Chapter 18

“Do you have a voice phone?” Starr asked. She was looking forward to spending the next few hours with him.
“Yeah. I have two. One over there, and one right here.”
“So we could probably just call the hospitals and police stations.”
“The hospital, yeah,” Josh said. “But we need to actually go to the police stations. They always have unregistereds and anonymous people so they just post descriptions on the wall.”
The two of them began calling the hospitals. “I’m looking for a girl who might have come in one of the last couple of days with out any id.”
“We don’t have any Jane Doe’s. We do have an older woman, but that wouldn’t be her, would it?”
“No. Thank you anyway.”
“No problem. Have you tried the police?”
After about 15 calls like this, the two of them were about ready to give up.
“Any luck?” Jake asked.
“No, you?”
“Nope. There is one last place. It’s all the way on the other side of town and she’d have to be in pretty bad shape to be there.”
“Well, lets give it a try anyway.”
“Rome Mental Hospital,” the voice on the other end answered. “How may I help you?”
“We’re looking for a young girl who may have been brought in sometime in the last few days. She would have been unregistered,” Jake began.
“We have one. She got picked up for claiming she was from another planet.”
“Do you know her name?” Starr interjected from the other end.
“She says her name’s Jenn something.’
“Yes,” Starr and Jake waited.
‘She came in on... wait a minute, let me go check the calendar. Please hold.”
“Is there something you’re not telling me?” Jake asked.
“Yes, but now’s not the time.”
“Your friend’s not crazy, is she?”
“No.”
“Then you mean...” before Jake could finish the question the receptionist came back.
“She came in 10 days ago, last Tuesday.”
“Thank you,” Starr said as she hung up. “Well, that couldn’t be her.”“Why not?”
“We haven’t been here a week.”
Jake looked at her puzzled.
“We’ll talk about it later. Right now we need to get to the police station and look for her there.”
Jake looked out side. The sun was setting, which meant they had about 3 hours until they had to be back. “We should have enough time to check the two closest police stations, but we probably won’t be able to make it to the orange or yellow stations.”
The police station was a large blue building. Something, something, something. Like Jake said there was a wall with descriptions of recently arrested criminals on it.
“There’s an awful lot of descriptions here,” Starr said. “Where do we begin?”
“There’s a small section over there for the ones who were arrested without any id.”
I was a small section of descriptions and they didn’t have any trouble eliminating all but the last one. “So, what does it say?”
“Let’s see,” Jake leaned in closer. “Charge: not registering.”
“That looks promising.”
“Sex :Female, Age:18-25, Height: 5’3”, rank: orange, picked up on 01,03,04- that was three days ago- in a slophouse after trying to obtain lodging using a fake credit card.”
“What does rank: orange mean?”
“It’s how we identify people’s status. Was she wearing an orange shirt or something?”
“Yeah, she had an orange tye-dye shirt on”
“A what?”
“Swirly pattern. Like your skin.”“Oh.. Yeah, that sounds like her then.”
“Can we find out for sure?”
“No, not now,” he checked his phone. “We should probably check the green station anyway.”
They quickly looked for signs of Jenn at the green police station, which was just like the blue one, except that it was a little nicer and green instead of blue. They were about to leave when Jake got a call.
“Well, who was it? Any news?”
“That was Robert and John. They’re not going to be able to make it back tonight. They said they’ll be back in the morning.” He looked at his phone again.” We should hurry or we won’t make it back in time either.” They ran all the way back to Jake’s apartment and were walking up the stairs just as the curfew alarm sounded.