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her. But her shirt says Angie,” he pointed out.
    Rich closed in on where we were standing and looked over our shoulders. “Oh, Angie Chambers. She was the one who was killed.”
    I felt air drain from my chest. Why was she using another name? “So you remember her? Her name was Angie? Not Brianna?”
    “I never knew her. I think I started a couple months after that all went down. But it was tragic. Everyone knew about the murder. Now that you mention it, I do remember the cops saying she’d been living under some kind of alias.”
    She’d changed her name. Just like Leslie had. Why? My mind was going in a million directions.
    “And who’s this?” I pointed to the woman next to her, squinting to make out the name on her shirt. “Toni?”
    “Yeah, I knew Toni. Those two were pretty tight, supposedly. I think Toni was a student at Wash U.”
    A friend. Toni. A student at Wash U. I committed the information to my mental contacts list. I motioned to Aidan that I was ready to leave. “Thanks so much for your help,” I said.
    “Like I said, it was a while ago.” Rich shrugged.
    “This is something, though,” I said. It wasn’t much, but it was the first real piece of information I had about the mysterious Brianna Siebert aka Angie Chambers aka my mother.

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    FOUR
    THANKS TO RICH , we had a next step: finding Toni Whateverherlastnamewas.
    We needed access to another computer. As we walked around and looked for one, I pulled my hat lower and scanned the people on the street, waiting for buses, walking strollers, slumped on benches. Did anyone recognize us? I couldn’t be sure. Was this how someone like Sam Beasley felt? Fame was kinda like a fabric softener sheet no one told you was clinging to your ass.
    “You think maybe Toni knows more about Chet?” Aidan asked. “Especially if he was your mom’s boyfriend?”
    “It’s possible,” I said. “I don’t know if I buy that my mom could have been involved with a criminal.”
    “Hey, I’m with you , aren’t I? And vice versa?” He gave me a lopsided grin.
    It wasn’t the same thing and he knew it. “He’s just such a creeper. And dangerous. Who could be attracted to that guy?”
    He shrugged. “You never know what he was like fifteen years ago. People change over time. Maybe he was better looking and nicer back then. Or who knows what she was really like? Maybe she had issues.”
    I tipped my head in concession. It was possible. If you considered all of the information I had so far, it was even probable.
    Still, I knew I was biased, but I couldn’t imagine that anyone related to me could be an evil person and especially not Chet-level evil. “There must be other possibilities. I mean, we still don’t know what the relationship was.”
    “Something went wrong. We know that. She changed her name, right? Maybe she got mixed up in bad stuff without realizing it, whether it was romantic or not.” Aidan stared up at the gray sky as he thought through potential scenarios, playing detective. “Maybe he used her to hide the money in her house or something. She found out what he was doing and questioned him about it and he killed her.”
    “Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “But she changed her name before she was killed. If we’re going on the theory that she changed her name because she knew she was in danger and was trying to escape him and his shady money, that wouldn’t explain why the money was in her house that night.” That led me to the other possibility, which neither of us was saying out loud: that she was fully culpable, that she knew exactly what Chet was doing and had even participated in it in some way. People changed their names when they were avoiding the law all the time. Hadn’t my sister done that very thing? She’d changed my name, too, from Maggie Siebert to Willa Fox.
    This was all beside the point, though.