Chapter 7 - The Woman at the Bus Stop
Nora used her afternoon off to visit Emberwood, now a small outpatient clinic under another name. Its sign had been replaced; the brickwork hadn't.
A woman with a grocery cart waited outside the bus stop.
“June Hayes?” she repeated. “Lord, I haven't heard that name in years.”
Her name was Odessa Bell. She had worked the night desk during the cooling-system failure.
“Your mama warned them,” Odessa said. “Three times. She kept copies because nobody answered.”
“Where are those copies?”
“June put them in a blue folder. Graham Pierce told her he'd deliver it upstairs.”
Nora's throat tightened. “Did he?”
“He came back without it. Next day they called her a thief.”
Odessa opened her cart and took out a yellowing newspaper clipping about the hospitalized residents.
“One gentleman lost his ability to live independently after that night,” she said. “People called it a freak heat wave. But the warning system could've brought help sooner.”
“Would you talk to an investigator?”
Odessa looked at the street. “I'd talk to somebody who wasn't paid by Caldwell.”
Nora wrote down a legal aid clinic's number. On the way home she called Ruth.
“Did Mom ever mention a blue folder?”
Silence.
“Grandma?”
“June told me, 'If I disappear, don't give those papers to the company.' I thought she meant she'd be fired.”
“Where did she put them?”
“After the lawyer quit, she mailed something to an address in Dallas. I never knew whose.”
Nora pulled over in a convenience-store parking lot. “Do you remember the name?”
May you like
“Elaine Caldwell.”
The woman Nora had helped down the staircase was the person June had trusted with her last evidence.
