By Saturday, he was training in a garage in Glenn Haven with two other guys, and a bag hung off a joist. There was one more person who did not sign, and nobody thought to ask her because she worked the front desk. Wilma Draper had run that desk for 9 years. She scheduled the mat time and logged the maintenance tickets. She called the vendor every time the camera system threw an error.
She knew exactly how long that system held footage before it started writing over itself. It was not 6 days. She did not say anything to Stuart. She went home and she opened a spiral notebook and she wrote down the date. Then it got quiet.
And the quiet is where it actually hurt. The Fairmount Community Center got a letter from its insurance carrier on Monday. Given recent media attention and pending allegations, the carrier could not extend coverage to the Saturday self-defense class until the matter resolved. The class was suspended. Nine adults got a phone call.
One of them was a woman named Alberta Dequa who worked nights at a distribution center. She cried on the phone and then apologized for crying. Verdell started getting calls at the bakery. Not threats, worse. Reporters in friendly voices asking whether her husband had ever hurt anybody before.
Jeremiah applied at four places in 11 days. Two of them recognized his name on the application and said the position had been filled while he was still standing there. And through all of it, he said nothing. Not one interview, not one post. 11 days at the center of the biggest story in the country.
And he did not make a single public statement. Everybody read that silence as guilt. He had stopped looking at his phone. So he did not know about the line at the bakery on Ardmore Avenue. Not reporters, customers, people who had watched the 90 seconds before the story turned and had decided they were not going to unwatch it.
A retired postal carrier from the Saturday class stood at that counter every morning for 11 days. He he bought one coffee a day and never drank any of them. Verdell rang them up and smiled and did not tell her husband because he would have told her to send them home. Rosco Mayberry could not stand it. He drove back up on the Sunday and sat in the kitchen with his hat on his knee.
Boy, you got the paperwork. Put it out. Not yet. Why not? Jeremiah turned his coffee cup around on the table.
Because they are not done, he said right now they think they are winning. People who think they are winning keep talking. Let them finish. Leander Seismore sitting across from him on two canes. Laughed once low and said man 20 years and the same man.
On the ninth day, Melvin Tibido from the commission called with the thing that was supposed to end it. The hearing was set 11 days out from the incident. 9 in the morning. Commission chambers and the house footage from Ironbound Athletics was gone. Their system runs a rolling loop.
Melvin said and he sounded sick about it. Owner says the drive overwrote the whole evening. Everything before and after, which meant the record of that 90 seconds was now whatever a 14-page complaint said it was. Verdell stood in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel in both hands. Jeremiah did not move for a long moment.