Lauren was in her office, practicing her iaido exercises. It was her lunch break, although investigators didn't have scheduled breaks the way office workers might. Stakeouts could proceed for hours without breaks, and they often had to eat while watching, even pee in bottles stashed in their car to throw out later. Today was a rare day when she wasn't out on duty, and she used the time for this particularly singular method of exercise and meditation. No calls came through to her office line, and her cell phone was off for this brief period of time, so that even Joe had to leave a message if he needed her.

When she finished, she left her office line blocked but checked her cell phone. To her surprise, she saw she had a voicemail from Westminster Law Group. Probably Sunny. He remained the liaison to the firm. She dialled voicemail.

"Hey, Lauren, Sunny here. I have another job for you, but this isn't the usual kind. Call me back and I'll give you the details."

Curious, she didn't even change out of her gear, but did put her sword back on its rack, before calling him back. "Hey, Sunny, what's up?" she asked.

"You're not going to believe this," he said.

"What is it?"

"Remember Martha Anderson? From Queensborough?"

"Yeah? The older woman who helped us that time with the Trybeks? And who was kind of a mentor to Rachel?"

"Yeah, that's her."

"She came to my wedding because Joe's family invited her. She must have passed away years ago, though."

"As a matter of fact, she only just passed away now."

"What?!" she squawked. "She was old back then! How old was she when she died, a hundred?"

"A hundred and four, actually."

"Fuck," she breathed. "So, what, was there an obituary in the paper over there?"

"There was, in the New Westminster Record, which you may or may not know was the old Royal City Record we used to deliver."

"Oh, yeah. I gave it up after Rachel left."

"But the reason I'm actually calling you is, our firm represents her estate."

Lauren blinked. "You're shitting me."

"Believe me, I'm as surprised as you are."

"So... okay, so, she has a will?"

"Yes, they drew it up some years ago, before I started there. I was given the file to review just today. I've read the will. Now, here is where we need you."

"I'm intrigued. An investigator for a will?"

"For the most part it's pretty straightforward. The beneficiaries are clearly laid out and they'd been in constant contact with Mrs. Anderson. There's no next of kin to track down. There's one person, though, we do need to find, and we can't find her."

"Her?"

Sunny let a moment go by without saying anything.

"What?" Lauren asked, perturbed.

"That person is Rachel."

Lauren gasped. "Our Rachel?!"

"Yup. Rachel McWilliam."

"And you... you want to hire me to find her?!"

Sunny chuckled sheepishly, and Lauren could picture that grin on his face. "She's proving hard to find. It could be she has a married name we just don't know about."

"Huh. Rachel, married. I can't picture it."

"Would any of us have pictured us married when we were thirteen?"

"No, I guess not."

"Look, I'm sure if I really tried I might be able to find her, but I just don't have the time, and this kind of work is up your alley, and the Anderson estate will pay for your time, and... frankly... I want it to be you who finds her."

Lauren thought she might cry. Sunny knew how much Rachel meant to her. "Thanks, Sunny. I'd consider it an honour to do this work. It will be my sacred quest."

"You know," Sunny said, a little wistfully, "I kind of feel bad. We've been reunited about four years now, and yet we never looked for her, or for Al."

"I do too," she said. "I'd like to excuse myself by saying work and family takes up my entire time, especially after Joe's dad got sick, but that just sounds kind of weak."

"Maybe you're still feeling sore?"

"Sore?" she asked, confused.

"Rachel never called after she moved away. I know you were hurt by that."

She thought about it. It had hurt, back then. Thirty years had gone by, though, and the edges had been dulled. "Nah, I really don't think that's it."

"Well, anyway," he said. "If you find her, can you give me her information and let me call her first?"

"Uh... okay. Is there a reason?"

"I need to be the one to tell her about the will."

"Oh. Legal thing?"

"Yeah. Hey, there's a memorial being organized by the New Westminster Historical Society. Mrs. Anderson's cremains are going to be there in an urn, it'll be a whole thing. Maybe... if you can track Rachel down in time... we can have a proper reunion."

