Taming Cross (Love Inc.) (5 page)

Pecking at the keys with the fingers of my right hand, I search the name. Within milliseconds, links appear. The first one grabs my attention: Meredith Kinsey – Managing Editor,
The Red & Black.

I squint. Clearly, that one's not my girl. Missy King was a high-priced prostitute, not a journalism student.

I click on the second link and find 'Meredith Kinsey' on a list of University of Georgia, Grady College scholarship recipients. She's there not once, but three times: William Dale Tichenor Scholarship for Excellence in Journalistic Writing, Sean Love Scholarship for Dependability and Service, Gloria Stamps Scholarship for Excellence in Academics.

I snort a little, drawing a glance from the punk ass kid beside me. Yeah, this can't be her.

Back on the main page, I try a few other links, wondering why the hell I didn't ask my father where the girl was from. Couldn't have been Georgia. I find another Meredith Kinsey: award-winning quilter from Salt Lake City. Her web site features a picture of a gray-haired woman with a bowl cut.

The next link takes me to Meredith Kinsey, singer/songwriter. I get excited about this, but then I notice she's in Ireland—and just updated her blog with new lyrics today.

I sift through Meredith Kinsey, freelance writer for an Atlanta home brewery magazine (probably the college kid after college); Meredith Kinsey, high school gymnastics star in Boise, Idaho (photo shows a girl who can't be older than ten); Meredith Kinsey, harpist in Knoxville, Tennessee (tall with a bird-like nose, which my father would hate); Meredith Kinsey, dead at age 86 in Kansas City, Kansas, and another dozen or so Meredith Kinsey’s before I get to almost an entire page of links that direct me to
The Red & Black
: award-winning college newspaper at the University of Georgia, operating independently without the use of student funds since 1980.

Woop de freaking hoo.

I sigh and click on one of the links, because it's dated two years before my Meredith Kinsey disappeared, and it looks to be a rant about the horror of beauty pageants. I skim the piece, finding that this particular Meredith Kinsey objects to pageants on the grounds that they objectify women; she compares the women in their swim suits to cattle at an auction. Another snort, followed by a rub of my eyes. Definitely not my Meredith.

Except…there's a small square picture in the middle of two columns of text, and the face is identical to the one in my picture.

Meredith Kinsey, college feminist.

Holy shit.

I spend the next hour looking for more information, trying to figure out how a college student with strawberry-blonde hair, twinkling green eyes, and a wide smile turned into Missy King, governor's mistress and small time extortionist-turned-sex slave.

I click on every link I find, reading through a couple of her news stories and one more opinion piece (“Holiday Celebrations Can Be Inclusive And Traditional”) before the timer on my screen flashes, and I'm forced to give my computer to a woman who's wearing a skirt suit and typing on her Blackberry. I pay three dollars for a permanent card, which will buy me unlimited time tomorrow, and head out into a drizzling rain.

The photo my father gave me is tucked into a little pocket on the inside of my beat-up jeans, but I can see her face as I roll down the streets of downtown Napa. The bike's tires make a
shhh
sound, tossing up a spray of rainwater that makes my ankles cold and chills my feet through my boots.

I don't get it. Is this some ruse my father cooked up? Why would a girl with a college degree—and no student loans—turn to a life of prostitution?

I know what they say. People like Lizzy.
“The girls choose to be escorts. It's their
choice
, Cross. Smarter than giving yourself away for free, huh?”
Marchant fed me even more cliché lines: They're stakeholders, some of them have stock portfolios, working on college degrees through the University of Phoenix, la da da.

I bet most of them don't have college degrees. I bet they didn't get into the whoring business just for giggles.

As I fumble for the garage button with my elbow, pressing into the pants pocket where I keep my keys, I feel the familiar sting of guilt. Whoever she is, Missy King deserved better than what she got. And as far as bullshit goes, I'd have it coming out my ears if I didn't admit that it's my fault nobody went after her. I could have told somebody. I should have.

