Another three days passed. He found a good lawyer and made more phone calls. Unfortunately, none of that solved the bigger problem or finding Meg. Despair gnawed at him. Where the hell had she gone?
Since her parents continued to dodge his calls, he made both Lady E. and Torie give it a try. But the Korandas wouldn't crack. He imagined her sick with dysentery in the jungles of Cambodia or freezing to death on her way up K2. His nerves were raw. He couldn't sleep. Could barely eat. He lost track of the agenda during the first meeting he called.
Kenny showed up at his house one evening with a pizza. "I'm seriously starting to worry about you. It's time you get a grip."
"Look who's talking," Ted retorted. "You went nuts when Lady E. ran out on you."
Kenny pleaded memory loss.
That night Ted once again found himself lying sleepless in his bed. How ironic that Meg used to call him Mr. Cool. As he stared at the ceiling, he imagined her gored by a bull or bitten by a king cobra, but when he began picturing her getting gang-raped by a band of guerrilla soldiers, he couldn't take it any longer. He threw himself out of bed, jumped in his truck, and drove to the landfill.
The night was cool and still. He left on his high beams and stood between the funnels of light as he stared out at the empty, polluted land. Kenny was right. He had to pull himself together. But how could he do that? He was no closer to finding her than when he'd begun, and his life had fallen apart.
Maybe it was the desolation, or the stillness, or the dark, empty land so full of untapped promise. For whatever reason, he felt himself standing straighter. And he finally saw what he'd missed-the glaring fact he'd overlooked in all his attempts to find her.
Meg needed money to leave the country. From the beginning, he'd assumed her parents had given it to her to make up for everything she'd gone through. That was what logic told him. His logic. But he wasn't the one calling the shots, and he'd never once gotten out of his own head to slip into hers.
He envisioned her face in all its moods. Her laughter and anger, her sweetness and sass. He knew her as well as he knew himself, and as he opened his mind to hers, the essential fact he should have picked up on from the beginning became blindingly clear.
Meg wouldn't take a penny from her parents. Not for shelter. Not for travel. Not for anything. Clay Koranda had lied to him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
M eg heard the car creeping along behind her. Although it was barely ten o'clock at night, the chilly October rain had emptied the streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side. She walked faster past the wet, black garbage bags that sagged at the curb. Rain dripped through the fire escapes above her head, and trash floated in the flooded gutters. Some of the former redbrick tenement buildings on Clay's block had been spruced up, but most hadn't, and the neighborhood was dodgy at best. Still, she hadn't thought twice about clearing her head with a trip to her favorite cheap deli for a hamburger. But she hadn't counted on the rain driving everyone inside on her way back.
The building that housed Clay's cramped fifth-floor walkup was almost two blocks away. She'd subleased his dingy apartment while he was in L.A. shooting a meaty role in an indie film that might be the break he'd been waiting for. The place was small and depressing, with only two minuscule windows admitting trickles of thready light, but it was cheap, and once she'd gotten rid of Clay's greasy old couch, along with the detritus left behind by various girlfriends, she had room to make her jewelry.
The car stayed with her. A quick glance over her shoulder showed a black stretch limo, not anything to get nervous about, but it had been a long week. A long six weeks. Her brain was fuzzy from exhaustion, and her fingers so sore from laboring over her jewelry collection that only willpower kept her going. But her hard work was paying off.
She didn't try to convince herself she was happy, but she knew she'd made the best decisions she could about her future. Sunny Skipjack had been on target when she'd said Meg should reposition herself for the high-end market. The boutique managers she'd shown her sample pieces to liked the juxtaposition of modern design and ancient relics, and the orders had come in more quickly than she'd dreamed possible. If her life's goal was to be a jewelry designer, she would have been ecstatic, but that wasn't her goal. Not now. Finally, she knew what she wanted to do.
The car was still right behind her, its headlights yellow smears on the wet asphalt. Rain had soaked through her canvas sneakers, and she pulled the purple trench she'd found at a secondhand store more tightly around her. Security grilles barred the windows of the sari shop, the Korean discount home-goods store, even the dumpling place-all closed for the night.