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Kat
Frank dropped a stack of yearbooks on my desk in the newsroom and said, “Look through these for background—quotes about Cory Dempsey, awards he won, clubs he sponsored. Don’t skim, be thorough. I want eyes on every page.”
I grabbed the one on top and stared at the cover. Northside High 2005–2006 and a student-rendered illustration of a breaking wave and a sunset. I sighed and thought back to my own high school years, my own senior yearbook only four years older than this one. I flipped open the cover and started paging through candid shots of kids who looked exactly like the ones I went to school with. People who knew how to have fun while I became consumed with living up to my mother’s unfulfilled potential. Trying—and failing—to make up for the opportunity stolen from her by a positive pregnancy test two years into her career at the Washington Post.
I’d poured myself into the task. Not just writing for the school newspaper, but becoming the editor of it. Attending football games with a notebook instead of a water bottle filled with vodka, waiting outside the locker room looking for a quote instead of a hookup.
My true passion had been fiction—filling pages with short stories and bits of dialogue that popped into my head at odd times. I fantasized about book tours and being short-listed for prizes—possibly even winning one of them. My favorite college professor had written me a letter of recommendation that had landed me a coveted spot in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for grad school, but my mother had said no, convincing me that journalism was the more distinguished field. Fiction is for teenagers and bored housewives. I’d ended up at Northwestern’s journalism school instead. Over $200,000 in student loans and two years of my life for the privilege of looking through yearbooks for Frank Durham.
I flipped through the senior portraits, skimming names and faces—tuxedo bow ties, pearls and off-the-shoulder formal wear—pausing when I reached Kristen’s. It would have been taken at the beginning of the year, fresh off summer vacation. I imagined her spending her days at the beach, the center of a large group of laughing girls, flirting with surfers and lifeguards.
I stared at her smiling face, the way her hair swept back across her shoulders. Her senior quote was one by Charlotte Brontë. I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward. I wondered why she chose it and whether it might mean something different to her now.
On an adjacent page was a candid of her, arm in arm with another girl. The caption read Kristen Gentry and Laura Lazar. I jotted Laura’s name in my notes and kept flipping. Page after page of seniors, each one the same as the last. Until I saw a name I wasn’t looking for. Meg Williams. There she was, staring into the camera, a half smile playing across her lips. She looked unremarkable, someone you’d see and then promptly forget.
I glanced around the newsroom, everyone consumed with their own work—talking on the phone, fingers flying across a keyboard, leaning on a doorjamb chatting up Marty at the Metro desk. Then I thought about my team—three men, plus me—all of us hungry to contribute something relevant. To see our own name at the bottom of one of Frank’s stories. Additional reporting by Kat Roberts.
I turned to my computer and logged in to one of the search engines we used to track down sources and entered Laura Lazar’s information. In seconds I had a current phone number and address.
***
We met during her lunch break. She worked as a temp in a tall office building in Westwood. “I only have forty-five minutes for lunch,” she said on the phone, “so it’s going to have to be salads from the café in the lobby. Hope that’s okay.”
We sat across from each other at a rickety metal table on the sidewalk in front of her building, cars on Wilshire zooming past. Laura was taller than I’d expected, dressed in what was probably one of her interview suits. We peeled the plastic lids off our prepackaged salads and started eating. “You went to UCLA?” I asked.
“Just graduated with a degree in communications.” She rolled her eyes. “I should have gone to grad school. The job market is shit.”
“I know I told you I wanted to talk with former students about Cory Dempsey, but I was hoping you could give me a little background on a side project I’m working on.”
She looked up from her food, wary. “I’m not going to talk about Kristen,” she said.
“Actually, I want to ask about a different classmate of yours. Meg Williams.”
Laura looked relieved and poked at a piece of cucumber with her fork. “Wow, I haven’t thought about her for a long time. What do you want to know?”
“Some people think she was the one who exposed Cory Dempsey.”
Laura stopped chewing, her fork suspended in the air, a smile playing across her face. “You’re kidding me. How’d she do that? And why?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. People close to him think she targeted him. That it was deliberate.”
She set her fork down and gave a loose laugh. “To be honest, I didn’t know her well. Meg was a loner, always lurking around on the edges of things. Kristen was friendly with her, but Kristen was friendly with everyone. Girl code, she used to call it.”
“Do you think Meg was also a victim of Cory’s?”
Laura shook her head. “I doubt it. She was a mousy thing, not at all his type. He liked fire. Personality. He mostly ignored girls like Meg.”
“Do you think Kristen would have confided in her?”
“If she did, she never said anything about it to me.”
“What would Kristen have told her about Cory?”
Laura gave me a shrewd look and took a sip of her soda. “I told you I’m not talking about Kristen.”
I turned off my recorder and capped my pen. “I don’t want to write about Kristen. In fact, we can put this whole conversation off the record. That means I can’t quote you or paraphrase you. I won’t even tell anyone other than my editor that we’ve talked. But whatever happened to Kristen, I think Meg knew about it, and that’s why she did what she did. It might explain why she put herself in Cory’s home, under his influence.”
I waited, letting Laura think. I’d already decided I wasn’t going to push it. Forcing a woman to talk about sexual assault—even if it wasn’t hers—wasn’t a line I was willing to cross. “The court documents that have been released don’t include any details about what he did to her,” I said. “Secondhand accounts are my best bet. If it was revenge, I’d like a clearer picture. Revenge for what?”
