Daniel touched the paper with two fingers.
“She was trying to leave herself a witness,” he said.
We sat quietly for a moment, listening to the muffled sound of gulls outside.
Chapter 23: The Wrong List
The museum packet included a typed list headed VERIFIED DELIVERIES.
It named twenty-six households and described the supplies each had received.
Most entries included dates, initials, and the signatures of volunteers.
A second list, headed PAYMENTS REPORTED, contained forty-one households.
Several appeared on the payment list but not on the delivery list.
Others appeared with conflicting amounts.
Daniel recognized his mother’s handwritten circles around the discrepancies.
A note beside one entry said that the person had moved away before the reported payment date.
Another noted that a resident had died several months earlier.
Miriam cautioned that the lists had not been independently authenticated by the museum.
They were preserved historical documents, not conclusions.
Daniel agreed and requested high-quality scans for his attorney.
I studied the names without copying the private details.
One surname struck me because it matched the family that had owned the neighborhood bakery.
The owner, Margaret Bellamy, had died before I moved to Briar Glen, but Sophie and I still visited the shop under its new name.
I wondered whether her family knew about the entry.
Daniel said investigators should make any necessary contact.
He did not want neighbors approaching people based on a fragment of an old list.
His restraint impressed me.
I had been impatient for answers for weeks, but he had lived with this uncertainty for almost twenty years.
He understood that careless certainty could damage innocent people.
When we finished reviewing the packet, Miriam showed us a photograph of the firehouse basement before the cabinet disappeared.
In the background, nearly hidden behind a stack of chairs, stood a second gray cabinet.
Its door was marked with a white label.
The label read CORRESPONDENCE.
Daniel leaned closer.
“I never knew there were two cabinets,” he said.
The missing cabinet had been described in every account as the main records cabinet.
Nobody had mentioned a separate one for letters.
Miriam turned the photograph over.
On the back, Evelyn had written one sentence.
“The letters should be counted separately from the payments.”
We understood that this distinction might matter, but we did not yet know why.
Chapter 24: What Marjorie Had Been Waiting For
The answer emerged from a small set of postcards stored with the museum photographs.
Each postcard had been sent to Evelyn by a resident requesting a status update.
