“No. Never. It was clearly painful for you. I lost my mom, too, cancer, a year before your dad died.” He cleared his throat. “We knew how much it sucks. It made us closer.” And his face went a little red. “Everyone thinks they know what it would be like to lose a parent. Everyone is wrong. Until it happens—”
“Trevor!” The other barista—his aunt—called.
“Stay here.” He got up, worked the line that had formed, smiling, making change, dispensing coffee. Jane sat, wondering, What would David have possibly known about my dad? When the line was served, Trevor hurried back and sat down.
She told him, then, about Liv Danger.
He shook his head and lowered his voice. “It’s someone jerking you. Delete and forget it.”
“I’m going to figure out who it is.” She wondered if he would suggest the obvious, that it was Kamala.
“It’s a misguided friend of David’s. Just a kid holding a grudge.”
She looked at him.
“It’s not me,” he said quickly.
“You’d be surprised how quickly people believe the worst of you.”
“I don’t have time to torment you online, Jane. I work, I go to community college.”
“I guess you weren’t going to play in college.” As soon as she said it, she regretted the words. The stress, and having not dealt with anyone but Adam and her mother and people who hated her, was making her thoughtless. She told herself to do better.
His expression went blank. “The week after your crash, I hurt my knee. Was out for the season. No college stayed interested in me.”
She remembered the brace on his leg when he’d stopped Parker from bullying her. In that awful daze of running the school gauntlet, she never asked him about it. The accident eclipsed everything else in her life. She had been a bad friend. Football had always meant so much to him. She wanted to reach out and take his hand. But she thought he would pull away. He didn’t want to be her friend.
“It was that week of the accident. I was distracted from the game with thoughts of you. And David. Whole team was. I didn’t pay attention and I got hurt.” His mouth narrowed. “It’s no one’s fault but my own.”
“I’m really sorry.”
He shrugged.
“I’m going to find out what was going on with David. Especially since you told me he said this somehow involved my dad. You can help me or you don’t have to. I really wish you would.”
He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no. “You still have your old cell phone number?”
“Yes.”
“You’re at Saint Michael’s, I heard?” Like it was unfair that a brain-damaged amnesiac was there at an expensive, selective school and he was grinding it out at a community college.
“I flunked out. I couldn’t handle it, academically. But I live on campus. In Adam Kessler’s room, so I don’t sleep on the streets. I sometimes go to classes; the bigger ones, where I won’t be noticed.” She had not confessed this to anyone. Only Adam knew. “I am pretending to have a life. So finding out the truth matters to me, OK, I need this. Mock it all you want.”
Trevor stared. “I am not mocking you. I never would.” She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.
She stood up. “Thanks for talking to me.”
“Sure. Jane?”
“Yeah?”
He swallowed. “I’m just sorry about everything.”
She turned and left before anything else could be said. She walked down Old Travis, the traffic thick, heading to the next name on her list.
17
PERRI?” MAGGIE SAID. “We need to talk. Um, about that trace you wanted me to do.”
Perri glanced up from her desk. “Already?”
Maggie was giving Perri a look that she didn’t quite care for. “Mike made me go to this superboring meeting, so I turned my attention to your problem. Liv approved your friend request about two a.m. So as you, I posted a link on her page to a quick memorial I created about your son. Liv clicked on it. But I added in trap code that would give us Liv’s IP address, and then I called the ISP and found out the billing address. We’ve been working with a few of the big service providers on security issues and one of my buddies there was willing to share.”
“So who does the account belong to?”
Maggie said, “You.”
“What?”
“It was posted from your computer.” Maggie stared at her. “So, either you wasted my time because you thought you could get away with this or someone has access to your computer that you don’t know about.”
Perri was stunned. “That can’t be. I wouldn’t have asked you to trace it if I’d written it.”
Maggie kept a neutral expression on her face. “I’m going to assume you’re not harassing yourself. Does anyone else have a key to your house? What about your ex-husband?”
“He’s not my ex, the divorce isn’t final. But he gave me back his keys when he moved out and I changed the locks. But Cal would never do anything like this.”
“A neighbor?”
“No. But I leave a key under a potted plant in the backyard in case I get locked out.”
“Who would know it was there?”
“No one.” She realized it was the same hiding place where she’d kept a key when David and Jane were little, and she and Laurel had both told each other where the emergency key was. Laurel’s was in one of those fake rocks. Laurel.
“Wait, are you saying that someone was in my house at two this morning?” A sick panic rose in her chest.
“Or your system could have been hacked and someone is accessing it remotely. You could bring it to me and I could check.” But Maggie’s voice, never warm, was strangely flat.
“Oh, I will. Thank you.” Maggie nodded and left. And Perri realized, with a jolt, that Maggie was wondering if Perri was capable of posting that awful garbage on the Faceplace page of a girl who’d killed her son.
18
JANE’S NEXT STOP was an open-air office park built of limestone, sprawling across a half acre. Freelance investigator Randy Franklin had an office nestled in among several real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and clinical psychologists. There were so many counselors on the wealthier side of Austin, it made Jane wonder—in a way she never had before—if money could not buy happiness.
She thought of knocking but instead she decided to try the door. It was unlocked. There was a reception desk with no one sitting at it, but she could hear the steady clack of typing in the inner office.
“Hello?” a deep male voice called to her.
“Mr. Franklin?”
He stepped out of the inner office. He was a big, broad man, with short, thinning hair and the solid, no-nonsense look of a former police officer. He wore a good-quality suit, no tie.
“May I help you?” he asked, friendly at the possibility of a client.
“My name is Jane Norton,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. Maybe he hadn’t recognized her face at first. But she heard the reaction to her name in that one syllable.
“I was hoping I could talk to you about a case from two years ago. I was involved. You were the investigator for an attorney named Kip Evander.”
“Yes. I remember it. You crashed a car and killed a young man.” His voice now was flat.
She decided to be as blunt as he was. “You found a so-called suicide note the day after the wreck? And gave it to the police?”
“I don’t think it’s appropriate I speak with you about this.”