Thread of Betrayal (4 page)

EIGHT

Ten minutes later, Lauren and I were back in front of the home with the putting green in Soaring Eagle. I’d knocked on the door again, got no answer, and went back to the car. I slipped back behind the wheel and shoved my hands in front of the heater.

“Now what?” Lauren asked from the passenger seat.

I turned the heat down to a lower setting. “We wait. Nothing else to do.”

She sighed and leaned back in the seat. “Great.”

I understood her frustration. Our daughter, the daughter we'd been missing, the daughter I'd been searching for for nearly ten years, was with this girl. Morgan. I wanted to rip the town apart, call out an APB, do anything I could to locate them. But I couldn't. The only thing either of could do was wait.

“If we leave, we might miss her,” I said.  “If we…”

She held up a hand. “I got it. I don’t need an explanation.”

I pushed the button on the side of the driver’s seat and it complied, reclining slightly.

“Sorry,” Lauren said after a few minutes. “Didn’t mean to cut you off.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m just frustrated.”

“I know.” I was, too. But I was used to it.

“I know there’s nothing else to do,” she said. “I’m just worn down from this chase. Or whatever you want to call it.”

“I know.”

“Is this how it always is?” she asked. She didn’t look at me, just played with her fingers, picking at her nails, rubbing her thumb over her knuckles.

I shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes it’s easier.”

“How is it ever easier?” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t see that.”

I stared at the house for a long moment.

“I was in Dallas, maybe two years ago,” I said. “I can’t even remember why I was there initially, but I ended up helping this woman find her son. He was a college kid. All she knew was that he’d had a fight with his girlfriend. Hadn’t checked in with his mom in a couple of days and she was freaked out. Understandably. I went and talked to the girlfriend. He wanted her to come home with him for the summer. She wasn’t sure her parents would be okay with that. It was a fight over nothing. But she knew when he got frustrated he’d go up to this lake in Oklahoma and camp by himself, just to get away. And they had a deal. If she ever really needed to get ahold of him, an emergency or something, she could text him with a code word and he’d call. She texted him. He called back in about thirty seconds. She told him his mother was worried, that I was looking for him. He felt terrible, apologized to her, to me and immediately called his mom.” I shrugged. “That was pretty damn easy.”

“They weren’t all like that,” she said. She didn’t pose this as a question, just stated it like something she knew to be true.

“No. But some were. You just never know.”

“I wish we had a secret code,” she said, her voice wistful.

I reached out and briefly touched her hand. “Me, too,” I said. “Me, too.”

She smiled at me, a sad smile that tore at my heart. As much as I wanted to find Elizabeth for me, I wanted to find her for Lauren, too. For both of us. I glanced out the front window, my eyes scanning the road. Every car that passed us on the street gave me a little twinge, wondering if it was the one that might be carrying Elizabeth. But each one continued by, either headed toward another gigantic house or out of the subdivision.

“Was that night in San Diego weird for you?” Lauren asked, shifting in her seat.

“Which night?”

“Me and you,” she said. “The hotel.”

I’d been in San Diego two weeks prior, helping out an old friend, when I’d gotten the photo of Elizabeth that set this entire search in motion. In the middle of helping my friend, Lauren and I spent the night together in the hotel where I was staying. It was the first time we’d been together since the divorce. And there hadn’t been time to discuss it.

“Weird?” I asked, then shook my head. “No. It was the opposite of that.”

“Opposite?”

“Familiar,” I said. “Comfortable. Right. I don’t know how to explain it.” I paused. “We got divorced because we went different ways. Not because we didn’t love each other. At least, that’s how I’ve always looked at it.”

She nodded in agreement. “Me, too. And I’m not trying to rehash any of the old stuff. We’ve done that.” A faint smile drifted on to her face. “And it felt the same way for me. Familiar. In a good way. I needed it.”

I smiled back, unsure what else to say. At that moment, I’d needed it, too. Needed to be comforted and loved and with her. Not someone random, but her.

