software. And she was still a mom, in her heart, in her mind—that was an unchanged image. Hylist was a start-up company, ten months old, thirty employees strong, in an office overlooking a bend of Lake Austin. From her boss’s office Perri could see the soaring arch of the Pennybacker Bridge spanning Lake Austin along Loop 360. But the new HR chief, a prim-mouthed woman named Deborah, who seemed to lack any sense of fun, had told Perri that it was unprofessional and to replace her cards and use the title “Executive Assistant to the CEO.” Perri had smiled tightly and said, “All right.” She knew she could go to her boss and keep the original card, but that wasn’t how she wanted to start with Deborah. Here she would pick her battles.
She worked, officially, for the CEO, an old high school friend named Mike Alderson she’d grown up with in Lakehaven. She and Mike had been the less fortunate kids at what was often seen as a rich-kid school: he lived with his grandparents in an old house, one of the first built in Lakehaven, back when it was country and not suburban; she and her mother had lived in one of the few apartments in Lakehaven’s school district. Her mother cleaned houses and eventually started a housecleaning service that had a dozen workers. Mike had gone on to Rice, at full scholarship, for an undergraduate computer-science degree and then an MBA, while Perri, also on scholarship, stayed close to home at Texas State and got an English degree. She started teaching middle school, but then met Cal, who was a friend of Mike’s, and married him six months later. They moved to San Francisco for his first start-up company, and after a few more years she decided to stay home when she got pregnant with David and they moved back to Austin. So this had been her first out-of-the-home job in many years, and she loved it. Basically, she took care of the office. There were four execs—Mike, the marketing/sales, engineering, and HR vice presidents—but most of the employees were software designers, grinding out code to finish their first product release. They were building a product to simplify the integration of company-issued cell phones with computer networks, to make them easier to manage and to share information securely. Many of the developers were young, and they worked long hours. Perri often felt tender toward them. Aside from managing Mike’s schedule, she stocked the refrigerator, had dinner brought in when lots of the “kids”—she knew she shouldn’t think of them this way, but she did, some of them were barely older than what David would be now—were working late, and coordinated the Friday-afternoon beer break that was one of the rewards of working for a driven yet more casual company. She had taken two of the developers who were in sore need of fashion advice shopping for clothes suitable for high-level meetings with customers. She’d helped two engineers who’d moved here from San Francisco find places to live and a preschool for another family. She kept things running smoothly, while Mike and his execs wooed potential customers and the programmers coded and drew incomprehensible diagrams on whiteboards and lived off the pizza she ordered.
Perri had needed this, after David died. Activity and chatter to fill the empty hours. She liked the people, and she knew they liked her. She was valued.
She had gone in extra early the morning after the awkward dinner with Cal, ignoring the wine headache gently throbbing in her head. So she was productive about what needed to be done: she brewed two pots of coffee (the developers usually did this themselves because they drank it so fast), stocked the fridge with new cans of soda, cleared the conference rooms, reordered supplies.
“Good morning,” Mike Alderson said as he hurried past her desk. He was a nice-looking man, tall and trim, brown hair thinning, divorced for several years, with soft brown eyes and a bold smile. She had talked him into a more stylish pair of eyeglasses. He kept trying to talk her into dinner, a kind of dinner that seemed between more than friends. It was a side effect of long friendship and loneliness, but she could not encourage him. At least not now. She was deeply fond of Mike, but she wasn’t ready. “How are you?” he asked. “I’m sorry I was gone yesterday. You and David, and Cal, too, were much in my thoughts.”
They walked into his office together. She closed the door. “I’m fine. I don’t want to make a production of it here.”
“Of course.”
“But I do need your help. I want to unmask an anonymous Internet user.” Mike Alderson had been David’s godfather. Mike would want to rage at this person’s cruelty, fix the problem, take care of it for her, but he was busy launching what could be a hugely successful company. She didn’t want him involved.
“Is someone bothering you?” He took a step toward her.
“No, it’s nothing like that.” She said nothing more and he waited and she still said nothing.
Mike hesitated. “Is Cal being difficult?” Mike had kept his opinion about their separation to himself.
“Of course not. So who would you suggest?”
“At ferreting out someone who wants to be hidden? Maggie, I’d say.”
She gritted her teeth, but she put a bright smile on her face. “Thanks, I’ll ask her.”
“Is there anything else I can do to help you…?” He flushed with embarrassment. Mike had been a wonderful godfather to David, remembering every birthday, always encouraging him in his art and his sports and his studies, coming to his football games, laughing at his drawn comics. She would not tell him about the “ALL WILL PAY” written on the stone.
“If you feel up to it, could we have dinner this week?”
Perri hesitated for a moment, then said, “Sure.” He’s being your old friend and your boss. He’s worried about you.
“How about tonight?” Mike asked.