Thread of Suspicion (Joe Tyler Mystery #2)

by Jeff Shelby

  We exited the airport, turned onto the highway and were passing the exit for Mall of America before she spoke again.

  “I’m just preparing myself to be disappointed,” Lauren said. “You know that’s what I do. I’ve refused to let myself believe she was still alive, refused to think I’d ever get that call from you. And then I get it. Today. And here we are. Driving to go see our daughter. Maybe.”

  Brake lights lit up in front of us and I slowed, the late afternoon traffic beginning to tie up the freeways.

  “I mean, what if she doesn’t know who we are?” Lauren said, staring straight ahead. “What if she doesn’t remember? Or what if she blames us?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What if she doesn’t want to talk to us?” Lauren said. “What if she doesn’t want to leave?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And what if she’s…not alright?” she said, her voice dropping. “What if she’s not okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know, Lauren. I don’t have any answers. But I want them.”

  The traffic started moving again and I changed lanes, focusing on the freeway in front of me.

  “I want them,” I said.

  FORTY-TWO

  The walk in front of the Corzine address hadn’t been shoveled or cleared, unlike every other house on the block. It was a split-level home, painted yellow, with small windows and a screen door covering a dark wooden door. The yard sloped toward the street, the driveway a hill of compacted ice and snow. Smoke snaked out of the chimney.

  I parked across the street and we sat in the car for a moment, silent. I had no idea what I was going to encounter when I knocked on the door. I didn’t know if this was the person that took Elizabeth from my front yard or if she’d come to them through another channel.

  But as I stared at the house, I was angry. Angry that my daughter had lived there without me. Angry that someone else had gotten to see her grow up and take care of her. Whoever was in that house, they’d gotten all of the things that I’d been robbed of. They had taken things away from me that I couldn’t get back.

  “You have that look,” Lauren said.

  “What look?” I said, my eyes still on the house.

  “The one that broke our marriage,” she said. “The one that told me that finding Elizabeth was more important to you than anything else. The one that scared me sometimes.”

  I didn’t say anything, just opened the car door and stepped out into the street. Lauren got out on her side. We crossed the street and shuffled up the driveway, the snow trying to find its ways inside my shoes. I navigated the snow-covered steps up to the front door and stuck my finger on the doorbell. I felt Lauren’s hand on my elbow. I took a deep breath that did nothing to calm my nerves and waited.

  Footsteps echoed behind the door and a young girl, probably six or so, opened the door. Blond ponytail, big brown eyes, wearing a long sleeve T-shirt and sweatpants.

  “Are your parents home?” I said, loud enough so she could hear me through the screen door.

  She hesitated, then closed the door. Footsteps echoed away from the door and were soon replaced by heavier footsteps. The door opened again.

  An older version of the young girl appeared. Around my age, sporting a longer blond ponytail and the same brown eyes. But hers were red-rimmed, framed by dark circles. Slender, she wore faded jeans and a plain gray thermal.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “Are you Valerie Corzine?” I asked.

  She hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. What can I do for you?”

  “You have a daughter? Ellie?”

  Her shoulders stiffened and the lines in her face drew tighter. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Joe Tyler. You have a daughter named Ellie?”

  If my name meant anything to her, she didn’t show it. Instead, she stepped closer to the door. “Yes. Ellie is my daughter. Is she with you?” Her eyes scanned the street behind us.

  “No. She is not.”

  “What do you know?” she asked, the tension moving to near panic. “Have you spoken to her? Do you know where she is? Who are you?”

  A different kind of dread was filling me now. Lauren’s hand tightened on my elbow. Her questions weren’t what I’d hoped to hear.

  “We’re her parents,” I said.

  She stared at me, her mouth setting in an angry line. “Excuse me?”

  “Elizabeth Tyler,” I said, my hands beginning to shake again. “The girl you call Ellie? Her name’s Elizabeth. She was taken from us. I’m her father. This is her mother. And we’re here to take her back.”

  “Taken from you?” she asked, squinting at me. “What the hell is this?”

  “Where is she?” I said, my voice rising, my patience ebbing away.

  “What do you mean she was taken from you…”

  I slammed my hand against the plexiglass pane in the door and it banged against the frame. “Where is she?”

  The woman jumped back and the little girl hidden behind her legs took off running.

  “She’s my daughter!” I screamed. “Not yours! And so help me God, if you’re the one that took her, I am going to end your life! Where is she?”

  The woman stepped away from the door, her eyes wide, her hand covering her mouth.

  “Joe,” Lauren whispered, her other hand touching my waist now. “Easy.”

  Another person approached the door. A man, about her age, wearing jeans and a University of Minnesota sweatshirt. About my size, slightly built. He put his hands on his wife’s shoulders, looked from me to her and gently moved her back so he was between us.

  “I’m not sure what the hell is going on here, but you need to leave,” he said.

  “Where’s my daughter?” I asked.

  “I’m going to call the police if you don’t leave.”

  The woman said something behind him and he glanced back at her quickly, not wanting to take his eyes off me.

