Snapshot (28 page)

Of seven doors lining the second floor hallway, three were shut. I twisted the handles with care. They opened noiselessly, one to reveal a spacious linen closet, the next, a bathroom.

Rebecca's room had suffered under the same interior decorator as her mother's, resulting in an overblown “little-girl's” room, all pastels and florals. But the housekeeper had been kept away, and a bit of the child who'd lived there remained with the dust.

She'd collected stuffed animals. A large lion crouched in a corner next to a propped-up giraffe and a kangaroo with a baby in its pouch. Smaller animals crowded the bed. Hippos had been a favorite.

A large wooden chair seemed out of place in a corner. I lifted it and found that the marks it left on the carpet were shallower, newer, than the marks left by a nearby rocker, the only other chair in the room. Had someone brought it in recently? Did Emily sit for hours in her late daughter's room?

Did she keep her secrets here?

I started with the bureau, opening each drawer, working methodically, bottom to top, left to right. My fingers sorted through piles of white undershirts, cotton panties, colored turtlenecks. Rebecca's socks were neatly rolled, some banded with lace.

I surveyed a shelf of dolls: worn Raggedy Anns and much-used baby dolls, stiff porcelain collectors' items, foreign figurines in exotic outfits, a row of Barbie dolls with wasp waists and clouds of hair.

Her closet was a miniature of her mother's, color coded, excessively neat. Her shoes were paired: patent leathers, sneakers, tiny pink-and-white saddle shoes.

I sat in the big chair, bit my tongue, and tugged at my hair. The chair was positioned oddly; it faced neither window nor bed. What had Emily looked at when she sat here? Why here?

Was the view unimportant, only the fact that she was in her daughter's bedroom, pretending Rebecca might rush upstairs, home from school, ready to change into play clothes? Did she keep her eyes closed to strengthen the fantasy? To better smell any lingering scent? At seven, Paolina had smelled of cherry Life Savers. Rebecca's room smelled of mint.

I stared at the ceiling and read nothing on its white surface. I glanced down.

Faint tracks led from the foot of the chair toward the closet, as if something had been dragged over the high-pile carpet. I traced the drag marks to a rectangular laundry hamper, hesitated. If the woman communed with her daughter's soiled clothes, I wasn't sure I wanted to know about it.

The hamper was heaped with photographs: scrapbooks, loose snapshots, paper envelopes from Fotomat and One Hour Photo.
FREE DOUBLE PRINTS!
screamed a coupon.
JOIN OUR PHOTO CLUB!
I hauled the hamper back to the chair, using the old track marks as a guide.

While Harold went to his office, Emily sat in a straight-backed chair and reviewed her daughter's life. I lifted five fat volumes from the left-hand side of the hamper. A pink and lacy baby book had a brass plate inscribed
REBECCA, HER FIRST YEAR
. Four subsequent albums in peacock-feather design—one per year—were as methodically organized as the color-coded clothing.

Most parents keep a baby book—even my erratic mother attempted one—but the majority decrease their obsessive photo taking after the second or third year. Emily had never tired of her subject matter. Was she validating her choice of motherhood over career by selecting her daughter as sole model over and over again? By choosing a cheap automatic camera, the kind so many mothers seem to use? By taking her too-well-composed photos to the one-hour developer?

A racehorse hauling hay? A promising poet penning limericks? A labor of love?

I'd leave stuff like that to Dr. Donovan.

I skimmed each book. Rebecca in a swimming pool, supported by a Mickey Mouse inner tube. Rebecca on her first sled, a red Flexible Flyer. Rebecca wearing a bright yellow dress, her white tights bagging at the knees and ankles, holding a toy camera made of bright red plastic, aiming it awkwardly, beaming.

All shots carefully preserved under plastic. I lifted each collection by the binding and shook it. No loose items fluttered to the floor. I stacked the books on the bed, started in on the packets and loose photos. More of the same.

She'd sent me photographs. She'd concealed photographs in a laundry hamper. Before her marriage, photographs had been her life.

I started to organize the envelopes by date, from Becca's final birthday to her last days. I hefted each packet. None seemed noticeably lighter or heavier than the others.

