Chapter 5
CHAPTER
Jordyn
Present
AFTER LEAVING THE ASCENT, Jordyn walked toward Division Street to find the coffee shop Tara used to hit after her workout.
She recalled the quirky place well even though Tara had never mentioned it by name.
Tara had video-called twice from the location, and Jordyn remembered the vintage coin-operated horse out front, clearly visible through the glass storefront windows.
An internet search had pointed her toward The Right Track, a thoroughbred-themed kitschy spot that had a strong local following because of the quality of their coffee beans roasted in-house.
Jordyn wasn’t certain if Tara had favored it because her friends went there or because her friends didn’t go there.
But then, there was a lot about her foster sister that Jordyn still needed to learn.
They’d bonded for two years as kids in a rough foster home, then hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years.
On Jordyn’s part because she’d never been told Tara’s adoptive family’s name, and they’d taken her upstate, far from the Brooklyn foster situation they’d briefly shared.
For Tara’s part, the long separation was because her adoptive family ensured she had no contact with her former life.
And then, somewhere in her teens, Tara had undergone a dissociative amnesia episode that had erased her memories of portions of her past.
But she’d undergone therapy as an adult—to process trauma over her birth parents’ deaths, according to her—and had somehow unlocked the buried memories of foster care.
And, of course, her close friendship with Jordyn.
Tara had seemed genuinely elated to recall Jordyn, locating her at no small personal expense, all without telling her adoptive family.
Now, pushing open the door to the shop where jazz tunes played, Jordyn inhaled the rich notes of coffee, molasses, and something dark and heavenly. Even though drinking a cup would probably keep her awake half the night, she decided to order whatever had been freshly brewed.
Five minutes later, she took a seat at a table near the windows, positioned so she could see down the street to the stoplight that marked the intersection with Broadway.
Saratoga Springs was a town of about twenty-eight thousand people, although in the summers during racing season, that number tripled.
The rest of the year, like now, it had more of a small-town vibe.
Seeing locals come and go wasn’t difficult with the downtown area concentrated on Broadway and the few streets intersecting it.
Jordyn had gotten acquainted with the lay of the land in the weeks before she’d attended the block party so she could hit the ground running once she’d inveigled her way into the book club.
She was rechecking her makeup to ensure the old holes from her facial piercings were hidden when her cell phone vibrated.
She took her first sip of The Right Track’s signature house blend and flipped over the screen to see Ezra’s number, then opted to answer so she could put an end to this once and for all.
She hit the button to connect them.
“Ezra, you have to stop contacting me,” she said without preamble. “I’m going to block you after this conversation.”
Silence stretched on the other end. She ground her teeth impatiently until she prodded him, “Are you there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Just trying to reconcile the fact that I miss you with that super hostile greeting.”
She took a deep breath, reminding herself that smoothing things over with him would be better than drawing an adversarial line in the sand. She hadn’t appreciated that last text he’d sent her, the one she worried Destiny Griffin might have spotted over her shoulder back at the gym.
You could be in a lot of danger yourself if someone from that book club finds out who you are and what you’re really doing there.
What if Ezra decided to interfere in Jordyn’s investigation, telling himself it was for her own good? She’d never imagined her introverted financial analyst ex-boyfriend, who was happiest when surrounded by spreadsheets and data, would suddenly decide to turn overprotective.
“You lost the right to miss me when you told me to choose you or my foster sister.” She slid the coffee sleeve up and down on the cup, keeping her voice low even though there was no one seated close to her.
The din of the jazz tunes and whirr of the espresso machine helped her keep the conversation private.
“The fact that you tried to manipulate me into doing what you wanted only proved how little you understand me. There’s no backtracking to fix that, okay? We’re done.”
“All right then, I guess that’s that,” he huffed, not bothering to hide his affronted male pride. “Where do you want me to forward this certified mail that arrived for you?”
“I changed my address at the post office.” Who would have sent her something certified? “I don’t understand—”
“Nevertheless, the delivery lady asked me to sign for it, and I did. Where should I send it?”
Jordyn wanted to argue that he had no right to sign for her mail when she didn’t live with him any longer but didn’t want to alienate him further. “Would you mind taking a photo of the envelope first so I can figure out what it’s about?”
She hated to share her new address even though it probably wouldn’t take him long to unearth the details if he went searching for her online.
If she’d learned one thing through her investigation into Tara’s death, it was that you could discover a ton about people via internet searches.
She’d taken that into account before her trip to Saratoga, hiring a data removal service to scrub some mentions of her past before building shiny new social media profiles.
Despite her best efforts, her socials were lacking, but at least they were consistent with the story she’d spun about herself.
“It’s from some slick Manhattan law firm. Want me to just open it for you?” he offered.
Her heart sank as she connected the dots about who the letter was from.
“That would be illegal, so no thank you.” She didn’t trust him enough for that. “Just snap a pic.” She lowered her phone so she could see the screen when the image came over.
As she did so, a flash of school-bus yellow darted through her peripheral vision from out on the street. When she peered through the coffee shop window, she spotted the vehicle at the corner where it stopped to let a handful of teens out onto the sidewalk.
“What do you think?” Ezra’s voice sounded again. “When I hold it up to the light, I can see the words ‘cease and desist’ in bold, but that’s all I can make out.”
She swore under her breath. Both at the content, and at her nosy former lover.
“Thanks, Ez. I’ll text you a post office box number where you can send it to me, and then I’ll be done taking your calls. Have a nice life.”
Before she stabbed the disconnect button, she could hear him asking, “You think it’s because Tara’s family—”
Then the line went blissfully dead. She didn’t need his anxieties wound up with her own, knotting her tension tighter.
Because she recognized the name of the law firm representing the Hughes family.
In particular, Tara’s father, who was a retired CEO of a pharmaceutical company and remained a major power broker in the industry.
What Randall Hughes wanted, Randall Hughes got.
It bugged Jordyn to no end that he didn’t seem invested in finding out what had happened to his adopted daughter.
But then, he had biological heirs by his first wife, so he hadn’t seemed overly concerned about Tara, the nonbiological child that his second wife had wanted.
True to the stereotype for the ex-model turned trophy wife, Lauren had preferred a brief stint at motherhood without wreaking havoc on her figure.
Hence, Tara, the fourteen-year-old foster child who was so sweet-natured, she’d never held the lack of love in her adoptive family against them.
Jordyn, however, had been livid with both Randall and Lauren when she’d spoken to them over the phone after the hit-and-run accident.
Randall had been more concerned with keeping his name out of the papers, and Lauren just wanted to “move on” by packing up her Saratoga mansion and relocating to their mountain home outside Jackson Hole.
Neither of them had shown the least bit of interest in pressuring the police working the investigation.
Recognizing that Tara’s parents had no interest in getting to the bottom of what happened to their daughter, Jordyn had briefly hired a private investigator herself at the beginning of summer.
That had been the first time she’d heard from the Hughes’ family law firm.
They’d warned her to let the police handle the investigation and had threatened a cease-and-desist order if she didn’t call off her PI.
She hadn’t fired the guy because of that threat; she’d already quickly realized that his methods weren’t effective in obtaining new information from Tara’s tight-lipped friends.
They would only speak about Tara through their attorneys.
So she’d sacked the PI and figured she needed a workaround.
Some other way to unearth information and maybe stir the pot.
Like infiltrate the group herself, since none of them knew about Tara’s foster sister.
The PI hadn’t told anyone whom he’d been working for, so the fact that the Hughes’ family lawyer had known spoke volumes about how well connected they were.
Too bad they hadn’t put any of those resources toward figuring out who killed Tara.