Emily looked up sharply.
“She wrote in Mom’s notebook?”
“She said your mother was the only adult who kept asking about the children’s names.”
Lena folded her hands.
“I couldn’t say those names out loud then.”
“You can now.”
Lena looked directly at her.
“Then I will, wherever you need me to say them.”
Chapter Eleven: Peter’s Other Name
Marian Pell lived in a house painted the color of sea glass, three blocks from the lake.
She answered the door holding a tray of tomato seedlings.
She was fifty-two and had the broad shoulders of someone who worked outdoors in every season.
When Emily introduced herself, Marian set down the tray and sat on the porch steps.
“Nora’s daughter,” she said.
“I wondered whether you would find me.”
Emily did not ask why Marian had never contacted her directly.
She could see that the woman expected the question.
Instead she asked for permission to bring Walter Vale into the conversation by telephone.
Marian agreed, though her face tightened when she heard his name.
Walter listened from his kitchen while Emily explained what they had learned.
Then Marian began.
She said Eastward brought four children to her mother’s group home during the flood, when the county’s regular foster services were overwhelmed.
Two were returned to relatives within weeks.
One was moved to a licensed facility after a medical evaluation.
The fourth stayed for months.
He called himself Peter.
His documents called him Daniel Price.
Walter made a sound Emily had never heard from him before.
It was not quite a sob.
It was the sound of a person struggling to keep listening.
“Why was his name changed?” Emily asked.
Marian said the intake worker claimed the child was confused after a traumatic separation.
The name Daniel Price appeared on a replacement record submitted by Eastward.
The original name was classified as unverified.
“Did he know who he was?” Walter asked over the phone.
“He never stopped saying his name was Peter Vale,” Marian answered.
“He said his mother worked at the post office and his uncle fixed school boilers.”
Walter closed his eyes.
“That’s us.”
Marian looked toward the road.
“I was nineteen,” she said.
“My mother told me the authorities had already checked his story.”
“Did they?” Emily asked.
“Not in front of me.”
Marian described how Peter marked his height on a doorframe and kept a paper drawing of Saturn under his pillow.
He asked for the green lunchbox until he was told it had been lost in the flood.
