On Thursday morning Tess returned to the Alder Hotel for Saira's written correction to the room record: Tess had not checked in with Nell Voss; an arrival box had been marked in error. Nell's registration remained under her own identification. June's envelope was in Tess's bag, where she had put it before leaving home.
“The hold instruction was added before the delivery arrived,” Saira said. “The sender called to say nobody but you could collect it, with ID. That is why the package clerk checked separately.”
June had found time to make that call. Not the one to her daughter. Tess thanked Saira and went to a bench outside. She and Mara had compared the packet with the case last night. She wanted to read it again before meeting Alma.
June had copied four pages concerning Alma and Nell. There were gaps in the page numbers, which Tess checked against the original notebook in her bag. One missing page belonged to somebody else. June had at least kept that person out of the hotel. On the first copy she had written the Friday meeting with Alma and Ren. Under that was a possible car and a note beside Tess's name: Ask her before she collects. Tess turned the page over. The packet had reached the hotel before the question reached her.
She called Mara. “I'm going to Ren's office. Can you meet me there?”
“I have the original Alma slip. I could bring it.”
“Bring your log too. I don't want you having to guess from June's handwriting.”
Mara was silent for a moment. “Do you want me beside you when you tell Alma about Nell?”
“I want Alma to choose that.”
Ren's office occupied two rooms above a shop that sold shoes for people who stood all day. Tess arrived first. A poster in the stairwell offered help with rent forms, and she found herself staring at it longer than the words required. Downstairs, somebody was trying on a pair that squeaked on the floor. It was an ordinary Thursday. She wanted it to remain one for every person whose name lay behind the cover of June's case.
Ren met her at the door. He had a frayed sleeve on an otherwise careful jacket. He offered coffee; she took water. She had rehearsed saying that June was wrong to put her on the list. Ren did not ask her to defend the feeling.
“Alma said she'll come when she's finished speaking to the people at work,” he said. “June warned her some time ago that the rear access might be known. Alma told me that yesterday. She had already argued with June about moving again.”
“June wrote down the argument,” Tess said. “She didn't write that she listened.”
Ren looked at the selected copies. Tess showed him the dated suspicion about Nell and the Friday fallback, with other pages folded away. He knew June had wanted a meeting but had not known Tess had been penciled into a drive. When he read her name, he looked up. “Did you agree to any of this?”
“No.”
“Then Alma should hear that from you.”
Tess had not come for permission to be angry. Hearing the question asked without a defense of June made her throat ache anyway. She took the list out of its folder. “Six names were Nell. She used them on June's errands. Mine is at the bottom because June wanted me next, though not as a cover. I thought I was counting women in danger.”
“You had reason to think so.”
“I spent two nights looking at how cleanly she'd crossed them out.”
Mara arrived with a folder and a dented thermos. Tess noticed both before her sister's face. Mara set the folder on a spare chair and left the thermos closed. She looked as if she had traveled from the dispatch desk without taking the workday off her shoulders.
Ren said Alma wanted the daughters there for the first account, but she could ask either of them to leave. Tess nodded. Mara did too. For once neither supplied an arrangement before the person at risk entered the room.
Alma came twenty minutes later, carrying a lunch bag she had not had time to empty. She took a chair facing the door. Tess remembered her at the funeral: the coat over her arm, the story about June leaving her in the cold. Here she did not begin with June.
“What do you know Nell did?” Alma asked.
Tess laid the hotel correction beside the copied pages. “We know she tried to get these papers using my name. She called my friend as me and told my neighbor I had sent her for my key. She didn't get the packet or the key. June suspected Nell sold Owen information about your work entrance. We haven't seen proof of what she told him.”
Alma looked at Ren. “June told me the entrance might be exposed. She wouldn't say who she thought had told him. I asked.”
Mara held the Alma slip on her knee. Tess watched her hands tighten. June's withholding was no longer a question for a dead woman's notebook. It had a person in the room who had lived with the uncertainty.
“She wrote that she wanted to be sure,” Tess said.
“She was sure enough to suggest I leave.” Alma set down her lunch bag. “Was she sure enough to give me the name?”
“No.”
For a few seconds nobody offered a theory about June's intentions. Alma took out half a sandwich and put it on the desk, untouched.
“What is Friday?” she asked. “Ren said June had a plan.”
Tess gave her the loose list and the page with the proposed car. “She put me down as a contact. She didn't tell me. She wrote a fallback move if you changed your mind.”
“I had told her I was tired of moving.”
“I know that now.”
Alma ran a finger alongside Tess's name, without touching the ink. “Then I need to say it again where she can't answer for me.” She looked at both sisters. “I'm staying. I will change what I have to change at work. I may need somebody to walk with me or help me make a report. I am not getting into another car because June was frightened.”
Mara opened her mouth, then closed it. Tess had seen her sister organize a journey in the time it took somebody to name a need. This time she waited.
Alma ate a bite of the sandwich at last. “Tell me what Nell knows that June put in the packet,” she said. “Then we can talk about which people at work hear any of it.”
Tess turned to the selected pages. She had imagined the list as a warning about her own Friday. Now Friday had a different kind of pressure: her mother had arranged an escape nobody wanted, and the woman June suspected of selling a route still walked the city under Tess's name.