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.
TEN
Denver International Airport was located east of the city, out on the plains before you hit the Kansas border. I’d driven to the airport once before—I couldn’t recall why—but as I sped down the roads that left the highway and pointed me toward the airport, I recognized the giant, white, tent-like structure as it grew larger.