Free Poisonous: A Novel by Allison Brennan

have school tomorrow.”
    He glanced at his laptop and Austin still hadn’t responded. He closed it and put it in the box that protected it from wind and wet. His tree house had one electrical socket that his dad had hired a man to put in, so Tommy sometimes left his laptop up here. He made sure it was plugged in so that it wouldn’t die.
    “Can we have a bowl of ice cream first?” he asked as they climbed out of the tree house.
    “Sure,” Amanda said. “You get the bowls, I’ll dish up.”

 
    Chapter Five
    TUESDAY
    Max had been up since well before dawn, unable to sleep. Insomnia was a familiar part of her life. David thought her lack of sleep was a direct result of being drugged and tortured by a psycho nutcase last June, but sleep had never been easy for her, so she didn’t know why he kept hounding her about it—like he had last night. She’d even seen a doctor about her insomnia—which was a waste of time.
    “I can prescribe you sleeping pills,” he’d said.
    “No,” she’d replied. Maybe three months ago she’d have gone the pill route if she was desperate for slumber, but after being drugged by the psychopathic whack-job, she refused even the mildest pain meds, so she wasn’t going to take pills to sleep.
    The doctor wouldn’t let it go. Feeling quite sure that Max needed more sleep, he suggested another approach. “Doctor Olsen is the best psychiatrist I’ve worked with. She doesn’t take many new patients, but I can convince her to add you.”
    Hell no, Max wanted to say. Instead, she’d politely declined.
    A shrink. Absolutely not. Max understood her own problems, idiosyncrasies, and baggage. She didn’t need anyone else telling her she was a judgmental bitch who let the past control her present. She was far more self-aware than most people. She didn’t know who her dad was. She didn’t have a birth certificate—she didn’t even know where she’d been born. Hell, she didn’t even know if her birthday was really December 31 or if her mother just made it up so Max’s birthday was always a party. Her mother’s disappearance when she was ten, and her college roommate’s murder more than a decade later, had very clearly fueled her obsession with investigating cold cases. What happened in high school was simply more fodder for her neuroses. She didn’t need to spend two hundred dollars an hour on a doctor to tell her she’d had an unusual and difficult childhood. She didn’t need someone to explain why she didn’t trust people or why she was unforgiving to liars. She knew why, and talking it out with some arrogant know-it-all head wasn’t going to change her worldview. Max knew who she was and she was okay with it.
    She just wanted an extra hour of sleep each night.
    A benefit of insomnia, however, was early morning productivity. She drank coffee and updated her boards. The timeline was solid, as she’d told David the night before. She filled in additional details about the people involved in Ivy’s life that she’d learned from Grace or through her staff notes. But it was that two-hour window that intrigued Max.
    Max didn’t have a copy of Ivy’s phone records—she didn’t have the authority to get them on her own, and Grace wouldn’t give her a copy—but Grace had told her that Ivy’s phone hadn’t been used to make a call after she left her house just before ten thirty the night she was killed. She’d sent a dozen text messages to different people up until ten thirty, but Grace had spoken with each person and there was nothing incriminating. Nothing about meeting up, no arguments, nothing suspicious. Max wanted to see those messages nonetheless, and she hoped that when Graham and his team arrived tomorrow he could sweet-talk Grace into sharing.
    Another fact: Ivy, who practically lived her life on social media, hadn’t posted anything from ten the evening she died, until a single tweet at one ten in the morning. Her 10 P.M. update was a selfie taken in her bedroom,