October 20, 2018

October 20, 2018, marks a point where a date on a brief handwritten note becomes a crucial lead in Nella Rogers’s investigation. A record of a confirmed sighting of Kendra Rae Phillips near the Intersection of 100th Street and Broadway says that Kendra took Shani Edmonds’s phone and then went underground; reading it, Nella recognizes that Shani was the person placed in the black sedan.

The Date in the Notes

The date first appears in a note beneath a photograph on a page allotted entirely to one of the women under review, rather than a row like the pages for the others. The hot-pink sticky note describes her as seeming complacent, says that further efforts would not hurt, and records an order of eight jars arriving on October 20. The note gives the date a place in a sequence of efforts, though the excerpt does not establish what the jars contain or whether the order was fulfilled.

A Sighting of Kendra Rae Phillips

Nella later returns to the photograph of Kendra Rae Phillips in her camera roll. Judging from the quality of the wallet-sized image, she guesses it was taken around the publication of Burning Heart and may have been among Kendra’s last public photographs. Alongside it, she finds additional notes in Richard Wagner’s handwriting, dated from the 1980s through the present. One records a possible sighting upstate; another speculates that Kendra moved to Paris in 1992. The final note is more definite: on October 20, 2018, Kendra was confirmed near the Intersection of 100th Street and Broadway.

The Date’s Consequence

The last note says Kendra took Shani’s phone and then went underground. Its detail turns the date from a mark in Richard Wagner’s record into evidence about Shani’s fate. Nella’s immediate realization connects Kendra’s sighting with the black sedan Shani had been put in, making October 20 a point of convergence between the surveillance record and the danger facing Shani.