Lionel Baptiste was the last to enter. At seventy-six, he moved carefully, using a cane and carrying a thick envelope in a worn leather case. He had once kept the hotel's books, and he still possessed a talent for identifying a misplaced decimal or an unexplained alteration in an account. Elias helped him into a chair while Celeste prepared a recording device and explained that each person could pause, refuse a question, or ask for legal advice.
"We're not here to make anyone perform a memory for a camera," Celeste told them. "We're here to preserve what you personally saw, heard, and recorded, in a way that can be checked later." The witnesses relaxed slightly. For decades, people had asked them for rumors, opinions, or dramatic accusations, but few had cared about the precise facts.
Ruth Anne began with the years before the fire. She described a hotel that served paying guests and people who could not afford a room without treating either group as less worthy. She remembered the staff being told to keep clean blankets and hot soup ready after midnight, because families often arrived frightened and exhausted. Altha had trained employees to greet every person with the same words, whether the person carried a suitcase, a paper bag, or nothing at all.
"Miss Monroe didn't keep a separate kindness for people with money," Ruth Anne said. "If somebody came in hungry, she fed them. If they came in scared, she found out why. That's why we followed her through every expansion and every hard winter. We knew what the place meant."
Then her expression darkened. After the investors arrived, department heads began receiving instructions that conflicted with Altha's policies. Staff were pressured to direct guests without reservations away from the lobby, even if emergency rooms were vacant. Meals that had been provided under the community fund were increasingly described as unapproved expenditures, and employees who questioned the changes received warnings about professionalism.
Samuel confirmed that the shifts had been deliberate. He remembered being ordered to remove signs directing displaced families to the community office, because executives complained the signs made the hotel look too much like a social service agency. He also remembered Altha objecting during a staff meeting. "She said we weren't building a palace for people to admire from outside," he recalled. "We were building doors people could walk through."
Lionel opened his envelope and arranged several copies of meeting minutes on the table. They showed Altha raising questions about community housing transfers and Charles Vale responding that unrestricted executive management was necessary for growth. The minutes were not inherently proof of criminal fraud, but they established a documented conflict months before the fire. More significantly, a later sheet showed Greer presenting emergency authority papers while Altha was still hospitalized.
"I was there when the board met," Lionel said, his voice trembling. "They told us she couldn't be reached and that she'd signed away temporary control. Martin Greer held up the pages and said everything had been notarized properly. I knew she was in the hospital because I'd sent flowers to her room."