Chapter 5 - Ruth Weller's Warning

Ruth Weller lived above a bakery on Maple Avenue. She opened the door only after Detective Park identified herself and showed her the handwriting from my father's note.

For a moment Ruth looked at the page as if it might burn her.

“He finally got it to you,” she said.

“He's been dead five years,” I replied.

“I know.” She stepped aside. “That doesn't mean he wasn't trying.”

Her apartment was crowded with plants and careful stacks of newspapers. She made tea nobody drank. Then she opened a blue tin and removed a photograph of a young woman in pink scrubs.

“June Bell,” Ruth said. “Night aide. Twenty-four years old. She died at Alder House on June eighteenth.”

I'd heard that a staff member had died, but Alma always said the fire had spread before anyone knew what was happening. June's death had become a sentence people repeated and then rushed past.

“June called me an hour before the alarm,” Ruth continued. “She said Alma ordered her to leave the residents' medication room unlocked and go home. June refused. She was afraid somebody was stealing from residents who couldn't defend themselves.”

“What was being stolen?” Park asked.

“Relief grants, private deposits, and money from a trust set up for people with no surviving family. Your father found irregular withdrawals. Alma told him it was bookkeeping noise.”

Ruth showed us photocopied bank records with the same payee appearing under three different company names. Elena would have spotted it in seconds.

“Why didn't you tell the police?” I asked.

“I did. The investigator told me the records were lost in the fire. Then my apartment door was broken. A note was left on my pillow.” Ruth's fingers shook. “It said my son would be the next one trapped behind a locked door.”

Park leaned forward. “Do you still have that note?”

“In a safe place.”

Ruth stood and reached for a binder behind the couch. A small white card slipped from its pages. On it was a photograph of a chain stretched across two metal exit bars.

“That exit wasn't supposed to be secured,” Ruth said. “June died trying to open it.”

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Park asked who had taken the picture.

Ruth looked at me, grief creasing her face. “Your father did. And after he showed it to Alma, he stopped trusting his own heart medication.”