The A-Word by Joy Preble Page B

a scheme. So:
     •   I would spend some quality time researching newspaper reports from the day five years ago when Amber had her own life-changing AI. This would be a little tricky. Yes, there had been a break-in, but technically nobody was hurt. When Terry came home, she was sitting in the mess. (Of course she was dead. And Bo had already talked to her. But Terry didn’t know.) That was the problem: no living person but me knew.
     •   If I figured out something, I would get Casey to take me to Austin to follow up. My opinion was this: Amber didn’t know because she didn’t
want
to know. Or she was afraid of knowing, which I totally understood. I wasn’t sure what was going on between her and Bo Shivers, but she was afraid of him, too. Maybe because he had been there when her whole life turned into something else.
     •   Whatever the truth was, I needed to find it. There were problems I couldn’t solve. I couldn’t put my family back together unless my father decided he wanted to come home full-time. I couldn’t have my brother the way he used to be. I couldn’t stop him from getting worked up over Lanie Phelps. I was hard-pressed to find a way to track down Renfroe and Manny again. But Amber’s death? That was doable.

B y one in the afternoon, here is what I had discovered about Amber:
     •   The only mention of the robbery was a small article in the local news section of the
Austin American-Statesman
. She was referred to as a student named A. Velasco. Her full first name was not given. But it had to be her.
     •   The article also named the address—and after digging some more, I discovered a record of the sale of the apartment building two months later. I guess it had been notable because it was by the UT campus and not far from all the hip places on Guadalupe and Lamar and 6th Street—so it was worth a bucket of money.
     •   Amber Velasco had no other mention online from that time or any other.
    This did not surprise me, since both Casey and I had tried looking her up before on personal stuff like Facebook or Tumblr. Casey said Management did their best to wipe out reference once you were no longer exactly human. I guess the A. Velasco had slipped by them somehow. I had no problem believing this was possible. My brother still appreciated a toke of weed now and then to settle himself, so I knew the A-word community wasn’t all-knowing.
    Terry McClain, on the other hand, was all over the web. For starters, there was his blog: Of Mice and Men. He hadn’t posted in over a year, but back five years ago he was writing up a storm. Stuff about Comic Con—he favored
Star Trek
over
Battlestar Galactica
, although he rattled on for so long that I think I fell asleep with my eyes open—and a series of posts that talked about his work testing drugs on mice.
    This gave me pause. I remembered how he experimented with the tainted vitamins that Renfroe was giving Mom. He fed them to his mice, and they forgot to look for cheese. Of course that hadn’t happened yet when he was blogging.
    Another series proclaimed his undying love for the South Congress doughnut truck. For each day that week, he talked about doughnuts. Sweet. Savory. Weird. In Houston we had normal doughnuts: glazed or jellies or what have you. But in Austin you could get doughnuts with fried chicken on them. Or ones with habañero peppers. Terry’s favorite was a maple frosting and bacon doughnut which sounded disgusting, but who was I to judge people’s food preferences?
    Only one article about the robbery quoted him. “My girlfriend was terrified,” he said. Once again, Amber’s name was left out.
    I wondered if I could ask her about that. Was it Bo who’dfinagled the silence? Or did the police want to protect her identity because the criminals were still at large?
    All I could say for sure was that I was now craving doughnuts in the worst way. It was time to take a break. Plus, Maggie was coming over to discuss