“And why would I believe that?”
“Listen, if I were coming after you because I bore a grudge against you for not saving my son’s life, I wouldn’t have just stopped at breaking up your engagement. You’d have a knife in your guts.” She tried to sound tough.
He laughed. “Oh, sure, Mrs. Lakehaven. You’re a real badass.”
“I know you think this is about you. And Brenda Hobson, and whoever else worked the crash. But it’s not. It’s about me. You’re just an innocent victim. Like me.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I can prove it to you,” she said.
“Let’s go inside and talk about it,” he said. “I make a real good iced tea.”
She didn’t want to be alone with him. He was barely taller than she was, but he was powerfully built. The way he smiled at her made her skin crawl.
“What’s that?” he asked as she brought the notebook with her.
“Proof,” she said.
He shrugged and walked into the house, her following. “You want iced tea?”
She didn’t but she said sure. This had clearly been his parents’ house; photos of the family were still on the mantel, in the hallway. The parents must be dead, she realized, and now the house was his. In a photo, a man who easily could be Shiloh’s brother wore an Army uniform, perhaps on a tour of duty.
She followed Shiloh into the kitchen. It was orderly, immaculate, neat as a soldier’s. He poured the tea from a pitcher, then added mint and lemon when she nodded. He poured his own, added a slug of Jim Beam from a bottle on the tiled counter. He raised the bottle toward her and she shook her head.
“I drank most of that when Mimi broke off the engagement,” he said. “I did not get a sympathetic vibe from you or your husband this morning, Mrs. Hall. I don’t think that in this moment you realize”—he smiled again—“I am the victim here.”
“I do realize that. So am I.”
“Yeah, you really looked helpless beating up on Jane Norton. I saw the video.” The awful little smile returned. “You sure got a lot of energy.”
“I know how the video looks,” she said.
“Do you?” He smiled. “Look, if it’s you and the husband pulling this little revenge, tell me, and I’ll concentrate on him. He’s just going to drag you down.”
“I’ve already filed for divorce,” she said. Why had she told him that? It only made his smile a little sharper. “And Cal would never do this. He’s a CEO, an investor, he wouldn’t dirty his hands or risk his reputation.” She was speaking too fast, telegraphing her nerves. He seemed like a man who could scent fear on the air.
Do this for David.
“And I am not Liv Danger. It’s Jane Norton and her mother.”
“And I believe you why?”
She showed him the notebook with the Liv Danger cartoon character. “Jane wrote these stories; my son drew the character. They always did this kind of stuff when they were little, I guess they thought they could design a video game around her.”
“And this proves what?”
“No one knew they had done this, except Jane.” She showed him the title page, where David and Jane claimed authorship of Liv Danger. “My husband and I never knew about this character. Only Jane did.”
“But she has amnesia. Why would she remember this cartoon character?”
“It’s a lie. Or it was a lie, until her memory came back. Or she has her own set of Liv Danger drawings and knows the name.”
“Talented kids,” he said, paging through the images. “Where did you find this, since only Jane knows about this character?”
“Hidden. On the top shelf of my son’s room. I couldn’t bear to change anything in the room after he died. I never threw out any of his stuff. She must have thought that he had tossed the notebook.”
He shut the notebook. “Or she doesn’t really remember. I saw her at the wreck. Girl was hurt bad.”
“Would I bring you this evidence if I was Liv Danger? It points to either me or to the Nortons. It narrows the field. I would only bring this if I’m not Liv.” He could not find out about the postings being from her computer; it would be damning evidence.
That gave him pause. He drank his tea, watching her. She didn’t like the way he stared at her; he was ten years younger than her, but he watched her with the gaze of the guy in a bar who wants to buy you a drink and you want the floor to swallow him whole.
“Or you want me to think you’re not Liv.”
“You could take it straight to the police.”
He chewed his lip.
“Listen.” She made her voice stern. “If my husband wanted revenge on you, he wouldn’t steal from you and break up your engagement. He’d get your ass fired from the county; he has friends in high places. He’d plant drugs on you so you’d go to jail for a long time.”
Shiloh, at this, laughed.
“But he wouldn’t take your girlfriend away from you. That’s small.”
“Not to me it’s not,” Shiloh said. “So, you’ve had your tea and you’ve pled your case, Miss Perri-with-an-i. You can go now.”
“I want your help proving the Nortons are behind this.”
“Yeah, a girl who’s got amnesia and her mother firebombed Brenda’s house.”
“Go do an Internet search on ‘Laurel Norton mom blog.’ Laurel wrote this blog on raising her daughter, for years. It will show that this is a woman who is obsessed with her kid’s image. And before the accident, there was another accident: her husband supposedly died cleaning his gun.”
Now she had his attention. “Supposedly?”
“Did I stutter?” she said, and his lip curled for a moment. She forged ahead: “I always wondered. How low she would stoop. A woman who writes all about her child’s private moments so she can sell stroller ads and yogurt coupons on her blog. And then she loses her husband, and then her daughter kills my son, and her perfect image of herself, the one she’s broadcast to the world, is shredded. It’s not fair. But it is what it is.” She took a deep breath. “So now her daughter’s homeless, a mental case, and why wouldn’t she want revenge on everyone who’s somehow contributed to her pain?” The more she spoke, the more convinced she became. This was the answer. Maybe Jane had defaced the gravestone and then gone to the cemetery hoping to run into Perri, or planning to wait for her to inevitably show up. She might have bribed the driver to take the video, or maybe it wasn’t really a rideshare car at all but a friend ready to record Perri’s grief and rage. And Perri had neatly put her neck into the noose of their making.
“So you think my next step is to read a mom blog?” Darkness in Shiloh’s tone.
“Yes. It’s called Blossoming Laurel. And then you’ll see I’m telling you the truth.”
“So let’s say I believe you, Mrs. Hall. What then? Why are you telling me this instead of the police?” He asked like he already knew the answer.
“Well. You wanted to know. You could stop them.”