'It's about the girl again.'
Isaiah's jaw hardened.
"Five years, three investigators and half a fortune chasing a name," Richard said.
'Perhaps she has already moved on.
Perhaps she doesn't want to be found.
That last sentence didn't go down well.
Then Isaiah looked up, and the emptiness in his face unsettled even Richard.
"Don't you decide what she wants for herself," he said.
Richard exhaled and stepped back, but the damage was already done.
Once the room was empty, Isaiah opened the drawer, looked at the tape, and realized
something that expensive professionals had somehow managed to hide with reports, data extractions, and searches in public records.
I had been looking for him as an executive.
I needed to search for her like a child.
That afternoon, instead of attending a dinner with potential partners, Isaiah drove himself to Lincoln Elementary School.
The building remained closed, one of the many underutilized properties caught between political failures and redevelopment proposals.
A temporary fence surrounded the land.
The paint peeled off the window frames.
Weeds had sprouted through the cracked asphalt.
The place seemed smaller than I remembered and sadder than I had expected.
He stood for a long minute by the old perimeter, listening to ghostly noises in the wind: children shouting, lunch bells, shoes on the cement.
A voice behind him said, "Are you waiting for someone, son?"
Isaiah turned back.
An older man, wearing a maintenance jacket, was carrying a key ring and a paper bag with tools.
His beard was white, his shoulders still broad, his eyes piercing, like those of men who had spent years keeping buildings running after everyone else had given up.
The label on the jacket said Barnes.
Isaiah introduced himself and, suddenly feeling silly, asked if he had ever met a girl named Victoria Hayes who had attended the school years ago.
Mister.
Barnes stared at him for a moment, then at the fence, and then back at Isaiah.
"The girl with the red ribbons?" he asked.
Isaiah forgot how to breathe.
Do you remember her?
Barnes let out a hoarse laugh.
"It's hard not to remember a kid who shared lunch with that skinny white boy everyone pretended not to see." He switched the paper bag to one hand.
'You were him.'
Isaiah could only nod his head.
Barnes looked at the glass frame that Isaiah had unknowingly taken out of his coat pocket.
'I saw that tape once on your wrist.
I haven't thought about it in years. He tilted his head toward the corner.
'Victoria still feeds the children, you know?'
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