Jessica called after he told her.
She sounded frightened but also angry.
She said there had been three photographs, and Richard knew that.
Daniel asked whether she had hidden a fourth.
She insisted she had not.
He realized that whoever sent the message wanted them to quarrel over an absence neither could prove.
It was a precise attack on the weakest part of their relationship, and it worked for a moment.
He had to put the phone down before he accused her of another lie.
Afterward he returned to Ernest’s picture of the service stair.
The sign beneath the bell was written in careful block letters.
Someone had thought about people trapped behind that door long before the fire.
Daniel circled the image and wrote a new question beside it: Who decided the lower rooms could be occupied, and who knew the doors might fail?
That seemed more important than guessing which marriage had been destroyed most spectacularly.
Laurel Finch agreed to meet Mara only after receiving a written explanation of who Mara represented.
She did not want a sympathetic conversation that later became an involuntary confession.
The meeting took place in a conference room at a neighborhood mediation center, with Laurel’s own attorney present.
Daniel waited in the lobby and studied a poster about tenant rights, irritated that the most important conversation of his life was happening behind a door he could not enter.
When Mara emerged, she looked tired.
Laurel had confirmed that Richard instructed her to assemble names of surviving Saint Alden families who possessed independent documents.
She had also confirmed that the dinners were organized as collection opportunities, each followed by offers of jobs, donations, or private settlement assistance.
Laurel did not know what became of all the materials.
She had seen a locked cabinet in Richard’s offsite office and a list of boxes identified only by the families’ initials.
“What about Jessica’s box?”
Daniel asked.
“Laurel remembers it arriving,” Mara said.
“She was instructed to deliver it unopened.
Two days later Richard asked for a courier to take a packet to a document conservator in Providence.
We need the shipping record.”
Daniel thought of the third photograph, the van at the loading bay.
Richard would not have staged a twelve-person dinner just to see an old vehicle unless the image showed something more consequential.
Perhaps there was someone standing beside it whom Jessica had not recognized.
Perhaps the van carried equipment the official report claimed was elsewhere.
