"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?'
Food pantry on Thursdays at the New Hope Baptist Church, two blocks east.
I've been doing it for years.
All the reports Isaiah had read, all the databases he had consulted, all the dead-end interviews and inquiries sent by email suddenly collapsed under the weight of that simple fact.
She had not vanished into mystery.
She had stayed where hunger still lived.
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