Thread of Hope

THREE

I walked out of the hospital. Palm trees waved in the breeze, the smell of the ocean riding the air as if to remind me I was in a place that used to be home. Massive aircraft carriers hulked beneath the arching blue bridge on the other side of the bay, anchored to the south end of downtown. I sat down on a stone bench just off the main doors and opened the file Jane gave me.

The complaint had been filed on behalf of eighteen-year-old Meredith Jordan. It said the contact between her and Chuck had come as a result of their relationship at Coronado High School. And it said Chuck beat the crap out of Meredith Jordan.

I stopped reading. Two questions immediately popped into my head. What was Chuck doing on a school campus? And more specifically, what was he doing at our alma mater? He wasn’t a teacher or administrator last I knew and I was willing to bet that hadn’t changed.

As unlikely as it was to find him on any school campus, Coronado High School’s would’ve been the last one on the list. We spent four years there and while I hadn’t minded high school, Chuck thought it contained all the charm of a toxic dump. He had clashed with teachers, coaches and our classmates and barely managed to graduate. He’d skipped the graduation ceremony and as far as I knew he hadn’t had anything to do with the school since he walked off the campus more than two decades prior.

He’d spent most of his adult life working construction. He started out as an employee for a homebuilder, but didn’t care much for taking orders and building tract homes. He’d gotten his general contractor’s license and built a small but thriving business of his own when I’d left Coronado. He was happy doing it.

I flipped quickly through the papers in the file until I found what I was looking for. Five photos were clipped to the back flap of the folder. Meredith Jordan was a pretty girl beneath the bruises. Long brown hair. Two perfectly brown oval eyes above a slender nose. Cheekbones that looked magazine cover worthy. At least, before someone had used her as a sparring partner.

There was a wide cut across the bridge of her nose. Deep purplish rings encircled the pretty eyes. Small yellow bruises dotted her cheeks. Red lines that resembled fingerprints snaked around the middle of her neck. Another cut at the right corner of her mouth gave her the macabre appearance of smiling when she was doing anything but.

The damage on her face wasn’t from a fall or a car accident or any other benign occurrence. Someone had teed her up and swung away. Choked her for an encore.

I clipped the photos together again and paged through the rest of the file. Dates, descriptions, times. Nothing damning one way or another. The photos were enough.

I turned the pages again, looking for the girl’s address, seeing if I might recognize it. I was surprised to find two. One in Coronado and one up in Rancho Santa Fe. I wondered if the girl’s parents were divorced or if they had bought their way in to one of the best public high schools in the country. I closed the file and laid it down next to me.

A light fog was rolling in from the south, a thin layer of moisture clinging to the air. Lauren and I used to sit on our back deck with a bottle of wine, watching the fog drift in from the other side of the island across San Diego Harbor. We'd talk about dinner plans and friends and vacations and work and family and other things you talked about when you were drunk on a cheap bottle of Merlot. Things that held promise, provided excitement.

I picked up the file and stood. I took a deep breath, let the salty air filter into my nose and lungs. Returning to Coronado was going to bring back memories. I knew that before I'd hopped on the plane. If I was going to help Chuck, I’d be fighting those memories the whole way and I wasn’t sure I had it in me.

As I gazed at the now gray-looking buildings across the bay, murky behind the fog, I felt no promise. No excitement. No hope.