Can you come outside? Let’s talk on your porch. I’m at my mother’s house. If you want, we can tape me saying that I forgive you for attacking me and then that can go viral, too.
Face-to-face. The last two meetings had not gone well. Her striking and dragging Jane, Jane knocking hot coffee out of her hands and throwing her out of the house. She could wake up Cal and get him to go with her. This could be a trap. What if she was the crowbar attacker?
She decided. Meet me on my porch in ten minutes.
She went to Cal’s door and listened. She heard a soft snoring. She went downstairs and loaded her Keurig with the first cup of coffee and turned on the porch light.
49
PERRI SAT ON the porch, two steaming mugs of coffee at her side. Jane walked up the steps; Perri had watched her come out of the Norton house, not turning on the outside lights, closing the door very quietly.
She held something in her hand, but it wasn’t a crowbar, to Perri’s relief. It was a piece of paper.
Perri offered her the coffee, hoping Jane wouldn’t slap the mug out of her hand this time. Jane took the coffee and sat across from her.
“Cal’s inside. I asked him to stay.” Perri kept her voice low.
“I’m not here to fight with you. I’m here to ask you two questions and show you something. And it’s going to cost us both a lot, but we need to know.”
“You’ve gotten me out of bed, this better be good.”
“Is my copy of A Wrinkle in Time on David’s bookshelf?”
It was the most unexpected question. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “I just noticed it was there the other day. I didn’t know why he would have it, unless you had loaned it to him.”
“I didn’t. Kamala stole it.” And she told her about how Kamala had planted the note, what her once-best friend had done that fateful night, her seeing them at the lake house, her planting the note Jane had written in the aftermath of her father’s loss, and then leaving the book in David’s room.
“She texted someone else. A boy who cared about me. It doesn’t matter who it is; this isn’t his fault. David and I were trying to get away from him, he was following us from the lake house. We lost him and turned onto that road. And then the crash.”
Perri stared at her, as if trying to reconcile the fact that she was finally being given a partial story of those missing hours. “It’s still your fault.”
“If that was all there was to the crash, if it was simply my fault, why is someone targeting people now?”
Perri didn’t say anything for a long time; it is a hard thing to have a pillar of why you hate someone suddenly stripped away. “She saw you at the lake house kissing my son? You and David…”
“Did you and my mom know about us? Adam said he saw the two of you arguing that night.”
Perri cupped her hands around her mug. “It wasn’t about you, no.”
“What, then?”
“I had seen her eyeing Cal. She was a widow; she was distraught and she was lonely. I didn’t like the attention she was giving him. I knew she wasn’t thinking clearly and wouldn’t have betrayed our friendship and so I told her to stop with the looks. Cal’s so wrapped up in his own thoughts he never noticed. She was angry with me, denying she was after him, hurt at the accusation. Finally, I believed her. She left.”
Jane whispered to herself, and later Perri would realize she’d said, “Which anvil do I drop on you first?”
Then Jane said, “I was pregnant. I miscarried during the coma.”
Perri rocked in her chair, nearly spilling the coffee as she set it down, a cold agony clawing at her heart and her guts. “David?” she finally said.
“Yes. I wasn’t with anyone else. I was seeing this other boy, but we hadn’t slept together.”
“You and David.” She turned away for a moment. “Jane, when you were little, your mom and I used to joke that you and David would marry. Or date. Just joking, but you sort of hope. You were always so cute together. Inseparable. But you just say things like that…you don’t really mean them.” Her voice drifted off.
Jane sipped the coffee. She didn’t look at Perri. “You were like a second mom to me. There’s always one of your parents’ friends you think, yeah, you could turn to her if you needed to. You could trust her. She would help you. You were that person for me. I thought you knew that.”
Perri couldn’t speak.
“I loved you. And Mr. Hall. Not just David. I lost him and I lost you both, too. Maybe you didn’t care about losing me. Not a bit. I’m not your kid. David was special and I’m a screwup.”
“Jane…”
“I know you had your grief. I just thought you would have sympathy or empathy or some kind of ‘pathy’ for me. I mean, not right away. My brain got broken and I lost the whole sense of who I was, and now I know I lost the baby…” She stopped. She took refuge in another sip of coffee.
“Why didn’t you or your mother tell us?”
“She never told me. I found notes about the miscarriage in a copy of my medical file she had; she had never shown it to me. And if I knew I was pregnant, I don’t remember it. I didn’t tell anyone. I don’t even know if I told David. But we had talked about running away to Canada. Maybe he wanted to get me away from here.”
“If you had told him, he would have told me and Cal.”
“Would he? Lakehaven isn’t exactly a hotbed of teen pregnancy. It can change plans. And Lakehaven kids have big plans.”
That truth was like a knife in the air between them.
“But he and Kamala…” She didn’t finish. “I’m afraid to ask what the second question is.”
“Did you ever find, in David’s stuff, a flash drive with a musical-note label?”
Perri sipped the coffee; she could hardly taste it, wrapping her head around the miscarriage. David’s child. Jane carried David’s child. Jane cost me a grandchild, too—the thought leapt up, unbidden, and she pushed it away. She could not go there. Jane had lost as well. So she forced herself to think, and the memory came back, sharp and sudden. “Yes. A flash drive with a musical-note label. It was in a paper bag of stuff that Randy Franklin gave me. Some of David’s belongings that were in his backpack or his pockets when he died. That, his phone, some cash, his keys. It was attached to his keys that were in his pocket. The police gave it to Randy Franklin when he was meeting with them; then Randy gave it back to me.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“I think so.” She in fact remembered clearly: she’d seen it again recently while going through his desk drawers when she’d ended up finding the Liv Danger notebook.
“Would you please give it to me?”
“What kind of music is on it?”
“It actually belonged to my dad. My mom gave a bunch of my dad’s computer odds and ends to David after he died. I’d like it back. Yeah, it’s just music that belonged to Dad.”
She didn’t believe Jane. “Why is this suddenly important?” Perri asked.
“It just is,” Jane said. “It was my father’s. You let me have it, I’ll make a video and post it saying that you weren’t at fault for what happened at the cemetery.”
“I’m not sure I know where it is.”
“I’ll come with you to look.”