Now the only new story I had was the four-month-old police report that pinged on Birdwine’s radar. In it, an ancient eyesore of a Buick with a crumpled hood and a long scraped side came driving in wild loops through Morningside. One good wife of the neighborhood saw the sketchy car pass by, out of place on her street. She also clocked a kid in the backseat, and noted how erratically the female driver wove from curb to curb. She did nothing. Not until the second time it passed, and she worried that her neighborhood was being cased. Then she called the cops.
A cruiser was dispatched, but by the time it arrived, the Buick had already wibbled off the road and banged into an evergreen in some upstanding citizen’s front yard. The accident happened two blocks down from the lot where our old apartment used to be. If Kai was looking for it as the last stop on her Past Lives Tour, she was out of luck. The whole house had been torn down, and a faux craftsman with three thousand square feet of living space had been crammed onto the lot.
The driver—Karen Porter from New Orleans, according to her ID—was groggy and disoriented. She’d whanged her head against the steering wheel. She and her child were taken by ambulance to Grady Hospital, where they ascertained that the concussion was the least of her problems. She was in the end stages of lung cancer that had spread all through her—brain, bones, and beyond. The child was treated for a sprained wrist and released to DFCS. The woman remained, drifting in and out of consciousness with limited lucidity. She died six days later.
I’d accepted that Kai was dead. I’d wept and wept in Birdwine’s arms as we stared out at my city’s skyline. But if this woman was Kai, then my mother had already been cremated; Adult Protective Services, unable to locate a living relative, had done it at the end of May.
That info came from Birdwine; he’d followed up on the woman while I tried to get a bead on the kid. He thought DFCS would be more open to inquiries about a ten-year-old girl-child from me. I was a female blood relative and upstanding member of the bar, while he was a fired former policeman, emphasis on man, with less than a week sober. Fair enough.
I spent the better part of two business days poking my way through endless automated menus, only to get a person who would transfer me to another person, who inevitably sent me back into the menu or, if I lucked out, into a voicemail. I recorded a honey-throated message whenever I got the option, building up a solid legion of inquiries.
Julian, new to red tape, got frustrated fast. He’d quit at the suburban Mellow Mushroom and was both interning for me and looking for another job in midtown. He’d completed his transfer application to Georgia State and was sending me endless links to real estate listings in good school zones that had yards and at least two bedrooms. They all had carriage houses or basement apartments, too. The implication was I’d have a brotherly built-in renter, close enough to help with after-school care. He wanted the both of us to storm DFCS in person, locked and loaded.
I told him to stand down. I stayed sugar-sweet and patient, even when I got disconnected after a solid half hour spent on hold. I was casting a wide but very gentle net. If this was Hana—and I hoped it was—I wanted her caseworker already thinking well of us, predisposed to see us as an asset. I promised him if no one got back to us by Monday morning, I’d take the afternoon off. We’d go to the DFCS offices and run a good cop/bad cop, pitching tents and hissy fits as needed, hurling lawsuit threats and bribes around, whatever it took, but to let me try the sweet road first.
It was almost lunchtime on Friday when Verona poked her head into my office. She looked spooked.
“It’s a woman from Social Services,” she said, eyes wide.
She knew how important this call was—the whole firm did. I’d invited Nick out for a drink on Wednesday, and I’d leveled with him about all that had gone down with my family situation in the last half year. Nick was more than forgiving; he was downright supportive. As well he should be. We went way back, and I’d literally taken a beating—almost a bullet—for the firm. It didn’t hurt that Winkley v. Winkley was unfolding beautifully, both in terms of the settlement itself and the good publicity. Oakleigh adored my sorry ass; I’d turned her life into a big fat bowl of roses. She was an asshole, sure, but she was my asshole, and Nick all but glowed, rhapsodizing about the referrals she’d give her spoiled, rich friends when it came time for their inevitable divorces.
As a bonus, Nick was an incorrigible gossip, so I’d only had to plop my fresh and steaming guts out on a table once. The tremble in Verona’s voice as she told me who was on the phone was testament to how fast and thoroughly he’d spread the word.
I hit Save on the motion I was writing and set my laptop aside, saying, “Super, put the call through.”
“No, not on the phone,” Verona told me in a hushed, dramatic whisper. “There’s a woman here. Right here. In the lobby. Now.”