Pat Jordan’s five grandchildren mean the world to her. Now that one of them has been missing from home for nearly a month – the sweet, vulnerable 16-year-old girl she adores – Jordan knows a feeling of desperation she never could have imagined before.

In that first week after Corey Lynn Theriault ran away, Jordan slept with her clothes on in case she got word about her granddaughter’s whereabouts and had to drive somewhere in the middle of the night. Whenever she closed her Waterville home-furnishings store for the day, Jordan would rush home to check the telephone answering machine, hoping her granddaughter had called to say she was OK.

The last time Jordan heard her granddaughter’s voice was Dec. 27, when Theriault left a message saying that she was at a friend’s house in Waterville and would call back later. She never did. And from that day on, Jordan has been on an exhaustive search from Portland to Bangor that she vows to continue until she finds the granddaughter she calls “my buddy.”

“It’s heart-wrenching,” Jordan said Wednesday as she prepared to leave her home in Benton to search the streets of Bangor for the second time this week. “I’m just so afraid of what could happen to her.”

While any young runaway is vulnerable to the perils of life on the street, Jordan said, her granddaughter’s mental illness makes her more susceptible than most. Theriault suffers from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Her father lives in Bradford, her mother in Biddeford. Because neither was able to provide the care Theriault required, Jordan said, the girl was placed in the custody of the Department of Human Services. After being hospitalized from June through October in Lewiston, where she received counseling and medication, Theriault went to live with her grandmother.

“I knew it was the right thing for her, ” Jordan said. “Her parents felt that Corey needed lots of love, and I was her best bet. I was so glad to be able to do it. She is really the sweetest girl, with such a big heart, and she appreciates so much what people do for her. It’s just that her two feet aren’t on the ground right now.”

Things seemed to be going so well at first, Jordan said. She and her granddaughter were extremely close. As the holidays neared, Jordan was busy seven days a week at her shop. Although she could not spend as much time with her granddaughter as she would have liked, she promised the teen-ager that they would be able to do more together when the Christmas rush was over.

As Jordan would learn too late, however, her granddaughter stopped taking her medication sometime in mid-December.

On the day she ran away, Theriault decided to dye her long hair pink. Jordan thought it was an outrageous thing to do, and the two argued. Her granddaughter went to her friend’s house and never came back home. When Jordan checked the girl’s bedroom, she found all of her granddaughter’s medication.

“I think she had begun making irrational choices and was becoming manic,” said Jordan, who now regrets how she reacted to the hair episode. “Looking back on it, there were probably signs that I missed. With me working so much, I think Corey was alone more than she should have been. We never had any behavioral problems in the house, although Corey was always embarrassed by the side effects of the medication. She’d be eating a hamburger at McDonald’s and her hands would be shaking. She didn’t sleep. I know it hurt her self-esteem, and teens have enough to deal with without adding those kinds of issues.”

Theriault always felt she was different somehow, her grandmother said. She was always looking for

a way to fit in with other people. Now Jordan is afraid that her granddaughter’s low self-esteem, overly trusting nature and need for acceptance could make her exceedingly vulnerable in a strange city.

Jordan has made two unsuccessful trips to Portland, where her granddaughter has friends. On Monday, she filed a missing-person report with the Bangor police, searched the downtown by car and stopped off at Shaw House and a few businesses to show people a picture of her granddaughter.

She visited the Job Corps, which Theriault had talked about joining one day to learn a trade, but no one there had seen the girl. Neither had her father in Bradford.

Following a report that someone in Bangor might have seen a pink-haired female walking toward the Rite Aid pharmacy at Third and Union streets, Jordan talked to a clerk at the store who recalled selling candy to someone who resembled Theriault’s picture. Jordan also spoke with someone in Bangor who might have seen a girl of that description buying food at Shop ‘n Save. On Wednesday, Jordan returned to Bangor to continue her search of the streets.

“My biggest fear is that Corey will fall into the drug scene,” she said. “If she is the person who has been seen buying food in Bangor, I worry about where she’s getting the money from. I’m very worried about her physical health, too, and how she’s getting along without a change of clothes. But the sightings give me hope I didn’t have before. All I want to do is talk with her, to tell her how much she is loved and that things will be OK. I’ll just keep running around, looking for any information I can get. I’m committed to this young lady, and I’ll do whatever it takes to find out where she is.”