And she put up her hands. “Thank you for bringing me here. But I am not having this long-overdue talk with you right now.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Adam’s voice broke. “You have to understand. I’ve tried to make so many things up to you. I thought…I thought I had hurt your dad. Giving him that hacker drive. Maybe he found out something he wasn’t supposed to and he killed himself, or… I didn’t know. So I thought the only thing I could do was take care of you. I tried. It was hard, because we had been so close and you didn’t remember me at all. You knew Kamala and David and Trevor when you were little, but I was your most recent friend, and I was gone from your brain.” He steadied his breath. “I just care about you a lot, more than I ever did before, and I miss the Jane I knew. I see flashes of her now and then. Not all of her.”
“No one has been better to me than you have. No one. That’s why what you’ve just done has hurt me so badly.” Those words were true and she felt a ragged edge in her voice.
“You hurt me, too,” Adam said. “But I’m not going to stand here and cry. I just want a chance with you.”
She said nothing.
“I feel weird about leaving you here. Don’t do anything dumb, Jane.”
“I won’t if you won’t,” she said. “But know this. If you tell my mom where I’m at, I’ll never speak to you again.” He nodded. She said, “Can I have that blanket you have in the trunk?”
“Sure. I’ll find a way to help you. You don’t have to doubt me.” He gave it to her, seemed ready to say something else, but then got in the car and drove off. She shivered, watching him leave.
Behind an oak, not far from the water of Lake Austin, she stripped down to bra and panties, jumped into the cold lake, and, shivering, scrubbed the scum and garbage from her skin. She wasn’t clean now exactly, but it helped. She used Adam’s blanket to dry off and she tried to rinse the worst from her clothes, careful not to damage the papers in her pockets. The clothes didn’t smell a whole lot better, but she still shrugged into them.
She walked around the house. Hoping for another shard of memory to pierce her mind and tell her what had happened here.
But nothing.
53
IT MADE SENSE now, even without what Trevor and Kamala had told her.
They had bought a crowbar. Why did you need such a tool? To break into a locked or boarded-up place. The Halls’ lake house was isolated, empty, and no one would have immediately thought to look for them there.
It sat a few hundred feet off Lake Austin, the lawn flat and green, sloping down to the water. Lake Austin always looked more like a river than a lake to her, winding through the beginning rises of the Texas Hill Country. She could see the houses on the opposite side. There was one that was a plain-looking ranch house that looked like it dated to the 1970s and hadn’t been updated. The one farther down the lakeside was a Tuscan giant, all new architecture, high-end and glamorous.
She had come out here a couple of times, for birthday parties when they were little. David’s birthday was at the beginning of summer and he liked the lake. She remembered that he’d nearly drowned out here, and Perri hated the house after that, but Cal refused to sell. When they were in third grade: her, Kamala, Trevor, and David, and other kids. She remembered that: ice cream and cake, jumping off the pier, swimming, the parents all watching over their cocktails, nervous, the cool pleasure of the grass against her bare, wet feet as she ran. They’d played freeze tag, the dumbest game ever, but oh they’d had fun. She remembered being frozen by Trevor—despite his bulk, he was fast—and David tagged her again, saving her, but Trevor caught him and froze him before he could reach the tree that was the safe base. David had sacrificed himself in the game to save her.
It should have been a sweet, funny memory, but it made the back of her throat hot with emotion. Her face, her head hurt. She walked around the house. The land, the house, had to be worth a fortune. But it was quiet and private; something could be hidden here.
If only she knew what it might be. It was infuriating to think the information was a ghost in her brain, untouchable, unreachable.
Then an offhand comment Amari had made rose in her mind: Cal Hall had come to Happy Taco. She hadn’t thought about it much, but he had been in touch with Kamala earlier in the evening; that was in the texting record; if she found David and Jane here, and she was incensed enough to text Trevor—and yes, Kamala had admitted, she had texted Cal as well. It was a possibility, done in anger. Look what your perfect son has done.
She peered in through a window. Maybe this was the window where Kamala saw them kissing. Kamala had said, I watched you through the window. You were crying. He took you in his arms. He kissed you, but like he’d never kissed me. He picked you up in his arms. You kissed him back. You—you wrapped your legs around his waist…He leaned you back against the wall…kissing you like you were everything to him and I was nothing.
She heard a car driving and stopping on the other side of the house. She peered around the corner.
Perri Hall. She froze. She watched Perri park. Then she saw Perri open her trunk and pull out a crowbar. It was sleek and steel and had a deadly cleanness to it.
Jane stepped out from the building. “Mrs. Hall?”
Perri looked like she was ready to drop the crowbar in shock. “Jane. Why are you here?”
“My mother attempted to have me committed to a mental home. She had hired goons to chase me and she got my best friend to betray me. They roughed up Trevor Blinn. I hid here.”
For a moment Perri said nothing to this catalog of tragedy. “Um, you smell bad.” Like a crazy person, Jane thought she would say.
“I hid from them in a Dumpster. My clothes don’t matter. My mother…my mother and your husband were having an affair before my dad died. I’m sorry.”
Perri tapped the crowbar against her own leg, gently. “That is really not a shock to me. I just talked with Randy Franklin.” They shared their information. Jane felt sick at the revelations.
“Why did you bring the crowbar?” Jane asked.
“Because you all were here that night. With a crowbar. Let’s go inside. Maybe it will prompt your memories.”
Perri unlocked the door.
Jane followed Perri through the house. It was a second home, but the furniture was not hand-me-downs from the main house; it was nice, high-end, a beautiful home but sterile, as if it wanted for people. Jane walked through the rooms. No doors were locked, nothing padlocked where you might need a crowbar to gain entry. She found a room with a touch of David about it—photos, posters of Lakehaven football, a wooden Lakehaven Roadrunners baseball bat mounted above the bed. A large window faced the driveway.
”Anything?” Perri asked. And Jane shook her head.
“I hate this house,” Perri said.