Photograph, page 5
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I told you. My name is Maro.”
“So what, are you some kind of psychic?”
“No. Nothing like that. I was hit by lightning as a little girl. It messed me up physically for years, but it gave me unique gifts, too. I sense things. I see things.”
“Like guns in dreams?”
“Sometimes. Life is violent. It’s about predators and prey.”
“Look, whoever you are—”
“Maro.”
“Okay. Maro. No offense, Maro, but I’m drunk, and I’ve got a headache, and I’m going home. All right? Do you need anything? Money? Are you homeless?”
“No, but it’s kind of you to offer help.”
“Do you live around here?”
“I rented a small apartment on the beach for the summer.”
“Great. Terrific. Well, good night.”
“Good night, Shannon.”
I got to my feet unsteadily and kicked through the sand, barely able to keep my balance. I went down the beach toward the ocean, not toward the land, and I only stopped when the waves lashed my ankles. I held on to myself tightly. My shoulders shook. I was crying. Crying hard. I hadn’t cried since it happened, and I hated crying. But tears rolled out of me, as if the door to my Room of Evil Things had swung open, and I couldn’t figure out how to shut it.
“It’s not really a dream, is it, Shannon?”
Maro was next to me.
I realized that I needed to talk, to explain, to confess, and a stranger was as good as anyone else.
“No. It’s not a dream. It happened.”
“There was a gun.”
“Yes. I see a man in shadow. He has a gun, and the gun is pointed at me. It goes off. That’s what I see.”
“When did this happen?”
“It didn’t,” I said. “That’s the problem. It’s real, but it’s not. I know it happened, but it didn’t happen. That’s what’s driving me crazy.”
Maro frowned. “Have you ever tried regression?”
“What’s that?”
“Regression involves going back into your past. Exploring your memories. Bringing them to life again.”
“This isn’t in my past. I remember my past.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no.”
“What does that mean?”
“Maybe you need to go farther back,” Maro said.
FIVE
I didn’t drive, and I didn’t call an Uber. I called Kate Selby. She picked me up outside my father’s condo, and we drove to a Waffle House a few blocks away on the A1A. Kate didn’t ask me why we were having breakfast about ten hours earlier than we’d planned. I ordered coffee and pancakes, and she ordered eggs and bacon, and we sat in a booth across from each other.
“I hope I didn’t get you out of bed,” I said.
“No, I was up.”
“That’s a relief. I’d hate to think you look this good rolling out of bed.”
Kate smiled. “That’s sweet, but I’d take your face over mine.”
I tapped my nose. “Really? With this thing? Every four years, the Winter Olympics people call me up to ask about using it for ski jumps.”
“Oh, stop,” Kate said with a laugh. “Your nose is perfect for your face. It makes you distinctive. Interesting to look at. Your face has character.”
“Even with the scar?”
“Even with the scar. Me, I’m just sort of bland.”
“You are not bland by any stretch of the imagination. Your prettiness is actually annoying.”
“Well, thank you.”
I drank my coffee and got a refill. From my purse, I found four Advil and popped them in my mouth. When I checked my hand mirror, I saw that my teeth were stained red from all the wine, my hair was a mess, and my eyes had Publix shopping bags underneath them. “Jesus.”
Kate giggled. “Okay, I admit that you looked better this morning.”
“No kidding.”
“Are you all right, Shannon?”
“Sort of. I appreciate you coming to rescue me. The alternative was staying at my father’s, and that’s definitely not a plan.”
“You can crash at my place if you want,” Kate said. “It’ll be nice to have company.”
“Thanks.”
The waitress brought our breakfast. I shouldn’t have been hungry after so much Korean food, but I dug in on my pancakes anyway. Kate didn’t seem to have much of an appetite, and most of her meal stayed on the plate.
“Did you talk to the police?” she asked.
“I did. As of right now, they’re not very close to finding out what happened to your mother.”
“I figured. Did you tell them about Faith hiring you? About what she wanted you to do?”
“No, I wanted to talk to you about that first.”
“Why?”
“The police don’t know what I know,” I explained. “They’re trying to figure out why someone might have wanted to kill Faith Selby, but they don’t know that Faith was really someone else. It would change the whole nature of the investigation if I told them the truth.”
“Isn’t that what we want?”
“Maybe, but here’s the thing. We don’t know why your mother built a new life and a new identity. We do know it was right around the time she got pregnant with you. If she was protecting you, then we may not want to spread her secret around too widely, at least until we know what she was running from. I don’t want to do or say anything that puts you at risk.”
“Will you keep looking into this yourself?” Kate asked.
“I will if you want me to.”
“I do.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear that, because I hate unfinished business.”
“So what’s next?”
“Well, first things first,” I said. “Did the police tell you about the car with Michigan plates? The one the witness saw near your mother’s house?”
“Yes.”
“Does Michigan mean anything to you? Did your mother ever talk about Michigan? Did she have any roots there?”
“No. The police asked me that, too. I’ve never been to Michigan, and as far as I knew, my mother never had been, either. Like I said, she always told me that she lived in Florida her whole life.”