Instead, I tried to forget about her. I told myself it wasn't my business. That she was already out of reach.

It might have stuck, if I hadn’t been taken to Mexico myself and watched as my best friend was on the auction block. Ever since that day, it's been under my skin like a bad rash. Missy King was just as helpless as we were.

And for all my lofty thoughts about desperation and how escorts have no other options, I want to believe that Missy King is
not
Meredith Kinsey. I want to believe that Missy was a slutty girl who wanted to drive a shiny red Porsche and wear expensive jewelry. A girl who, just like me, was giving it away to anyone who asked and figured, why not charge?

If I let myself believe that this girl—the one inside my pocket, with the happy eyes—is somewhere down in Mexico, I'll go fucking crazy.

The next morning, I wake up early, take my time shaving, and ride back to the library. I take the third-to-last seat in the computer lab, and by the time I'm ears-deep in a story Meredith Kinsey wrote about date rape, a pair of teenage lovebirds come in and take the seats on either side of me. As I lean in to the computer, they lean around me, laughing about something they saw on Facebook. For some reason, their whispers piss me off. I glance at the dude, giving him more of an evil eye than I intended. He looks like a kid: seventeen, eighteen? If Meredith started college at eighteen and that was almost eight years ago, that means she’s twenty-five or twenty-six now. That means the year that she was twenty-three—my age, Suri’s age, Lizzy’s age—she was on her way to becoming a sex slave.

My desire to know what happened to her amps up a notch, so much so that my hands feel sweaty and my temples throb. How did she get to Vegas? After another hour of searching, plus some credit card fees paid to various databases, I find a missing person’s report filed a little over four years ago—or rather, I find her on a list of missing people. I can’t get any information about her specific report unless I travel to Georgia, and that would waste too much time. A few minutes later, I’m surprised when I come across a news brief in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
. It mentions that police are looking for twenty-two year old Meredith Kinsey of Albany, Georgia, for questioning in relation to the arrest of Sean Tacoma. This makes me feel almost sick with curiosity.

As I print off a few more of her stories, it dawns on me that maybe it’s not just curiosity that makes this feel so urgent. So…personal. From the looks of things, Meredith Kinsey had a pretty violent fall from grace. I had a fall, too, didn’t I? Went from the only child of California’s governor—charming and wealthy, with a world as wide as Hargrove Day School and the privileged, sheltered social circles of Napa—to disabled, disinherited fuckup who can’t even work.

It makes me feel weird about myself. Like I don’t even know who I am. And for some reason, that makes me want to understand who Meredith Kinsey is. I want to know what happened to her. Maybe I just want to see someone else’s route to ruin.

I shove her stories into my back pocket and speed back to the shop. On the way there, I picture myself in a police station, ratting out my father. I grit my teeth. I’d probably get prosecuted for sitting on what I knew this last year, but I could do it. I still have some of the e-mails I found on my father’s computer, between Priscilla and Jim Gunn, and between Priscilla and my father. Not all of them, but enough that even if he avoided prosecution, he’d be ruined.

The question is: Should I? If I were to tell the cops, would anyone actually go rescue ‘Missy King’? As far as I know, there’s no organization actively sending people out to look for sex slaves. Some of the authorities investigate, yeah, but that seems to be it. Nobody’s going to jump onto their bike and just go searching through Mexico. Not for a former escort. Not for a married man’s mistress. The legal system is fucked up, and people like ‘Missy King’ usually don’t get justice. People like Meredith Kinsey: pretty, educated, scholarship-getting girls whose families file missing persons’ reports… Now that’s another story. But I can’t actually prove that Missy King
is
Meredith. Not yet, anyway.

