An Introduction (of Sorts)

Most people assumed Nell Jones had an idyllic childhood. And, if you didn't look past the obvious facts, it was understandable. A dad, a mom, a boy, a girl, a dog,acat, a hampster, a gerbil, an assortment of fish, 2/5 acres of land in a nice neighborhood, a big house with a white picket fence: what's not to like?

But a little bit of carefull digging, if you knew where to look, told a very different story. Eric Beale knew the facts of Nell's real childhood. Facts like the number of times the police had been called to their house (between when the family moved in when Nell was three and when she moved out at almost seventeen): 15. Twice to look for Nell, three times to look for her brother, Randy, five times for both kids (all but one of this group occured in the last seven years before Nell moved out). The other five times were for more normal things: twice for shady people loitering around, once for a robbery attempt, once for an un-answered call from the security company, and once for an accidental dial-or at least that was the official story.
Then there was the family's long and illustrious history with DHR: seven dismissed or inconclusive child abuse, endangerment, or neglect cases, all but one after ananymous tips (the other one was a teacher concerned about the blood blister Randy got on his knee sliding into home plate during the Little League Tournament finals). Which brought up the subject of ER visits: 26 in 14 years. Everything from appendicitis, broken bones, and a concusionto x-rays,...well, Eric couldn't find any causes that started with Y or Z, but the x-rays, broken bones, and dislocted joints made up for it. Some of the stories were pcredible (It's hard to fake appendicitis), some probable (Randy broke four fingers in his years playing baseball), some plausible (Nell's cracked rib from jumping off a swing), and some downright unlikely (what self-respecting seven-year-old boy falls out of a tree twice in a week, even if he was unhurt the first time?).
But the cherry on top of the sundae of statistics was that both children had filed for emencipation the day of their sixteenth birthdays. Randy's case dragged on for two years, at which point he was eighteen and it didn't matter anyways. Nell won in just over a year, at which point she had already moved out to college and was pretty much self-sufficient.
Then there was where the sibblings went after they left: Randy joined the Marines and ended up an agent with a cover so deep Nell was one of about a dozen people whoknew he wasn't, in fact, dead (his personell file listed him as MIA). (And she didn't find out until she started working with NCIS.) Combine that with what Eric already knew about Nell's life during and post-college, and that every member of her extended family (except her and one cousin) was either tetotaler or alcoholic, and that her father was the latter, "A good dad and a great man...before about 7:30 or so," and Eric had a pretty good idea of what Nell's previous life had been like.

So he wasn't all that surprised when she started having falshbacks-but the triggers helped him piece in more of the puzzle that was Nell Jones.

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