Page 67 of When a Soul Cries

“Her name is Sol.”

“Sol,” he repeated slowly. “Damn. She got your ass calling security already?”

“Darius.”

“All right, all right. What you need?”

I gave him the information I had. “Nothing crazy. Basic public shit. Where she’s from, family, whatever you can find.”

“So everything except her favorite color and birth chart.”

“Do the fucking search.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Lover Man.”

I hung up on him.

About an hour later, my phone rang again.

“Talk to me.”

“Your girlfriend clean.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Your future girlfriend clean.”

“Darius.”

“Damn, all right.” Papers shuffled on his end before his voice settled. “She came here from Pinehaven, Mississippi. No siblings that I can find. Doesn’t look like she has any close family living around here either. There’s an aunt back in Pinehaven who looks like her closest family connection.”

I sat forward. “So nobody here?”

“Not that I can verify. Whatever support system she got here, it doesn’t look like it’s family.”

That bothered me more than it should have.

“Parents?”

His tone changed. “Both gone. Mama died in a car accident when Sol was seventeen. Daddy died four years later from a heart attack. He was forty-eight.”

My smile disappeared. “Damn.”

“Yeah.”

Seventeen.

At seventeen, I’d been worried about football, girls, and whether Mama was going to catch me sneaking back into the house after curfew.

Sol had been burying her mother.

“What about work?”

“Retail. Warehouse. Pretty consistent employment. Nothing jumps out.”

I rubbed my jaw, hesitating before asking the question that had been bothering me since last night.

“What about her daughter’s father?”