Picking up the phone on the counter, I turn the dial while Nolan rattles off the numbers for me. Someone picks up after the first ring and I explain once again that I’m looking for a relative by the name of Tobias Duskin. I’m losing a little hope at this point, though. He might not even be alive anymore, let alone housed in the only other prison within easy driving distance from here.
The woman puts me on hold and it only takes a few minutes for her to come back on the line. “Yes, we do have a man here by the name of Tobias Duskin. He’s been here since he was transferred in 1947.”
“Don’t you mean 1946?” I ask, knowing the date of the transfer request on the form I saw was exactly nine months before I was born and the whole reason I put everything together. Maybe that was some sort of weird, coincidental mistake, and my father wrote the wrong date. Maybe I jumped to conclusions because that answer made so many things fall into place and gave them an explanation, instead of jumbled nonsense in my head. Her private nightly meetings might not have been definitive proof of an affair, maybe it was just…I don’t know, family stuff. Stranger things have happened, especially recently. It’s not like I found a birth certificate in the file listing Tobias as my father.
The woman tells me to hold again and I hear her shuffling through papers. After a few minutes, she comes back on the line. “No, it was definitely 1947, although we did receive the first request in 1946. Unfortunately, we were full at that time and couldn’t accommodate the request. It says here that on September 3, 1947, we received a phone call from his previous place of incarceration, Gallow’s Hill. It doesn’t give much of an explanation on the paperwork I have access to; it just says an emergency call was placed requesting transfer immediately because of a dangerous, possibly life-threatening event that Gallow’s Hill was unable to handle. He was picked up by us that same day.”
I barely pay attention to what she says after she informed me of his official transfer date, and when she rattles off visitation days and hours, at least I snap to it long enough to scribble those down on the sales ledger next to the phone that’s open to a blank page. When she asks me if I need anything else, I don’t bother answering her; I just hang up the phone.
“I’m guessing by what I heard you found the right prison. Did he die or something? Is that why you look like you’re in shock?” Nolan asks, pulling the ledger across the counter toward him to see what I wrote down.
“He’s still alive and yes, he’s there. Tobias wasn’t transferred nine months before I was born like I thought,” I mumble, going through the woman’s words in my head again, realizing I was right all along with my suspicions, and I feel even more sure of them now than I was five minutes ago.
“Okay, so what does that mean? You don’t think he’s your father now? It was all just suspicion anyway so it’s not like we had any concrete proof,” he reminds me, pushing the ledger back where it was.
“I think we have even better proof now,” I inform him, ripping the page out of the ledger with the visitation times. “He wasn’t transferred in 1946, but an immediate and emergency transfer was called in to Strongfield on the same day I was born. That seems a little bit strange to me. How about you?”
Nolan runs his hand through his hair and shakes his head back and forth slowly. “Yeah, that’s a little too coincidental even for me. I’m assuming you’d like to go on a little road trip, since Strongfield is only an hour away, and if the times on the paper in your hand are visiting hours, that means we still have five hours left today.”
Turning away from the counter, I grab the spare set of my father’s car keys from the hook hanging on the wall. Thankfully, I don’t need to wait for another random bit of luck that my father will emerge from his office, allowing me the opportunity to steal his car keys that are always kept in his desk—or be forced to have Nolan pick the lock and try to come up with a lie about why I need the keys.
Feeling an abnormal burst of happiness and, strangely, not at all uncomfortable with it, I decide to try my hand at being just a little bit nice, tossing the keys to Nolan and informing him that he can drive. It’s the only bit of control I feel comfortable conceding to right now.