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counties. Her caseload was staggering. Her part-time staff consisted of a secretary and two women who investigated “situations.” The sign on her blond brick office read “Northwest Kansas Social Services.”
    We parked in front and Josie came in with me. I flipped on the light and we winced when the cheap fluorescent bulb stabilized. Everything was in its place. Neat, but dreary. Low budget and no hope for improvement. Kansas was operating on a shoestring.
    “Aren’t there privacy issues here?” Josie asked. “Don’t you need some kind of official paperwork?”
    “Nope. I’m just doing what any friend would do. There’s no crime involved and no suspects so I don’t need a warrant. I’m just trying to figure out how to get in touch with that poor woman’s family. As a friend.”
    “Still. It’s wrong to look at her clients’ personal records.”
    “That’s why I won’t. But I don’t need the law to tell me that.” A row of mismatched file cabinets stood along one wall. Two of them were locked. I looked through the key ring. “I’ll bet that’s what these little keys are for. With luck, all the personnel files, past and present, will be in one of these two-drawer files.”
    But they weren’t. I found minutes of board meetings, old ledgers, budget sheets for the state, copies of compliance reports, pages of statistics, and government rules and regulations. “They have to be in one of these locked drawers.”
    “That’s good. She was a careful person, then,” Josie said.
    I unlocked the drawer and opened it. “Look at these files. She’s even got me beat. Color-coded and every label bolded and in caps.”
    “No personnel files,” Josie said. “But there’s no good reason to keep them in the top drawer. That’s something she wouldn’t check every day.”
    We worked our way down and found a file labeled “Employees” in the bottom drawer of the cabinet closest to the wall. I pulled it out and placed it on Mary’s desk. I flipped through the sheets. A total of eleven men and seven women had been employed by her office during the past nineteen years.
    Some had left to find work that paid more. A couple files contained notes in Mary’s large extroverted handwriting that they were going to get more schooling. These were followed by exclamation marks and one even had a smiley face.
    I paused. Mary was very much involved in the lives of people, whether clients or employees. I winked back tears and looked at Josie. She squeezed my shoulder.
    “Life’s a bitch, sometimes,” she said softly.
    I started to complete her sentence “and then you die,” but couldn’t bear to inject any humor into this day’s events. I reached for a Kleenex sprouting from the box on the desk, glanced around the office, and was struck by a detail I hadn’t noticed before. There were no pictures of her with family.
    None.
    No picture of her period.
    There were enormous collages of kids she’d helped or placed in homes. But no photo of her with persons wearing dated clothing suggesting her own childhood. There were 4-H pictures, pictures of multi-county events, pictures of fair exhibits, but no pictures of adults who might be her relation. Slowly, I went from grouping to grouping.
    Granted she would usually be the one taking the photos, but some little kid would always be pestering her to have their photo with her for the scrapbook. For that matter, where were the photos of her at church events in her role as an Episcopal priest?
    “This is starting to weird me out,” I said, calling Josie’s attention to the omission.
    She stared. “It is strange. Let’s go through the files again. We only looked at the files labeled ‘employees’ before. That’s where I keep my own personal records, but maybe she files it somewhere else.”
    “OK. But I don’t see how we could have missed anything.”
    “We must have,” she insisted. “It’s part of government compliance. And she has to have her fingerprints on file