Six Years Ago
Detective Sorensen called our house two days later and asked my dad to come in, alone first, and then asked if I'd come in separately, because — her words — "your daughter noticed the parts that usually get missed."
I sat across a table that wasn't as scary as TV had trained me to expect, just scuffed and gray, with a folder in front of the detective that she didn't open right away.
"Six years ago," she said, "I worked a case in another county, different jurisdiction than mine now, so it took a minute to pull. A woman named Deborah Lynch was under investigation for how she was feeding her partner's son. Bowl on the floor. Withheld meals as punishment. Sound familiar?"
My stomach did something I didn't have a word for yet.
"The case never closed," she went on. "It went cold because Deborah Lynch disappeared before we could file charges. No forwarding address. New town, we assume, new name — that happens more than people think, especially when the paper trail is thin and nobody's actively hunting."
"The boy," I said. "What happened to the boy?"
She slid a single photo across the table, a school picture, a kid with a gap-toothed smile and a collared shirt that looked ironed by someone trying too hard. "Toby Marchetti. He went to live with his biological mother after the investigation started. He's ten now. He's safe."
He's safe. Two words that landed on me like they were about Junie, not about a stranger.
"You think it's her," I said. Not a question, not really.
"I think," Detective Sorensen said, choosing each word like it might go off, "that a woman using a technique this specific, this exact, doesn't invent it twice. I think Deborah Lynch found a new name, a new town, and eventually a new family. And I think your sister is very, very lucky she has an older sister who takes photographs."
She finally opened the folder. On top was a printout — a name-change filing, county records, dated five years and eight months ago. Deborah A. Lynch, petitioning to become, legally, permanently:
Corinne Vasquez.