  I shrugged Lauren off my arm and pulled out my cell phone. “Tell you what. I’ll do it for you. Because I’m not going anywhere until I see her. And while I’m at it, I’m also going to call the F.B.I. because they’ve been involved in looking for her, too, so they are all going to want to talk with you. And when I get off the phone, I’m coming through this door to find my daughter. They can sort through the fucking wreckage when they get here.”

  The man stepped forward, closer to the door. “Wait, wait. Ellie is your daughter?”

  I gritted my teeth. “Her name is Elizabeth.”

  The woman spoke again. He turned around annoyed, said something to her that sounded like he wanted her to be quiet.

  He turned back to me. “Have you seen her?”

  “I just saw her in a yearbook photo. She’s my daughter.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Have you seen her recently?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  He ran a hand through his hair and unlocked the screen door. “Ellie ran away three days ago.”

  FORTY-THREE

  Alex and Valerie Corzine sat on their sofa, nervous, anxious, and not very happy. Lauren and I sat across from them on an old, floral-patterned loveseat. The little girl had been dismissed to her room.

  Alex looked at his wife nervously one more time, then at me. “You’re her father?”

  “I am. This is her mother.”

  “I need some assurances from you.”

  Anger flashed in my gut. “Right now, I’m not assuring you of anything.”

  “You get angry about anything I’m about to tell you, we can go outside and you can take it out on me,” he said. “But not on my wife, and not in front of our other daughter.”

  “Elizabeth isn’t your daughter.”

  Lauren rested her hand on my knee.

  He licked his lips, took a deep breath. “Take it out on me. Not on Val and not in front of Teresa.”

  I looked at Valerie. Her hands were in her lap, clasped so tightly
together that her knuckles were the color of enamel.

  I looked back to Alex. “Alright. On you. Not your wife. Not in front of your daughter.”

  He studied me for a moment, then nodded. “We adopted Ellie eight years ago. Through very private channels.”

  “Illegally,” Lauren said.

  He nodded. “Yes. At the time, we thought we were unable to have children. We were years away on the public adoption lists. No guarantees of anything ever. So we explored other options.”

  I pictured Elizabeth standing in the front yard with the Christmas lights. Like it was the day before and a hundred years before, all at the same time.

  “We found a woman on the Internet, offering private adoptions,” he continued. “For…a large sum. At first, it seemed out of reach. But we were desperate.” He glanced at his wife and she nodded, staring at her hands. “So, we agreed to meet with her.”

  “Where did you meet?” I asked, glancing around the room, looking for pictures of Elizabeth. But there was only generic art on the walls.

  “Phoenix,” Alex said. “We flew in on a Sunday afternoon, met with her that night. She told us that a girl was available. Orphaned. Parents died in a home explosion. Only child. About seven years old.”

  I was chewing on the inside of my cheek, my teeth grinding into my flesh as I listened. Lauren’s fingernails dug into my leg.

  “We asked for more info and she said that was all she could tell us and that was all we could discuss with her,” Alex said. “There was no extended family and she’d be turned over to DCFS within forty-eight hours if we didn’t want her.”

  Lauren cleared her throat. “This woman say where she was coming from?”

  “No. We asked and she wouldn’t tell us. We had to decide that night and let her know the next morning.”

  “So, you said yes,” I said.

  Alex let out a long breath. “We went back to our hotel and Val and I talked about it. The cost was our entire life savings and then some. We pulled money from retirement funds and borrowed against our home.”

  “How much?”

  He hesitated.

  “How much?” I asked again, my voice tight.

  “A hundred thousand dollars,” he said.

  I looked away from him. He’d bought my daughter for the price of a house.

  “So, we talked it over and decided to do it,” he said, rubbing at his chin. “We wanted a child badly and it sounded like she needed a family.”

  “She didn’t,” I said. “She had one.”

  He swallowed. “We didn’t know that.”

  “But you blindly accepted that some seven-year old girl could be bought for a hundred grand, outside of the normal legal process,” I said, not bothering to hide my disgust.

  “We were desperate,” Valerie whispered.

  “As desperate as we’ve been to find her?” I asked. “I doubt that very much.”

  Quiet settled over the room for a moment.

  “Yes, we probably knew that it wasn’t the…smartest thing to do,” Alex finally said. “But we did believe that this girl was coming to us with nowhere else to go.”

  I believed that that’s what they wanted to believe. But it didn’t make it alright.

  “I called the woman, told her yes,” Alex continued. “She told us we needed to wait in Phoenix for forty-eight hours and then she’d be there. We made arrangements to stay two more nights and then she was brought to us.”

  A thousand questions were running through my brain. What was she like? How did she feel? What did she say? But I kept my mouth closed and let him continue.

  “She was quiet, very withdrawn,” Alex said. “Which we were prepared for. Again, we thought she’d just lost her parents and we were told it would be best not to bring it up. So, we didn’t. And we didn’t force ourselves on her.”

  “Who was the woman?” I asked, trying to keep my composure and not picture how Elizabeth felt at that moment. “The woman who brought her to you and took your money?”

