Sorry for the long-ish wait! July is a busy month at my job, so I haven't had as much time to write. I tried to make the next few a little longer to make it up to you all :)
TW for mentions of violence, physical abuse, ableism
The guilty part of Skye's brain – the part where the little Jiminy Cricket lived and whispered that most of Skye's impulsive ideas were bad ones that were going to get her into trouble or get someone hurt – was working overtime as she lay there in the dark, listening to Jemma's heavy breathing. The sounds of the house had settled around her as she tossed and turned: the water running for Bobbi's shower, the solid footsteps of Phil coming upstairs and going into his bedroom, the exhale of the day sinking over them all like a heavy blanket. Jiminy Cricket said it was a bad idea, but Skye knew she had to see that file, and she had to do it soon before she lost her nerve again.
Even though she was fast asleep, Skye could hear Jemma's protests in her mind. Often Jemma's voice and Jiminy Cricket's lumped together until they were one in the same, speaking in unison. That's not a good idea, Jemma would say. Her face would be all scrunched up and worried-looking. Skye, that's private. And you might get caught, and then you'll be in awful trouble.
"Well then I won't get caught," Skye whispered to the little Jemma in her head. The real Jemma didn't stir. "I have to know, Jemma. I have to know what they're telling people about me. About us. And who knows? Maybe there'll be something in there about…" A sharp breath lodged itself in Skye's chest before she could finish the thought. That might be too much to hope for right now. About your parents, Jiminy-Jemma said. Skye, I know you're desperate to know about them, but that's not a good idea either.
Skye had had this conversation with Jemma – the real Jemma – before. She had never told Jemma about the aching empty space she felt deep inside of her. Some things were too private for even best friends. But Skye had told Jemma more than once that she intended to find her parents one day. Jemma tried to be sympathetic about it, but she couldn't keep herself from rattling off all the ways it could go wrong.
"You might not like what you find out," she had warned. "They might not be alive anymore. They might not be able to take of you. They might not be nice."
"I know that," Skye had said, with more confidence than she really had. "But they might also be good people who have been looking for me this whole time. Even if they're not, I at least want to know. I want to know where I came from. Besides," she pointed out, "aren't you the one who always says discovery is one of life's gifts?"
"Yes," Jemma admitted. Her face was puckered with concern. "But some gifts are better left unopened."
Skye had dropped the subject back then, but thinking about it now, she shook her head in utter bemusement. What good was a present if you didn't open it? Even if it was a crummy present that you wanted to give back, like the little ceramic angel statues with the dopey faces that the nuns gave them for Christmas every year, at least you got something out of it. Those angel statues had wings made out of bent wire that Skye repurposed into her computer circuitry, so they weren't completely useless. Even if her file was filled with stuff she didn't want to see, at least she would know what she was up against.
Skye wasn't sure how long she waited, but it felt like ages had crawled by before she decided everyone was long asleep and not likely to catch her creeping around. Jemma was out like a light, and the sound of Bobbi's crutches thumping against the baseboards had stopped a long time ago. May and Phil were a little harder to gauge, but Skye knew she had been able to sneak in and out of Jemma's room before without detection back when they were still supposed to be in separate rooms, so she was reasonably confident in her ability to slip down to May and Phil's office without waking anyone up.
Kicking the sheets back, Skye slid out of bed and set her feet on the floor. She eased her way across the room and to the door, ears trained for sounds of stirring. Jemma's breathing continued to hold slow and steady, even as Skye turned the handle and pushed the door open with the lightest touch she could manage. Years of sneaking around to avoid angry foster parents or to slip food from the kitchen had trained her well.
She had almost no difficulty creeping down the stairs, and she avoided the creaky step that was second from the bottom. The first floor was nearly pitch dark, but Skye's eyes adjusted quickly, and she slipped towards the office where she knew May had returned the computer before bed.
As she suspected, the laptop was sitting where she thought it would be: right on top of May's desk, plugged in and practically waiting for her to wake it up. Skye perched herself on the desk chair and popped the lid of the computer up. The screen erupted in bright blue light, which sent Skye reeling for a moment until she found the brightness key and dimmed the screen to a less painful level. Rubbing the spots out of her eyes with one hand, she pecked out the computer password that May had shown her with the other, and soon the laptop was unlocked and at her command.
