ellectrical | July 2007, Gunpowder and Sky

The sound, like a gunshot, startles Elle enough that she stills in the doorway to the gas station. Aside from her own car, the lot is empty, and in the mart behind her there's only a cashier now occupied with tapping the keys of his cell phone. It's less than a second later that a plume of blue light stretches over the concrete that Elle's watching. She takes a step forward, letting the glass door close behind her, and follows the sound of the next loud pop to look to the northwest sky. There's a bright flash of light, and a distant cascade of gold sparks, followed shortly by an explosion of green light behind it.

Fireworks. For the first time, Elle thinks to realize how the gas station is empty, its lot clear. She looks down to the plastic bag on her arm – a wrapped sandwich, plastic bowl of chopped fruit, two bottles of soda, a large candy bar, a penlight, hair pins, and batteries. It's the Fourth of July. She shouldn't have lost track of time.

Her stop here is just under ten miles short of St. Johns, Michigan, which is in turn about twenty-three miles south of Ithaca. Now, she doesn't linger at the sight of the fireworks. Elle makes her way to her rented hatchback, tossing the plastic bag in the passenger's seat and pulling out of the lot without another glance at them.

There's no shortage of motels along US-127 as she drives toward the town that was her home for most of the first six years of her life. Elle passes them one after another, internally debating the possible risks and benefits. Eventually, she drives through her destination, pulling into the edge of an empty Wal-Mart parking lot in Alma, a town just a few miles farther north. After eating the sandwich and fruit, Elle climbs over the seats to curl up in the back of the car, pulling a navy blue blanket over herself.

It's what she does for the next few nights, changing and washing in rest stop restrooms and driving into different parking lots at night. The first two places she visits in Ithaca require nothing elaborate – she doesn't need any reason to check the property records at the local courthouse, and easily enough passes as a young mother at the elementary school she'd wandered through nearly nineteen years ago. Her grandmother's home is listed among the property titles, though the property transferred soon after the fire.

Elle recognizes nothing but the building of her old elementary school – everything inside is completely unfamiliar. She slips into the administration office during the lunch hour, and despite finding her year, her teacher (the name she only recognizes from the report card she'd found in Tokyo), her name isn't listed once. Nothing so much as a yearbook photo or attendance sheet.

It's not her last stop, but already, she's getting what she expected.

Slipping into Gratiot Community Hospital required more planning. Snagging a nurse's ID was the most difficult task – she followed one just coming off his shift to a Denny's nearby, and took her chance when the man unclipped it and set it aside on the table as a woman sat down across from him. Elle pretended to accidentally knock into their table as she headed for the restroom, the spilled coffee that resulted distracting them enough to allow her to nab the ID and slip into her pocket amid her apologies. She'd been planning to just take a photo of it, but the restroom instead led to the Bar, giving her and X ample time to produce a convincing counterfeit.

The light blue scrubs and white tennis shoes are from the Bar, as well, and with minimal make up and her hair tied back in a ponytail, as well as the strategic decision to avoid the head nurse, no one gives Elle a second glance. It takes one brief visit to get a mental layout of the place, and another access the archives in the basement.

Elle goes through the employment records first, finding the files that report her mother's work at the hospital from February 1983 to April 1989. She'd quit abruptly, three months before her death, the only note written for it being "personal reasons." Throughout the files, there's not one mention of a daughter or child of any kind, though a few pages are noticeably missing.

She moves on from these to patient records. Despite dim memories of a seeing a doctor in this hospital at least twice, including on time she clearly remembers because her father had been the one to bring her, a half-hour search turns up nothing about these visits. What she does find is one more set of files concerning her mother – nothing more than a doctor's statement declaring her death from injuries sustained during a single car accident, trauma to the head and blood loss. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Elle leaves the files where they are, and makes her way out of the basement. From one of the rooms on the way to the stairs, that annoying alarm that sounds as a patient's heart rate rockets and plummets goes off, distracting her attention. She looks both ways down the hall, and steps into the room, closing its door behind her.

Five minutes later, as Elle is pressing down the handle of the Gratiot Community Hospital's back lot exit, a nurse and medical intern are monitoring their patient, perplexed at his sudden and apparently unaided cardiac recovery.

Elle has less to work with for her last visit, but she doesn't need as much – a generic police badge is enough, and she's not even asked to open it once she identifies herself as a detective out of Lansing. The request for access to the files available at the Ithaca Police Department is greeted with little more than a hand wave and an offered Styrofoam cup of coffee, and her only company is the small video camera affixed over the door.

She finds what she came for quickly enough – her mother had two speeding tickets, before the report on the accident that took her life. It doesn't indicate that her mother had used alcohol or drugs, though does suggest that she may have fallen asleep before her car slammed into the tree that totaled it, as there was no sign of any attempt to swerve or break. Nothing in the police report or the death certificate mentions anything about her daughter's existence.

A quick check using the room's computer confirms what by this point Elle had already concluded – that when her father took her into the Company, he had covered his tracks along the way. They'd made far more than just six years disappear before. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Elle Bishop didn't exist.

With a nearly unnoticeable flick of her hand, the camera's wires are quickly short-circuited. After double checking the hall outside, Elle photocopies a few of her mother's files and stuffs them into her bag, before giving the computer and copier the same treatment. The malfunctions are mentioned to the deputy on staff, and she hangs around long enough for one more cup of coffee and to listen to the deputy's complaints about the crappy old equipment they have up here before he lets her leave with a handshake and a call over his shoulder for someone to contact maintenance.

When she's out, Elle thinks about driving to the apartment where she had once lived with her mother. If it was still standing. She couldn't go to her grandmother's house, after all. But it's a flickering thought that's dismissed straight away – instead, when she pulls away from the station, she heads south. She can return the car in Detroit, and catch a bus west from there.

It's not until she's resting in the Detroit station, keeping an eye out for the bus that will take her back to Chicago, that she pulls out her list, and marks off Ithaca.