As I wait at a red light under the dim midday sun, I tick off the verifiable information I know about ‘Missy’. Former Vegas escort, working at the Starry Sky Brothel on the Strip and rumored to be the governor's mistress. This ‘Missy’, mentioned in only one gossip column on a local, Vegas blog, was supposedly “exclusive, in a Kingly way”, which I assume was meant to allude to her relationship with my father. I know, based on what the Love Inc. shrink told Lizzy, that Missy King was liked, and that some of the Love Inc. girls missed her, and felt like not enough had been done to find her.

Jim Gunn's cousin was a detective in Vegas; still is. Hunter West told me one of the detective’s buddies pulled the Missy King case. I’m not sure if it’s true, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

I roll into the garage and lift my left arm out of its leather band. And for the first time since the wreck, I feel shitty about my hand for a reason that has nothing to do with me. If I wanted to go look for Missy King, or Meredith Kinsey, or whoever the hell the missing woman really is, I'd probably get my one-handed self shot.

I swing off the bike and feel the curtain of darkness drop around me, enclosing me inside a box of dread. Then I look up and spot Lizzy in front of the door that divides the shop and garage.

“Fuck.”

Lizzy grins evilly and holds up a garage remote. “Bet you forgot who watched over the shop while you were sleeping, bro.”

“I didn't forget,” I mutter as I bridge the gap between us. I reach for a strand of her long brown hair and tug it, out of habit. “Just didn't figure you'd go sneaking around like a cat burglar.”

Lizzy curls her hand. “Meow.”

I brush past her and open the door to the show room. She follows me inside, but instead of going upstairs, to the site of the Suri disaster, I slump down into one of the leather chairs beside a restored, hybrid-ized 1967 BMW R 69S. I reach into an old-school Coca-Cola cooler beside the chair and pull out a glass bottle of Sunkist, which I tuck into the crook of my left elbow. Then I grab a Dr. Pepper.

Lizzy stands in front of me with her hands on her slim hips. She reaches out and grabs the Dr. Pepper, but she doesn't open it.

“You know why I'm here, C.”

I widen my eyes in feigned drama and hold out both hands. “Let me guess: It's an intervention.”

“You could call it that.” She nods, looking shrewd with black Aviators propped up on her head. And hot in tight blue jeans and a jade green t-shirt, with diamonds winking in her ears.

I push up the sleeve of my battered button-up, so she can see the permanent skid mark scars inside my elbow. “Too much H?”

She shakes her head. “Too little C.” She narrows her eyes. “I can see you've shaved, and I support that. You went out somewhere, on a bike no less, and I support that, too. But seriously, Cross, I want to know how you are, because Suri's worried about you and I am, too.”

Right—so this is about Suri. I rub my eyes, but I can't complain much. I should have known a long time ago she was getting too...caught up. Lizzy even told me that she was, on the drive to the vineyard on the day that we got hauled off to Mexico. But I didn’t believe her. And after that day’s adventure, I kind of forgot about it. Selfish, thoughtless Cross. I let Suri get and stay close to me, and then I let her lay it all out on the table before I sent her away with her tail between her legs.

Through the web of my fingers, rubbing my eyes, I see Lizzy sink down to the polished cement floor and cross her legs. Looking up at me, she says, “It's not your fault she didn't see straight. She shouldn't have thought you felt the same way just because she hoped you did. She's not upset with you. She’s upset...with herself, I guess.”

I cross my arms loosely over my chest. “That why she hasn't called?”

Lizzy nods.

“She ever gonna call?”

She nods again. “Sometime. Probably soon. I think she's just embarrassed.”

I snort. “No need for that shit. We're all friends, aren't we?” The question comes out sounding kind of like a jab. I feel like a five-year-old, but the truth is, it bugs the shit out of me that Lizzy's just a few weeks away from walking down the aisle to marry Hunter Player West. Instead of being my friend, she's going to be some other dude's wife. I know it’s immature and patriarchal and whatever else, but it rubs me the wrong way.

Lizzy makes a tsking sound. “I sense some bitterness.” And then, in all seriousness: “Really, Cross. You still don't like him, do you?”