“Do you ever wonder what it would be like if we were still together?” she asked. “Like, if we’d gotten through her disappearance somehow and managed to stay together?”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ve thought about it. Probably wished for it.” I traced my finger along the steering wheel. “My anger hasn’t always been about Elizabeth being taken. It was also about what her being gone did to you and me. Whoever took our daughter also took our marriage.”

Her lips pursed. “Yeah. Yeah.”

“I will always be angry about that,” I said. “No one can give us that back, you know?”

Lauren started to say something, then stopped. Then she turned to me. “You think we’d have had another child?”

My smile was genuine. Instantaneous. “Yeah. Without a doubt. We said we always wanted two. And that we wanted some space in between them, to enjoy them. So, yeah. I think so.”

The smile found her face again. “Yeah.” She started to say something else, but her eyes shifted past me and the smile disappeared. “Car. In the driveway.”

I turned to see a white Ford Explorer stop just short of the garage door. I could see a driver.

And no one else.

I pushed my door open, the warm air of the car interior replaced by a cold, sharp wind. I stepped onto the sidewalk and Lauren was right behind me.

The girl wore black yoga pants and a hot-pink thermal vest over a long-sleeve black T-shirt. Her long black hair was expertly woven into a tight French braid and adorned with a thick hot-pink headband. She scurried around the front end of the Explorer, heading to the front door of the house. She froze when she saw us.

I held up a hand. “Hi. Are you Morgan?”

Her bright green eyes regarded us. “Who are you?”

“I’m Joe,” I said. “This is Lauren. Are you Morgan?”

“Do I know you?” she asked, taking another step toward the front door.

“No. But you know our daughter. Elizabeth. Or Ellie. Corzine.”

She looked from me to Lauren, then back to me, her hands fidgeting inside the pockets of her vest. “Who?”

“Ellie Corzine,” I said. “I think you picked her up at a hotel earlier this morning?”

Her already pink cheeks flushed brighter. “You’re her parents?” Her tone was derisive. “From Minnesota?”

I knew she didn’t believe us. If she’d been friends with Elizabeth back in Minnesota, she would have met the Corzines. Known them. We were complete strangers to this girl.

“No,” Lauren said slowly, her voice shaking. “We’re her real parents. Who she was taken from.”

The color drained out of her face. “Holy shit.” Just as quickly, a flush of color returned to her cheeks. “I mean, sorry.”

I looked at the car again. “She’s not with you?”

“I, uh…I…”

“Morgan,” I said, sharply. “Morgan Thompkins. I think you were friends with her back in Minnesota. She called you. She ran away because she found out she was adopted. Only guess what? She wasn’t. She was taken from us. And she was with you this morning, I’m pretty sure of it.” I paused. “Please. I’m begging you. We’ve been looking for her for years. And we came here from Minnesota. We need to find her. Where is she?”

She pulled a phone from her pocket, punched a number and held it to her ear.

“Morgan?” I asked again. “Where is she?”

She held up a finger.

I waited.

“Shit,” she muttered under her breath. She didn’t apologize this time.

“What?” I asked.

“She’s at the airport,” Morgan said.

NINE

“She called me three days ago,” Morgan said. “Asked if I could meet her and loan her some money.”

We were inside Morgan’s house. She’d continued to try and call Elizabeth, but even I knew it was useless. Bryce had said she'd turned off her phone. My gut was churning more than it ever had. I couldn’t rationalize how we could be so close, yet so far away. It wasn’t fair.

“I moved here two years ago,” Morgan said, shedding the vest and kicking off her shoes, still clutching her phone. “We went to the same school in Minnesota. We were best friends. But my dad got some stupid job here and we had to move.”

She moved out of the entryway toward the kitchen.

“We talk every week,” she continued. “We’re still best friends. Or just like best friends. Or whatever. We text. We email. Facebook. But we talk every Sunday night on the phone for sure. Two years, we haven’t missed a Sunday night.”

I nodded.

“So it was weird to see her number pop up on a non-Sunday,” Morgan said. “Like, I knew something was wrong. I just knew. And she told me how she found a paper or something that said she was adopted.”

“How was she?” Lauren asked. “I mean, how did she feel about that?”