She'd sent me photographs, dammit.

I started leafing through the most recent envelopes, dated just before Becca's death, working my way backward through her life.

Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing.

“What—what the hell are you—” I heard Harold Woodrow's outraged splutter from the doorway. “Who said you could pry through Becca's—through
her
things? How dare you?”

“Your wife must have had a darkroom,” I observed calmly.

“No. Only a bathroom in the basement. And she hardly ever used it. It smelled the place up. I didn't like it.”

“After Becca died—”

“Don't use her nickname. You have no right.”

“After your daughter died, did your wife use her darkroom?”

“She might have. Once, twice.”

“Recently?”

“Get out of here. Get out. Put everything back exactly the way it was, and get out!”

His mouth twitched with fury as he spoke. I stuffed photos into envelopes, dumped them into the hamper, restored it to the closet.

“Before I leave,” I said, facing off with Woodrow near the doorway, “I'm going to search the darkroom.”

“There's nothing there.”

“Not even a shot of Savannah Cates? Bet she's photogenic.”

He pressed his lips together, parted them enough to say, “This is nothing but blackmail. If I don't cooperate, you'll talk.”

“At least you've got that straight,” I said. “Could you show me the basement stairs?”

34

If you want to know the age of a house, check the basement. Two hours ago, I'd thought the Woodrow place was practically brand-new. Now I recognized it as a modernization job, a good one. The basement, with its seamed cement floor and exposed beams, its old oil tank in one corner—just in case the modern gas furnace became obsolete—added fifty years.

Down a single step, in a corner that might once have housed a root cellar, a chemical smell oozed from under a partially open door.

If the door had been locked or closed, I might have hesitated, even with the picklocks screaming in my pocket. I don't know much about photography; my workaday needs in that area are met by Roz.

If I discovered undeveloped film inside, I'd need to call her, get her to come over.

Woodrow was sure to enjoy that. I shrugged. Who knew? Maybe a conservative lawyer type like Harold would get a charge out of Roz.

I eased down the step, shoved open the door, and ducked under the low transom.

E. J. Ruhly's career was represented by three newspaper clips, mounted in cheap black frames. As grainy news photos go, they were impressive, but the meager display was hardly in the same league as Dr. Muir's power wall.

I hoped the originals were superbly framed and proudly displayed on the Woodrows' living room walls. I doubted it.

Preconversion, the bathroom had been Spartan, with simple white fixtures, bare-bulb lighting. A sanded plywood workbench had been constructed to fit around the tiny sink, a larger metal sink installed nearby. A second bare bulb, this one red, stuck out of a wall-mounted socket.

Compared to Harold's leather-and-walnut office, Emily's darkroom looked like Cinderella's quarters. Inferior, indeed. Had it angered Emily, this dismissal of her work, this relegation to the cellar, this diminishment of her former career?

Maybe not, but it angered me. I studied the three grainy prints, the cheap frames. I always worry that if Vincent van Gogh had been Virginia van Gogh, she'd have been consigned to paint in the outhouse. Keep all the smelly things together, my dear.

I surveyed the room. It should have been easy going, such a small place. But the various pieces of machinery, of which I could only dubiously identify an enlarger, the shallow trays, the storage bins and files, were foreign to me, hardly everyday stuff like bureaus and desks.

I knew enough not to mess with lightproof envelopes.

There were three of them stacked on the toilet-seat cover. I examined them gingerly. Unsealed.

I flicked off the white bulb, located a second switch, and the room was bathed in a red glow. Now I couldn't inadvertently destroy what I was searching for.

The unsealed envelopes were empty.

Wooden shelves held large tinted-glass bottles. Fixer, developer, unlabeled liquids with sharp and pungent odors. Manila folders contained magazine clips of ancient, abandoned, stone dwellings.

Spider webs filled the corners.

I found the pictures strung like laundry on a line, over my head, across one end of the tiny room. Six shots, six photos that were definitely not of Rebecca.

Were these what Harold's break-in artist had sought?

My hands fumbled with the edges of the first photo. It was small, dark, grainy. The interior of a building. Metal pipes and buckets. Machinery.

