Dear Irene

“Why, yes,” Hobson said.

“Let’s take a look at Gertrude Havens’ records,” I said.

Devoe was working up some speed now, and it took less time to pull up her file.

“Transferred November 6, 1944. Worked in wiring.” His snow white brows drew together. “I don’t know what to make of that November 6 business. Sometimes we would transfer groups of workers as projects ended in one plant and new ones began in the other. Let me take a closer look at their records.”

He typed a command and, indeed, peered closer at the screen. “Mr. Devoe,” I warned, “that’s probably not safe.” He was close enough to leave smudges on the monitor. That close to the screen, even if radiation wasn’t a problem, he’d get static electricity in his nose hairs.

“O-L-Y,” he said to me, then leaned back. “O-L-Y…”

“Beg pardon?”

“O-L-Y. That’s what’s listed as the reason for the transfer.”

“What does it mean?”

“I have no idea,” he said unhappily, clearly outraged that a perso

“Could you tell us the names of any other workers who transferred on that same day?” Frank asked.

He scratched his head, and then tapped in another set of commands. It took the computer just a little longer to come up with matching records.

Thirty-eight names. A short list, but longer than our fifteen.

“Oh my,” he said, frowning, “I forgot to specify females. There are some men on this list. Here’s one from our San Diego plant. I’ll redo that search.”

“Could you also narrow it to those who came from the L.A. plant and who have ‘O-L-Y’ as the reason for leaving?”

He began typing in the search specifications, saying each aloud as he entered them. “And Oly,” he said as he put in the last, then pressed the command to start the search.

Oly. He said it as a word that time, reminding me of other words in my treasure trove of mythological terms.

“Olympic? Olympiad? Olympus?”

Devoe looked at me as if I had conjured a ghost.

“Olympus!” he whispered. “By God, it’s Olympus.”

He stared silently at the screen for a moment, as Frank and I exchanged glances.

“Mount Olympus, home of the gods. Was that the name of a special project?” I asked.

“Perhaps it was,” he said absently, his thoughts obviously drifting for a time. He looked up at me. “Olympus was the name of our child care center.”

The computer beeped and he looked back to the screen. “A list of twenty-five names,” he said, printing them out.

“Why would the child care center be listed as the reason for a transfer?” Frank asked.

He sighed. “That, I’m afraid, is a very sad tale. I had quite forgotten it until Miss Kelly mentioned its name.” He looked between us. “You’re both too young, I suppose. Born in the 1950s?”

We nodded.

“Yes, well, many people your age don’t realize it, but in the years just before and during the war, there were a great many federally funded child care centers.”

“Federally funded child care?” I thought about the defeat of such proposals in the 1970s and since.

“They built them for war workers?”

“Yes, but we had some even before that, as a part of the WPA. After the U.S. entered the war, of course, the number of them grew by leaps and bounds, especially in places like Las Piernas and Los Angeles, where there were so many war-related industries.”

“So this Olympus was one of the federally funded centers?”

“No, it was our own.”

“Mercury’s?”

“Yes. The government funded centers usually closed early in the evenings. We were working three shifts, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We needed child care centers to match. We couldn’t wait for the federal government to decide it could sponsor such centers, so we sponsored our own.”

“In Los Angeles?” Frank asked.

“The Olympus Child Care Center was in Los Angeles. The one in Las Piernas was simply called the Mercury Child Care Center. They were both closed before the end of the war.”

“Why?”

He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Old J.D. would spin in his grave if he knew I was dredging all of this up again. But I’m an old coot now, and past scaring.

“Life in Southern California was very different in those days. It was different everywhere. But you ca

He hesitated again, then began speaking in a low, confiding voice, as if he were dishing the dirt on the bride at a wedding reception. “There was a very strange and sad incident at that day care center. A little boy died. I don’t remember all of the details, but as I recall, one of the workers at the center was blamed for the boy’s death. The center was closed.”

“You don’t remember anything about the person who was blamed?” Frank asked. “Was it a man? A woman?”

“A woman, I believe. Yes. There was a big trial.” His brows drew together again. “I’m sorry, it’s so long ago. I was so busy after they closed that center, I didn’t follow all of that very closely, I’m afraid.”

“What happened to all the children who were being cared for at the Olympus Center?”

“Now, that part I remember. I handled most of that. The company offered to transfer a few of the mothers and their children down here, and to help them get settled in Las Piernas. As I recall, J.D. offered that only to the war widows, not every woman who had a child there. Most of the other women were forced to make other arrangements. But he had a soft spot for the widows. The first women he hired were Pearl Harbor widows. He got great press out of that – but I wouldn’t want to disparage his motives.”

“So these twenty-five came down here, to Las Piernas?”

“Yes. I was in charge of helping them to find housing down here, which wasn’t easy, I can tell you.”

“How did you manage that?” I asked. “I’ve always heard that housing was scarce around here then.”

“Oh, it was. Very much so. But as I said, Mercury Aircraft had a tremendous amount of power in Southern California in those days, and we got it all worked out. J.D. wasn’t above pressuring officials for favors when he needed them. And as I said, he also knew how to milk the publicity value of a good deed, and he made the most of what we were doing for these women.”

We started comparing his list to ours. We had six exact matches to the names of mothers on our list, including the mothers of the three victims:

Josephine Blaylock

Bertha Thayer

Gertrude Havens

Peggy Davis

Amanda Edgerton

Louisa Parker

Most of the others didn’t match in one of two ways. If a woman was on Devoe’s list, and not ours, her child’s (or children’s) current age would not be fifty-four. If she was on ours, but not Devoe’s, a check of the Mercury records revealed that she was not transferred with the Olympus group.

There was one exception. A woman named Maggie Robinson had transferred with the Olympus group. Her only child, Robert Robinson, would be fifty-four, but hadn’t called the police or the newspaper.

“Maybe he didn’t scare as easily as the others,” I said.