  They exchanged nervous looks, hesitancy riddling their body language.

  “I’m telling you right now, all of this is coming out one way or another,” I said. “You don’t wanna tell us now? That’s fine. But you’re going to be talking to other people and they are going to ask the same question and you won’t have the choice of not answering.”

  Alex leaned back in the couch and folded his arms across his chest. “Her name was Marianna Gelson. But we’ve never spoken to her again.”

  Probably not even her real name, if she was what I thought she was.

  “So, she was quiet and withdrawn,” Alex said. “For quite some time, but eventually, she started to come around. We purposely avoided talking about her past and, given what we were told, we didn’t think she’d want to talk about it.”

  I felt my blood pressure rise and I was having a difficult time maintaining any semblance of civility. I didn’t know what was going through Lauren’s mind, but it was all I could do to not jump across the room and attack him.

  “We kept her home for a couple of years,” he said. “Val homeschooled her. She really seemed to like it and…”

  “You know what?” I said, cutting him off. “I could give a shit about what she seemed to like and what she didn’t. I could give a shit about how you felt or homeschooling or anything else you did with my daughter. What I want to know is where she is so I can see her.”

  Lauren’s hand pressed down on my thigh like she was trying to keep me seated.

  Valerie started crying silently, tears streaming down her face. Alex put his arm around her. I wanted to punch them both in the face.

  “As she’s gotten older, she’s asked us a few more questions,” he said, his voice less steady. “About her adoption. We were…careful.”

  “Meaning you lied,” I said.

  “Meaning we told her what we knew.”

  “So, you told her that you bought her for a hundred thousand bucks? Did she ask to see the price tag that was on her toe?”

  He shifted, uncomfortable. “No. Of course not. We were vague about the adoption details. We told her it was through an agency and that there was little information due to the circumstances.” He glanced at his wife. “That’s what we were told to do.”

  I wanted to be able to put myself in his position, to understand where he was coming from, to have some sort of sympathy. But I couldn’t. All I could see was the guy who’d taken my place.

  “And she was satisfied with that?” Lauren asked. “She just accepted vague details?”

  “At first, I guess,” Alex said. “And there weren’t many more questions. But then recently, she pressed some more. She wanted more answers. More clarification.”

  “And?” Lauren said.

  He cleared his throat. “We shared some things, but not others. But…I think she sensed that. That we were leaving some things out.”

  “Why?”

  He glanced at his wife, then back at me. “We told her it was a private adoption. That records were scarce. She wanted more info on her birth parents. We tried to be vague, but she pushed. So, we told her about the explosion and the deaths.”

  The hair on the back of my neck was standing at attention.

  Alex Corzine ran a hand through his hair, deep lines gutting his forehead. “She said she didn’t remember any explosion. We told her that was probably normal, that she’d blocked it out. Too traumatic. But she was adamant. She didn’t remember any explosion. And that’s when she really started getting angry with us.”

  I wondered what Elizabeth was like when she was angry. Did she yell? Did she withdraw? Did she slam doors? Was she like me? Like Lauren?

  I didn’t have those answers and I despised Corzine for that.

  “So, she went digging,” he said.

  “Digging?” I asked.

  “Through our file cabinets,” he said.

  I took a deep breath, glanced at Lauren, who was deep in concentration, her eyes focused on Corzine. I turned my
eyes back to him. “You kept her adoption paperwork in a file cabinet? Seriously?”

  He shook his head. “No. We didn’t. There’s barely any paperwork to begin with. But we came home one night and she had the entire thing torn apart. Paper and files everywhere, screaming at us.”

  “So, then you told her?” I asked.

  He hesitated then shook his head again. “No. We still maintained we’d told her everything we could tell her.”

  My teeth ground together.

  “But then a week ago, she found it,” he said.

  “What’s it?”

  “The one piece of paper we had,” he replied. “With Gelson’s name on it. A phone number. A couple of other details about our meeting in Phoenix. We kept it in case we ever…I don’t know. We just kept it.” He exhaled. “Kept it inside the pocket of a pair of jeans that I don’t ever wear. Buried in my closet. But she found it.”

  Valerie Corzine wiped at her eyes. “She called us liars. Called us a hundred things. She called the number. It was disconnected. Then she just refused to talk to us. Just stopped talking. Nothing for two days.”

  “Then what?” Lauren asked, her hand still clutching my leg.

  Alex and Valerie exchanged a look, then Valerie looked at Lauren, then me.

  “Then she left,” Valerie said. “With Bryce.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  “Who is Bryce?” I asked.

  Both of their expressions changed, concern and worry shifted into dislike.

  “Her boyfriend,” Alex Corzine said. “He’s older. Twenty. And not a great influence.”

  I was trying to create some distance as I asked questions, tried to separate myself emotionally from the fact that I was asking questions about my daughter, whom I didn’t really know.

  “Not a great influence how?” I asked.

  “He’s twenty dating a seventeen-year old,” he said, frowning. “No job. Doesn’t go to school. I know he’s taken alcohol from our house. Doesn’t respect our rules about curfew. Just not who you want dating your daughter.”