The children stood beside the lake wearing matching blue jackets.
One boy had a bandage on his wrist; another held a handmade sign welcoming new campers.
Peter stood at the back, taller than Jessica remembered, one hand resting on the shoulder of a younger student named Theo Marquez.
Hannah pointed to a woman at the edge of the image.
“That’s Miriam Shaw,” she said.
“And that’s the maintenance supervisor, Paul Benton.”
Jessica leaned closer.
Paul Benton was not the gray-haired man she had expected.
He looked barely thirty, with thick glasses and a face that had been partly cut off by the photographer.
In the official reports he had been described as an elderly caretaker who retired shortly after the fire.
Hannah insisted he was not elderly when the photograph was taken.
Jessica wondered whether two men with the same name had been confused, or whether a witness’s age had been altered deliberately.
Hannah’s father, retired paramedic Owen Briggs, agreed to speak with Mara.
He remembered arriving at Saint Alden during the fire and hearing several teenagers shouting that more children were downstairs.
The first responders found the basement service door locked, but the key given to them opened only the outer storage room.
Owen remembered a ringing sound that stopped abruptly while the crew searched for a second entrance.
He had written that detail in his field notes.
He did not know whether the notes survived the county’s record conversion.
Daniel met Owen with Mara present.
Owen held his cup of coffee with both hands and apologized for not saying more sooner.
Daniel told him that the people who had lost family members were owed the truth, not another adult’s guilt.
Owen nodded, relieved but not absolved.
He drew a rough map on a legal pad, showing where the ambulance was parked and where rescuers carried survivors.
He placed Peter near the kitchen entrance, not in the upstairs dormitory where the official timeline said he had been last seen.
“Could you have mistaken him for another boy?”
Mara asked.
“Of course,” Owen said.
“Smoke changes faces.
Panic changes memory.
But Peter had a bright yellow sleeve patch.
I remember it because he kept pointing behind him.”
Daniel called Jessica later and told her there might be a witness who saw Peter near the basement.
She began crying and asked whether that meant Peter had tried to save someone.
Daniel said it might, but no one could responsibly say yet.
