Noah stared at Ava as his drugged mind wrestled with what he was hearing and began to connect the dots, lending support to his worst fears. Maybe there was some hidden reason to question the depth or quality of Ava’s anesthesia training, which the NSC knew about and did not want to be exposed. It was also the reason he’d hired Roberta Hinkle.
As if reading Noah’s mind, Ava lifted her legs off her ottoman and moved herself forward to sit on it, bringing her closer to Noah. She leaned toward him and lowered her voice, presumably to keep the men on the floor below from hearing. “Before I tell you what I plan to tell you, I want to ask what the private investigator found that made you suddenly fly the hell off to Lubbock?”
Noah felt himself stiffen. They had reached a critical juncture, a crossroads, a moment of truth. Although he felt nervous about Keyon and George being in the house, emphasizing her home-court advantage, he thought it was time to fish or cut bait, whatever the consequences.
43
THURSDAY, AUGUST 17, 11:15 P.M.
Noah debated how to start. He girded himself for what was to come as he settled on presenting the information in the order he had learned it. “I had told Ms. Hinkle you had graduated from the Coronado High School in Lubbock in 2000, so she started there,” he said. “Unexpectedly, she found that there had not been an Ava London in the Coronado High School for the last fifty years.”
Noah paused, watching Ava and her reaction, which he’d expected would be a mixture of anger and defensiveness as she had been caught in a blatant lie. Instead, she just nodded as if she expected what Noah had said and took it in stride.
“The private investigator decided on her own to look for Ava London at high schools in the Lubbock area,” Noah said, watching Ava’s lack of response with continued disbelief. It seemed that she never ceased to surprise him. Here was yet another layer of the onion. He went on: “And after considerable searching Ms. Hinkle was successful. She found an Ava London who’d attended Brownfield High School in a small town of the same name about forty miles southeast of Lubbock.”
Ava nodded again. “Is that all?” she questioned, in response to Noah’s second pause.
“No, it’s not all,” Noah said. “Ava London was in the class of 2000, but she didn’t graduate. Ava London committed suicide on a Friday night, April fourteenth, 2000. It was almost a year to the day from her father’s suicide carried out with the same gun in the same room. After the event, it was thought that Ava London had been harassed on social media following her father’s death and urged and browbeaten to emulate her father. It seems as if it was an early case of cyberbullying.”
“She was a very capable private investigator,” Ava said with little or no emotion.
“Ms. Hinkle didn’t tell me all those details,” Noah said. “I read several issues of the Brownfield Gazette that were published after the event. It was big news in Brownfield.”
“And I’m sure there must be more tidbits the private investigator discovered,” Ava said almost mockingly.
“There were,” Noah said. “She found out that there was a Gail Shafter in the same class as Ava London. I had told Ms. Hinkle that was your Facebook user name.”
“Very interesting,” Ava said with a semi-smile. “What else?”
“That’s it,” Noah said. “Ms. Hinkle was planning on moving her investigation to the Brazos University Medical Center yesterday, but before she could do so, she was murdered in her home. What worries and horrifies me is that it wasn’t a coincidence that it happened when it did.”
“I’m afraid I have to agree with you,” Ava said, suddenly becoming serious. “The timing is just too coincidental.”
Noah shuddered and stared at Ava. Here was yet another surprise. To his utter dismay, she was agreeing with his worst fears that he had played an indirect role in Roberta Hinkle’s death. “Who are you?” Noah asked existentially.
“I’m Ava London,” Ava said without a moment’s hesitation, regaining her aplomb. “I have so completely become Ava London that occasionally I forget that I wasn’t always she. As an example, I often truly believe my father committed suicide. It’s like what you were suggesting one night when we were talking about how people on social media can get confused with what is true and what they have made up to make their lives look and sound better.”
“What about Ava London committing suicide?” Noah asked. “How does that fit in?” He was having trouble understanding how the Ava he knew could be so insouciant about the history she was cavalierly revealing, especially if she had played a role in the online harrassment.
“Obviously, I changed the narrative in that regard,” Ava said. “I can imagine you find all this shocking, but understand I had always been jealous of Ava London and had always wanted to be her. Her death was what made it possible, and my need for a new identity was the stimulus. And it was easy. We looked a lot alike, although she was prettier. All it took was a quick nose job, which I always wanted to do anyway, hair color change, and a few forms to be filled out at Lubbock County Courthouse to make it legal.”
“Why didn’t you do the legal work in Brownfield?” Noah asked. He hadn’t thought about checking the court records in Lubbock.
“I’m not sure they would have let me do it in Brownfield,” Ava said. “When you want to change your name, the authorities discourage and often deny celebrity names, and Ava was a local celebrity.”
“You said you had a need for a new identity,” Noah said. “I don’t understand. Why?”
“I was being held back by my old identity,” Ava said. “When I moved with my dentist boss to Lubbock and got a taste of what an education could do for you, I needed a new beginning. Becoming Ava London was that new beginning. She had had a different outlook on life and a different scholastic record. She would have gone to college and become something more than a dental assistant. She would have at least been the dentist.”
“In the articles I read in The Brownfield Gazette, you, as Gail Shafter, as well as two other classmates were named as having harassed Ava London after her father’s suicide on AOL Instant Messaging to encourage her to follow her father’s lead,” Noah said. “Was that true?”
“It might have been, on some level,” Ava admitted. “But there were a lot of girls who were jealous of Ava London, and she was an entitled snob. What irked me and a sizable number of other female classmates at the time was that she began using her father’s suicide to her advantage, looking for more acclaim and status because she was supposedly suffering, the poor dear. It made a lot of us sick, and I wasn’t afraid to tell her. But I never encouraged her to kill herself.
“She and I had been friends, or at least as friendly as was possible with the most popular girl in the class who was never satisfied with her status. But when I was honest with her about using her father’s suicide as she was, she ostracized me and got me harassed big time about being a slut. And one other thing. When I was in the ninth grade I got harassed so much online I couldn’t go to school for a week, and Ava London and two of her then closest friends were the culprits.” Ava shook her head. “Growing up is getting progressively more difficult with social media providing instant, nonstop communication. And I think it is harder for girls than boys with the mixed messages we must deal with about sex. If you don’t indulge, you’re a prude. If you do, you’re a slut. I wasn’t a slut. I only had one boyfriend in high school and that was short lived.”