Chapter Thirteen G: The Second Witness
Officer Webb returned with a colleague who photographed the gravel and the nearby tire marks.
A neighbor named Mr. Ellis came out of his house carrying a folding chair.
He was nearly eighty and moved slowly with a cane.
“I saw a woman stop here before breakfast,” he said.
Dana asked him to describe her.
“Dark coat, white shoes, and a shopping bag.”
“Did you recognize her?”
“No.”
He looked embarrassed.
“My eyes aren’t what they were.”
Dana thanked him and asked what he had actually seen the woman do.
Mr. Ellis said she had bent down beside the curb for several seconds.
“I thought she’d dropped her keys,” he explained.
Lena watched Dana write the account without adding assumptions.
After the officers left, Mr. Ellis asked whether he had been useful.
“You told them what you saw,” Lena said.
“That’s useful.”
“Celia says you have a way of making people say things they don’t mean.”
Lena felt a brief, unexpected sting.
“Did I make you say anything?”
“No.”
“Then you can decide for yourself.”
Mr. Ellis nodded and shuffled toward his porch.
A few minutes later, a woman in a dark jacket approached from the opposite end of the street.
Lena recognized her as the visitor who had entered Celia’s house two evenings earlier.
The woman stopped when she saw the officers’ vehicle leaving.
“Are you Lena Ortiz?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“My name is Felicity Grant.”
She hesitated before continuing.
“Celia asked me to photograph some repairs on this street.”
“What sort of repairs?”
“Things she thought were dangerous.”
Felicity opened the shopping bag she carried and took out a small camera.
“She told me the gravel near your driveway had been there for months.”
Lena looked at the camera but did not ask to touch it.
“Did you take a picture?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“Was the gravel there then?”
Felicity swallowed.
“No.”
Lena waited.
“I came back this morning because she said she had found a new problem,” Felicity continued.
“I didn’t put anything down, but I saw her carrying a bag of stones toward the curb.”
“Did you see her empty it?”
“No.”
Felicity’s voice shook.
“I went into the shop before she reached the driveway.”
Lena kept her expression neutral.
“Would you be willing to tell Officer Webb exactly that?”
“I already called her office.”
Felicity looked toward Celia’s house.
“I don’t want to become part of somebody’s plan to hurt a child.”
Lena understood the distinction between a useful witness and a perfect witness.
Felicity could not prove who had scattered the stones.
But she could describe what she had observed before and after they appeared.
“Thank you for coming to me,” Lena said.
“I should have asked why she needed the photographs,” Felicity replied.
“You can still decide what you do next.”
Felicity put the camera away and walked toward the bus stop.
Lena remained by the gate until the street grew quiet.
She had spent years studying how small failures combined into serious accidents.
Now she could see a different combination forming around her.
One person wanted a dramatic result, and several other people were being asked to supply harmless-looking pieces of the scene.
The danger lay in the way those pieces fitted together.
