Forgive Me(12)

Angie was in a spitfire mood—cranky, short-fused, and jacked up as if she’d had Red Bull in her coffee. It was the energy of the hunt. Her blood buzzed and she felt all her senses come to life. No detail could be overlooked, no lead ignored. It was day two of Angie’s investigation and already new cases came in—the phone didn’t stop ringing on account of Nadine—but she farmed out those jobs to her & Associates. Finding Nadine would take focus and a team effort.

Accompanying Angie was a Vietnamese semi-pro skateboarder and computer expert named Bao Johnson. He was twenty-two, had long dark hair, plenty of piercings and tattoos, and wore flannel as if grunge was still the music of the day. Angie had met Bao when she’d tracked him from Washington to Boston after he’d fled his foster home. She’d met him again after she’d tracked him from a new foster home in Delaware to a rundown motel in Jacksonville, Florida. She’d met him again when he ran from a foster home in Maryland to a skate park in Newark, New Jersey.

He’d stopped running at age fourteen when Angie introduced him to a couple she knew who later agreed to adopt him. The dad was an accountant, mom a schoolteacher, and the perfectly normal home life provided Bao with what all these kids wanted. Bao had run because the foster families Child Services had placed him with wanted the payday more than they wanted the kid. Didn’t happen all the time, but it happened with enough frequency to make Angie’s business a profitable one. Truth be told, she’d gladly give up the income to make the problem go away.

Bao’s adopted family had rules, of course, and expectations he’d had to meet, grades and such. They’d asked the hard questions. They didn’t change a no to a yes just because he got angry, just because he told them that he hated them and was going to run again. It wasn’t easy, but Bao’s parents knew every kid he hung out with, where he went, who he went with, what time he’d be home—and surprise, surprise, he never made good on that threat to run.

A few years later, just after he’d turned twenty, he went to work for Angie as a certified computer forensic consultant. He was incredibly helpful, not only because of his skills and expertise at the keyboard, but also because he knew how runaway kids thought.

Sitting at Nadine’s desk, Boa was looking at her PC, mumbling to himself, which Angie took as a good sign. While he worked, Angie scoured the bedroom, looking for a journal or anything that might reveal more about Nadine or give a clue where she might have run.

As far as bedrooms went, Angie didn’t think anyone would pin this to a Pinterest board, but it was nice enough. Compared to a lot of the bedrooms runaways abandoned, this one was practically palatial. The color scheme was white with a splash of fuchsia. Cutouts from magazines of the “it” celebs of the day were taped to poster board, so they could be replaced with a new contingent of “it” when the fashions changed. Books stood in the bookcase, clothes hung neatly in the closet, a collection of stuffed animals too precious for the trash lined the bed.

She was rummaging though Nadine’s dresser when Carolyn entered carrying a laptop computer. It used to be, long before Angie’s time, that the photographs she had asked Carolyn to gather would have been put into a shoebox or displayed in photo albums. Now they were mostly in pixel form.

“I made a digital album of all the recent pictures of Nadine that were on my phone. Some of them Greg sent me, but he didn’t have a lot.”

“This will be helpful,” said Angie.

“I did get a bunch e-mailed to me from Nadine’s friends.”

Angie stopped what she was doing to shift through the collection of photos. She ignored the booze on Carolyn’s breath. Finding Nadine would be only half the battle. Angie might locate the missing girl, but without big changes in the Jessup family, Nadine might not stick around.

If the photos were any indication, they had a lot of fence mending to do. The pictures of Nadine with her parents were somber, her brown eyes heavy with sadness, but not all the photos were gloomy. Some showed Nadine laughing with her friends, making goofy expressions, looking like a kid who had a place in the world, who fit in, who wasn’t lonely and alone.

Angie began to believe that life with her alcoholic mother and disinterested father was the main reason, if not the only reason, Nadine ran. It was a show of defiance, a way to teach them a lesson. On the poster board of cutout celebrities, Angie recognized one of Anna Kendrick from the movie Pitch Perfect. The “Cup” song from that film featured the line, “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.” Angie wondered what those lyrics meant to Nadine.

“What are you going to do with these, anyway?” Carolyn’s words came out a little sloppy. She wobbled slightly on her feet.

Two in the afternoon and the woman already had her drunk on. This job made it easy for Angie to appreciate her good fortune, to be ever grateful to her parents for her upbringing.

“Bao is going to create a Find Nadine Jessup Facebook page,” Angie said. “We’ll list my phone number, but we need as many recent pictures as we can get. This goes up today. Then we’ll e-mail all of Nadine’s friends and ask for their help linking to the page.”

Bao was hunched over Nadine’s laptop, but listening. “I’ve already created the e-mail address, Find Nadine Jessup at gmail dot com,” he said without peeling his eyes from the screen.

“Not saying it will go viral,” Angie added, “but it could, and it’s an important step in the process.”