Thread of Hope (The Joe Tyler Series, #1) (21 page)

“You don’t care that your girlfriend is missing?” Gina asked.

“My dad’s an attorney,” he said, the surliness I’d seen before returning in full effect.  He produced a cell phone and held it up like a trophy.  “You wanna talk to me anymore, you run it by him.”

He stared at me for a long moment, then looked at Gina.  Satisfied that he’d stymied us, he chuckled and slipped the phone back into the pocket of his shorts.  “That’s what I thought.”  He picked up his book and gave each of us one last look.  “Later.”

He walked back through the door and into the high school.

FORTY-TWO

We stopped back in the main office so I could ask Lana McCauley to print me out one more thing.  She did so without uttering a word.

Gina and I walked outside into the courtyard at the front of the school.  There was a large stone fountain in the middle of it and water trickled quietly.

“Off the record,” I said to her.  “Jordan seem like the type of guy who’d hit his daughter?”

“I’m not sure what that type is.”

“What have you seen, Gina?”

She took a deep breath and sat down on the edge of the bench that encircled the fountain.  “If I hadn’t seen anything, I’d tell you that, no, he’s not capable of it.  He’s a good father.  He’s got a brutal temper, but he’s a good father.”

I sat down next to her.  “But you have seen something.”

She bit down on her bottom lip for a moment.  Fine wrinkles rippled across her forehead.  She brushed her hair back away from her face.

“That thing he was talking about back there?” she finally said.  “The camping trip?  I remember when she came back.  It was a Sunday night.  Jon and Olivia left that morning, went to Chicago to meet with some investors.  I drove him to the airport.”  Her mouth twisted aimlessly for a moment.  “Olivia went into the airport first.  Jon hung back.  He gave me an envelope to give to Meredith when she got home.  He told me they’d fought before she left and he felt bad about it.  He wanted me to make sure I gave it to Meredith the moment she came home.”

The sun was hot on my neck.  The breeze from the other side of the school where we’d spoken to Derek was nonexistent.  I kept listening.

“She came home late,” she continued.  “About nine or so.  I went up to her room and gave her the envelope.  She was unpacking her bag.  She opened it right in front of me, started crying as she read it.”

“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.