Celeste asked which hospital and what day. Lionel answered with the details he had written in a diary at the time, and Elias compared them against the medical records recovered from storage. The purported notarization occurred while Altha was under treatment for smoke inhalation. A separate witness certification bore the name of a man Lionel recalled seeing at another meeting miles away on the same afternoon.
"Why didn't you object?" Elias asked, keeping his tone gentle. Lionel looked down at his hands. "I did ask how a woman in the hospital could sign papers downtown," he answered.
"Greer told me I wasn't qualified to discuss legal procedure, and Charles said I could pack my things if I wanted to accuse people of lying. My wife was sick that year. We had a mortgage. I went back to my desk."
The admission hung heavily in the small room. Altha reached across the table and touched his sleeve. "You should have been free to ask that question without losing your livelihood," she said. "That's the real shame in this story. People who did honest work were made afraid of telling the truth."
Lionel had eventually copied certain ledgers when he saw numbers being altered without supporting vouchers. He showed Celeste entries indicating that community housing payments stopped after the 1984 fire and that equivalent amounts began moving into management accounts. His records did not account for the entire subsequent history, but they could help investigators establish where a systematic diversion began. Every sheet contained a date, an account description, and handwriting that could be compared with surviving originals.
Samuel described the threats that followed. Strange men began visiting the staff entrance and asking about Altha's schedule. Workers who continued calling her were warned that they might lose their jobs or be accused of damaging hotel property. A kitchen supervisor was dismissed after raising questions about unpaid community meal invoices, and several housekeeping employees quietly resigned rather than remain in a workplace where old loyalty was being treated as misconduct.
Ruth Anne brought a photograph of a Christmas dinner at Monroe House. In it, children crowded around a table while Altha carried a large tray of cornbread. Ruth Anne pointed to a young couple near the back and explained that their family had been allowed to stay during an emergency after the husband lost his job. They later helped staff the hotel's first community kitchen, returning a kindness without being asked to repay it.
"Those children grew up thinking the hotel was a safe place," Ruth Anne said. "I want to know what they would say if they walked into that lobby now and saw the founder thrown out because she didn't look expensive enough." She wiped her eyes with a tissue and straightened her back. "I'll sign whatever statement is true. I've been quiet long enough."