The outage lasted four hours.
During the second hour, a delivery van attempted to enter the street despite the utility crew’s temporary barrier.
The driver said he had been sent to collect equipment from Celia’s house.
A utility worker directed him to park outside the work area.
Lena noticed the van because its side panel bore the same faded logo Ruth had described after the unsolicited assessment visit.
She did not approach it.
She called Dana and reported the observation without suggesting a conclusion.
Dana asked for the location and told her to stay indoors.
The van remained parked for twenty minutes before leaving.
The next morning, Dana confirmed that the utility outage had been caused by a failed transformer unrelated to the neighborhood dispute.
The van, however, belonged to a small subcontractor that had received work orders through Felix Rowe.
Dana said investigators were checking whether the visits to Lena and Ruth had been arranged by the same person.
“I want to know whether anyone is still planning to come back,” Lena said.
“So do I,” Dana replied.
Chapter Thirteen O: A Meeting Without Celia
Ruth proposed a meeting for residents who wanted to discuss ordinary neighborhood problems without inviting a fight.
She chose the library’s smallest room and asked people to bring one practical concern.
Ben brought a question about children crossing the street near the bus stop.
Aisha wanted better lighting at the corner.
An elderly man named Harold asked whether someone could help him replace the loose handle on his front gate.
Nia wanted the neighborhood to stop using a group message thread that mixed emergency warnings with arguments about lawn ornaments.
Malik brought a sketch of the damaged noticeboard.
Lena brought nothing except a notebook.
Ruth looked around the table.
“We have spent so much time talking about one person that we have forgotten the street is full of other people,” she said.
Harold raised his hand.
“I have not forgotten.”
Ruth smiled.
“Then you are ahead of us.”
They began with the crossing.
Ben described how drivers sometimes cut the corner too closely when the morning traffic backed up.
Aisha suggested asking the city for a marked crossing rather than placing homemade signs in the road.
Malik offered to measure the sight lines from the sidewalk and send the observations to the traffic office.
Lena warned against treating a few observations as a complete engineering study.
“We can describe what we see,” she said.
“The city can decide what changes are appropriate.”
Nia wrote that down.
They moved on to lighting.
Harold knew which streetlight had been flickering for months and supplied its pole number from memory.
Aisha submitted a maintenance request on her phone before the meeting ended.
Malik agreed to fix Harold’s gate handle for the price of a cup of coffee.
Harold insisted on paying for the replacement part.
The group decided to post verified emergency notices separately from ordinary complaints.
Ruth would moderate the new message thread for the first month, but only until another resident volunteered.
“I am not becoming the queen of Alder Street,” she declared.
“We already tried that arrangement.”
Several people laughed.
Lena kept her eyes on her notebook.
She had not come to the meeting to laugh at Celia, but she could appreciate the relief in the room.