“Okay.” I speared the last piece of pancake. “Then let’s get back to me and Faith. Last fall, your mother hired me. I think her goal was to see if her cover story held up. That is, if someone looked for her, would they be able to find her? Unfortunately, it looks like someone did. I’d like to know how that happened, because I’m pretty good, and I couldn’t do it.”
Kate pursed her lips in thought. “If someone knew who she used to be, they’d be coming at the search from the opposite angle, right? You were looking for who she was. They already knew who she was and were looking for who she became. Faith. My mother. Maybe it was easier that way.”
“That’s possible, but the bigger question is the timing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, why did your mother come to me at that particular moment? She’d been living under a false identity for a quarter of a century, but suddenly she was worried enough about being exposed that she hired me to dig into her past. That tells me something happened. Something put her at risk. Do you have any idea at all what it could be?”
Kate eased back into the booth. “I can’t think of anything.”
“Let’s go back to last fall, Kate. What was going on in your in your mother’s life? And in yours, too. Were there any changes? New jobs? Visitors? Unexpected correspondence? Did your mother say anything? Did anything happen that made her nervous, or upset, or scared?”
“No, there was nothing like that. Well, except for—”
Kate stopped, and her lovely face lost all of its color. “Oh my God.”
“What is it?”
“Oh God, I never thought—what did I do? Was it my fault? I should have checked with her. She was so upset.”
“Kate, what are you saying? What are you talking about?”
“The photograph,” she murmured.
I waited for her to go on, but she stared over my shoulder as if she could see some unseen monster watching us from another table. “Kate, what was this photograph? Was it a picture of your mother? Could it tell us more about who she was?”
“No, she took the picture herself,” Kate replied quietly. “I found it, and then—God, I don’t see how it’s possible, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. That’s why my mother is dead. It started with a photograph.”
We sat on the floor in Kate’s apartment, our backs against the living room wall. I’d had plenty to drink and didn’t need more, but Kate was on her third glass of white wine in the hour we’d been here. She’d been crying off and on, her pretty eyes red, her makeup streaked. So far, she’d said nothing about her mother, and I didn’t push her to tell me more until she was ready.
A hardcover book sat on the carpet in front of us. It was one of those oversized coffee table books that guests flip through at parties. Its title was Millennium Memories. The subhead read: Everyday photographs from everyday people at the turn of the century. Kate had pulled the volume from a bookshelf, but when I reached for the book to look at the pictures, she took my wrist gently and pulled it back.
I understood. Too soon. First she needed to explain.
“Someday I want to work in Hollywood,” she announced finally.
I had no idea where she was going with this, but I said, “Okay.”
“I want to write. I mean, I write for the newspaper now, but I want to write screenplays. Or novels. Something like that. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this impulse to create things. I see people, and I imagine stories about them. I go to the ocean, and I think about shells traveling for centuries to get to the beach. I paint, too. I’m not any good, but I love to paint.”
I looked around the apartment and saw framed watercolors hung on the walls, mostly ocean scenes, all of them featuring an anonymous woman in the foreground, like an observer who can appreciate the beauty of the setting. I realized the paintings were Kate’s.
“You’re wrong,” I told her. “You’re very good.”
A little smile broke across her face. “Thank you.”
I waited for her to go on.
“The bottom line with me is, I’m all about creating things. That’s my passion.” She laughed. “You know, the stuff that doesn’t make any money. Whereas my mother was always the practical one. She did people’s taxes. She made sure the bills got paid. She never seemed to have the artistic gene in her at all. There I was, writing and painting and taking piano lessons and my mother’s idea of fun was doing sudoku puzzles. I didn’t get it. I mean, I loved her, but I always wondered why she never wanted to explore the creative side of herself.”
“People are different,” I said.
“Oh, I know. It didn’t bother me. I just thought it was strange, like there had to be a part of her that I wasn’t seeing.”
She let another long stretch of silence pass. She drank her wine and stared at the book of photographs on the floor.
“Two years ago, I was in the attic of our house in St. Augustine. I’d just gotten my master’s in journalism, and I had a lot of essays and books packed up in boxes. I wanted to store them away. I don’t think I’d ever been up in the attic before. Attics are creepy, all the spiderwebs and bugs, so I was working fast and being kind of careless. I tipped over a box of my mom’s stuff. Mostly old clothes. But when I went to pick it up, I saw something else.”
“What?”
“A camera,” Kate said. “A Konica thirty-five-millimeter camera. It was dusty and looked years old, but I could tell it was a pretty expensive model. I know that may not sound like much, but to me, it was a revelation. My mom had a camera. She used to take photographs. That was the creative part of her I’d always wondered about.”
“What did you do?”
“I showed it to her. I had so many questions.”
“And?”
“She shut me down. She said it was nothing but a failed hobby. She told me she got it in her head to take pictures one summer in her twenties, but she could never get the exposures right, and she got bored because the pics were so bad. So she put the camera away and never used it again.”