The little Jemma voice in her head was begging her to stop before she went too far and got to a point where she couldn't go back, but Skye ignored it and opened the web browser, clicking over to the tab where May's email was sitting there waiting to be read. Rather than scroll though several weeks' worth of personal emails, Skye quickly plugged Miss Hand's name into the search bar at the top of the page, hoping that the woman would pop up as a contact. She told herself that this was the way to make what she was doing less invasive. This way, she wouldn't look at any email from anyone other than Miss Hand, and she wouldn't browse through the whole inbox.
Luck was on her side, apparently, because a contact for Victoria Hand jumped right to the top of the suggested results, and Skye wasted no time in clicking on her social worker's name to narrow the inbox. At the top were a couple of emails that looked more causal in nature. One had the subject line "Dinner Plans (because Izzy keeps forgetting to call you)" and had a few replies logged back and forth. Skye wondered if this meant that Miss Hand and the mysterious Izzy would be stopping by the house at some point, but didn't dwell on the question. Another email was titled "Checking in, Re: the girls." That one piqued Skye's interest instantly. She chewed on her lip momentarily, debating whether or not an email conversation about her counted as being within the scope of her investigation.
Something above her creaked, and Skye froze in terror. Holding her breath, she waited a solid thirty seconds before she dared to move again. She inched two fingers over to the ALT and F4 keys, in case she needed to plunge the screen to black at a moment's notice, but another minute ticked by without another sound, and Skye decided that the noise was caused by the old house settling.
Chastened by the scare, however, Skye opted not to spend her potentially scarce time on the check-in email. She was here for her file, and that was it. She scrolled past a forwarded listicle on "The 10 reasons why people who practice tai chi make the best friends" and another one requesting a file from "the McMillan case." She was a little surprised at how frequently May and Miss Hand seemed to be in contact with one another. She had underestimated what they meant when they told her and Jemma that they were friends who also sometimes worked together, she supposed, but in her defense, grownups said all the time that they were friends with people who they barely talked to more than twice a year.
She was about to abandon the search and try a new keyword when she saw it. The subject line read "Wisconsin Department of Children and Families – Social Services: File Poots, File Simmons," and Skye probably would have skipped over it for being so long if her eye hadn't latched onto the unfortunate name that was supposed to be hers. It was hard to overlook a word like "poots," Skye thought with a grimace. Taking a steeling breath, Skye stretched out her hand and clicked on the email.
May, the email began, attached are Jemma and Skye's files. I know the documents all say Mary Sue Poots, but she prefers Skye. I'm sure you've got that already. Some of the older records are a little hard to read, since they're handwritten, but everything should be scanned in for both girls. Don't hesitate to reach out with questions or concerns, either by email or on my cell. You have both. I can't thank you and Phil enough for what you're doing. I know the two of you are going to be great.
The email was signed with one of those form signatures that had Miss Hand's full name and job title, and Skye had to smile a little at the formality of it. She scrolled past the signature and to the bottom, where two attachments were sitting there, just waiting to be read. Both documents were labeled with strings of indiscernible numbers, so Skye clicked on the first one and waited with bated breath for the file to load up on her screen.
It was Jemma's, Skye realized after a minute of scrolling through the first couple of pages. She meant to close out of it right away and switch over to her own, but the words "Return Report," which were emblazoned across the heading of a page in bright red letters caught her attention. She had no idea what that was supposed to mean. Was Jemma getting sent back? Skye did her best to pick through the dense document, and while a lot of it made about as much sense as something written in the wingdings font, she was able to piece together that it was a report that Miss Hand had to file every time Jemma went back to St. Agnes. The one Skye had landed on was from Jemma's most recent return, when she had come back from the Williams' house.
While the Williams' hadn't been the very worst people Jemma had ever lived with, as far as Skye was concerned, they were up there. According to Jemma, they had acted all nice and excited to have her when she had first arrived, but they very quickly discovered that they had no idea how to take care of someone as like Jemma. Jemma told Skye about how they had forced her to look them in the eye at all times, and had taped her fingers together with duct tape so that she wouldn't tap or fidget with them.
