Why had her father been calling law enforcement, and what was the result? Nothing.
It was only one call each time, a day apart, weeks before he died. The other phone numbers were home, Jane’s phone, Cal Hall, the school, his college friends. Normal stuff.
She looked at the spreadsheets. In one column were the names of what must be people or companies, but just initials: IGL was the most common one, listed several times. None of the names were companies she recognized: GM2, Alpha, HFK. In the next column were amounts of money ranging from $20,000 to $100,000. Pages and pages. A lot of money. There were no dates on the entries.
Paper-clipped to the bottom of the spreadsheet printouts was a piece of paper, with a field of flowers printed in faded colors on the background. The stationery looked vaguely familiar: written across it, printed in block printing, was a meaningless string of numbers: R34D2FT97S, and then u: LDN001 p: BFH@78832.
The numbers and letters meant nothing to her. But they had to mean something with these spreadsheets. She studied them. LDN001. She realized with a jolt those were her mother’s initials: Laurel Dumont Norton.
Was this a way to access these spreadsheets?
Behind the spreadsheets were a number of PowerPoint slides that, she realized, were the investor pitch for Norton Financial. This was the company he wanted to start after he’d had a business failure with Cal. He had originally been an accountant specializing in start-up and new companies. There was a business proposal in the file for Norton Financial. The plan was to open up a network of CPA offices in lesser-served areas, with discount fees for tax preparation and basic accounting services to help small businesses start and grow, and help cash-reliant businesses with their particular challenges. There was an analysis of neighborhoods in Austin, San Antonio, Brownsville, New Orleans, Dallas, Laredo, Houston, and more, where his network would grow. She closed the proposal and looked through the other papers.
She realized, after a moment, the file was incomplete. There was no written report from Randy Franklin, no summary of the investigation to say what the whole point was. No client, no report. Just phone numbers, meaningless spreadsheets with unrecognizable names in them, and a business plan that never came to fruition because her father died.
At the back of the file were surveillance photos of her father: at his office he’d rented in Lakehaven while he worked on his new venture, leaving his office, leaving his home. One of the photos was of Brent and Jane out shopping, judging from a department store bag that Jane was carrying. Her hair was long then; she only wore it chopped short after the accident. She did not look happy, but disappointed, and Brent had an arm around her, trying to talk to her. Jane was leaning away from him. She was being awful to her dad, typical teenager stuff, and she didn’t even remember why, but she felt as though she’d just been stabbed in the chest. Franklin had followed them. And then later, investigated her.
The next sheet jolted her. A photo sheet of pictures, taken in rapid sequence. She and her dad…and Adam Kessler, sitting on the patio of a favorite Tex-Mex restaurant, having lunch. Laughing. Dad joking, Adam smiling politely. Jane excused herself. Adam and Dad still talking.
Adam handing something to Dad. Dad nodding and putting it in his pocket. Jane returning to the table, unaware.
What was this? She checked the dates written on the back of the pictures. A few weeks before Dad died.
There were other photo sheets. Her father traveling, going into his business, coming home, dinners out with Mom. Laurel looking worried, tired, holding her father’s hand, leaning toward him. And looking unhappy. Her father looked tired.
“You’re too big for the swing,” a small voice behind Jane said. She turned and saw a little girl frowning at her. “It’s for kids.”
“I guess you’re right.” Jane stood up and she walked to the park bench and sat back down. The little girl watched her, as if surprised that Jane had moved. She took the swing that Jane had vacated, empty now like all the rest, and knelt on the seat, moving gently in rhythm.
Nothing in her life seemed to be what she thought. She put away the perplexing file on her father and opened the file on David.
It was much more detailed than the file she’d found in her mom’s file cabinet. She supposed that one was shared with her mother’s attorney, and this was the one produced for the Halls’ lawyer, Kip Evander.
There were photos, reports, and interviews with Amari (she who passed the note to Jane in class and then texted Kamala at Happy Taco), Trevor, Kamala, and others who’d had contact with her and David in the course of the evening. The time line was nearly the same as hers, with one additional fact: that Kamala had called the Halls earlier in the evening and spoken with Cal Hall. Nothing was noted as to the content of that conversation.
Did they know? Did the Halls know, before the crash, that David and Jane were together? Was that the argument between Laurel and Perri that Adam discovered when he stopped by her home?
The orange phone that Brenda Hobson remembered lying by the wreck was not mentioned in a detailed inventory of what was recovered from the wreck site at the car. So, after Brenda Hobson moved it out of the way, someone had taken it. Also not listed: the laptop David used at Happy Taco.
Or the crowbar. She and David had misplaced all sorts of things in their secret odyssey.
Where was it all?
Unless these items had been purposefully taken from the crash site in the chaos.
Who would have had access? Who had come to the crash site? The Halls had both come to the accident site, her mother. Kamala, Trevor, Adam? She realized that she didn’t know. No one had ever discussed it with her. It wasn’t a question you asked: Hey, Mom, which of my friends came to where I lay bleeding and David lay dead? Did you notice?
Could the phone, missed in the scene processing, have been taken at the same time the suicide note was planted? She bit her lip at this thought of efficiency.
She moved on to the report of the suicide-note analysis, which was stamped “Confidential: Client’s Eyes Only.” The paper and ink had been tested chemically. The ink came from a Skymon Gel Pen and was two to three years old. The ink had been on the paper for several months; it wasn’t contemporary to the crash. The paper came from a Japanese notebook, with an unusually high fiber count—the analyst made a note that those were expensive paper notebooks. Jane recognized the brand name: Tayami. No one had ever asked her if she owned a Tayami notebook.