Page 30 of The Chosen
I didn’t when I brought him on to help with the more difficult situations I’d often faced in my line of work.
And his background was still just as pristine.
In the beginning, I saw it as an advantage. The last thing I wanted or needed was someone who might become a liability. In my mind, if he was this proficient at covering his own tracks, he’d be good at covering my clients’ tracks, as well.
Now I couldn’t help but think I should have pressed for more information. Because after several hours of looking through every corner of the web, I couldn’t find a single thing on Blake Ford, other than what he wanted me to find. As if his digital presence had been carefully curated.
I had a feeling it was.
Staring blankly at my screen, I mentally reviewed everything I knew about him. Everything he’d shared with me.
It wasn’t much. For as long as I’d known him, he’d been notoriously tight-lipped. He never spoke of his childhood or family. Never shared stories about old friends or his college days.
There was only one thing I knew with any sort of certainty.
Every once in a while, he’d run a search for someone named Chandler Meadows.
I’d always been curious about who she was, but I never crossed that line.
Never invaded his privacy.
Until now.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard for a beat, a twinge of guilt settling low in my stomach.
But I needed answers, so I typed her name into my company’s interface.
I’d expected to find the same useless information most searches returned. Social media profiles. Employment history. College records.
But there was almost nothing recent. Nothing since roughly thirty years ago.
I wasn’t all that surprised not to find much, considering Blake had been looking for her as long as I’d known him.
What did surprise me was the court record I found for child neglect proceedings against someone named Shelby Meadows, who I assumed to be Chandler’s mother. Since Chandler was a minor, they were sealed, but that didn’t stop me from being able to access them.
According to the court records, Chandler and her brother, Pierson, had been taken from their mother and placed in a foster home due to their mother’s battle with addiction. She eventually cleaned up her habit and got her kids back. The record even showed the judge commending Shelby for all the effort she put into getting her act together. After a year of constant home visits and meetings with social workers, she eventually had her full parental rights restored.
This was about when Chandler was in third grade.
I searched through the court file to see if there was any indication of what school she may have attended and learned Shelby had agreed to keep sending Chandler and Pierson to the same school their foster parents had sent them to — The Chosen Path Academy in a middle-class suburb of Fort Myers.
Unfortunately, the school ceased operations approximately twenty-five years ago. Regardless, I was able to find digital scans of the school yearbooks filed in the local library. Including one from Chandler’s third-grade year.
She looked like any other eight- or nine-year-old. A few missing teeth. Bright smile. Dark hair.
But there was something familiar about her eyes. I couldn’t quite place where I’d seen them before.
Then I flipped forward to the fifth-grade class and found her brother’s photo.
Unlike Chandler, he seemed a bit more hardened. Haunted. As if he hadn’t forgotten what their mother had done. And he stayed that way over the next several years.
But Chandler didn’t stay the same.
Over the next few years, her smile began to fade, her eyes lost their life, and her clothes became baggy.
I got the feeling things at home had taken a turn.
But after scouring through child services reports, I couldn’t find anything where they’d gotten involved.