“She was confused,” Morgan said, setting the phone down on a massive stone island in the middle of the kitchen. “And hurt. And pissed. I tried to talk her down, get her to chill, but she was beyond pissed. She felt like her whole life was a lie.”

“Had she ever said anything before about being adopted?” I asked.

Morgan shook her head, the braid swinging back and forth. “Nope. But she always was kinda weird about when she was a kid.”

“What do you mean?” I wanted to sit down and pore over every detail she could give me. It was irrational and there wasn’t time for that but it didn’t keep me from wanting it.

Morgan glanced at her phone, frowned. “Like, she couldn’t remember a lot. And she didn’t tell people that because she couldn’t figure out why.”

Lauren and I exchanged glances. I’d often daydreamed that Elizabeth was alive and I’d wondered what she’d remember. If she would remember being taken. Or Coronado. Or us. Lauren had always maintained that if she was alive and the abduction wasn’t violent, she probably had blocked out a lot of the details. She’d done hours of reading and research in the days and weeks following her disappearance, digging into the psychology of kidnapped children. Many missing kids blocked out the traumatic details of suddenly losing one life and being thrust into another. They would accept a fictional history rather than deal with the reality of having been ripped from loved ones.

“Why did she come here?” I asked. “To Denver. I mean, if she wasn’t planning on staying?”

Morgan raised her eyebrows at me like the answer was simple. “Because of me.”

“You.”

“She knew she could trust me,” she said. “She knew I’d help her.”

I leaned against the breakfast bar. “What did she need?”

“Money,” she said. “A new phone. A ride away from her dork of a boyfriend.”

I felt a little pang of sympathy for Bryce, the slighted boyfriend, but quickly put it aside. “And you took her to the airport?”

She glanced down at her phone again. “Yeah. But she won’t answer.”

“The new phone?” I asked. “The one you gave her?”

She nodded.

“Why the airport?” I asked. “Where is she going?”

“She’s trying to figure out what happened,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Small details,” she said. “Small details are coming back. Or she’s seeing them. When she found the paper that said she was adopted, I think it freaked her out. But she couldn’t sleep. For days. And she said she kept seeing things.”

“Like?” Lauren asked.

“The beach,” she said. “Palm trees. Ocean.”

My pulse quickened. “Coronado.”

“What?”

“Coronado,” I repeated. “Where she lived. Where we lived.”

Morgan rubbed her hands together. “I don’t know. But she decided she wanted to go see if she could see anything else that might help her remember.”

“So she’s going to San Diego?” I asked, the hope sparking again.

“No,” Morgan said, extinguishing the spark. “Los Angeles.”

“Why L.A.?”

Morgan shrugged. “I don’t know. She felt like she needed to go somewhere. We looked at a map. It seemed to make sense.”

“Sending a kid to L.A. by herself made sense?” I asked, incensed. “Really?”

Lauren put a hand on my arm, but I shook it off.

“Are you serious?” I said. I didn't care that Morgan was just a kid herself as I unleashed all of my anger and frustration. “She’s never been there before. She’s going there alone. And you think it makes sense to let her go? What the hell kind of friend are you?”

Morgan’s shoulders slumped and her eyes drifted to the floor. I didn’t care if she felt bad. I did care that she was apparently stupid.

“Joe,” Lauren said, her voice sharp as her nails dug into my arm.

I shrugged her off.

“So you bought her a ticket?” Lauren asked Morgan. “Is that why she came to you?”

“I gave her money for a ticket,” Morgan said, still staring at the floor. “And some extra because she’s almost out. For hotel or whatever. She’s supposed to call me when she gets to L.A. so that I know…”

“What time’s the flight?” I interrupted. “And what airline?”

Morgan hesitated.

“What time?” I yelled.

She winced, then glanced at the clock on the microwave. “She was looking at one that left at one-thirty. I don’t know the airline.”

I looked at Lauren. “Stay here with her. Get as much info as you can. Keep calling the number. Call her parents. But stay with her and don’t let her out of your sight.” I jogged toward the front door.

“Where are you going?” Lauren yelled.

“Airport,” I said, and, before she could stop me, I opened the door and ran into the cold, cold wind.