Chapter 4 - A Witness With a New Name
Reggie Wallace lived under another name now.
Nora learned that from Grace Lin, the attorney she hired the following morning. Grace had spent eleven years representing small businesses and workers in insurance and employment disputes. She listened without interrupting, photographed the notebook, and asked Nora to leave the original sealed in a document sleeve.
"I can help preserve evidence and contact appropriate investigators," Grace said. "I cannot guarantee prosecution twelve years later, and I won't tell you this proves arson when it doesn't."
"I'm not asking you to invent a crime. I want to know why everyone lied about the risk."
Grace looked at the dispatch ticket. "Then start with a factual statement. Where you got it, when, and exactly what Silas told you. And stop talking to him alone."
The attorney found old civil filings that included the name Reginald Wallace, a forklift operator at the Mercer warehouse when it burned. A forwarding address led to a volunteer mechanic at a church garage in Belleville, Illinois, now using his mother's surname: Reggie Bell.
Nora went with Grace. Reggie was fifty-three, heavyset, with a faded scar across the bridge of his nose. When Nora said her father's name, he set down a wrench and looked at the floor.
"I saw the fire exit," he said. "The chain wasn't there every day. They put it on when outside drivers were unloading so no one could slip merchandise out the back. I complained. My supervisor told me the shift would run only another hour."
"Who was your supervisor?"
"Dorian Pike."
Reggie brought them to a folding table at the back of the garage. He had retained an old timecard and a photocopy of a safety complaint he'd filed with a shift manager three weeks before the fire. The copy carried a date stamp and a handwritten notation that the chain had been removed. He said the chain returned the night Paul died.
"Why weren't you interviewed?" Grace asked.
"I was. I told a fire investigator about the chain. Afterward my boss offered me severance if I signed a release. I signed. It didn't forbid me from speaking, but I thought I'd already told the people who mattered. Then somebody came to my apartment and said my family would be safer if I took a job elsewhere."
"Did you report that threat?"
"No. I moved. I regret it."
Nora opened her father's letter. Reggie read the words with his mouth clenched tight.
"He told me to wait by the back gate," he said. "I was supposed to make sure he could get out after retrieving the ledger. But the alarm went off on the north side. Smoke came through the wall faster than I expected. The security guard yelled that everyone had to leave. I tried the rear door and found the chain. Paul was somewhere inside."
"Did you see him?"
"For one second, through the warehouse office window. He was waving something. It looked like a folder."
Grace asked permission to record Reggie's recollection. He agreed, correcting dates when he wasn't certain rather than pretending perfect memory.
On the drive back Nora thought about how an investigation could contain a witness's account and still leave a family with an incomplete truth. She had wanted one person to blame. Instead she found a row of choices made by men who each assumed another man would repair the danger.
Back at the diner an envelope lay beneath the front door. There was no stamp. Inside were three glossy photographs: her mother's front porch, Reggie entering the church garage, and Nora leaving Grace's office.
Written in block capitals on the back of the last photo were the words: KEEP YOUR FAMILY OUT OF THIS.
Nora did not pick up her phone to confront Silas. She placed the photographs in an unused takeout container and called Grace.
"Don't touch the backs again," Grace said. "I'll advise you about preserving them, and we need to report the threat. Can you close early?"
Nora looked at the empty booths and the unpaid invoice folder beside the register.
"I can't afford to."
"Then tell me who you trust to stay with you."
Nora thought of Frank, the custodian, and of the customers she'd served for years without ever asking anything in return.
"I know who," she said.
May you like
Then her phone displayed a message from an unknown number.
It was a photograph of the red notebook on her mother's kitchen table, taken through the window the previous night.