I held up the next one. More pipes. Vats and coolers. Hoses. A cement floor with a drain. JHHI? Damn. Weren't there any identifying details in the dim shots? I studied each one. Drains and pipes and vats. No context. No meaning. No words.

I attacked the files.
Artists
consisted of a series of portraits, eight-by-ten blowups of unknown intriguing faces.
Bears
had been shot in zoos. Metal cages loomed and threatened, more terrifying than tooth or claw. No
Hospitals
. No helpful clues. No packets marked: Open in case of my disappearance or death. No explanation of the six photos. By the time I reached
Wampanoog
my fingers were stiff from opening and closing envelopes, my eyes tired of focusing, refocusing.

I flipped the light to full spectrum, blinking rapidly. I took one of the empty lightproof envelopes, tucked the six photos inside, and shoved the thin packet down the waistband of my slacks, snug against the small of my back.

Harold Woodrow saw me out. He didn't seem disposed to chat. As I got into my car, I knocked the long-forgotten meter maid's hat off my head and onto the grass. I retrieved it and stuffed it unceremoniously into the dash compartment.

Maybe Harold Woodrow thought I moonlighted as a meter maid. That could account for his hostility.

35

Before entering my house, I checked the side drive, the yard, even under the back porch where I usually store the garbage cans. No replacements. Was I going to have to send an illegally altered passport to the Feds, live through their intensive questioning, fill out forms for the rest of my life over eighty bucks' worth of trash containers?

I'd been so sure Paco Sanchez would jump at the deal.

One more bright idea gone awry. Now Roz and I would have to stuff the week's garbage into Hefty bags for the dogs to plunder. The neighbors would complain.

I dumped my purse on the hall table with a heavy thud. There were no messages on my answering machine. No packets from Emily Woodrow. Finding Emily was the key, dammit. Were there any bases Mooney wouldn't have covered? He'd check the local hospitals. Airports and bus stations. Credit card charges. The morgue.

If she'd killed Tina, and then killed herself … if she'd driven to one of the local beaches, disrobed, and kept on swimming out to sea—stroking, paddling, pushing her endurance until she was too exhausted to turn back, how long could her body stay submerged, undiscovered?

I'm a strong swimmer. When my mom died and I found myself wrenched away from everything I'd known, suddenly propelled from Detroit to Boston, the ocean had almost sucked me down. Dour November mornings, my seventeenth autumn, I'd ride the subway to East Boston, walk slowly to the sandy shore, all the time thinking that I could keep on walking, walking … walk till I had to swim, swim in cold, endless green till I'd never have to do anything again.

If Emily
had
killed herself after disposing of Tina Sukhia, then what about the death of the Cephagen CEO? Chalk it up to random urban crime?

Had Emily been murdered like the others?

In the kitchen, I popped the top on a Pepsi. Someone had killed the president of a pharmaceutical lab, a drug company that made a chemotherapy drug, this week of all weeks, in this town of all towns. Cephagen might not have employed Tina Sukhia, but there had to be a connection.

The
Globe
was hiding under the hall table this time; nothing is ever where it's supposed to be in this house. After the first bracing sip, the cola turned unappetizing, so I made myself a cup of instant soup from boiling water and a packet of powder and sat down to learn what I could about Cephagen's late David Menander.

Ringing tributes from colleagues, outraged cries for more police protection, those I could live without. Facts. Where were facts? The who, what, where, when, why journalists used to jam into the first paragraph, and now rarely bother to include at all if juicier details are available. I learned the per-night cost of his plush hotel room before I discovered that Menander had not come here as a tourist.

Body discovered after he'd failed to attend a scheduled meeting at the Jonas Hand/James Helping Institute. If that didn't raise a red flag for Mooney, I'd eat my picklocks.

Who would Menander have dealt with at JHHI? Not peons. CEOs were accustomed to dealing with CEOs. Muir, certainly. Renzel, as Chief of Pharmacy? A humble resident anesthesiologist like Peña?

The police were questioning several unnamed individuals. No one had heard the two shots, which indicated a silencer. A front-desk receptionist thought she remembered that flowers had been delivered to Mr. Menander's room.