“I didn’t have the day off,” Gloria said. “The stockyards depended a lot on train service, and the dike that protected Vanport also happened to be a railroad bed. We knew there was snowmelt. My boss, Mr. Williams, had men out in cars patrolling the tracks. At four o’clock one of the men came running back to Mr. Williams’s office. He said that the dike had a sixty-foot breach. We all ran to the window, and we could see the railroad bed from there, giving way, water gushing out.”

She reached for her tea.

Susan scooted forward. “You were his secretary,” she said. “You were in there on a holiday. He must not have been able to function without you.”

“That man couldn’t have signed his name by himself.”

Gloria had said that Williams had made two calls that day. But Williams was the president of the company. Used to giving orders.

“Your boss didn’t make the first call,” Archie said.

Gloria smiled to herself. “Of course he didn’t. A man like that, back then? He told me to do it. I had a desk outside his office and I went to it and I picked up the phone. He had told me to call the Housing Authority, which ran Vanport. But then I thought, what if I don’t?” Her hands were fists. “What if Vanport gets washed away, and McBee with it?”

Archie took another sip of tea.

Gloria was sitting perfectly still. “My gentleman friend, you see, he was a porter. And I knew that he was in Seattle by then, not due back until evening. He would be safe.” Her shoulders raised and fell. “I returned to Mr. Williams’s office and told him that I had made the call,” she said. “And we watched for five or six minutes as the dike gave way. Until the breach was a hundred and fifty feet wide. And still we didn’t hear the evacuation siren. And Mr. Williams, he was turning red in the face. He was a good man, you see, and he knew that those people were in danger. And he picked up the phone himself.” She raised her white eyebrows. “I had never seen him do that before. I had never seen him make a call himself. And he called the Housing Authority and he screamed at them. He told them, in very colorful language, that they needed to sound the alarm.”

“What happened to your friend?” Archie asked.

“I never saw him again. I was too afraid of what he’d done, and ashamed of what I’d done. Three children drowned that day. But it worked. McBee was never found. Until last week.”

“Your friend, he was black?” Susan asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s why you wanted to move to California?” Susan said.