She was.
That was the entire mistake.
There had been two of them, as it turned out. Two women named Waverly Linwood, born two years apart, in two neighboring counties, in the days when records were kept on cards. One of them had d*ed in the spring of the year before the crash. The other lived at 14 Pennock Street, and had since 1974, and had been recorded in a state database by a clerk, three years earlier, under the wrong date of birth.
The search that had been run for the baby’s relatives had found a woman called Waverly Linwood.
She was de*d.
There was a box on the form. Living paternal relatives: none identified. Somebody had ticked it. And the same morning the box was ticked, the logbook page that Mr. Amory had written on a tarp, and the trooper had copied, and the clerk had filed, had gone into a folder labeled with the wrong case number.
It had been in a cabinet in the basement of the sheriff’s office for seven years.
Constanza Ng found it at four o’clock on Thursday.
I do not want to make this a story about villains, because it is not one. I have thought about it since, at some length. A trooper copied a note correctly, a clerk entered a date wrongly, a caseworker ticked a box. At no point in the whole chain did anyone do something that was obviously wrong. It was a very quiet failure, made of very small errors, and the cost of it was seven years.
