Chapter 3: The Woman Across the Table

“You haven't told me anything,” Elena said.

Tessa Ward gave the towel cart a push. “Keep it that way.”

The laundry room hummed with dryers. At the far end, another woman sorted sheets with her back to them. Elena stepped aside to let Tessa pass.

“Mara's asking who sat near me,” Elena said quietly. “Ruth heard her.”

“Ruth hears everything.”

“You should know the investigators are preserving the footage.”

Tessa stopped. “You told them about me?”

“I described the women nearby. I couldn't give them your name yesterday.”

“Now you can.”

“I haven't.” Elena could see Tessa weighing that answer. “If Mara comes to you, tell an officer. I can ask the investigators to speak to you separately.”

Tessa let out a humorless breath. “You haven't been here a full day.”

“That's true.”

“Then you don't know which officer listens.”

Tessa rolled the cart away. Elena did not follow her. An offer of protection she could not guarantee would only make things worse.

At lunch, she chose a seat near the wall. Tessa sat two tables away, facing the room. Mara was absent. Her friends ate without their usual audience, speaking in short whispers whenever an officer passed.

Elena opened her notebook beneath the table. She had copied three dates from the payment schedule: April 12, May 3, and June 19. All three were attached to invoices from Greyline. The first two described deliveries. The third described administrative services, though it was much larger than the others.

She wrote a question beneath the dates:

What changed in June?

Someone sat across from her. Tessa.

“Put that away,” Tessa said.

Elena closed the notebook. “All right.”

“Mara's people think you wrote down their names.”

“I wrote down the names of companies.”

“They don't care about the difference.”

Tessa pulled the top from her yogurt but didn't eat. “Two weeks ago, Mara asked me to watch for a list in the laundry. She said somebody might try to hide it inside a uniform hem.”

“What kind of list?”

“Names. I never saw it. She wouldn't tell me why she wanted it.”

“Why ask you?”

“I sort the repairs. I see the seams.” Tessa looked at Elena's sleeve. “She made the same request of someone in property.”

Elena kept her face still. Two weeks earlier, she had been in county custody. Her transfer had not yet been approved. If Mara had begun searching before learning Elena's destination, the list concerned someone else.

“Did she give you a name to look for?” Elena asked.

“One. I thought it was the person sending the list.”

“Who?”

Tessa's spoon scraped the bottom of the yogurt cup. “Caleb Voss.”

Elena had to set her hand flat against the table.

Caleb Voss was an inventory clerk at Warehouse Seventeen. His name appeared on the early delivery records she had copied. After June 19, it disappeared. Victor Hale had told her Caleb had died in a loading accident that summer; Elena had never seen a death certificate. She had accepted Victor's explanation because, at the time, she had accepted too many of them.

“How did Mara know that name?” Elena asked.

“That's what I hoped you'd tell me.”

At the serving line, one of Mara's friends picked up a tray and looked toward them. Tessa noticed. She stood at once.

“The milk yesterday,” Elena said. “Why did you offer it?”

Tessa's mouth tightened. “You were sitting there covered in it, and everyone was laughing. I had an unopened carton.”

It was such a plain answer that Elena believed it.

Tessa walked away before the woman from Mara's table could reach them. Elena remained seated. The name Caleb Voss had turned an old accounting question into a living one: if Mara wanted his name erased from a list, what had happened to the man himself?

During afternoon recreation, Elena asked Ruth whether incoming mail ever passed through the laundry. Ruth said it didn't, but property bags sometimes arrived with clothing sent from another facility. Repairs had to be checked before anything was issued.

“You're thinking someone slipped a list into a shirt,” Ruth said.

“Maybe. I don't know who.”

“Tessa does a good job,” Ruth said. “Mara knows she can make her afraid.”

Elena looked down at the paper she'd been given for a request to speak with an investigator. She could write Tessa's name and hope Price found a safe way to reach her. Or she could leave Tessa out and make Price hunt for the list without its only known witness.

She wrote what Tessa had told her about the list and Caleb Voss. Under

source

, she wrote:

Please ask me in person. Do not approach the source on the unit without arranging a private interview.

An officer collected the request. Elena had no control over how quickly it would be read. She went back to her cell and searched her notebook for June 19.

There were two entries. The Greyline payment was on the first page. On the next was a smaller transfer she had almost forgotten, made to cover storage fees after Victor said the shipment was canceled.

The reference field contained six letters and two numbers:

CV-0619

.

Elena stared at them. She had assumed the letters marked a container. They could just as easily have been Caleb Voss's initials.

Tessa arrived at the cell door carrying a stack of folded uniforms. Ruth took them from her. Beneath the top shirt lay a narrow strip of paper, folded twice.

Tessa looked at Elena. “I found the list.”

Elena did not reach for it. Tessa had brought it to their door in full view of the block, and that choice carried a risk she had not asked Elena to share. Elena moved closer so the three of them could read it together. Ruth stood where anyone looking through the narrow window would see only her back.

Tessa unfolded the paper. Elena recognized several warehouse employees from the records. The last name was Caleb Voss.

Beside it, in a different hand, someone had written a date from the previous month.

Caleb had supposedly died years ago.

Someone had marked his name less than thirty days earlier.