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Twenty-Five
One positive thingI could say for Jalen and me bickering, I wasn’t even tempted to put off any work I had to do. I’d slept through most of Saturday, then started working like crazy first thing Sunday morning, some on finding Jenna’s other siblings, some on a few other possible cases I’d come up with on my own.
Missing kids. Fort Collins, Loveland, the whole area. To start, anyway. The cops would have some of these cases, the ones where the parents had filed reports, but others would be the sorts of kids who didn’t have adults looking out for them, the kids who were on the streets here to escape from something worse elsewhere.
Some of the disappeared would be runaways. Some would be dead.
Some would have been taken like Meka, but without anyone looking for them, they would vanish.
I was going to do whatever it took to make sure that didn’t happen. When Jenna gave me leads to follow, I’d do it, but I didn’t plan on limiting my work to the specific assignments I was given. I had a feeling some of the people in my life would have something to say about that, but I didn’t care. I’d found something I could fight for.
All of that was why I was back at the county courthouse, hoping I wouldn’t be condemned to that same musty basement room where I’d spent too many hours already.
“Next.” A far too happy, sandy-haired man beamed at me. “How can I help you?”
“I need to see census records. Hard copies.”
He blinked. “From where and when?”
“Whatever ones you have here.”
His smile faltered, and he shifted in his seat. “Miss, we have copies of records from five counties, going back twenty years.”
I smiled and hoped he didn’t think I was laughing at how pale his face had gotten. “Then that’s what I want.”
As I followed the directions he’d given me, I thought back to the call I’d gotten from Jenna a few hours ago. Technically, what I was doing was checking out an idea that she’d had rather than something specific Agent Matthews had asked of her. The fact that it would help me with what I was doing was just icing on the cake.
Jenna had no problem accessing digital census records, but a few things she’d found made her wonder if those records were as accurate as they should have been. She hadn’t given me a reason why she suspected that, but I hadn’t needed her to. If she asked me to go look at the hard copies, then that was what I would do. I’d look for evidence of tampering on the hard copies and take pictures I’d later send to Jenna. It would take a long time to compare the digital copies to the hard copies, so I wouldn’t do that here and now. If Jenna wanted me to help with the comparison, she’d ask.
I planned on keeping the census pictures for my project too. I could compare one year to the next and find the missing names, the kids no one reported missing. It wouldn’t help me with the street kids, but it was more information than I could find with just filed reports.
The room with the papers I wanted was much nicer than the previous one. This one had windows.
I started with the previous year’s findings and took a deep breath before wading in. This was going to be tedious, intensive work that I wouldn’t be able to finish today. Hours of poring over papers, with nothing but the same to look forward to for the rest of the week, at least. Normally, that would drive me crazy, but this sort of detail-oriented work was what I needed to keep myself from remembering that it’d been three days since Jalen had shown up at my place, and three days since I’d last heard from him.
But that wasn’t important. I had details to focus on.
* * *
When I sawthe figure standing in front of my apartment door, my heart leaped. Then I realized that this figure, while still tall, was a few inches shy of Jalen’s height. The shoulders weren’t quite as broad.
Still, it was a figure I knew and cared about.
“Clay, I wasn’t expecting to see you.”
He grinned at me as he pushed off the railing. He rubbed his hands together, then blew on them. “Thanks for showing up before things started freezing off.”
I unlocked the door. “Come in. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for things freezing off.”
He laughed, and it brought my first real smile in days. I’d forgotten how good it felt to be with someone who made me laugh rather than someone who infuriated me. I still wanted Jalen, despite our argument, and I believed that he’d come to his senses soon. When that time came, we’d talk things out, but it was nice not to need to think at the moment.
I kicked off my shoes and Clay did the same. “Do you want something to eat? I’m starving.”
“Long day?” he asked as he followed me into the kitchen. “Does county-wide courthouse research always build up an appetite?”
I threw a sharp look over my shoulder as I rummaged in my freezer for my last frozen pizza. “Do I even want to know how you know that?”
“Probably not,” he admitted as he reached over to pre-heat the oven.
