Forget to Remember

when.”
    “That’s exactly the kind of help I need. But I’m afraid I can’t pay you for your time. As you know, I don’t have any money.”
    “Don’t worry about it. I’m intrigued by the challenge. Rigo, thanks for e-mailing me the photos of Carol this morning. You’re a good photographer. I’ve already started putting them on Web sites for missing and unidentified persons.”
    “We looked at a bunch of those yesterday.”
    Carol cut in. “Nobody except us seems to be looking for me. Maybe I’m an orphan. Maybe I don’t have any family.”
    Frances nodded. “If so, that will add some complexity. Certainly your attacker isn’t looking for you. He probably thinks you’re dead. If he’s seen the news reports to the contrary, he hopes you won’t regain your memory. I understand the police have checked your fingerprints with national databases and haven’t come up with anything. I guess you’re a law-abiding citizen.”
    “That’s a relief. Although, if I were a felon, at least I’d know who I am.”
    Frances turned on a tape recorder. “Do you mind if I record our conversation? I want a friend of mine to listen to it who’s an expert on accents. Although you don’t seem to have much of one. Also, write something for me.” Frances produced a piece of paper and a pen. “Write ‘Carol Golden’ and then write the sentence, ‘The quick young fox jumps over the lazy brown dog’ and anything else that comes into your head.”
    “I know.” Carol smiled as she began writing. “You have a friend who’s a handwriting expert.”
    “Yes. Now I’d like you to take a DNA test. It’s easy to do; you just scrape the inside of your cheek with what looks like a miniature toothbrush. I’ve got a kit with me for just such an occasion. Although, we don’t come across an amnesiac every day. I’ll go get it.”
    When she went out of the room, Carol turned to Rigo. “Don’t these tests cost money?”
    “Shhh. My parents will pay for it.”
    “Your parents are paying for everything.”
    “They’ve got plenty of money.”
    “But I don’t want to be a charity case.”
    Rigo put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll get a chance to pay them back.”
    Frances returned with the DNA kit and showed Carol how to scrape the inside of her cheek. She had to do it twice more, three hours apart. Frances explained what would happen to it. “We’ll test your mitochondrial DNA, or mt-DNA as it’s called. This is DNA that exists outside the cell nucleus. The beauty of it is a mother passes it intact to all her children.”
    “So I have the same mt-DNA as my mother.”
    “And your mother’s mother, and her mother, back for thousands of years. It will show what group, called a haplogroup, you belong to, which will allow us to trace your female ancestors’ path out of Africa.”
    “At the moment I’d just like to trace my mother or grandmother.”
    “Your DNA will be placed on a database using a code to identify it. When it matches the DNA of someone else, we’ll contact that person. It could be a man. If you have any brothers or sisters they have the same mt-DNA you have.”
    Rigo had taken a class in genetics. “Couldn’t there be thousands of people who have the same mt-DNA as Carol?”
    “Yes, that’s possible, depending on what group you’re in. We can’t prove somebody is your sibling or in your direct ancestral line with it. We’ll use it in conjunction with any other information we have about Carol.”
    Carol looked thoughtful. “What if we find somebody who might be my father? Is there a DNA test we can do?”
    “We’ll also test your autosomal, or non-sex-linked DNA. Using statistical analysis, we can determine probable relationships. You and each of your parents or full brothers and sisters share about half of your DNA, including identical segments of what are called markers. Grandparents, half siblings, aunts, or uncles share roughly a quarter of your DNA. You share a percentage of your DNA with your cousins, depending on whether they’re first, second, third—”
    “Let’s say we find somebody we think is about a second cousin through statistical analysis, but we don’t know exactly how we’re related. What do we do then?”
    “We start with whatever clues we have about you and look for your common ancestor. Genealogical information is widely available online as more and more people get interested in their past. We can also look up records of births,