Forgive Me(28)

Carolyn Jessup already felt the same persistent ache, and probably got flashes of hope within a crowd of strangers. Angie had to find Nadine. The likelihood of a happy reunion dimmed with each passing day.

The Nats game held Angie’s interest more than the takeout. She had no trouble finding space for her leftovers. Her refrigerator was mostly empty. Any day now, a new cookbook would arrive from Barnes & Noble—something about clean eats, her most recent purchase—and Angie would peruse the pages, feeling guilty for not having the time or energy to shop and cook.

She returned to the futon when her phone rang.

“What’s up, Bao?” she answered. Her pulse ticked up a notch or two.

“I think I have something on that photograph. You got a minute?”

Her pulse ticked up some more. “Yeah, sure.”

“Better in person. Can you meet now?”

“Of course. Where?”

“Your place.”

“Okay. What time?”

“Now. I’m downstairs.”

Angie rolled her eyes. “Bao, why didn’t you start the conversation with Angie I’m downstairs. May I come up?”

“You could have been busy. I didn’t want to be presumptuous.”

“Just come up.” She buzzed him inside.

He had a different way of thinking about things, which was why she wanted his help to identify the girl in the photograph. Who could she be? A sister she never knew?

Bao came in wearing a gray hoodie and carrying his skateboard.

“Is that how you got here?” Angie asked.

“It’s how I get everywhere.” He had a studio apartment several miles from Angie’s place, but his skateboard made getting around town a breeze.

Angie got Bao some water from the tap. She would have given him some wine, or a beer, but he didn’t drink alcohol. A vegan and the guy who got Angie into yoga, Bao liked to have a clear head at all times. He was careful with everything he put into his body.

He set the photograph on the coffee table, and there she was—that sweet girl with the sad smile and deformed ear, wearing a lovely pink dress with white polka dots.

“So?” Angie said. “What do you got?”

“I don’t know who the girl is, but I do know where this picture was taken and more important, when.”





CHAPTER 14



When. Angie held her breath in anticipation.

“There are clues here,” Bao said, “that tells us when this was taken, but first—” He flipped the picture over and Angie read the haunting message her mother had written on the back.




May God forgive me

IC12843488




“Some photographic paper has the brand printed on the back, like this one does.”

Angie had been so focused on her mother’s writing she hadn’t paid attention to the wallpaper-like printing on the back. Printed in faint lettering were the words THIS PAPER MANUFACTURED BY KODAK, set at a tilt and displayed numerous times so it covered the entire back of the image.

“Kodak had four common brandings. Velox dates back to the 1940s to 1950s.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I have a friend who’s a photographer. I asked. I don’t get every answer from the computer. Just most of them.” Bao smiled.

Angie returned a smile. “Go on.”

“Kodak Velox Paper. That watermark was used in the 1950s and 60s.”

“I didn’t think the photo was that old.”

“It’s not. This one here”—Bao’s finger tapped on the watermark decorating the back of the image that read THIS PAPER MANUFACTURED BY KODAK—“came after ‘A Kodak Paper,’ another watermark which was from the late sixties to early seventies. Based on that, we know for sure that this image was printed between the mid-seventies to the eighties.”

“Amazing.”

“Now, look here.” Bao flipped the image over to the picture side. “See this?” He put his finger on the poster plastered to the side of a building in the image background.




000

DS

THS

’m I

IN’?




Angie had studied the poster before at her father’s house. The figure in front blocked out the crucial letters, and she couldn’t get any clues from it. “Yeah, I already looked at that, but couldn’t make anything of it.”

“Me neither. But I went to a website and put the letters into an application people use to help them with Scrabble. It creates all the words that contain those letters. For example, with the letters T-H-S, the application returned words like childbirths, tenths, and paths. I did it for D-S and got a list as well. Apostrophe M, I’m guessing is I’m. I’m also guessing the I-N-apostrophe is I-N-G, but there are a whole lot of words that end in i-n-g, right?”

“Right. And?”

“I couldn’t make out the text between 000 and DS, it was just too blurry, so I wrote a little program that takes all the D-S and T-H-S words and does a search using those three zeros. I figure those zeros have to be some common number, otherwise why print it on a poster? My program ran through all word combos and the numbers one thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand, and one million. Manually it would have taken me forever, but my program did it all in a flash. I generated a bunch of image search URLS because that’s what we’re looking for. Am I right, or am I right?”