“No,” Frances Larson said. “She grew up in the Kenton neighborhood. Lived there until she moved in with me. She was a secretary at Portland Union Stockyards. After she and Dad got married, she stayed home.”

Susan looked around for a pen and paper. Her eyes settled on a ballpoint on Anne’s desk, and she snapped it up.

“Hey,” Anne said.

Kenton, Susan wrote on her hand. Portland Union Stockyards. Secretary. She was grasping at straws. “Do you mind me asking when they got married?”

“Nineteen-fifty-four.”

Susan wrote that down on the base of her thumb. Gloria Larson would have still been single in 1948. “What was her maiden name?” Susan asked.

“Green. Gloria Green.”

Susan wrote the word Green across her palm. “And she never mentioned someone named McBee, or the Vanport flood?”

“The Vanport flood?” Frances Larson paused. “She talked about it. When I was growing up we knew a lot of people who’d lost their homes and moved to North Portland. A lot of them had conspiracy theories about how the Housing Authority let the city flood. Get rid of all the black folks.” She paused again and chuckled. “But my mother never believed it.”

“Okay, then,” Susan said, trying to hide her disappointment. “Thanks anyway.”

“Sorry I couldn’t help.”

Susan hung up. The detectives were gone. Anne was holding out her hand, palm up. Susan put the pen in it.

“I couldn’t go with them anyway,” Susan said. “I have too much to do.”

She went back into Archie’s office and slumped into the chair facing his computer.

It was true. She did have too much to do. She had sent the Times the info about the killer’s most recent victim, but she had a lot of work yet to do on the actual story. The Word document she was working on was open on the screen. The cursor blinked at her insistently.

Susan minimized the window, opened Archie’s Internet browser, and Googled “Gloria Larson.” Over twenty-six thousand hits came up. So she tried “‘Gloria Larson’ Vanport.” Nothing. “‘Gloria Larson’ ‘Portland Union Stockyards.’” Nothing. “‘Portland Union Stockyards’ Vanport.”

Bingo.

The first hit was a PDF from the Oregon Historical Society documenting the flood. Susan scanned it for highlights. W. E. Williams, the president of the Portland Union Stockyards, had been the first one to call and report the levy break. One of his employees, Floyd Wright, had been patrolling the railroad fill and had seen the roadbed give way. He’d raced back to his stockyard and alerted Williams, who immediately called the Housing Authority.

Williams and Wright waited, but didn’t hear an evacuation siren, so Williams had called back. “For God’s sake, alert those people!” he was reported to have shouted into the phone. And the siren sounded not long after. Thirty-five minutes later, Vanport was under fifteen feet of water.

Gloria Larson had worked for the Portland Union Stockyards.