Lauren smiled. "That would be nice. And kind of full circle, don't you think?"

She logged the new work order with Accounting and adjusted the schedule to give herself enough time to do the work.

She discovered she didn't even need it. It took her more time to change out of her gear than to find her. Well, maybe it wasn't that fast, but private investigators and police officers both got down on their knees and thanked the privacy gods every day since Facebook had come into existence. It made their work so easy that she feared losing her job sometimes.

It took some trial and error with different keyword combinations. She did try with her maiden name first, just in case, but nothing came up, so she tried variations on the first name with Queensborough, and Burnaby as the last place Lauren knew she'd ended up. She looked up the high schools in Burnaby and tried her name with each one, and the years she would have attended.

The jackpot arrived when she tried it with Burnaby South.

Rachel Chan.

There was her picture. A slightly older version of the girl she'd grown up with. Her dirty blonde hair wasn't tangled in the back, but she had the same green eyes. No t-shirts and shorts anymore, at least not in the pictures she'd posted, which weren't many and seemed to portray her as a professional. Pant suits in grey or black seemed to be her preference. Occupation: CPA, working at Henderson Peters. An accountant? Rachel? It seemed so... boring. This wasn't the vibrant, adventurous girl with the skinned knees she remembered.

Relationship status: divorced. Interesting. So, she'd been married, and to someone of Asian heritage, although Lauren shouldn't assume. She wondered who Rachel's spouse was. A whole history she didn't know. She felt robbed. Rachel had married someone and Lauren hadn't been her maid of honour.

Rachel hadn't posted anything for a while. Her last post was interesting. "I have left Henderson Peters to pursue other opportunities." Odd that she hadn't changed her work status, though; it was as if she'd just stopped maintaining the page.

She had a link to a Twitter page, though. Lauren clicked on it, and what she found was even more interesting.

Her profile picture on this page, oddly enough, was not a photo of her, but some CGI image of a slender woman with pointy ears and bowl-shaped brown hair, wearing leather armour that Lauren imagined people wore in fetish clubs, and holding a long, curved sword. Something about that image stirred her. It was the first indication that Rachel wasn't boring after all.

When she saw the feed, though, her brow furrowed. What the fuck was this?

It appeared Rachel was using some kind of handle on this page. @Loreleielf. Lauren looked at the profile picture again and wondered if there was some relationship between it and the handle.

Under this handle, Rachel appeared to be updating her progress on a certain game. Lauren checked back to the Facebook page and discovered that these posts were more recent than her last post about leaving Henderson Peters.

There appeared to be threads under each update, and the comments in the threads appeared to be written by other handles who had some very nasty things to say about her. She appeared to be trading insults with these people but quickly got drowned out by the sheer numbers of nasty comments. Lauren felt herself getting sick reading the detailed descriptions of what these people wanted to do to her. These were threats. These people, if they were caught, could be prosecuted. She wanted to grab her sword off her rack and start swinging at these ethereal trolls; they were threatening her friend just as surely as Mr. Trybek had threatened her that fateful day.

She needed to go to her. She needed to find and protect her. Rachel was in trouble, she could tell. Maybe not physical trouble, but something in that quiet Facebook page and this sea of filth on Twitter led her to believe that Rachel needed an ally. Maybe this was the perfect time for Lauren to find her old friend again.

First, though, Sunny needed to contact her, so she needed to find a phone number for her. This took a little longer, but now that she had her preferred name and the company she used to work for, a few well placed phone calls to the right people within the company, former coworkers disgruntled, apparently, by something Rachel had done, got her what she needed. She did something she hardly ever did when wheedling information out of people: she told the truth. She was a childhood friend of Rachel's trying to track her down to inform her about the death of an older woman who was a fixture in both of their lives. She was shunted a couple of times, but the last woman she was shunted to surprised her by saying, "I'll call you back in five minutes," and hanging up.

