She went to the charity e-mails, paged through them. Notes to Laurel’s assistant, drafts of e-mails soliciting funds. A note to a bank about an unusual deposit, her mother had to fill out some paperwork. It had been a large overseas donation.
Jane skipped to the accounts she hadn’t seen before. They looked mostly like spam; perhaps these were the accounts her mom used when shopping online or enrolling in a loyalty program. But there were several from banks overseas, and they recorded deposits and withdrawals. Like the spreadsheets she’d seen in her father’s file she’d taken from Randy Franklin. She even recognized some of the abbreviated names: HFK, Alpha. Those had been entries in the spreadsheets.
Were the spreadsheets in her father’s file not her dad’s at all but her mother’s? Why?
She printed out a couple of the bank e-mails, folded them, and tucked them into her jeans pocket.
She went back to the search window and searched for “Jane.”
She found two recent e-mail threads. The first was with a private mental hospital just outside Austin. Questions, arrangements, discussions about whether or not it was the proper place for Jane. How the involuntary-commitment process would work, if that was the path she chose to pursue.
She means to lock you up. Or she did.
And then the second batch of e-mails, all variations found in a drafts folder. She read them, her heart hammering in her chest:
As you know I wrote the Blossoming Laurel: Modern Mom blog for many years, being one of the top five parenting blogs for an extended amount of time, generating both substantial advertising revenue and readership. I wrote primarily about the challenges of raising my daughter Jane (while running a successful charity) and then later about the tragic loss of my husband, Brent. I am proposing a new book project, dealing with my daughter’s traumatic accident and resulting amnesia, the crash investigation and how it made us pariahs in our small tight-knit suburban hometown. I especially wish to focus on the way amnesia patients are ignored by our medical system and how my daughter Jane was reduced to living on the streets (against my wishes), my difficult decision to commit her to a mental facility…
Jane closed her eyes. Her life, her problems, the current disaster, were fodder for her mother’s career, still. And she was writing like the commitment had already happened. Like it was just a chapter. The same way she had treated the rest of Jane’s life. She Internet-searched the intended recipient’s name: it was a top literary agent in New York.
She went to her mother’s browser and went through the history. Many views of the video of Perri attacking Jane. Searches for names like Brenda Hobson, Shiloh Rooke, Amari Bowman, Randy Franklin…but all from the week before.
Had her mother been building a list? Jane had never checked if her mother had an alibi for the night when Brenda Hobson’s home burned.
It couldn’t be. Her mother. But…if those spreadsheets her father had been investigating belonged to her mother…
She thought of the odd code written in her father’s file: R34D2FT97S. She had written it and the other odd numbers in the file down on a piece of paper in her wallet. She entered the number into the search window for the computer. Nothing. She entered it into a browser search window. Nothing.
Then she noticed the two entries under the long code. U: and P:, each with their own entry. Username and password? Typical log-in requirements if it was a website. Maybe the long code was a website address. She copied R34D2FT97S into the address line for the browser, added the usual “.com.”
The browser jumped to a clean black page. A message on the page read, You are not authorized for access from this system. Thank you.
It was a website, but it couldn’t be accessed. No way here to enter the username and the password. What did that mean? What was it? It wasn’t the kind of website address a person would enter, just looking to see what it was. It made her uneasy.
She heard her mother enter through the garage door. Jane wiped the browser history, yanked the drive from the port, and put the computer to sleep. The stray bits of the world she knew had been shredded, and she forced a smile to her face as she walked into the kitchen. Her mother unloaded the foil-wrapped tacos.
“Hungry, darling?”
“Yes, Mom.” She sounded subservient, but for the moment that was the role to play. She had to figure out a way out, a place to go where her mother couldn’t find her and stick her in a padded room.
She needed a weapon with which to fight back. A secret to stop her mother cold. And if her mother was Liv Danger…she needed a way to put a stop to this now, before someone else got hurt. She didn’t want to call the police on her own mother.
They ate and then she went upstairs to text Trevor. She had changed her plans.
51
SOMETIMES SMALL TALK stuck in Perri’s mind; such knowledge had been a good way to navigate the social strata of Lakehaven, to remember where someone went to school or whose brother married whom or that someone’s parent worked in an unusual field. She had made small talk a few times with Randy Franklin during the investigation and it seemed a miracle that any of it had stuck in her head during the haze of David’s death—but it had. She remembered once that he’d mentioned he was from La Grange, a town halfway between Austin and Houston on Highway 71, famous for its kolache bakeries—sweet and savory pastries that Czech immigrants had brought to Texas. When driving back from Houston the Halls would often stop at a certain bakery, but Randy insisted that a rival bakery a block down was better. This smallest of details had stuck in her mind.
She did some Internet searching and found Randy Franklin’s parents still lived in La Grange; his father had been a coach at the high school there. She called the number she found, and Randy Franklin answered with a hesitant yes. She said, “Oh, sorry, wrong number,” and hung up.
It was about a sixty-five-mile drive. She would go as soon as Cal left. He did not seem the least bit inclined to do so, standing in the kitchen showered but in yesterday’s clothes, sipping coffee. He eyed her over the mug.
“What’s on your agenda today?”
“Lots of errands to run. I need to get going.”
He didn’t take the hint. “Jane posted a video about you.” He held up his phone and thumbed the control.
Jane, sitting at a desk. “My name is Jane Norton. Recently a video of me being dragged toward a grave has gone viral on the Internet, and many harsh comments are being directed toward Perri Hall, the woman in the video. Please don’t hold this against Perri. She is the mother of my dear friend David, who was in a car crash with me and died. David’s grave had been defaced and Mrs. Hall was understandably devastated, as any parent would be. She is a good person who has suffered a terrible tragedy. Put yourself in her shoes. Please don’t post that video anymore, take it down if you’ve shared it or put it up. You are mocking a woman who lost her only child. I don’t want to be a part of that. Thanks for listening.”