Love In Plain Sight. Jeanie London

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      There was something about the way the features came together that warned not even eight years could transform this child into the young woman who visibly reined in inconvenience each time they met.

      Glancing up, Courtney saw her disbelief reflected in Giselle’s expression. “Are you sure? This can’t be possible.”

      “Apparently Araceli’s file wound up on a compliance officer’s desk. Turns out he used to be in the classroom before he went into staffing. He looked at the Araceli in the file and questioned whether she was his third-grade student. The classroom photo was his, but he still wasn’t sure. He contacted the photography company on the off chance they had records since they’re not based locally. You’re looking at what he found.”

      A rare piece of evidence left after the hurricane. Courtney stared at the proof again and latched on to the first thing she could in the midst of her racing thoughts. The most irrelevant. The least horrifying.

      “Why was a compliance officer reviewing Araceli’s file? I should have been included.”

      “No meetings were scheduled because of this situation. Araceli, or the girl we thought was her, got into a fight with a weapon during summer classes.”

      The zero-tolerance policy changed the rules when a weapon was involved. “What weapon?”

      Giselle scowled. “A chair. But given the way she used it... She has to be moved.”

      “Okay.” Courtney rubbed her temples, willed her brain to reason. “Then where is Araceli, and who is this girl?”

      “If we knew, we wouldn’t have a problem.”

      That stopped Courtney cold. A powerful wave of vertigo rolled through her.

      Two girls. One name.

      A missing child.

      Her heart pounded so hard each beat throbbed as reality narrowed down to the terrifying implications.

      A missing child.

      Details didn’t matter. The situation simply didn’t get any worse. Letting her eyes flutter shut, she blocked out Giselle’s expression, the hard-won professionalism that wasn’t concealing her panic.

      Inhaling deeply, Courtney willed herself to think, to ask the questions that were critically important now that a child was missing.

      “Has anyone spoken to the Pereas yet?” She forced the words past the tightness in her chest. “What about this girl?”

      “The FBI will conduct the investigation.”

      “Not the police?”

      “We have nothing on Araceli but what’s in this file,” Giselle explained. “She crossed state lines during the hurricane evacuations. The investigation is out of police jurisdiction.”

      The hurricane.

      Another euphemism. There had been hurricanes before and since, but Katrina was the hurricane. Giselle didn’t have to say another word because again, her expression reflected the helplessness and horror of an event that had been far beyond the control of the people involved, an event that had challenged everything from their comfy worldview to standard business practice for this department.

      All hard-copy documentation had been lost in the flooding. Out of the five thousand plus kids in foster care at the time, two thousand had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina, then many shuffled again a month later because of Hurricane Rita.

      Kids had wound up spread over nineteen states in that mess, and social workers such as Courtney, Giselle and Nanette had tracked them all down again. The aftershocks were still being felt to this day, along with memories of the litany of priorities that had dictated their lives as they functioned from evacuation shelters because offices and homes had been flooded, cell towers had been down, and the city had been under martial law.

      First, we keep you alive....

      Then we get you safe....

      Then we work on your health and medications....

      Then we figure out where you belong....

      Recalling that long road back to a functioning system brought another realization, one that hit with familiar category-five velocity.

      The hurricane had been eight years ago.

      “Tell me we have some other documentation, Giselle,” she demanded. “Tell me we’re not operating on what Nanette pieced together after the hurricane.”

      Giselle spread her hands in entreaty, motioned to the desk. She didn’t have to say another word because they were both thinking the same thing.

      The only person who might shed some light on this situation had died on the side of the road, surrounded by strangers on a drizzly February morning.

      “Her work was stellar.” Giselle assumed the crappy responsibility of verbalizing the doubt that would be cast on someone not able to defend herself. “I won’t believe this situation is a result of negligence. That goes against everything I know about her.”

      “You’re right. Absolutely right.”

      “The FBI will want conclusive proof, but we don’t have any. Nanette looks culpable. This department looks culpable.”

      Which circled right back around to the we.

      Giselle was responsible for this department and everything that took place within. Courtney was responsible for this case and everything that had taken place since Nanette.

      A child was missing.

      The only answer that mattered, the one that left her doing exactly what she’d been told not to do—panicking—was the very one she had no answer for.

      What were their chances of finding Araceli alive?

      “We had no way of tracking Araceli after the hurricane.” Giselle riffled through documents one by one. “We can’t prove Araceli’s the child on one document in this folder. We can’t prove we placed the real Araceli with the Perea family. We can’t prove she’s the Araceli in this Red Cross database.”

      Her voice escalated. “We can’t prove she evacuated to the Superdome with her foster family, then got separated on the buses in Houston. We can’t prove she went to Atlanta after being evacuated during Hurricane Rita. We can’t prove she was the child we got an emergency injunction to remain out of state until the Pereas moved out of the FEMA trailer and back into their home. We have no idea who we’ve been shuffling around because the last known photo of Araceli is from third grade.”

      The papers were now all over Courtney’s desk. Papers that proved nothing conclusively—except that Araceli Ruiz-Ortiz had gotten lost somewhere over the course of the past eight years.

      Courtney walked to the window that provided no escape. She saw nothing but eight years stretching out like a lifetime, and all the horrifying things that could happen to a girl alone. The passage of time was marked only by the silence echoing as she mentally replayed every horror story she’d ever heard.

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