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Kat
June
I stay at the fundraiser, keeping a loose eye on Meg, but she and Ron don’t talk again. She leaves around eleven, and I wait fifteen minutes before retrieving my own car. Then I text my mother, the only person still awake who might care.
I saw Meg Williams tonight. She’s back.
Even though it’s 1:30 in the morning in Chicago, I know she’s up. When I was a kid and would wake in the middle of the night, she’d be in her study, reading newspapers, magazines, and political blogs. Anything she could get her hands on.
As I make my way down the winding street and back toward Sunset, I try to imagine Meg on her way home, only thinking about her introduction to Ron. Not knowing I was there too, watching her.
A couple months after Nate, I called Connor, one of the nicer reporters who had worked alongside me under Frank. “Did the police ever talk to Nate Burgess?” I’d asked. Even saying the name made me sweat, but I needed to know.
“Oh yeah,” Connor said. “An anonymous tip was called in, shortly after you left, about an attempted rape. The police investigated, but didn’t find anything. Since there was nothing to back up her story, they wrote it off as a crazy ex-girlfriend, looking for revenge.”
Connor’s words hit me like a punch. Meg never mentioned anything about an attempted rape. Not even a warning—Don’t go alone or Watch your drink around him. Instead, she’d led me to believe that if I concealed who I was and what I wanted from him, Nate would share all of Cory’s secrets. She didn’t care that it might put the young female reporter on the other end of the phone at risk.
My mother’s reply buzzes as I turn onto the freeway that will lead me home. I’ve kicked off my heels, and the gas pedal vibrates against my bare foot.
This is your second chance. Don’t squander it.
A familiar pinch of disappointment. With just a few words, she’s reminded me that most people don’t need a second chance at all.
I never told my mother what happened with Nate. All she knows is that I was on the Cory Dempsey story, and then I wasn’t. I was a young, promising reporter working at the LA Times, and then I wasn’t. I’d gone to the high school the following morning, gotten the quote for Frank, and delivered it on the edge between late and too late. But as the story developed, with new and horrific details being released every day, I couldn’t stomach it. I kept seeing Nate’s face, blurry around the edges, the last thing I remembered before I passed out. There’s a special kind of hell in not remembering trauma. It becomes a dark and faceless fear that lurks in unexpected places—the smell of whiskey, a certain type of bar stool, a song, a laugh—reaching out to grab you when you least expect it.
I slid off the story and another junior reporter from Frank’s team stepped in, no one aside from my mother seeming to notice or care.
“What were you thinking?” she’d asked when I told her I’d quit the paper. “I pulled a lot of strings to get you that job.”
“It’s done,” I’d said. I couldn’t tell her that I was sick every morning, terrified that, despite the empty condom wrapper, I’d somehow gotten pregnant or caught an STD. I began to isolate myself, declining dinner invitations, nights out with friends, until the only person I saw regularly was my best friend, Jenna, from journalism school.
“Things didn’t work out,” I told Jenna. “You know what it’s like. Endless fact-checking. Twenty-hour days chasing someone else’s byline. I want the freedom to write my own stories.”
Leaning on my time working at the LA Times allowed me to get a few decent freelance jobs at the beginning, but Nate had changed me. For years, I had to fight down panic attacks every time I had to meet a source in person, always choosing a crowded place. Never eating or drinking anything. I felt safer behind a computer screen, eventually settling there permanently.
As a result, research became my specialty. I know how to take a deep dive into someone’s financials or to dig up old records from small claims court for a property dispute. Over the years, I’ve used these skills to learn as much as I can about Meg Williams.
I’m not the naive reporter I was back then. If I’m going to pull myself out of the professional hole I’ve been in for the last several years, exposing Meg and unraveling a decade of her cons and thievery will be how I’ll do it.
She owes me that.
***
Being an investigative journalist is like traveling through a maze backward. I start at the end and try to find my way back to the beginning, discarding false leads and dead ends until all the signposts are clearly marked. And to understand anyone, you have to start with their family of origin, which informs every choice they make.
I started my search years ago, using public records. In 2001, Meg’s mother, Rosie, inherited a house in Brentwood from her paternal grandparents. Brentwood is a pocket neighborhood, between Santa Monica and Westwood, filled with an eclectic mix of high-end condominiums and large estates. Home to twentysomething tech bros as well as megastars like Jennifer Garner and Gwyneth Paltrow, properties like the one Rosie inherited on Canyon Drive sell for millions of dollars.
In 2004, Rosie put a developer named Ron Ashton on the title to the house. Eight months later, she’d signed a quitclaim deed, giving him sole ownership. She’d died a year later.
But public records will only provide a framework. They can’t tell you anything about the people behind them. For that, you have to talk to those who might have known them.
I needed a busybody. Someone who paid attention to the comings and goings of their neighbors. Who was moving in, who was moving out. Who had rip-roaring fights in the driveway at five in the morning. Who came home drunk in the middle of the night. Every neighborhood had one; you just had to knock on enough doors to find them. I spoke to a lot of housekeepers and ladies who lunch, all of them refusing to acknowledge whether they’d known the Williams family or not.
But finally, I found Mrs. Nelson, who lived in the house directly behind the Canyon Drive property. “I’ve lived here for nearly fifty years,” she said, after I’d introduced myself as an old friend of Meg’s, trying to track her down. “I remember the Williams family well.”
We’d settled into white rattan furniture on Mrs. Nelson’s sunporch, overlooking a flat expanse of grass leading toward a tall hedge at the back, behind which stood Meg’s family home. “I remember Meg’s mother, Rose. She was a spunky and sparkly young lady.” Mrs. Nelson lowered her voice. “Rupert and Emily’s son—Rose’s father, Dean—had some trouble with drugs. In and out of rehab for years.” She sighed. “They never said so, but I’m certain that’s why Rupert never retired. He worked until he was almost eighty.”
“What happened to Dean?” I asked.
