Her Mother’s Grave

Chapter Nineteen

One week later, Josie found Gretchen and Noah standing awkwardly in front of her desk. “What do you mean we have a problem?” she asked.

Noah sat in the guest chair while Gretchen began pacing, her notepad in hand. She took out a pair of reading glasses and perched them on the bridge of her nose before flipping a few pages. She read off the names of every person she had talked to at the Department of Human Services. None of them meant anything to Josie.

“Stop,” Josie said. “You’re telling me you talked to all of those people, and they all told you the same thing?”

Gretchen looked up at her. “Yes. The Belinda Rose file is not there. The Department of Human Services does not have it.”

“Not there?” Noah asked. “Meaning it could be somewhere else? Do they have off-site storage?”

“No, they don’t. All the county records are stored in one place—at the main office in Bellewood—and Belinda Rose’s file is not among them,” Gretchen said.

“So, they lost it,” Josie said.

“They wouldn’t go that far,” Gretchen replied.

Noah laughed. “Which means they lost it. Or it was destroyed somehow, and they don’t want to take the heat.”

Josie ran a hand through her hair. “Okay, well, surely they had some kind of file for Maggie Smith. She ran the home Belinda lived in.”

Gretchen waved her pen in the air. “Yes. That’s the only lead we’ve got at this point. Turns out Maggie Smith got married in the late ’90s, moved on from the foster home program, and became Maggie Lane. She and her husband traveled the country in an RV until he died of a heart attack.”

“That was in her personnel file?” Noah asked, perplexed.

Gretchen smiled. “No, I got that from one of the DHS workers. Office gossip. She was new to the office when Maggie left to get married. Maggie had been running the group home for almost thirty years, so it was quite the hot topic of conversation at the time.”

Josie asked, “How old was Maggie when she got married?”

“In her sixties. That was the other reason for all the gossip. She waited her whole life to get married, and then her husband was dead within ten years. It’s terrible.”

“She gave up her position at the group home in the late ’90s,” Josie remarked. “That was twenty years ago. Which means she would be in her mid-eighties. Is she—is she still alive?”

“Yes,” Gretchen said. “She is currently a resident at Rockview Ridge, right here in Denton.”