Thread of Hope (The Joe Tyler Series, #1) (22 page)

“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.”

“You do anything about it?”

“I tried,” he said.  “At first, I just let her know that I didn’t like him and that I didn’t like the idea of them dating.  She didn’t listen.  So then I got involved a little.”

“What’s that mean?”

He sipped at the coffee.  “Took her cell phone away so she couldn’t talk to his dumb ass.  Made her go to a couple of functions with Olivia and me so she couldn’t go out with him.  And I had him pulled out of her classes at Coronado.”

“School let you do that?”

He raised an eyebrow, as if it wasn’t even an issue.  “I paid for a lot of the buildings on that campus.  I didn’t ask for anything in return.  I stay out of the way.  But this was something I wanted done.”

The coffee was scalding and I burnt the tip of my tongue.  I wasn’t sure about the heavy-handed approach, but it made sense.  For him.  He was used to getting what he wanted.

“But none of it worked,” Jordan said.  “We were just screaming at each other all the time and she was still finding ways to be with him.”  He rubbed at his chin, the defeat not sitting well with him.  “Olivia convinced me to back off.  So I did.”

We stayed quiet for a moment, drinking the coffee and not looking at one another.

“As far as you know,” I finally asked.  “Has she had sex with anyone else?”

His shoulders stiffened.  “I don’t believe so, no.”

I wasn’t entirely sure how to bring up the prostitution rumor with him.  I had no doubt he’d deny it immediately, then follow it up with some sort of angry eruption.  And I wouldn’t blame him for that.  Hearing that your daughter may have been trading sex for money would’ve been devastating to any parent. 

There was something in his demeanor, though, that told me if Meredith was involved in prostitution, her father didn’t know.  The uneasiness with which he spoke about getting her on birth control told me a lot.  It wasn’t a subject he talked a lot about and probably tried never to think about.  There were no signs that sex for his daughter was anything other than a normal parental concern.