She set the trophies down. What would happen to his stuff when she and Cal were gone? There was no one else who would want his memories. They’d go into a trash fill, she supposed, and it was silly to be upset, but she felt a chasm open in her chest.
She looked up. Bringing down the trophy box had left a vacant stretch on the shelf. Peeking out from behind the stack of board games—Life, Monopoly, Stratego—she saw the edge of a notebook. She pulled down the board games, fighting back memories of the hours she and Jane and David had played them—Cal was gone so often on business—and stacked them on the floor. She pulled down the notebook. It was thin, with fine paper, stamped with a Japanese logo. She’d never seen it before.
She opened it. Inside were more of her son’s sketches. These featured detailed drawings of a young woman in a form-fitting red jumpsuit, as if ready for action, with a bobbed haircut of white hair and purple eyes. She turned the page. The next drawing was a close-up of the young woman’s face, and her cartoonish eyes were enlarged. Perri could see that the black pupil was oddly shaped, not a circle but a raised fist.
She turned the page. The next had huge, stylized letters above the same figure:
LIV DANGER!
SHE NEVER RUNS FROM A FIGHT!
THIRSTY FOR ADVENTURE AND INTRIGUE!
(Artistic Concept by David Hall, Game Story by Jane Norton, Game Prototype by D+J Design. All rights reserved. Do not steal this idea, Jane will cut you!)
23
JANE AND CAL drove to Brenda’s sister’s house on the north side of San Antonio. A woman in her late forties stood in the driveway, in jeans and a UTSA sweatshirt with a roadrunner’s profile above the letters, her hair pulled back in a ponytail.
They made quick introductions. They followed her through a small and neatly kept house. She had made a pot of decaf and they accepted her offer of a cup. They sat out in the quiet of the patio and kept their voices soft. The night breeze felt good against Jane’s face.
“I’m sorry to bother you so late,” Jane said. “Is your son going to be OK?”
“Yes, he’ll be fine. I wanted to spend the night with him at the hospital, but he’d said he’d rest better if I came home.” She knotted a napkin, unknotted it.
“I’m glad he’ll be all right,” Jane said.
Brenda said, “I haven’t told the arson investigator that you called. This better not be some kind of prank.”
“It’s not. And I’ll be happy to talk to them,” Cal said. “But we’re not at all sure these two incidents are related.”
“The investigators haven’t told me much.” Brenda knotted one of the napkins. “They think the fires have to do with my financial situation.”
Cal and Jane glanced at each other; better to let her talk.
“Why, when your own son was hurt?” Jane asked.
“My husband died several months ago. He left a lot of debts. I’ve been slowly paying them off. Some were gambling debts. The house was fully insured, I made sure of that. They think that I did it for the insurance, to pay off the gambling debts. Which is crazy.” She glanced again at Jane, as if recognizing something in her face. “It’s like whoever did this knew how much this house meant to me, that it’s a fresh start, and they took it away.”
“Do you know someone named Liv Danger?”
“No.”
“Mr. Hall’s son and I were involved in a car accident two years ago. The anniversary was yesterday. He died and I lost my memory of the previous three years, including the night of the accident and what specifically happened to us. Someone posted on my Faceplace page, using this Liv Danger name, a message to me, that they knew what I didn’t remember and that they were going to tell—that ‘all will pay.’ I took it as a threat. You were one of the paramedics who worked the crash.”
“How weird.” Brenda Hobson shifted in her seat.
“The accident was in Lakehaven. On High Oaks Road,” Cal said.
Her gaze jerked over to Jane. “You. You’re the ‘memory’ girl.”
“You remember her?” Cal asked.
She nodded. “I mean, we work so many emergencies, but you were in the paper, and they wrote about your amnesia.” She paled. “What does this have to do with me? I did nothing wrong. Why would someone try to hurt me?” Her voice rose in the quiet of the patio. She stood. “My son is in the hospital because of that fire.”
“Look, whoever did this, they’re crazy,” Jane said. “They targeted you. They targeted me. They wrote this ‘ALL WILL PAY’ threat on Mr. Hall’s son’s headstone. So please, try to remember. Did you see anything unusual at the crash site? Was there another witness, maybe? Someone on the road, or someone close to the wreck who might have seen it?”
“It was”—Brenda hesitated, looking at them both—“bad. It was a miracle the car didn’t go over the edge. Your son died a minute or so after we arrived, Mr. Hall. There was nothing that could have been done, and I’m sorry.”
“I know you did everything you could for him,” Cal said, his voice soft as a whisper. “Thank you.”
“Please try to remember,” Jane said. “What did you do, step by step?”
“The call came in, we headed toward High Oaks. I don’t think I’d ever responded to a wreck there. I guess it’s not a busy street. Saw the car, down the hill. You couldn’t have seen it from the road if there hadn’t been flashlights, it was pitch-black, I guess whoever called it in was there with a flashlight for the police and the emergency crews so they could find it. I remember. He lived on the street.”
James Marcolin, Jane thought.
“I went to the passenger side, my partner went to the driver. I remember because I hurt my knee, kneeling on a cell phone that had been thrown from the car, I guess. I kicked it aside and we got him out. He passed. We then focused on you, you were still alive and not as gravely injured.”
Jane closed her eyes. She could feel the tension coming off Cal, sitting next to her, hearing David’s death described in a clinical, two-word sentence. “A cell phone? Thrown from the car?”
“Yes. I remember it because it had an orange plastic case, like something a child would pick. And plus, we’re not supposed to move anything that could be evidence. I mean, obviously to save someone, we do. I just moved it out of the way with my foot so we could get your son out of the car.”
“I didn’t own an orange phone,” Jane said. “I don’t think I did. Did David?”
Cal shook his head, pale. “No. His cell phone was found in his jeans pocket.” He looked like he was fighting to maintain emotional control, and losing. Jane reached out and took his hand.
“I saw the inventory. An orange phone wasn’t on there.” Jane squeezed Cal’s hand. “Someone took it.”
There was another, unexplained phone at the crash scene. Did that mean they’d had a phone no one knew about, or that someone else had been at the scene and left it there? “Did you see this orange phone again?”
Brenda shook her head. “My focus was entirely on saving you and getting you treated.”
“Thank you,” Jane said. “David didn’t suffer, did he?” She glanced at Cal; his eyes were closed. She had asked James Marcolin the same question. She couldn’t bear the thought of him suffering.