Skye knew that not being able to tap always made Jemma upset, sometimes even more than whatever thing she needed to tap about in the first place, so it wasn't difficult for her to imagine how hard it must have been for Jemma to live in a place where she couldn't comfort herself or practice any of her usual tricks for calming down. That was why she hadn't been shocked when Jemma explained about how she started melting down much more easily at the Williams' house than was normal for her. What had shocked her were the ways in which Jemma had been punished for her behavior.
"They would get so angry," she had told Skye. She had been tapping like mad while she recounted the story, and Skye could tell it was getting to an especially bad part, because Jemma had started rock back and forth, ever so slightly. "They kept shouting at me to stop acting like a toddler. They said they didn't tolerate tantrums in their house, and that I had to learn self-discipline. When I couldn't stop, they would send me to the corner." That was where Jemma had picked up the habit of knocking her head against the wall. It was what the Williams' had made her do when she couldn't get control of herself, and it made Skye feel sick just to think about.
"If I didn't do it properly, Mr. Williams would take my head and do it himself," she had whispered to Skye, tears streaming down her face. "Or if he wasn't there, Mrs. Williams would get the broom." She shuddered, and it took several minutes before she spoke again. "She would swat at me, knock me about. The pieces of the brush were so scratchy, and the handle was heavy. It was made of wood, I think. She didn't like to touch me, but she would use the broom to make sure I was doing my punishment right. It never helped me calm down, it just made everything worse."
"Obviously," Skye had said, agape. "Who thinks that smacking a kid when she's upset is going to make her calm down? They're basically evil, Jemma. It's not your fault that they don't know how to be decent human beings."
"At least it only took them a few weeks to send me back," Jemma murmured. "Not like…"
"We don't need to talk about them," Skye said quickly. As bad as the Williamses were, Skye knew nothing would ever truly compare to the Walkers. She didn't want to make Jemma anymore more upset than she was by making her think about the torment she had endured under the "care" of Keith and Vanessa Walker. "Does Miss Hand know? About the Williamses, I mean?"
"No, not everything," Jemma said, ducking her head. "I couldn't tell her."
That was why Skye wasn't surprised to see that Miss Hand's return report seemed like a fairly standard document. It listed the reason for return as "incompatible family match," which Skye had to scoff at. The rest of the page listed things like dates of placement and a bunch of other things Skye couldn't fully understand. In the margin of the page, she saw a handwritten note, that she assumed was made by Miss Hand herself. The handwriting was small and neat, and was printed in all capital letters, which Skye thought was interesting.
Parents claimed not able to support Jemma's needs. Jemma appears distressed following time with them. Follow up is needed. Potential investigation? Skye raised her eyebrows. She should have given Miss Hand more credit. She was the best social worker either one of them had ever had, and she was the type of person to notice when things weren't right with her kids. Even though Jemma had never told Miss Hand what had gone on with the Williamses, the woman was smart enough to see past the incompatibility baloney that the foster parents had tried to feed her.
Curious, Skye scrolled quickly through more pages of the file. She didn't linger too long on any particular page, partially to save time, partially because a lot of the material was hard for her to decipher, and mostly because she felt more than a little guilty for looking at Jemma's personal history, even though she had been there for so much of it.
There were other return reports, several that listed similar reasons, like "wrong fit," "unable to meet needs," or "not a good lifestyle match," and the one from the Walkers that was suspiciously devoid of any real information or truth. Skye knew that social services knew what had happened in that home – that was why Jemma's case had been transferred over to Miss Hand instead of the negligent social worker she'd had prior – but so far nothing in the file seemed to document it beyond a vague mention of unfit parents and a notation about "evidence of mistreatment or harm to the child."
She scrolled past school records, test scores, a birth certificate from the UK, and medical records that did document Jemma's broken arm from the car crash that killed her parents, but that didn't mention the scoliosis surgery Jemma had undergone as a child before she was orphaned or the weeks it took for the burns on her fingertips to heal after she had been returned from Mrs. Patrick. Mrs. Patrick had been a severe elderly woman who thought that the best way to rid an eight-year-old Jemma of flappy hands and twitchy fingers was to have her press her fingertips onto a hot stove until she didn't want to tap them anymore. It had been a blessing when the cranky old woman had decided she'd rather move to Florida to be closer to her sister and had dropped Jemma off at St. Agnes on her way to the airport. That, at least, was in the file.
Skye felt a burning in her throat as she read page after page of notes and documents downplaying the horrible things Jemma had gone through. It was like the nuns at St. Agnes wanted to pretend like nothing bad had ever happened to Jemma. They were happy to put in pages that showed Jemma scoring in the top percentiles on all of her school exams, but they brushed everything else under the rug. It made Skye's blood boil.
The last page of Jemma's file had a handwritten intake form that must had been filed when Jemma first arrived at St. Agnes. It detailed the car accident, how long Jemma had lived in the US, and took stock of Jemma's personality. Quiet girl, very shy, it said. A few lines down, a new piece of handwriting mentioned that Jemma was strong academically but socially challenged, and a third handwriting stressed the importance of finding Jemma a patient, stable home with minimal stressors. Well, at least they got one thing right, Skye thought. But then again, what kid didn't want a stable, stress-free home?
At the very bottom of the scanned page was taped a tattered photograph of Jemma that Skye figured must have been taken not long after she arrived at St. Agnes. Her right arm was encased in a cast, and she was missing a front tooth, as many six-year-olds often were. She was posed for the camera, but she wasn't looking at it, her eyes instead cast downwards and full of palpable fear and grief. It wasn't exactly a flattering photo, but Skye couldn't blame Jemma. She had just lost her parents and been sent to a strange, new place – of course she would look sad and scared in her picture.
Deciding that she'd had enough of Jemma's file, Skye clicked out of the document and opened the next one. Hers. She paused before she started reading, listening hard to make sure the house was still asleep. After determining that she was well and truly the only one awake, Skye turned her attention fully back to the screen in front of her.
A lot of the material seemed to be the same: school and medical records, return reports that more often than not left out the most important details, and the like. The reasons listed on Skye's return reports were substantially more varied than Jemma's. The one from Mrs. Murphy specified that she wouldn't continue to care for a "violent child who took pleasure in destroying personal property and endangering others," which Skye felt was a little harsh for a five-year-old who had kicked over a chair because she was tired of being strapped to it. A few mentioned Skye's scuffles with other kids living in the home, like the one from the Bryants, while others mentioned her disciplinary problems, or her inability to keep from bouncing off the walls, and one even cited Skye's "flagrant and blatant disregard for basic rules or the laws of society." That one had come from the house where Skye had gotten caught trying to change her grades online, and Skye was almost amused at how indignant the comment sounded. Like she was the first kid ever in the history of the world to try and bump up her grades. The one from Mr. Erikson made no mention of his habit of chucking snow boots at kids' heads, although there was a handwritten note from Miss Hand on that one. Skye asked me to not send any other children there. Declined to elaborate. Will look into. Skye was pleased to see that Miss Hand had taken her seriously about that one.
The report from the Palmers made Skye's throat go tight. She had stayed with the Palmers when she was six, and they had been the best family she had ever had, at least before May and Phil. They were a kind older couple who had never had biological children of their own, but who had fostered countless kids before Skye went to stay with them. They were the first family Skye actually thought could have been a forever, until Mrs. Palmer was diagnosed with cancer and they couldn't take care of her anymore. That report held apologetic comments from the Palmers, and hopes that Skye would find another good home until Mrs. Palmer got better. A handwritten comment, presumably from Mr. Bridger, her social worker at the time, informed Skye that Mrs. Palmer had passed away less than a year later. The corners of her eyes burned with hot tears, but she blinked them back before they could fall. She hadn't known that Mrs. Palmer had died, and she was caught off guard by how sad she suddenly felt to learn it.
She forced herself to keep reading, determined not to dwell on her sorrow or allow herself to be overcome with all of the complicated emotions that she was sure would come with mourning Mrs. Palmer. She didn't want to think about how one of the only foster parents who had ever been nice to her was dead, or about how sad and lonely Mr. Palmer must be without his wife. She gave herself a shake and imagined she was shoving her memories of the Palmers into lockbox in a dark corner in the back of her brain. She had to keep pressing forward.
The next section was filled with various disciplinary reports from the nuns and from all of the schools Skye had attended over the years. Jemma's file had been markedly lacking in these, but Skye had expected to find scores in her own file. Many of the reports were ones she had seen before, from her previous attempts to access Sister Margaret's computer, and she didn't linger long on the numerous pages listing out every fight with Michaela Dodson and the other bullies at St. Agnes, every instance where Skye had talked back to a teacher or disobeyed instructions from one of the nuns, and every minor misstep or moment of misconduct Skye had ever been accused of. None of the reports ever mentioned Skye's reasons for doing the things she did, or the fact that she was rarely the one to start trouble, but she had expected as much. The nuns almost never took her side or believed her when she tried to explain that she had been fighting Michaela the Medusa out of self-defense or that she lost her temper in school because her teacher was making her feel dumb.
Looking through all of her return reports and page after page of all of her documented wrongdoings, it was a wonder anyone ever wanted to take her home at all. If she was a potential foster parent, she would have thought the girl in the file was dangerous, difficult, and violent. The girl in the file was a lost cause.
A weird, sour feeling started to writhe around in the pit of Skye's stomach. She had never thought of herself as any of those things, not really. She knew she was lousy at school, and that she got in trouble all the time, and that she had never been very good at doing things like listening to directions, but she had never truly considered the fact that, to most people, she amounted to little more than a problem child who was well on her way to full-on delinquency. To other people, she probably looked like a hopeless case. It was no wonder the only families that ever wanted to take her in were the ones who didn't actually seem to care about their kids, or the ones who thought that if you smacked a kid around enough, you could knock some obedience into them. If she was the person that her file made her out to be, then she didn't really deserve to live in a nice house with kind and attentive foster parents. If she was the person that her file made her out to be, then she didn't deserve to live with people like May and Phil. After all, they had agreed to foster her before they had even seen her file. They had come for Jemma, and had ended up getting stuck with her, too, but they hadn't known what they were getting themselves into.
The sour feeling in her stomach was starting to claw its way towards her throat as she imagined how disappointed Phil and May must have been when they finally looked at her file and saw that they had been swindled into taking home a kid as rotten as her. And now, here she was, hacking into May's email and snooping around where she didn't belong.
Guilt surged up again inside of her, but this time it was mixed around with another feeling – a more defiant one that was slowly starting to overpower the guilt. If she really was as bad as her file said she was, then why not embrace it? Why not be as bad as everyone thought she was? She was already going to be neck deep in trouble if she got caught, so why not make the most of it while she still had the opportunity?
Skye could tell she was nearing the end of the file, because the Skye being documented in the pages was getting younger and younger. Skye sucked in a breath through her teeth as her cursor landed on the last page. Her intake report. Jemma's had detailed the circumstances of her arrival, including the car crash and the identity of her parents, so if there was going to be any place where Skye could find a clue about her own parents, this page would be it. She squinted at the screen and was dismayed to see that the file was entirely handwritten and entirely in a spidery cursive that must have been scrawled by a very old nun who still believed in the importance of extra curlicues on all of her words. Skye had enough trouble reading printed words, but cursive was practically impossible. Everything looked like caterpillars crawling across the page, but Skye knew she couldn't let that stop her.
July 4th. Baby girl found on doorstey, the report began. Skye decided that the word was probably doorstep, even though the last letter definitely didn't look like a "p" to her. No idimti- Skye knit her eyebrows together, trying to decipher the unholy handwriting. Identification, she realized. No identification with child, no information. Child wearing only standard-issue sleeper and blanket from Ames' Memorial. Age unknown, appears to be between 0 and 2 months. Race unknown, possibly mixed. Skye scowled at that. Apparently, people had been preoccupied with her ethnicity from the moment she arrived at St. Agnes, although why it mattered for a baby on the doorstep, she couldn't fathom.
Her eyes flitted back over to the phrase "standard-issue sleeper and blanket from Ames' Memorial." She wasn't exactly sure what a sleeper was, but Ames' Memorial was definitely the name of the hospital closest to St. Agnes. She had heard it mentioned more than once, as various children over the years had made trips there for things like broken arms and appendectomies, and if she had been wearing a blanket from that hospital, then maybe it meant that she had been born there 0 to 2 months before the 4th of July. An electric current of excitement zipped up her spine and she could feel her heart pounding away in her chest.
Birthdate unknown, the file continued. For recording purposes, date of birth will be recorded as May 27th, the Holy Day of Pent- Skye had no idea what that word was supposed to be. It looked like it said Pent-cost, but she had never seen it before, so she couldn't be sure that was really what it said. Name unknown. Name will be given as Mary, for our Blessed Mother, Sue, for St. Susanna U Surim, the Korean martyr, to honor the child's potential heritage, and Poots, for Sister Norma Poots, the founder and original patron of St. Agnes' Orphanage.
Skye had never been told where her name had come from. She had always just assumed the nuns pulled it out of a random book of names they kept on hand, or that someone had thought it would be funny to stick a kid with a terrible name like Mary Sue Poots. Knowing the various namesakes didn't exactly make Skye like her legal name any better, but she appreciated the small bits of insight nonetheless. She wasn't sure how she felt about being named after a Korean saint when the nuns clearly didn't have any idea if she was actually Korean or not, but she supposed it was at least an attempt at a nice gesture, even if it was probably a misguided one.
There wasn't much else that Skye could read on the intake report, since the crabby cursive started to get even spikier and harder to read as the page went on, but Skye felt like she probably wasn't missing much else. The few words she could make out seemed to be describing her disposition as a baby, since she could pick out things like "fussy" and "not easily soothed."
Just like with Jemma's, a photograph was taped to the bottom of the intake form. This one was even more torn and faded, but Skye could see the red and wrinkled face of a tiny baby poking out from inside of a blanket. The baby had a tuft of dark hair and her face was screwed up like she was getting ready to start screaming. Skye smiled in spite of herself. That baby was her. She had never seen a picture of herself as a baby, and here she was, spitting mad and ready to tell somebody about it. There was something oddly comforting in knowing that some facets of her personality seemed to have been present since birth.
After lingering on the photo for a few moments more, Skye eventually clicked out of the file and sat back in the desk chair, trying to take it all in. The defiant feeling that had started to build up after she had read all of her disciplinary reports was still kicking around, creating a dangerous combination with the electric excitement that had overwhelmed her when she had pieced together the place and timeframe of her birth. The nascent beginnings of an idea began to take shape in her head, and before she had a plan fully formed, Skye found herself clicking open a new tab and firing up a google search on Ames' Memorial Hospital and Sheboygan County public records. She followed the search to an official-looking government site that told her she would need to submit a formal request in order to access any public records. She tried the hospital website next, but everything she found there was about scheduling appointments, finding doctors, and what to do in case of a medical emergency.
Frustrated, Skye clicked out of the google search and returned to the email. Maybe digging up information from the hospital would have to come later. Skye stifled a yawn, and realized that she had been on the computer for over an hour. It was much later than she had meant it to be, and she was starting to notice how heavy her eyes were growing. She quickly pulled open the browser history to clear any evidence of her presence on the computer and began the work of erasing her indiscretions.
As she scanned through the history listing to make sure she didn't miss anything, one entry caught her eye. It was an online police database that Skye figured May used to do work from home. Curious, she clicked on the entry to pull it up and see what exactly the site looked like. The entrance to the database portal looked standard, and it was password protected. Unlike May' email, this one wasn't still logged in, so Skye would need to do a little cracking if she wanted to gain access. Judging by the information in the site header, the database contained all kinds of public records, and Skye was sure that birth records would be included. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard as the little voice of Jemma returned to her head, warning her that on the scale of bad ideas Skye had acted on that night, this one would definitely be the worst one. It's one thing to go into someone's email, Jemma's voice scolded. And that was bad enough. This is probably illegal. Like actually illegal. You could go to jail for hacking into the police's files.
Or, Skye countered, I could impress them with my skills and get hired, like that guy from the Pentagon.
