It had been a Saturday in the middle of July when they’d found her. A feverishly hot day. The kind of day when the sun glinted off car windows, apartment blocks shimmered, and the blacktop began to melt beneath your feet. The kind of day when people lost their cool in the heat and tempers started to fray.

It wasn’t a neighborhood where you’d expect the locals to call the cops, but that was exactly what Donna Lavelle’s neighbor had done, complaining the baby next door wouldn’t stop screaming. The noise had been going on all night and most of the day, and the woman had been convinced the child had been left on its own while its mother was out with one of her many male friends.

The two patrolmen who’d attended the call had found the place unlocked, the door slightly ajar, and Donna Lavelle sprawled on the couch, a cheap plastic belt still coiled around her arm and a dirty syringe lying on her belly. She’d been dead for a day, maybe two.

The baby, wearing a soiled diaper and a stained onesie, had been hot and hungry and suffering from malnutrition. She’d been taken straight to a nearby hospital before being turned over to child services a week later. There was no record of the baby’s father or any other known relatives.

As she read through the words on the screen, it wasn’t lost on Jessica just how much the intervention of a pissed neighbor might have impacted on her own life. That she might not even be sitting here today, sipping coffee and eating doughnuts, were it not for the actions of a woman who couldn’t handle the sound of a screaming baby. Jessica took a deep breath and moved on to the next phase of Eleanor Lavelle’s life.

Three years were spent in the care of a foster family with a view to an adoption that never happened. Jessica figured the circumstances of the foster carers had probably changed. Maybe they’d moved to another state or gotten pregnant and suddenly didn’t have the room for someone else’s kid. Either way, Eleanor had been one of the unlucky ones. A group home and two more foster families followed before she’d eventually aged out of the system at eighteen.

Then she’d disappeared. Vanished into thin air.

For the next three years in Eleanor’s timeline, Jessica couldn’t find a single record of employment, IRS payments, home ownership, or car purchases. Not even so much as a bank account in her name. She guessed Eleanor had made her living from cash-in-hand bar work, similar to the job at Ace’s Bar, and had probably crashed at friends’ places or moved from one short-term cash rental to another. But that was all it was, guesswork.