I frowned, watching Kate’s face. “You didn’t believe her.”
“No. This wasn’t a starter camera for someone taking up a new hobby. This was for someone who knew what they were doing. Plus, I didn’t tell her what else I found.”
“What was that?”
“There was still a roll of film in the camera. I rewound it, and I managed to find a place to get it developed. I didn’t tell my mom about it. Somehow I knew she wouldn’t approve. Anyway, I got the pictures back, and they were amazing. She had clearly been doing this for years, and her artistry was incredible. She could take a cornfield or a dirt road, usually with just one person in the frame, and you’d feel this wave of drama and mystery in the shot.”
“Sort of like your paintings?” I asked.
“Yeah, a little bit. I do the same thing, using one person to bring the scene together and give it emotional richness. My mom did that with her photographs.”
“And her pictures showed cornfields? Dirt roads?”
“Most of them.”
“That sounds like the Midwest,” I said. “Like Michigan.”
Kate’s eyes widened. “I never thought about that, but I guess it’s possible.”
“What did you do with the pictures?”
“I kept them. I didn’t show them to Mom. I had the feeling that if she knew I had them, she wouldn’t like it. And I wanted to have that part of her for myself. It made me feel closer to her, to see the world through her artistic eyes. Not just the practical woman.” Kate hesitated, and her eyes went glassy with tears again. “But I also—I also did something stupid. I never should have done it.”
I glanced at the book of photographs on the floor. “What did you do?”
“There was a poster on campus. A Florida author was compiling a book about turn-of-the-century American life. Before iPhones and social media and everyone getting connected on the web. He was looking for photos taken by ordinary people, pictures capturing what life was like twenty-five years ago.”
“You sent him your mother’s pictures?”
Kate held up a finger. “One. I sent him one. It was different from most of the others, but I thought it captured the vision he was looking for. Obviously, he thought so, too, because—”
She reached for the book in front of us. It seemed to open automatically to the right page, as if the spine had memory. Kate tapped a picture that took up an entire page and said, “This is it. My mother took this photograph.”
I pulled the book closer.
The first thing I noticed was that there was no byline, caption, or anything else to identify the photographer. Kate seemed to read my mind.
“All the photos in the book are anonymous,” she told me. “No credit. That was part of the rights release I signed.”
“You signed?”
She flushed. “Yeah. I forged my mother’s name. I wanted it to be a surprise for her, you know? Plus, I never really thought he would actually use the photo. I figured it was a long shot. Also, well—”
“If you told her about it, you thought she’d say no.”
Kate nodded. “Exactly.”
I glanced at the name of the author on the book’s cover. Bruce Falline.
“Is there anything in the book or on this Bruce Falline’s website that links the photograph to your mother?” I asked.
Kate shook her head. “No. Nothing.”
“But Falline—he must know. The information would be in his records.”
“I assume so. I had to fill out a form when I submitted the picture, and I included my mother’s name and address.”
“Did you send him the print and the negative? Or just one or the other?”
“I sent him both. That was what his website said he needed. I sort of figured I’d get them back afterward, but when I read the fine print, I realized that he took ownership of any photos submitted to him.”
“Did you know he was planning to use the picture?”
“No, I had no idea until the book showed up in our mailbox. That was the compensation he offered. If he used the photo, we got a free copy of the book. When it arrived, I started going through it, and there was the photograph. I was so excited.”
“You told Faith?”
Kate bit her lip as she nodded. “I thought she’d be pleased.”
“She wasn’t?”
“No. She got very upset with me. She told me I never should have done that without her permission. I mean, okay, that was fair. But it’s not like anyone who saw the book would know it was her picture. There’s no name on it or anything. We argued for a while, but eventually, she calmed down, and we both apologized. She laughed about overreacting. That was that. She never brought it up again. Except—”
“Except what?”
“The other photos and negatives from that roll of film disappeared from my room the next day. She obviously went in and searched until she found them. I asked her about it, and she didn’t deny it. She said she burned them.”
“Burned them?”
“Yeah. I was angry. I didn’t know how she could do that. The photos were so good. But she said the pictures belonged to her, and this was her call, not mine. I couldn’t really argue with that. Plus, it was too late. They were gone. Of course, part of me wondered if she was lying, but one time when she was meeting somebody for lunch, I searched her bedroom. Turnabout is fair play, right? The pictures weren’t there. She got rid of them.”
I opened the book to the photograph again.
Kate was right. The image was beautifully framed, by an artist with a keen sense of how to use the camera to tell stories. The photograph showed a motel parking lot at night, with the rain falling in a gauzy halo around a single streetlight. Most of the spaces in the parking lot were empty, like a symbol of recession and decay. I could see only half of one dirty white van, with a partial license plate. It didn’t look like a Michigan plate to me. A row of wooden motel doors lined the background, some of them with their brass numbers askew. In the foreground, the centerpiece of the photograph, a little girl stood in front of a vending machine, her back to the camera, a red can of Coke in her hand. She wore a flowered dress down to her knees, and her feet were bare.
