by Jeff Shelby
“Any idea what it said?”
“None,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “Not my place to ask and Meredith didn’t say.” She looked at me. “But her face was still swollen and I could see a faint bruise on her cheek. It was almost gone, but I could see it. Didn’t seem like anything at the time and I hadn’t thought about it again until that asshole mentioned it.”
I twisted around and watched the water in the fountain. Pennies and dimes lined the bottom. A big piece of pink chewing gum rolled into a perfect ball rested next to a quarter.
I turned back around. “Ever see anything else?”
She shook her head. “Not once. Nothing even close. That’s why I never thought about that night as anything out of the ordinary.”
I’d struck Elizabeth once, when she was four. She’d been testing my patience all day, challenging everything I asked her to do, trying to assert her independence. We’d owned a dog then, a thirteen-year-old yellow Lab named Bob and she’d kicked him hard enough in the face that he’d yelped.
I spun her around and spanked her. She’d burst into tears, grabbing at her rear end as she ran to her room.
I was immediately sorry for doing it. Lauren and I were against any sort of physical punishment and though we’d been tempted previously, we’d managed to get through four and a half years without a spanking until I’d broken that afternoon.
I went to her room, lay down on the bed with her and hugged her for an hour as she kept telling me she was sorry, that she loved both Bob and me.
I never touched her in anger again and though I knew better, I couldn’t imagine anyone hitting their child in anger on a regular basis.
I felt Gina’s hand on my shoulder, heard her say something that I couldn’t make out.
Tears began to sting the corners of my eyes. I never knew exactly when they’d appear and rarely could I stop them when they did. My heart started beating faster and my gut ached. I was breathing loudly through my mouth.
Gina’s hand pressed harder against my arm. “Joe? Are you alright?”
I stood, wiped at the tears that continued to fall. “Let’s go get some lunch.”
FORTY-THREE
“What about Olivia?” I asked.
“What about her?” Gina asked.
“Anything,” I said. “Tell me about her.”
We were sitting in a diner near the Hotel Del. The car ride over had been silent after my mini-breakdown. She was working her way through a turkey sandwich and I was ignoring a hamburger.
She took a bite of the sandwich and wiped at her mouth with the paper napkin. “She’s alright. I don’t really know her. All of my dealings are with Jon. Seems a little aloof, but that’s not unusual.”
“How’s that?”
She let her tongue roll over her teeth and shrugged. “Jon thinks he needs a security director and he overpays for me, so I’m happy to do the work. But most of these guys who decide they need security greater than a home alarm system? It’s not really warranted, you know? They do it because their rich friends are doing it. There is no great threat out there.”
“Could be.”
“Sure, could be and my job is to spot one if it shows up. But I’ve worked for Jon for three years and you’re the first guy I’ve had to get physical with,” she said, a small smile creeping onto her face. “And we both know I didn’t need to get physical with you. But you were a stranger showing up on Jon’s property at night and I was looking to send a message.”
I nodded.
“Nobody’s out to get him,” she explained. “People aren’t lurking in the bushes, waiting to accost him. There aren’t Hollywood bozos with paparazzi trailing them, blocking their path. There isn’t much for me to do.” She shrugged. “So it’s not like he sends me out with her when Olivia goes shopping or anything like that. For as wealthy as they are, they keep a fairly low profile, save for their charity stuff. She can go out in relative anonymity.”
“She isn’t a big socialite?” I asked. “With the charities and what not?”
Gina shook her head. “No. She doesn’t do the trophy wife thing. No women’s groups, no planning committees, none of that juvenile bullshit where she has to wear a funny hat and gloves and drink tea just so everyone can compare their husbands’ wallets. She doesn’t have a lot of friends. She does her own thing. Like I said, I don’t know her very well, but I’ve always kind of liked that about her.”
She ate more of her sandwich. The waitress refilled our waters and I picked at the fat French fries next to the hamburger.
“What about the relationship?” I asked. “Between them?”
“Seems okay. No different than any other married couple other than they’re worth close to a billion dollars.”
“Other than that.”
Gina thought for a moment. “If you’re asking me if they get along, I’d say yes. But they don’t spend a ton of time together. And that’s again not unusual in a wealthy marriage. The wealth usually means sacrificing the marriage. They argue, sure, but it’s nothing I’d think that you wouldn’t see in any married household.”
“Which one is closer to Meredith?”
“Jon. Easily.”
“Why?”
She finished off the sandwich and pushed the plate aside. “He’s the one more involved in her life. Always at her games, always at school functions. He doesn’t miss a thing that has to do with her. He’ll cancel meetings at the last second if he has to. She’s priority number one.”
“But she’s not for Olivia?”
She squinted. “I wouldn’t say that. It’s not that she’s not a priority for Olivia, but it’s not obvious with her like it is with Jon. She’s not at every basketball game, she doesn’t schedule everything around Meredith the way Jon does. Olivia is independent and does her own thing. It’s just different.”
That didn’t come as a complete shock. I’d noticed a distinctly different attitude in each of them since Meredith had gone missing. Jordan was panicked, wired with worry, ready to do anything, unable to sit still because he felt like he had to be doing something.
While Olivia was clearly rattled, her anxiety was controlled, managed. She didn’t share her husband’s same delirium over the whereabouts of their daughter and I found that unsettling. I remembered Lauren’s behavior the second we realized Elizabeth was gone. She lost all rationale and was never the same again. That’s how it was with most parents.
“Can I ask you something?” Gina said, holding her water glass to her mouth.
I nodded.
She took a drink and set the glass back on the table. “Why do you do this?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I mean, I can’t imagine what happened with your daughter. I can't imagine what it’s like for Jon right at this moment.” She put her elbows on the table. “But I’d think that every time you try to help someone find their kid, it would be like living it all over again for you.”
The waitress came, cleared our plates and dropped the ticket on the table. I waited another couple of minutes before I answered.
“It is living it all over again,” I said to Gina. “Almost exactly. But there are three reasons I do it.”
Gina stared at me, listening.
“One, I would’ve ended my own life if I hadn’t found something to occupy my time,” I said. “I spent nine days in bed, in a motel room, drinking myself into oblivion. I’d bought every over the counter pill you could buy and stared at them all day long, wondering when I was going to drop them into my stomach with the alcohol and go away.” I folded my hands together on the table. “But I couldn’t because I didn’t know for sure where Elizabeth was. There was this tiny voice inside my head that was warning me that if I killed myself, she’d show up at my funeral. So I couldn’t do it. But I needed something to occupy my time.”
I held up two fingers. “Two, I learned how to look for someone that’s missing. I devoted three years of my life to looking for my daughter, every day, every hour, every
second. It wrecked my life, wrecked my marriage, wrecked my friendships, but I learned how to do it.” I took a deep breath. “And every time I agree to look for someone else’s child, I learn something new, something that I missed in looking for Elizabeth. There’s always something. In my screwed up way of thinking, I always convince myself that the thing that I learn might be the key to finding Elizabeth, the thing that’s been missing all these years.” I smiled and it hurt. “It never is, probably won’t ever be, but you never know.”
Gina nodded, the same sympathetic look on her face that I’d seen on thousands of others for eight years.
“And three,” I said, pulling my wallet out. “I’m good at it. I find kids. Can’t find mine, but I can find everyone else’s, for better or for worse. It’s not always a happy ending, but there is an ending. I’ve never gotten that ending, that finality. But providing it for someone else gives me hope.” I pulled out a twenty and tossed it on the ticket.
“Hope?” Gina asked, watching me as a I stood up.
I nodded and took a deep breath. “Hope that some day I’ll have what they have.” I smiled and it hurt much worse than the previous one. “An answer about what happened to my daughter.”
FORTY-FOUR
“Here’s what’s wrong with Derek’s story,” I said to Gina, handing her a piece of paper as we stood in the parking lot.
She studied it. “Meredith’s transcript.”’
The transcript was what I’d asked Lana McCauley to print out right before we left.
“Yeah. Tell me what you see.”
She leaned back against her BMW and read through it. “She’s smart. We already knew this, though.”
“Look at it,” I said, pointing at the paper.
She read through it again and frowned. “She gets good grades. That’s not a surprise. I don’t get it.”
“She doesn’t get good grades,” I said. “She gets perfect grades.”
“She always has.” She glanced at the paper. “GPA of four-point-four. How the hell do you get a four-point-four?”
“It’s a weighted scale,” I said. “She’s taking AP classes and killing them. Four-point-four means she has gotten an A in every class she’s taken in high school.”
“Again. Not a surprise. She studies hard. Jon stays on her about her grades, even though he knows he doesn’t need to.”
I nodded. “Right. So what Derek said doesn’t make sense to me.”
She stared through me for a moment, then refocused. “He said Jon got on her about a test grade.”
“Exactly.”
She glanced at the transcript, then back to me. “Maybe she got a B plus or something. Jon can be anal like that.”
I shook my head. “She doesn’t get B’s. That transcript shows it. Not even on tests. A perfect GPA means she’s perfect in the classroom. One B would bring it down.” I shook my head again. “There are no poor test grades to get on her about.”
“So it was something else. Or Derek got his story wrong.” Gina cocked an eyebrow. “Not like he’s in the same class of genius as Meredith.”
“I agree. But whatever happened in that pool house, it wasn’t over a grade. I don’t buy that for a second. Meredith may have told Derek that, but if she did, she wasn’t telling him the truth.”
She handed me the transcript back. “So how do we find out?”
“I’m having dinner with your boss tonight,” I said, folding the transcript up and putting it in my pocket. “I’ll ask him.”
FORTY-FIVE
I drove back to my hotel and showered, pulled on a pair of shorts and sat down at the desk near the far window. I wanted to make some notes about what I knew so far about Meredith Jordan.
It took me an hour and a half to record the details of every conversation I’d had involving Meredith. I created a timeline, both for my conversations and for what it looked like had taken place in Meredith’s life. I marked things I thought were important, underlined things I had questions about. I read through them again to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.
And after all that, I still wasn’t sure what I was looking at.
I called down to the concierge and asked if they had a business office where I might be able to use a computer. Five minutes later, a laptop was brought to my room with a portable printer and a ream of paper. I took another hour typing up the notes I’d made and printing them out. I spread them out on the bed and looked through them again.
Reading through my notes just confirmed something I’d already figured out. Nobody knew Meredith Jordan as well as they thought they did, which wasn’t that unusual with teenagers. They put out one image for their friends and family to see, while keeping other things to themselves. It was the unusually confident kid who could be his or herself to all people all the time. The people in her life wanted me to believe that Meredith was one of those unusual kids, but my notes were portraying a normal teenager who hadn’t been honest with everyone.
As I dressed for my dinner with Jon Jordan, my thoughts drifted to my own daughter, as they often did when I was in the midst of the menial tasks of every day life.
I wondered what Elizabeth would’ve been like at Meredith’s age. It was a fruitless exercise, trying to turn a child into an eighteen-year-old, but one I played often. She was a confident little girl, always nodding her head with authority when asked if she was okay or if she was hungry. She was happy to explain when she was upset, often placing her small hand on her hip and wagging her index finger. Even though the gesture was impolite, it was one that always made her mother and me stifle a laugh.
She was terrible at soccer, loved to dance to Springsteen, giggled when people smiled at her, cried when we got upset with her and I wasn’t sure how all that would’ve translated into her teenage years. I wanted to believe that all those idiosyncratic personality traits would’ve merged to form one of the greatest human beings ever created, but reality told me that she would’ve been as frustrating to us as every teenage daughter was to her parents. There was some kernel, though, some fraction of intuition that resided inside of me that insisted that Elizabeth would’ve been special, that I would’ve been proud of her, that she would’ve been different.
What that intuition couldn’t tell me, however, was what had happened to my daughter.
FORTY-SIX
Jon Jordan’s fork froze in mid-air. “Excuse me?”
“You heard my question.”
He set the fork down, anger slowly flooding his features. “Yes, I did and I think it’s fucking inappropriate.”
We were in the back corner of a steakhouse several blocks from my hotel. I’d been ushered in ahead of the forty-plus people lined up inside a velvet rope along the exterior of the restaurant. The nearest tables to the one we were sitting at were empty, giving us a buffer of privacy. The table was covered in stark white linens, with simple black plates and stainless steel flatware.
I’d ordered the smallest filet on the menu and Jordan, though he’d never ordered, was brought a large porterhouse. A bottle of red wine was already on the table, but I’d stuck with ice water. We discussed what I’d learned as we ate and we were nearly finished when I asked him if he believed that Meredith was sexually active.
“It’s completely appropriate based on what I’m hearing from her friends,the I said.
He stared at me across the table, his skin flushed, his eyes intense. “Explain.”
“Answer the question first.”
“Explain,” he repeated through locked teeth.
I leaned into the table. “You aren’t paying me to be appropriate. And every time you ask why I’m asking a question, you are wasting your daughter’s time. How many times do I have to say that?”
Jordan didn’t flinch. His face stayed stone-like. I leaned back in my chair and let a long breath out between my teeth. I could outlast him if I needed to.
“Yes, she is sexually active,” he finally said, unlocking his eyes from mine.
“How do you know?”
/>
His nose twitched and he shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “She spoke to Olivia about birth control a year ago.”
“Spoke to?”
“Asked for,” he said, glancing across the table at me. “She went to Olivia and asked for it.” He started to frown but caught himself. “I didn’t agree with it, but Olivia said it was the right thing to do.”
“Did you talk to her about it?”
He fumbled with the napkin for a moment. “No. It wasn’t something I was comfortable discussing with her. Like I said, I was against it. And I didn't want to make things worse.”
I could understand that. There was no easy way for a father to discuss sex with his daughter. No matter how open a parent wanted to be, it was going to be an emotional conversation. More so when the conversation was between father and daughter.
“What do you mean make it worse?” I asked.
He set the cloth napkin next to his plate. “I’m not crazy about her boyfriend and it’s been a…challenge.”
“Weathers?”
Jordan nodded. “You’ve met him?”
“I have.”
“And?”
“And I think he’s the kind of kid I wouldn’t want around my daughter.”
A cold smile froze on his mouth. “Derek is a prick. First class. Give me ten guys in her class and he’d be the eleventh I’d choose for her to date.”
“Would you ever approve of anyone she dates?”
He thought for a moment. “No, but there will be some I can tolerate. But Weathers?” He shook his head. “He’s an asshole.”
The waiter came, removed our plates and asked if I wanted coffee. I did and he returned momentarily with large cups for both of us.
“So, what?” I asked. “You were fighting about him?”
Jordan blew on the surface of the coffee. “Yeah. Constantly. I didn’t want them together. Period. Meredith, of course, didn’t like it.”
