Forgive Me by Daniel Palmer Read Free Book Online

lined the bed.
    She was rummaging though Nadine’s dresser when Carolyn entered carrying a laptop computer. It used to be, long before Angie’s time, that the photographs she had asked Carolyn to gather would have been put into a shoebox or displayed in photo albums. Now they were mostly in pixel form.
    “I made a digital album of all the recent pictures of Nadine that were on my phone. Some of them Greg sent me, but he didn’t have a lot.”
    “This will be helpful,” said Angie.
    “I did get a bunch e-mailed to me from Nadine’s friends.”
    Angie stopped what she was doing to shift through the collection of photos. She ignored the booze on Carolyn’s breath. Finding Nadine would be only half the battle. Angie might locate the missing girl, but without big changes in the Jessup family, Nadine might not stick around.
    If the photos were any indication, they had a lot of fence mending to do. The pictures of Nadine with her parents were somber, her brown eyes heavy with sadness, but not all the photos were gloomy. Some showed Nadine laughing with her friends, making goofy expressions, looking like a kid who had a place in the world, who fit in, who wasn’t lonely and alone.
    Angie began to believe that life with her alcoholic mother and disinterested father was the main reason, if not the only reason, Nadine ran. It was a show of defiance, a way to teach them a lesson. On the poster board of cutout celebrities, Angie recognized one of Anna Kendrick from the movie Pitch Perfect . The “Cup” song from that film featured the line, “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.” Angie wondered what those lyrics meant to Nadine.
    “What are you going to do with these, anyway?” Carolyn’s words came out a little sloppy. She wobbled slightly on her feet.
    Two in the afternoon and the woman already had her drunk on. This job made it easy for Angie to appreciate her good fortune, to be ever grateful to her parents for her upbringing.
    “Bao is going to create a Find Nadine Jessup Facebook page,” Angie said. “We’ll list my phone number, but we need as many recent pictures as we can get. This goes up today. Then we’ll e-mail all of Nadine’s friends and ask for their help linking to the page.”
    Bao was hunched over Nadine’s laptop, but listening. “I’ve already created the e-mail address, Find Nadine Jessup at gmail dot com,” he said without peeling his eyes from the screen.
    “Not saying it will go viral,” Angie added, “but it could, and it’s an important step in the process.”
    “Have you found anything helpful on Nadine’s computer yet?” Carolyn asked.
    Bao spun around the small wooden desk chair to face Carolyn. “She wanted to cover her tracks. She deleted her browser history before she ran. This was a planned event.”
    Carolyn looked crestfallen.
    “Don’t worry,” he said, pushing his long black hair from off his face. “Nothing is ever deleted on a computer. She must have read something about deleting the cookie file, but there are other ways to get at the data. Right now, I’m running a system restore and I’m also parsing the log files. We’ll know soon enough what she was looking up online. Chances are, that’s where she headed.”
    “How do you know?” Carolyn asked.
    “Because that’s what I would have done.”
    “Most runaways don’t go far,” Angie said. “From my experience, the ones who leave foster care are more likely to leave the state. Others stay close to home, crash with friends, people they meet. Few leave home thinking the street is their ultimate destination.”
    “But I’ve already called every one of Nadine’s friends and all my relatives, like you asked,” Carolyn said. “She’s not with any of them.”
    “That’s why I’m going to talk to each person individually,” Angie said. “Maybe one of them isn’t telling us the truth.”
    Bao returned to his efforts while Angie spent some time cross-referencing the list of friends she had