Different Circles

“Beany babies,” Pauline confirmed. “Remember them? They were quite the fad back in 1993 when this incident took place. I do not have information on what the parental reaction to the incident was, but there is a note from the judge that states that Miss Meghan seemed extremely remorseful for her actions, cried considerably as His Honor lectured her in juvenile court, and that he was confident that there was a low probability of her reoffending. And he was right. The only scrape with the law she has had since then was a parking ticket she got at the Pismo Beach pier in 1996. She paid it promptly and has committed no parking violations since.”

“Okay,” Jake said, nodding. “So far, so good.”

“It seems that she is heterosexual primarily,” Pauline said next. “Or at least there is no information to suggest she may be a lesbian or bisexual. She received a therapeutic abortion at the Pasa Robles Planned Parenthood clinic on May 11th of 1996 when she was nineteen years old. She was brought there and driven home by her sister. She was also treated for a case of gonorrhea in the same visit. It is worth mentioning as a piece of circumstantial evidence that that date is five weeks after a documented trip that Meghan took to Mazatlán, Mexico for Spring Break. Since then, she has had no pregnancies or cases of venereal disease that could be uncovered. She has been regularly filling prescriptions for Pro-G birth control pills ever since. And she has never again taken a Spring Break trip.”

“Interesting,” Jake said. “It sounds like she likes to fuck.” This was a bit worrisome on several levels, though not really unexpected. She was, after all, a young, healthy, reasonably attractive woman in the prime of her life.

“Don’t we all like to fuck?” Pauline asked simply. “All indications are that she does not currently have a regular boyfriend and that she never really has had a regular boyfriend. She identifies herself as Christian—Methodist in particular—but is not a regular churchgoer. She attends church usually only on Easter Sunday—when she’s not in Mazatlán getting knocked up and catching the clap on Spring Break anyway—and the Christmas Eve service. She is known to go out and drink alcohol on the weekends on occasion, but it is not a regular thing for her. There is some circumstantial evidence that she may like to toke up a little reefer now and then, but usually only in social situations. There is no evidence of any kind that she uses anything harder than pot and alcohol.”

“That is a good thing to know,” Jake said.

“Right,” Pauline agreed. “As for her academic life, she graduated twelfth in her class from San Luis Obispo High School in 1994. Her SAT scores were quite impressive, indicating a fair degree of intelligence. She was accepted to Cal Poly and began her freshman year in September of 1994 where she lived in the dorms on campus. Her declared major was Psychology and she carried an A average in her general education classes and a B minus average in the classes related to her major. She received her highest grades in English 1A and Sociology 101. In both of those classes, she was excused from the responsibility of taking the final because she had accumulated enough points with her essays and other assignments that she would hold onto an A even with a zero grade on the final.”

“That’s pretty good, right?” asked Jake, whose highest grade in college had been the B he had received for his intermediate guitar class.

“Yes,” Pauline said slowly. “That’s pretty good. She seems a very smart girl. She continued to attend Cal Poly until the end of the spring semester of 1996. Her grades were about the same as usual for that semester and she was on track for graduation with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology in June of this year, but for whatever reason—Steve could not uncover even speculation on this matter—she did not sign up for the fall semester of what would have been her junior year. She moved out of the dorms and went back home to her parents’ home. She got the job at KinderCare and has been living that life ever since.”

“What about her parents?” Jake asked. “Anything on them?”