Verna Reece
Chairs the Belmar Association. Senior living Hollingsworth descendant, and back in the city since the hearing.
Seventy, retired after thirty-one years in the records office at Santa Monica College, and the chair of the Belmar Association since before Delphine Ward took the case. Granddaughter of Josephine H. Reece, which makes her the senior living descendant of Adelia Rhodes Hollingsworth, a fact she treats as a duty roster rather than a title.
For years she ran the Association's meetings out of the community room at Virginia Avenue Park, minuted them in her own hand, and thanked people by their full names. For the past year she has done it from a niece's kitchen on Pueblo Council ground, by letters that arrive with the seals unbroken: the family moved her out of reach when Pike's money started buying claims and two people Ward trusted took his offers.
What the crew knows#
- She chairs the Association, keeps the minutes, and can name all three hundred households without a list.
- She has not been seen in the city for a year, and the Association does not discuss where she is.
- She is formal with everyone, unimpressed by professionals, and precise about thanks. She does not hurry.
Contact#
| Connection | Chair, Belmar Association, reachable in the city again. The year on Pueblo Council ground ended the morning of the hearing |
| Loyalty | Three hundred households, by name |
| Reach | Every descendant family on the Westside, and the Association's own paper |
| Favors | Lux, who addressed her properly the entire way home and did not once make it about himself. Cool on Vinnie, whose warmth she priced inside a minute. She has never met Hunter, who is the one who calls, and she prefers his questions to his crew's |