Jeff Shelby - Thread of Hope

“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.”

“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.”

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.