“Well, for a short time when we were babies. Our mothers were both unmarried. My father died before I was born, and Daniel’s, well, he wasn’t in the picture. Vera and Daniel moved into their own apartment, though, just after she got a job at the Olympic.”
I thought of the scene from last night and cringed. “The hotel?”
“Yes,” she said. “Vera was a maid there.”
“And your mother was too?”
“No,” she said. “Mother worked in a factory in the industrial district.”
I turned a page in my notebook. “So what do you remember about his disappearance?”
She took a deep breath and fixed her gaze out the window, where the red-lettered sign of Pike Place Market presided and a ferry streamed slowly through the bay. For low-income senior housing, the view was extraordinary. “My memories have faded some,” she said, rubbing her right hand. “But I remember Aunt Vera. I called her that, Auntie. I remember when she came to stay with us, right after Daniel disappeared. Vera had always been generous with smiles, but not anymore. I remember watching from the hallway as she sobbed. Her body trembled from her sorrow. I didn’t understand it then, of course. But I do now.” She pointed to a framed photo on the wall of three children. The lighting and dress dated the shot to the 1960s. “The boy,” she said. “My eldest. He died in a car accident twenty years ago. A head-on collision. A drunk driver was going the wrong way on an on-ramp. I’d thought of Vera many times as a young mother, of course. The thought of losing a baby was horrific. But when the highway patrol called me to tell me about Eddie’s death, I felt a kinship with Vera. I finally knew what she went through.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
She nodded. “I’ve had many years to come to terms with it. But I still grieve.”
“Do you believe that Daniel was…?” I couldn’t will myself to vocalize the thought.
“Killed?”
I nodded.
Eva threw up her hands. “I don’t know, dear. I’ve thought about it an awful lot over the years. Mother and I always wanted to believe that he only wandered off. That some nice family took him in. But the chances of that are slim. Mother knew that. Not Vera. She refused to believe the worst. She held out hope, until the very end.”
“The end?”
Eva frowned. “Mother shielded me from the details, of course,” she said. “I was only a little girl, too young to understand. But eventually I heard the whole story.”
“What happened?”
“Her body was found floating in Lake Washington,” she said.
I gasped.
Eva shook her head regretfully. “By the time they found her, her skin was so puffy, so waterlogged, that the medical examiner couldn’t make a ruling.”
I covered my mouth. “My God.”
“The police ruled it a suicide,” she continued, “but anyone who knew her didn’t believe that. She’d never leave this earth willingly without the knowledge that her son was safe.” She paused, eyeing my wedding ring.
“When you’re a mother, dear, you’ll understand.”
But I do understand. I swallowed hard and stared at my notebook, willing my emotion away. “So you think someone murdered her, then?”
“I have my suspicions,” she replied. “But no one really knows. In those days, we didn’t have justice in the same way we do now. If the daughter of a prominent family were found bobbing in the lake, you better bet an investigation would be launched. But for Vera Ray, daughter of a fisherman? The sad fact is that no one really cared. It’s why the police hardly batted an eye when Daniel went missing. Why waste police resources on the poor? It was the prominent thinking of the time.”
“So sad,” I said, shaking my head. “So there wasn’t even an investigation?”
“They did interview a man in connection with the crime,” she said. “A mason, I believe. Picked him up after getting a tip from someone. But the suspect died in jail. Heart attack. The case fizzled after that. It broke Mother’s heart that nothing more became of it. She always believed she’d find justice for her friend.”
I thought of my visit to the police archives, which had turned up nothing. “Do you know if they have the transcripts?”
“I wondered the same thing myself,” she said. “I set out to find them in the 1950s, but was told that all records from that year were destroyed in a fire.”
The whistle on the teakettle sounded. “Sure you don’t want