The low hum from a running car outside reverberated through the bedroom, filling Barbara's ears until she was conscious of the sound. Snatching up her glasses, she scooted over to the nearby window and tugged back the blinds.

There, wearing a sun hat and sunglasses despite the lack of sun, was Pamela. Her statuesque figure sauntered across the driveway towards the parked Lincoln on the street where a man with dark brown hair was waiting for her. Based on the car he drove and the crisp black suit he wore, Barbara could tell he was someone with money. But who he was, she had no clue, only that he wore the dopiest grin she had ever seen.

She watched as the two greeted each other, embracing for a few seconds too long for them to just be 'friends.' After pulling herself from the man's arms, Pamela hopped into the passenger's side before the car sped off towards downtown Gotham.

No sooner had the car left, there was a loud knock at the front door. Barbara's heart leaped with joy, thinking for a second it was Jason on the other side. But then reality set in, and she realized it couldn't be. He was still missing.

"Hold on!" she shouted as she struggled to get to her wheelchair. "I'll be there in a second!"

Rolling herself down the hall, Barbara was in too much of a hurry to notice or care about the state of undress she was in. It wasn't until she opened the door and felt a cold blast of wind against her skin did she realize she should've changed. Especially now, seeing it was Richard standing in front of her. Raising the newspaper in his hand, he glanced at her and asked, "Did you see this?"

"Another Wayne employee vanishes," she repeated the headline out loud. "Wait, what?"

"Yeah, just happened last night. His car was left in the Wayne Tower parking garage. His keys and everything left behind next to it." Richard made his way inside, moving past Barbara. Usually, she would have made some witty remark about this, but with the news of the missing man weighing on her mind, now was not the time.

"It sounds like he was abducted then." Barbara closed the door, cutting off the stream of frosty air pouring into the house.

Richard nodded as he examined the pot of poinsettias planted on the console table. Pinching its red petals between his fingers, he watched as they fluttered to the ground.

"Sorta like..." She couldn't say it. She couldn't say his name. Saying it would only make the ache in her heart return. But most of all, it would make his disappearance real.

He turned to her. "Like what?"

Barbara shook her head. "Nothing. It's nothing." She looked down at the petals on the floor, thinking about how they resembled the shade of Pamela's hair—a deep scarlet, almost like blood. What was it with her and blood lately? She found herself thinking about it more often than when she had first learned about periods.

Quickly tossing the morbid thought out, she turned her attention back to Richard and frowned. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm your caregiver, remember?" He tapped a pale finger against his temple.

"Right..." She shifted her eyes to the side. "Well, nurse, I need to go to the library. Think you can manage taking me?"

A smile tugged at the corner of Richard's mouth. "Sure, what do you need?"

Barbara shrugged. "Oh, it's nothing too exciting. Just more information on Pamela and the Isleys. See if she really is the granddaughter of the Pamela who moved to Seattle over fifty years ago."

He chuckled. "Sure sounds exciting."

"Trust me, reading through all that sludge about some family too rich for their own good is anything but." She sighed, already dreading all the chaff she would have to sift through to get to the wheat. "Let me go change first and then we can go."

She started to roll towards the bedroom, her wheelchair just crossing the threshold when she glanced back and saw Richard trailing behind her. Coming to an abrupt stop, she whipped her chair around and demanded, "Uh, what are you doing?"

Richard paused and scratched the back of his neck. "I thought you might need help changing. Isn't that what caregivers do?"

Barbara gawked at him. Caregiver or not, there was no way she was letting him change her. She wondered if he was that stupid to think she would actually let him inside her bedroom or simply a slave to his raging teenage hormones. Knowing how guys were, it was probably the latter.

"I'm fine," she replied coolly.

"All right, but if you need some help, I'll be out here." He gestured to the shadowy hallway with a tilt of his head.

Barbara gave a curt nod before turning around and slamming the door behind her. With a sigh, she leaned her head against the door, feeling the cool wood against the nape of her neck.

Why did guys have to be so weird?

**

Thirty minutes and one uneventful subway ride later, Barbara and Richard found themselves searching through rolls of microfilm about the Pacific Northwest during the early 20th century. With the two of them each at a microfilm reader, they combed through the microfilm twice as fast, but with zero the luck.

"Thank God Mrs. Kringle thinks I'm researching a class project," Barbara groaned as she replaced the roll of film with a new one.

"Wait, so you're not at Gotham University?" Richard turned from the screen and glanced at her.

Barbara snorted. "Hell, no. I already have enough ties to this city. I didn't need it printed on my degree too."

"Geez, Barbara. What did this city ever do to you?" He shot her a teasing grin. She knew he meant no harm by it, but the question struck a little too close to home.

The real question was, what hadn't this city done to her? Ever since she moved here, her life had slowly started to unravel. And just when she thought things couldn't get any worse, they did. But she was sure Richard didn't want to hear her sob story. Plus, she didn't really feel like explaining it. If she even began to answer that question, she knew they'd be here all night.

"Just keep searching," she huffed, turning back to her reader.

"That's the thing." Richard crossed his arms over his chest. "What am I even searching for?"

"Any mention of the name 'Isley.'" Barbara leaned forward in her chair and peered up at the magnified headlines, desperately searching for the name.

Richard propped his shoulders on the counter and continued reading. "So far, nothing," he said only after a few minutes.

"Keep reading," she mumbled as she kept scanning lines and lines of text. It was like trying to solve a crossword puzzle if said puzzle was only going in one direction and had a hundred more words.

"Hold on." Richard straightened up in his chair. "I found the name 'Pamela.'"

Barbara nudged herself right beside him and stared up at the screen, nearly knocking him out of his seat. "Where?"