To her relief, the woman did call back. "I had to leave the building on a coffee break," she said. "I'm sorry, I just couldn't talk to you in ear shot of my colleagues."

Lauren blinked in surprise. "Oh. Is something wrong?"

She cleared her throat. "The lawyers have let us know, in no uncertain terms, that we're not supposed to talk about what she did, it's in our NDAs, blah, blah, blah."

"Jesus. Look, I don't even need to know what she did--"

"It's bullshit."

Lauren blinked in surprise. "What?"

"What they're saying she did, it's bullshit. Rachel would never do that, she was set up."

That got Lauren's attention. Once again, Rachel was wronged, and Lauren wanted to strap on for her. "What happened?"

"Look, you don't have to know the details, but your friend got the shaft. We weren't necessarily friends, but we worked well together, and I know she's a professional. She would never embezzle money from a client. I think she was played by the CEO, that he was doing the embezzling and she took the fall for it."

"Ah. I see now why she mentioned she left the company; of course, she didn't mention any of that stuff."

"She couldn't. That was part of the deal. She didn't mention how she was set up, and they didn't pursue criminal charges. She had to accept being fired as her best case scenario, and she can't even go out and find other work because everyone's going to ask her why she left, and what can she say? Because they always find out. NDAs aren't worth the paper they're printed on, and the worst offenders are usually the guys at the very top who make us sign those things; they gossip like ladies in a sewing circle."

"Those fuckers," Lauren breathed.

"Indeed."

"Well, I don't know what I can do about that. I do need to find her, though. Would you be able to help me?"

"I'll give you the most recent cell phone number I have for her," the woman said. "She may have changed it, I don't know; she left with some considerable acrimony, and I don't know if she wants some of her former colleagues to be able to contact her."

"Okay, well, that's the best I can do. Thank you."

Lauren wrote the number down. Before the woman hung up, she said, "I hope she's okay. I wish I'd done more to help her, but it all happened so fast."

"If this was done by the people at the top, I really doubt there was anything you could have done," Lauren said conciliatorily.

"Yeah," she grumbled. "It's always the powerful men who get away with things, and the women below them who pay the price."

"I hear you, sister."

The woman chuckled sardonically, said a brief goodbye, and hung up.

Lauren took a deep breath as she looked at Rachel's number, written on a slip of paper just as hers had been when she'd given it to Rachel in 1981.

She knew she should give it to Sunny right away. She also remembered what the woman had said, that Rachel could have changed it if she didn't want her former colleagues to contact her. There was also that Twitter page and all of the hurtful things said, and she thought she might have even seen an address posted there by one of these people, whether it was real or not. She wouldn't merit it and seek another source. For now, though, she had this number, and before she gave it to Sunny, she decided she should check if it worked.

She dialled the number using her own phone. Her company's name showed in a call display, so she didn't want to tip Rachel off that a P.I. was looking for her by using the work line.

It rang and rang, and for a moment she thought the phone company would tell her the number wasn't in service.

Then:

"Who is this?"

Rachel's voice. After thirty years, here she was, on the other end of the line. And she sounded pissed off, and scared.

Lauren was so shocked to hear her, and by the tone in which she'd been addressed, that she couldn't speak. The words wouldn't come out.

"You get your jollies harassing me over the phone?" Rachel sneered. "I'm recording this call, fuckface. Why don't you say something so I can play it for the police?"

Lauren was paralyzed with incredulity. She was also spooked by that comment about the police. That was what stopped her from speaking.

"Yeah, I thought so, you fucking coward. Hide behind your Twitter handle and launch your vile attacks from the safety of your basement, I don't give a shit, just stop fucking calling me and leave me the fuck alone!"

And Rachel hung up.

If Lauren pictured what would happen when she and Rachel ever reunited, it certainly wouldn't have been this. Thanks for reading this far! If you like what you just read, hit "Vote" and leave a comment. To see what Al's up to in the present day, click "Continue reading."