Chapter 2 - Table Twelve Had Already Paid
Camille did not turn immediately. She kept one hand on Isaiah’s shoulder and asked Nia to take the paper star into her locked office. Then she looked toward the private dining room.
Lionel Kessler stood beside the window with a glass of red wine. Sixty-eight, white-haired, and perfectly dressed, he was the principal investor who had financed the Juniper Room’s expansion three years earlier. He smiled when he saw her, as though they had merely caught each other’s eyes at a holiday party.
Camille had once called him a friend.
“Tell Mr. Kessler his dinner is on the house,” she said to the maître d’. “Then tell him I need to speak with him after the medical team leaves.”
Nia raised an eyebrow. “On the house?”
“I’m buying myself five minutes.”
Paramedics arrived through the service door. Isaiah protested when they asked him to lie on the stretcher, but Camille walked beside him and told him exactly where they were taking him. She asked permission before touching his arm. His hand finally stopped gripping the paper star after she promised not to throw it away.
A diner approached as the stretcher left.
“I filmed what happened,” she said, cheeks flushed. “Your manager was awful.”
“Would you send the original file to the police if they ask?” Camille replied.
The woman nodded. “And to you.”
“Thank you. Please don’t post his face without asking him.”
The woman lowered her phone. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Camille had. Isaiah had spent enough years being stared at.
Brent waited in her office, standing beside the desk with the wounded dignity of a man who believed he was being disciplined for a minor breach of etiquette.
“He could’ve been violent,” he said before she sat down.
“He asked for water.”
“He was filthy.”
“That isn’t a threat.”
“We have standards.”
“Yes. You broke them.”
Brent folded his arms. “You’re making this about race.”
“You were the one who said ‘people like him’ and talked about what belonged in this neighborhood.”
“I meant homeless people.”
“You grabbed a hungry man by his coat and dragged him toward a glass door. You’re off the schedule while we investigate. Give Nia your keys.”
“She’s pregnant. She can’t even carry the dinner rush.”
“That has nothing to do with the keys.”
For the first time Brent looked genuinely startled. Camille held out her hand and waited until he placed his ring of keys on the desk.
“You will get a chance to give your account,” she said. “You won’t get to intimidate staff while you do it.”
When he left, Nia leaned against the doorframe and breathed out.
“I appreciate it,” she said.
“You shouldn't have had to stand alone.”
Nia rubbed the aching small of her back. “A couple at table six offered to help after he let go. Nobody wanted to move before that.”
Camille thought of the forty people who had witnessed Brent’s cruelty. “I know.”
She called her attorney, Dana Fields, and sent a photograph of the eviction notice. Dana called back within four minutes.
“The signature is suspicious,” she said. “I can’t tell you it’s forged from a photograph, but the recorded transfer is real. Winterbridge registered title last month.”
“My mother never sold.”
“Then we need the underlying documents. I’m contacting the title office and preparing a request for emergency relief.”
“Do we have time?”
“Maybe. Don’t let anybody tell Ruth she has to leave just because a notice says so.”
Camille called her mother through Nia’s phone, from the empty coatroom, without mentioning Isaiah. Ruth picked up on the second ring.
“Baby, are my pies on the table?”
“They are. Mama, did anybody come by the house today?”
A pause.
“One man. Said he was checking smoke alarms.”
“Did you let him in?”
“He had a company badge. He took pictures in the hall and asked whether you were coming for Christmas.”
Camille closed her eyes. “Did he touch anything?”
“He looked in your father’s old desk. I told him to leave it alone.”
“Lock the doors. Dana’s going to send someone you know. I’ll explain soon.”
“You sound like your daddy when he thought somebody was cheating at cards.”
“Mama, please.”
Ruth heard the fear beneath the words. “Doors are locked.”
At the hospital, Isaiah accepted warm broth only after a nurse tasted it first. His hands were raw from the cold. The doctor explained that he needed fluids, food in manageable portions, and careful observation, not a crowd of questions.
Camille sat beside him when he was settled.
“I am going to ask one thing,” she said. “How did Kessler get Mama’s house?”
Isaiah studied her.
“You still make that face when you’re mad.”
“Isaiah.”
“He told me to sign papers in 1998.”
“What papers?”
“I wouldn’t. Then the fire happened.”
Camille remembered flames licking at the boardinghouse windows, her father shouting for Isaiah, the river freezing along its edges. “People said you started it.”
“I know.”
“Did you?”
“No.” His voice cracked. “I was trying to get a little girl out.”
“Who?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what name she uses now.”
Camille wanted to ask a hundred questions. Instead she pulled the blanket higher over his shoulders and waited while he drank another spoonful of broth.
Dana called with an update after nine. The purported seller on the house transfer was Ruth, and the witness signature belonged to someone named Avery Sutton. Camille knew Avery: the bookkeeper for her restaurants, a Black man who had attended Ruth’s church for twenty years.
“That doesn’t sound right,” she said.
“The documents also reference an outstanding loan secured by your restaurant,” Dana replied. “If the transfer stands, Winterbridge may claim you defaulted on the expansion agreement.”
Camille sat up. “Lionel structured that loan.”
“Yes.”
Downstairs, her phone lit with a message from Lionel.
SORRY ABOUT THE DISTURBANCE. I CAN HELP WITH YOUR FAMILY PROBLEM IF YOU COME ALONE.
Camille read it twice. Then a photograph followed: her mother’s front door, taken from the street fifteen minutes earlier.
May you like
Beneath it were four words.
SHE SHOULD HAVE SOLD.