"Right there." He pointed at the middle of the screen. "But it's a Pamela Irving..."

"It's just an obituary for her husband." Barbara frowned, disappointment slowing the rapid beat of her heart. Already preparing to pull back and return to her own reader, the words, "President of the University of Washington," suddenly caught her eye.

"The University of Washington?" She adjusted her glasses, confirming she hadn't misread. "I just read about that somewhere." But where exactly? The half a dozen articles she must've combed through were interfering with her memory, jumbling phrases, and words together.

"What is it, Barbara?" Richard regarded her with a curious expression.

"I'm not sure yet, but..." Her voice trailed off as she ripped open her bag, pulling out the heavy, leather-bound book. Flipping to the dog-eared page, Barbara quickly skimmed the paragraph for any mention of the University of Washington. It didn't take long before her finger landed right on the words.

"Oh my God." She drew her finger back as if it had been scalded by the page.

"Barbara, what's going on?" Richard drew closer to her, glancing down at the page.

A haunted look crossed her face as she stared at him. "Richard... What's the date on that obituary?"

"Uh, May 1942." He frowned at her. "Can you tell me what's going on—"

"Pamela Irving might be the same woman as Pamela Isley!" she blurted out, drawing the attention of the few patrons nearby. "Sorry, forgot I was at a library." She winced.

Seemingly satisfied with her apology, they returned to their books.

Scooting closer to Richard, Barbara held up the book for him and placed her finger near the end of the page. "Pamela Isley's husband taught at the University of Washington, the same university Mr. Irving was the president of. He dies in 1942, twelve years after Pamela and Jason were married, and leaves behind a widow named Pamela Irving."

Richard cocked his head to the side and lifted his brow. "So what are you getting at?"

"What I'm getting at is that the dates match up!" she practically squealed. The patrons turned to her once again, shushing her. But unlike before, she was too excited to notice, much less care. "I don't have enough proof yet, but I have a theory the two Pamelas are the same person."

Richard, however, didn't look nearly as convinced. "If that's true, then where is Jason Woodrue? Nothing says he died."

Barbara paused, mulling this detail over, one so important it couldn't be overlooked. Richard was right. Nothing mentioned what happened to the professor. If he were still alive, then it couldn't be her. But if he were dead... "That's true. But that's why we need to keep searching. You look through the obituaries between 1930 to 1935 and I'll look for the ones after that until 1942."

"Aye, aye, captain." Richard gave her a salute before returning to his reader. He had just started to zoom out when Barbara reached out and stopped him.

"Wait, what does that say about the disappearances?" She pointed up at the screen.

"Hold on." He readjusted the image and zoomed in on the headline. "'Mysterious Disappearances Continue. More men vanish into the Seattle night.'"

"Hmm." Barbara tapped her chin. Moving back to her reader, she didn't have to search long before finding another article about the disappearances. Right there, on the front page, was the headline "The Night Creeper Strikes Again," dated summer 1940.

"Men continue to disappear without a trace," she read, her face only inches away from the screen. "When night falls, men beware. The Night Creeper continues his deadly spree of kidnapping those who wander the city after dark. While no bodies have been found since the disappearances first started in 1932, authorities believe these men are being lured to their deaths..."

"What are you thinking?" Richard asked, noticing her hand pressed against her forehead.

"Don't these disappearances sound awfully familiar?" She stared at the newspaper in the middle of the table. The pressure in her head was becoming unbearable.

Following her gaze, Richard stared at the bolded headline and gasped. "You don't think—Do you?"

"I—I don't know," she admitted. "When did these disappearances start in Gotham?"

"Around the summer. Why?"

A dull buzzing started to ring in her ears like that of a flying insect. Low at first and barely noticeable, Barbara shrugged it off as nothing more than a pesky fly. "That was when Pamela arrived, right?"

Richard nodded. At first slowly and then more surely. "Yes."

The buzzing was growing louder, resembling more of an alarm bell than the beat of a fly's wings. No, not an alarm bell. Instead, a river of blood rushed through her ears. She shut her eyes, hoping the sound would disappear. But with each passing second, her brain felt like it was going to explode. Just when she thought her eardrums were going to burst, the buzzing abruptly stopped when Richard asked, "But why the Wayne employees specifically?"

Silence. She could hear nothing but sweet silence interrupted by the occasional page turn from somewhere in the library.

"Why that's easy, Richard." Barbara lifted the book from her lap. "Thomas Wayne was engaged to Pamela Isley, but he suddenly ended it because of a scandal."

A deep crease formed between Richard's brows. "So you think she is targeting the employees out of revenge for that? Just because he didn't marry her? And why now? She had all this time before—"

"Look, I don't know, Richard." She took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. "I don't even know how it's possible it can be her after all these years, but this cannot just be a coincidence. I mean, you were just asking what happened to Jason Woodrue and we find out men started disappearing in 1932. Don't you think it's possible he could have disappeared too?"

Although her vision was blurry, she could see his bright blue eyes shift to the side as if to consider this. "Well, yeah..."

"And then we find out the men's bodies haven't been recovered. Just like here." Barbara rubbed her eyes and exhaled. "I get it. It's crazy, impossible even. There's no way Pamela could look like she did back in the Twenties. But you saw that painting. There's no doubt it was her."

She placed her glasses back on and gazed into Richard's clear face. Though he appeared just as skeptical, there was a certain gleam in his eye that wasn't there before. She was finally getting to him. Now, all she had to do was reel him in. "So what if it is possible somehow? What if she is going after the Wayne employees out of revenge for a broken heart?"

Richard remained silent, his body so still it looked as if he wasn't breathing. "Well, if that's true." A smile started to spread across his face. "Then hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."