by Linda Barnes
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 breakin 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 fo
r 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.
As good a way as any to get his room number.
Menander, thirty-nine, had been considered something of a whiz kid, although his company never seemed to take off after the early promise it had shown with the development and marketing of its premier drug, the costly but effective Cephamycin. Menander had been criticized for taking a soft approach to marketing, for keeping the company private, for not raising massive capital and diving headlong into the biotech future. His decision, some years ago, to repackage Cephamycin, using a fancy holographic logo, had been seen as sheer extravagance by several members of the board of directors who’d almost voted him out of office. Others had regarded it as a logical counterattack to the drug-tampering craze that had temporarily driven Tylenol off the shelves. This was from the business section, not the news update.
I finished the oversalted soup, rinsed the cup, shook it dry, and stuck it back in the cupboard. Then, returning to my desk, I spread out my borrowed treasures. Six dimly lit photographs. I rubbed my eyes, shook my head, went back to the kitchen, and burrowed in the fridge till I found the already-opened Pepsi. I ought to buy caffeine pills.
I went over the first photo with a magnifying lens, trying to identify the machinery. The lighting was so bad, the shadows so deep, I couldn’t be sure what I was seeing.
Same with the second. Same with the third, although I could sense some order, some setup that made me think of an assembly line. A large metal vat had no visible markings in the fourth shot. The fifth and sixth were even darker and murkier.
Had Emily blundered in taking these shots, or deliberately misprinted them?
Disgusted, I turned them facedown on the blotter, and immediately noticed a legible symbol, a faintly penciled notation in the bottom left-hand corner of the fourth photo.
Tiny numerals: 6, 3, 2. A letter L. A word: WOOD.
I stared at it until my head hurt, but no illumination came, so I unlocked the upper desk drawer and removed the file I’d forced Paolina’s friend, Sanchez, to xerox. Working two or three cases at once isn’t bad. When you hit a brick wall on one case, concentrating on the other can free enough brain cells to generate a breakthrough on the first.
Sometimes you just double your frustration level, shoot it straight into the danger zone.
The more I read about Mr. Thurman W. Vandenburg, the bastard who’d hired my garbage thief, the less I knew. An attorney, that most secretive of beasts, he was working for a client named Jaime Valdez Corroyo. Valdez Corroyo was interested in the whereabouts of one Marta Fuentes Giraldo, whom he believed to be his long-lost cousin. A question of inheritance was involved, but while he wished Mrs. Fuentes located, he did not wish to contact her directly. First, he needed assurance that she was not addicted to excessive gambling and drinking, as were so many other members of the Fuentes family. Codicils in the will could preclude her from inheriting if she were a gambler. Therefore it would be best not to raise her hopes until her character and her sources of income were evaluated by a reputable local firm.
Huh?
A list of Marta’s “associates” was appended, with an asterisk preceding my name. The client was particularly interested in learning as much about me as possible, including my relationship with Marta’s only daughter.
The phone rang. I let it go for three rings, trying to find the magic combination. Maybe the phantom caller would only hang up at the sound of my voice. I lifted the receiver, said nothing.
I heard faint muffled noises, grunts or groans.
“Hello?” I said softly. “Is that you, Emily?”
A slow, seemingly deliberate click.
Damn.
I closed the Vandenburg file, turned back to the photos.
Emily had developed them, therefore they were valuable. They meant something. They were part of the story she needed to tell. I would concentrate on the photos, the location shown in the photos.
632 L wood.
Six thirty-two Longwood Avenue?
Why not check it out? Paolina was safe, either with Roz or with Marta. If Sanchez chose to replace my trash cans, he wouldn’t need me to greet him with a brass band.
I already had my picklocks in my pocket.
I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes. Less than a week ago, I’d met Emily Woodrow for the first and only time.… So many things remained unseen. Emily’s daughter, Rebecca: I’d only viewed her snapshots. Tina: a single photograph. The CEO of Cephagen: a blurred likeness in a newspaper. For a moment the invisible dead seemed more real to me than Emily Woodrow. Through their photographs they had substance, a single frozen form. Emily had moved, walked, talked. Sobbed and whispered. If she entered my doorway, wearing other clothes, would I recognize her?
The intense blue eyes. The terse sudden speech.
“Do you own a gun?”
“Can you use it?”
“Have you used it?”
“Would you do it again?”
While I waited for darkness, I cleaned, oiled, and loaded my .38 police special.
36
Six thirty-two was the place I’d pegged as a former factory, an eyesore lowering JHHI’s property value. I drove around the block, circling it twice, checking the area.
You can learn a lot from
looking. Cops who walk a regular beat know who keeps the lights on, who turns them out, who draws the curtains, the angle at which Mrs. Patterson sets her shutters before going to sleep every night at 9:37 P.M. sharp. Especially in small towns, or small neighborhood enclaves, such habits keep the police informed. If I’d known the cops working the medical area, I’d have bought them a few beers and steered the conversation around to 632.
If I’d known them. If I hadn’t had the sense that time was running out for Emily.
If again. That ugly stammering word.
Since I saw no beat cop—nor was I likely to see one since most of Boston’s patrolmen are locked into speeding vehicles—I decided to pretend that the cop on the beat was me.
I was still wearing my Winchester breakin outfit, so the impersonation was fairly convincing. The meter-maid hat had suffered slightly in the dash compartment, but a few pats straightened it enough for night wear. I added a black jacket, one of many articles of clothing I keep in my car, to blend in with the dark and hide my gun.
I strolled the perimeter of the block. Six thirty-two was larger than I’d expected, edging up against the narrow alleyway that ran behind JHHI. While it didn’t share any walls with Helping Hand, one forty-foot section almost touched. I wondered if there was inside access from one to the other. An underground tunnel. If so, it might make the property a good acquisition for the hospital.
The front windows were plugged with plywood, crisscrossed with one-by-eight pine planks. Weathered boards. Rusty nails. Dust and cobwebs, dead leaves, and dirt. The front door didn’t need plywood; a shuttered metal grille, padlocked and rusty, did the job.
Maybe the Boston Housing Authority had plans to destroy the structure, rebuild from scratch. I wondered when 632 had last been occupied. It was no architectural treasure, nothing worth renovating. Far as I knew, it wasn’t an historic site. A few high windows had been smashed and left broken. A bird’s nest bridged a gap in a gutter.
Did it already belong to JHHI? Was it awaiting a construction crew? Lying fallow till some golden goose passed on and bequeathed a substantial legacy?
