Chapter 7 - The Woman Behind the Freight Elevator
Anna was alive.
She was found in a locked maintenance room beyond the freight elevator, weak, dehydrated, and frightened but able to speak. Paramedics took her to the hospital before Walter could reach the plant.
When he arrived at her bedside, she was asleep. He sat beside her for two hours, watching the rise and fall of the blanket.
When she woke, she said, “Where's Maisie?”
“Safe with me.”
Anna began to cry without making a sound.
Walter wanted to ask a hundred questions. Instead, he brought her a cup of water and waited until a nurse said she was ready to talk.
Anna explained that Dr. Price had promised to show her evidence that June’s trust had been misused. At the old plant, she discovered he was working with a man who claimed to be Peter. She tried to leave. Her phone was taken, and she was confined while the men argued about documents they wanted her to sign.
“Was it Peter?” Walter asked.
“I don't know,” Anna said. “He looked like Uncle Peter. He knew things about our family. But he never let me see him in daylight.”
Nora did not push her to guess. She arranged a formal interview when Anna was medically ready.
Maisie visited that afternoon. She stopped in the doorway, uncertain whether the woman in the bed was real.
Anna opened her arms but did not call her closer.
Maisie crossed the room slowly. She touched her mother’s sleeve, then climbed onto the bed. For several minutes they said nothing. Walter turned toward the window to give them privacy.
Later Maisie asked why her mother had not come for her.
“I tried,” Anna said. “I was stopped. You should never have had to wait alone.”
“I wasn't alone,” Maisie answered. “Mr. Eli found the drink.”
Anna looked at Walter. He nodded.
The preliminary toxicology report arrived that evening. The added substance in the punch was a sedating medication, and the quantity detected raised serious safety concerns. Investigators still needed to establish who added it and why; Eli’s recording was important evidence, but the full case required corroboration.
Celeste’s attorney claimed the powder had been intended for Celeste’s own use and had accidentally entered the communal pitcher. Anna’s account and the video complicated that explanation, but Nora refused to announce charges before the evidence was complete.
At the house, Walter removed Celeste’s framed photograph from the mantel. He did not smash it. He placed it in a drawer.
Eli found him holding June’s old Christmas stocking.
“I spent years thinking being fair meant hearing every explanation,” Walter said.
“Sometimes it does,” Eli replied.
“And sometimes?”
“Sometimes you have to look at what happened to the people who weren't allowed to explain.”
Walter considered the answer.
Anna remembered one more detail about the man at the plant: he had a scar beneath his chin. Peter had received such a scar in a bicycle accident when they were boys.
Nora arranged a comparison with old photographs and records. The man had disappeared before officers arrived, but a discarded coffee cup might provide forensic evidence.
Then Martin called Walter from his attorney’s office.
“I found the December payroll ledger,” he said. “But the numbers aren't the part you need to see.”
“What is?”
At the hospital, Anna asked for a notebook. She wrote down what she could remember about the plant, marking uncertain details with question marks. Nora thanked her for separating memory from guesses. Anna said she had spent days repeating facts to herself so she would not lose them, but fear had blurred the order of events.
Eli brought Maisie a packet of sunflower seeds for the spring garden. She asked whether flowers could grow after snow. He showed her a picture of yellow blooms on his phone. “They take time,” he said. “But the cold doesn't mean they're finished.” Maisie put the seeds beside her rabbit.
“June signed a letter before she died. It names the person who was taking the money.”
Walter gripped the phone.
“Who?”
May you like
Martin hesitated.
“Walter,” he said, “your name is on the first page.”