This isn't the time for jokes, mental Jemma chastised. This is really serious. It was serious. It was more serious than anything Skye had ever hacked before, but nothing had ever mattered as much to her before, either. If she was right, this database might help get her one step closer to finding her parents and filling the empty space that ate away at her insides like a cavity in a tooth.
Before she let the voice of Jemma talk her out of it, Skye typed in May's name and the password she had used to open the computer and clicked the login button. The attempt bounced, and a warning message popped up, informing her that her password was incorrect. At the bottom of the screen was a "Forgot Password?" button, and Skye couldn't believe her luck. She wouldn't have to hack anything at all. She clicked the button and quickly filled out the information to have a reset code emailed to May's inbox. A moment later, May's email pinged, and the reset code was at Skye's fingertips.
Her hands were practically on autopilot at that point, flying across the keyboard and changing May's password to the database before she had even fully registered the magnitude of what she was doing, and the next thing she knew, all of the knowledge of the Manitowoc police department was sitting just within reach. The database wasn't old, exactly, but it was clearly running off of a server that wasn't state-of-the-art either, so it took Skye a minute to navigate her way around the clunky coding and sorting features that seemed to be organizing the information.
She started with the crime reports and plugged in search parameters for the two months leading up to the date she arrived at St. Agnes, but that search was primarily a bust. The results were overwhelmingly large, listing everything with numeric keys that probably corresponded to different types of crimes – not that Skye had any clue what the difference between a 1-1-7 or an 0-8-4 was. Even more disappointing was the fact that most of the results were centered out of Manitowoc, which was nearly 30 miles from where she should have been looking.
Skye shook her head, chastising herself. Of course the Manitowoc database wouldn't report crimes in Sheboygan. She should have known that the information would be location-sensitive, since each precinct likely had its own database. Deterred but not defeated, Skye backtracked and found her way to a missing persons tab instead. Maybe she had gotten lost and someone was looking for her, all these years. Maybe she had been taken and hidden away. It would kind of be the perfect kidnapping, she reasoned, to hide the kid you stole in an orphanage.
The missing persons reports were fewer than the general crime ones, and they covered a wider geographic range, but nothing looked to be quite right from the window of time that Skye was hoping for. She expanded the search to include the entire year of her birth, just in case, but that didn't turn up much either. None of the files made any mention of a baby girl, and none of them indicated a pair of frantic, loving parents looking to get their infant daughter home safely.
She backed up the main portal once more, scanning over the categories to see if there was anything else that might be of use to her. There was no telling when she would ever get a chance like this again, and she was determined to make the most of it. One label near the bottom jumped out at her as promising, and she felt her pulse quicken at the phrase "Public Records." A google search hadn't given her the access she had needed for those, but a police search surely would. She clicked into the field and managed to find her way into the birth records section, wasting no time in narrowing to the summer months from thirteen years ago. Luckily for Skye, the results weren't confined to just Manitowoc, but to Skye's dismay, the wider scope meant the results were in the thousands. She tried to find filter options for the search to try and winnow the records down further, but the database seemed to be too old for a tool like that. Instead, she added Ames' Memorial as an additional keyword in the hopes that the database would accept the hospital as a criterium.
In what Skye could only consider to be a pure stroke of serendipity, the keyword was accepted, and the results dropped to just under 300. That was a number she could do something with. She scrolled until she landed on an entry that was labeled 0613SFA. Something about that entry felt promising. Maybe it was the S in the name – S for Skye, S for success.
With bated breath, she clicked to access the record and was met with utter dismay. Rather than presenting her with a detailed record of a baby's birth, with information like name, parents, and a home address where she could pop over for a chat, the database housed only a message that, as a private hospital, the Ames' Memorial records were not digitized and must be accessed by in-person request only. S for strike, S for stupid, S for you-know-what out of luck.
Desperate, Skye clicked through another six or seven records from the search, only to be met with the same standardized instructions for request. She had been so close, and now was facing what felt like a complete and total dead end. Tears of frustration pricked into her eyes, and Skye ground them out angrily with a fist. She wasn't going to give up, she couldn't ever do that, but at the moment, she didn't know what she was supposed to do next.
