She tried to call Randy Franklin’s office. No answer. Maybe his temp had fled once she saw his broken file cabinet. His voice mail mentioned a cell phone number. She tried that as well. No answer. She didn’t leave a message. What would she say? Hey, I stole your files, can you answer some questions on them for me?
She turned to the phone pages. The FBI number. She dialed it. She got an automated answer, instructing her to press the appropriate button to channel her call. She finally got an operator.
“My dad called this number before he died,” Jane said, her voice tentative, uncertain. “I mean, a few weeks before he died. I’m wondering if maybe he was trying to report a crime. His name was Brent Norton. Do you know if there was a record that he called?”
“When did he call?” The operator sounded sympathetic.
She gave the date on the record. “I just don’t know why he’d call the FBI.” Her voice broke. “They said he died in an accident cleaning his gun and I just don’t know if that’s true. He tried to call the Secret Service, too.”
“I’m sorry for your loss. We get lots of calls,” the operator said. “What’s your name and your number? I can see if I can find a record of his call in our database. And if so, we can call you back.”
She gave it to her, but then she realized she had just described her father, tearfully, as if he were a crank caller: calling governmental agencies and then dying from a gun mishap. She hung up. She started to dial the Secret Service number and then she hung up, too. He had called them just once, not again. Had he lost his nerve? Why would he have only called once? Maybe these spreadsheets weren’t enough proof, without knowing what the entries meant.
She tucked the files back in her bag. She didn’t even know where to start with the financial files. She needed another line of attack while she figured out what to do about the spreadsheets.
Pressing Adam had already spilled some secrets about that night. She couldn’t grill Trevor while he worked at the coffee shop. But she could talk to Amari Bowman, over at the University of Texas. She had her number in her phone from her earlier rebuffed attempt to communicate.
She texted Amari: I know you don’t want to talk to me but I MUST talk to you. Meet me at the Littlefield Fountain at noon.
She got a fast reply: CAN’T.
She texted back: MUST. PLEASE.
Jane took a deep breath and wrote: I will camp my homeless ass in front of your sorority house. I literally have nothing to do but to bug and annoy you. Talk to me for fifteen minutes and I’ll leave you alone.
Five minutes passed. Then the phone: Fine. Fountain at noon.
She didn’t want to take a rideshare car to the UT campus. Her mother, she knew, was tracking the charges and destinations, and she didn’t want to explain. But her mother’s office wasn’t far from the park—a ten-minute walk—and she could borrow her car. Or take it and leave a note. Laurel seemed to spend most of her hours on the phone at the charity office. She walked, the history of her father and David thumping against her shoulder. The office of her mom’s charity—Helpful Hands Reaching Out—was in a quiet park of restored bungalows that dated back from when Lakehaven was first settled.
The sign on the small pink house read HHRO. She opened the door; there was only her mother and a part-time assistant working there. Her mother had run it for nearly ten years now, as a job that still allowed her time to create her mom blog. And when Brent’s business with Cal failed, it had been her mom’s charity job that had kept the Nortons from having to tap into savings to stay afloat.
Laurel’s assistant, Grant, wasn’t at his desk but she could hear her mother’s voice, talking quietly in her office. “Well, I hear Grant, back with our lattes…” Laurel said.
Jane waited a moment and then stepped into the open doorway.
Laurel sat at her desk, her gaze going immediately to Jane, her smile freezing, and Kamala Grayson turning to face her, the inevitable, sugared smile creeping onto her face.
33
PERRI MET HIM at a bar where they’d met once before, when Matteo Vasquez had written the second of the “Girl Who Doesn’t Remember” stories. That one had focused on the connections between the two families, and Perri had felt it made her look a bit petty and vindictive, when she had said nothing that hadn’t been kind and forgiving. But Vasquez had a way of making one’s words take on color and an edge she didn’t want the world to see. Or maybe she had to be more careful about her tone. She had decided that she wouldn’t help him with the third interview, but he was done with her anyway. A back part of her mind had thought he’d write about her lost boy and that rotten Norton girl forever. And of course he wouldn’t. She’d had no mind for strategy back in those grief-crippled days; now her thoughts fell in place with a cold certainty. So he wouldn’t be able to twist hers, or Liv Danger’s, words in a way that made her look bad.
He didn’t look so good himself. Vasquez sat in a back booth with what looked like a Bloody Mary in front of him, a notepad, and a smartphone. He had lost weight since the last time she saw him, and back then he had worn pressed khakis and a nice shirt, looking the part of the polished reporter. Today he wore scruffy jeans and an old flannel shirt and a Round Rock Express cap that had a worn brim. He needed a shave. She realized as he stood to shake her hand that he needed a shower. The polished journalist was gone.
“Mr. Vasquez.”
He gestured across the booth. “Thank you for coming, Mrs. Hall.”
She sat. A waitress approached and she glanced at his drink.
“It’s a Virgin Mary,” he said.
“I’ll have the same,” she said. Although she had just been sent home from her job and there was a crazy man accusing her of arson and theft and she could use a drink, she wasn’t ready to start before lunch. Not yet.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Fine. You’re no longer with the paper?”
“Downsized. I’m freelance now.” He said this like it was a good thing, but she could hear a tension beneath his words.
“What does that even mean?”
“It means I’m on social media a lot, posting supershort news bits. Looking for a topic to write about or an interesting person to interview.”
“You said you got an e-mail about me?”
“You still live next door to Jane Norton.”
“Yes.”
“Her memory ever come back?”
“She says not.”
“I would imagine not. Liv Danger. Who is that?”
“Why are you asking me? You don’t write for the paper anymore.”
“But I still write, and a follow-up on the earlier stories would be interesting.”
“I can’t imagine that they would be.”
“The e-mail I got suggested that you are conducting a vendetta campaign against people tied to the crash.”
Her drink arrived and she thanked the waitress and took a sip. It was perfect and she wondered if it was the only good thing she would experience today.
“Well, that’s ridiculous.”
He slid a piece of paper to her. “This is the e-mail. I’ve had no luck tracing who sent it.”
She read it: