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.