The sudden sound of a toilet flushing above her head caused the blood in Skye's veins to turn to ice. Panic flooded her senses, and she wildly began the process of covering her tracks. She logged out of the database as fast as the server would allow her to, then flicked through the browser history once more to clear her illicit perusing. She moved the password reset email out of May's inbox and into the trash folder, then deleted the email from the trash permanently, just to be safe. Just as she was about to close out of the browser entirely and shut the computer off for good, a small voice shattered the silence around her and made Skye's heart stop dead.
"Skye? What are you doing? You weren't in bed." It was Jemma. The real Jemma, not the little voice in Skye's head. Skye whirled around and pressed a finger to her own lips in a desperate attempt to get Jemma to be quiet.
"I was worried you had run off, or –" Jemma stopped short as she took in the scene in front of her. "What are you doing on May's computer?" The hamster wheel in Skye's head was churning at full speed, trying to come up with some explanation for what she was doing that wouldn't result in Jemma being completely disappointed in her.
"I couldn't sleep, and I remembered I had… something else for homework, and –"
"Don't lie to me," Jemma said quietly. There was something fraught in her voice, and Skye felt her heart plummet to the pit of her stomach. "Please, Skye, don't lie."
For the most part, Skye considered herself a decent liar. She didn't go out of her way to make things up, of course, but if the situation required it, she had little trouble spouting off a falsehood, unlike Jemma, who turned into a total mess if she couldn't tell the truth. Jemma wasn't always great at telling if someone was lying to her, but Jemma knew her better than anyone, and in that moment, Skye knew she couldn't get away with anything but honesty.
"Jemma, I… please don't be mad," Skye pleaded. "I just had to know. I wasn't trying to do anything bad."
"Had to know what?" asked Jemma. She took a step closer to the computer, the blue light casting an eerie shadow across her face that made her stricken expression look all the more gruesome. "Is that May's email? Skye, you didn't…"
"It was already logged in when I was using the computer earlier," Skye explained in a frantic whisper. "And I didn't look at anything personal, I promise. I was just looking at the email Miss Hand sent back when we first came here. The email with our-"
"Our files," Jemma completed. She looked absolutely crushed and Skye felt like her insides were shriveling up with shame. It had felt so good in the moment to have all that unbridled access to the things she wanted to know, but now the weight of her actions was crashing down around her ears.
"You'll never believe what I found in there," Skye said quickly, as if the discoveries she'd made might outweigh the wrongness of her searching. "They've been keeping stuff from us, and I saw things about—"
"Skye, please," Jemma begged, her hands snaking up to her ears. "I don't want to know. We're not supposed to know." Her hands pressed against the side of her head, shutting Skye out, and the pointer finger on her right hand began tapping fervently against her skull. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to take a calming breath, but it came out shuddery and nervous-sounding. Skye was a little taken aback by how upset she was. She knew Jemma didn't like it when she did things that could get them in trouble, but she had never expected something like email snooping to send Jemma into a full-on spiral.
"I'm… I'm sorry," Skye blurted. "I'll stop. I won't tell you anything." She closed the distance between her and Jemma and placed a hand on Jemma's elbow with a light touch to let the girl know she was right there. Jemma opened her eyes and looked at Skye with more disappointment than Skye had ever seen before, then slowly lowered her hands from her ears.
"Skye, if May and Phil found out…"
"They won't," Skye assured her. "No one was supposed to find out, and no one will. I covered my tracks, I promise. Please don't be mad." It took a long time before Jemma spoke.
"I'm not mad," she said, her voice empty and small. "I just don't understand why you would do something so… so reckless when we're finally in a place that's good."
"I didn't do it on purpose," said Skye defensively. She shook her head, realizing how silly that sounded. "It's not like I planned on doing it, is what I mean. It was like the idea popped into my head and then I was already doing it before I could stop myself."
"We should go back to bed," Jemma said abruptly. Her face looked pale and drawn, and Skye knew better than to push the issue. Jemma had had enough of the conversation, and there was nothing to do but let her have some space.
"Okay," Skye assuaged. "Okay, you're right. Let's go to bed." She reached over and closed the web browser, then pushed the button to shut down the computer fully and closed the lid of the laptop with a final snap. Jemma didn't look at her once while she did it, and Skye tried hard not to feel even more hurt and ashamed than she already was.