Danny Davis’s search for Ricky

Dan Davis’s search for Ricky is a long, frustrated pursuit of the one person he believes may still connect him to his former life. It begins with records that cannot locate her, turns on a nearly overlooked notice identifying her as F. V. Heinicke, and ends its first phase in Yuma, where Dan discovers that she has married and rushes away with the information he has found.

The Search Begins in the Records

After waking decades later, Dan searches for Belle Darkin, Miles Gentry, and especially Frederica Virginia Gentry, whom he calls Ricky. None appears in the Los Angeles telephone listings or elsewhere in the national information search he commissions in Cleveland. Because Belle might be listed under either of two surnames, he pays quadruple the fee to search both. The Los Angeles County voter register offers no lead either.

Hired Girl, Inc. confirms by letter that it once had officers with Belle and Miles’s names, but says it can no longer help. The reply establishes that the names belong to a distant past, not a usable trail. Dan has neither fingerprints nor Social Security numbers, and lacks the money, time, and expertise to have a detective agency reconstruct the lives of people missing for thirty years.

He eventually gives up trying to find Miles and Belle, but keeps Ricky as his priority. He knows that she holds no Hired Girl stock and writes to Bank of America to ask whether it holds, or has ever held, a trust for her. The bank first answers with a form letter invoking confidentiality. Dan writes again, explaining that he is a Sleeper and that Ricky is his only surviving relative. A trust officer still refuses to disclose beneficiary information, but provides a crucial negative: no branch of the bank has ever held a trust in favor of Frederica Virginia Gentry.

That answer changes the meaning of Dan’s old arrangement. He had assigned stock for Ricky through the bank, but no trust exists; he concludes that someone must have taken the stock from her. In his reckoning, both of them have been robbed. The missing money is not merely a financial loss: the failed transfer is evidence that the protection he intended for Ricky never reached her.

A Name, a School Record, and a Vanishing Trail

A records office in Mojave supplies the first confirmation that Ricky’s childhood left a trace: it has a grade-school record for Frederica Virginia Gentry. But she withdrew in 1971. The record proves that the girl Dan remembers existed in that place and time; it does not say where she went next. With thousands of public schools across the country as possible destinations, Dan sees no practical way to write to each one or know whether their records could answer him.

The scale of the country makes her disappearance feel almost ordinary in its mechanics and extraordinary in its consequence. Dan imagines one child vanishing like a pebble in an ocean of a quarter of a billion people. That image gives the search its central problem: an identity can be documented, yet still be impossible to follow from one institution to the next.

Much later, a dream jolts Dan awake with the fear that he has overlooked Ricky in the vital statistics. He checks the stack of newspapers beside him, relieved that he has not already sent them down the chute, and rereads the notices across births, deaths, marriages, divorces, adoptions, name changes, commitments, and withdrawals. In the withdrawals printed in the Wednesday paper for May 2, 2001, he finds a notice from Riverside Sanctuary: F. V. Heinicke.

The initials become a lead because Heinicke is the surname of Ricky’s grandmother. Dan cannot explain how he knows it; he feels that the name has surfaced from a buried memory, perhaps something he heard from Ricky or Miles, or learned when he met the older woman at Sandia. The recognition is immediate even though its source is uncertain. In a newspaper column he had not expected to matter, the missing family name reconnects Ricky’s remembered identity to a recent record.

Dan asks for the meaning of the initials. After hesitating, the person assisting him checks a card and reads out the name as Frederica Virginia. The confirmation almost makes Dan faint. The search has moved from a school record nearly thirty years old to a recent sanctuary withdrawal, and the initials have become a full name he can act on.

Following Ricky to Brawley and Yuma

Rather than return to the director and have him contact Sawtelle Sanctuary, possibly with Dr. Albrecht verifying Dan’s identity, Dan leaves and hires a jumpcab straight to Brawley. The choice bypasses a possible official route to information. He spends three days there picking up Ricky’s trail, quickly learning that she and her grandmother had lived in the town, but that the grandmother had died twenty years earlier and Ricky had taken the Sleep.

The older records are comparatively easy to find in Brawley, a town of about a hundred thousand, but the trail less than a week old is harder. Dan had imagined Ricky as a young woman traveling alone. Discovering that she is with a man makes him fear that she may be vulnerable to the criminals who prey on Sleepers, a danger Dr. Bernstein had warned him about. His concern pushes him to search harder, though the assumption that she is alone has already proved wrong.

Dan follows a false lead to Calexico, returns to Brawley, starts again, and traces the pair as far as Yuma. There, at the county clerk’s office, he finds that Ricky has married. The register shocks him so completely that he abandons everything and boards a ship for Denver, stopping only to send Chuck Freudenberg a card asking him to clear Dan’s desk and pack the belongings in his room.

What the Search Reveals

The investigation’s progress is uneven: an old school transcript and a bank’s refusal appear to close doors, while a newspaper notice opens a route across decades. Each new fact revises what Dan knows without restoring the life he had expected to find. Ricky’s childhood in Mojave, her grandmother’s home in Brawley, her period in cold sleep, and her recent marriage form a trail assembled from separate records rather than a continuous account of her life.

The search also reveals the limits of Dan’s position as a returning Sleeper. He can pay for national inquiries, petition a bank on the extraordinary ground that Ricky is his only surviving relative, and travel quickly across the region, but none of those advantages gives him access to the private records or personal history he needs. The decisive clues are narrow—a withdrawn school transcript, two initials in the Times, a name on a card, and a county marriage register—and each arrives only after a delay or a wrong turn.

Yuma supplies an answer but not a reunion. Dan learns that Ricky has married, and his immediate departure for Denver shows how abruptly that discovery redirects him. The search has recovered her name and followed her movements across several places, yet the evidence presented here does not say what he saw in the register beyond the marriage or what he intends to do next. Its endpoint is therefore both a breakthrough and a rupture: Ricky is no longer an untraceable child, but the person Dan finds in the records has a life that has continued without him.