Photograph, page 24
“Did you go and talk to her?”
“Of course. I woke up my husband. Jay and I both went up to the loft.” She shook her head, and she sat in silence a long time before going on. “That was the worst morning of our lives. I keep looking back and thinking there must have been something else we could have done or said. But we were in shock. It happened so fast. Lara was part of our lives, and then she wasn’t.”
I let more silence pass.
Then Kate went on before I could ask anything more.
“Please tell us what happened, Betty. I need to know what happened to my mother.”
Betty took a slow breath in and out. When she picked up her coffee mug, I saw the quivering in her hand.
“It had been raining most of the night. I remember thinking it must have been a terrible time to drive back in the dark. I couldn’t imagine why she wouldn’t have waited until daylight. We climbed the steps to the loft, and the door was partially open. We knocked on the door, and Lara screamed at the noise. She spun around and screamed. Then she saw it was us. I don’t know who she was expecting, but she was terrified.”
“Was she alone?” I asked again.
Betty looked momentarily impatient. “Yes, yes, she was alone. Why do you keep asking me that?”
“I’m sorry. Go on.”
“Lara was packing. She had an old suitcase on her bed, and she was stuffing clothes inside. We asked what she was doing, and she sat us both down, and she told us she had to leave. We asked for how long. We were thinking a few days, a couple of weeks. She said she didn’t know, but it would be a long time. She said she hoped that someday she could come back, or reach out to us, but she wasn’t sure. It might be a few months, it might be forever. She told us she loved us and she was sorry and she was grateful to us for everything, but she had to go. She had to leave right away.”
Kate and I waited as Betty dealt with the memories.
“Naturally, we asked what was going on. How could we help. We asked about the girl she’d gone to see, had something gone wrong. Lara told us the girl was dead. She’d been murdered. And she said she was now at serious risk herself—that she would be killed if anyone found her. That’s why she had to run. We begged her to talk to the police, or an attorney, or someone, but she said she was dealing with people who didn’t care about the law. Violent men, drug dealers. They’d eliminate her if they found her. She said we were at risk, too, simply because we knew her. If anyone thought we knew how to find her, they’d kill us without a second thought. So she told us it was better that we know nothing at all. After that, she left. She drove away and was gone. Lara was the closest thing I’d ever had to a daughter, and she was out of my life.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said again. “Did Lara tell you anything else? Did she give you any other details?”
“No. We pressed her, of course, but she said the less we knew, the safer we’d be. And of course, we saw in the papers the next day that a teenage girl in Devil Creek had been killed. We assumed that was the girl Lara had been trying to help.”
“Did anyone come looking for her?”
Betty nodded. “Yes, a couple of days later, a policeman showed up asking questions about her.”
A policeman.
I thought about what Chuck Kimble had told me. Lara Lovell had called the Devil Creek police herself to say she’d left the motel early in the evening. She hadn’t been there when the murder occurred. So Phil Potter had crossed Lara off his list. There was no follow-up after that.
And yet a policeman had showed up at Lara’s door.
“Was it the local police?” I asked.
“No. I didn’t know him.”
“Do you remember what he looked like?”
“After all this time? Oh, no.”
“Did he show you a badge?”
Betty hesitated. “I—I’m not sure. As I think about it now, he was dressed in a suit, not a uniform. I don’t think we ever thought to ask about identification. Around here, if someone says they’re with the police, you assume they are.”
“What did he want?”
“To know where Lara was.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth,” Betty replied. “We told him Lara was gone. We didn’t know where she went. We said she’d been afraid for her life, and he didn’t seem surprised. We asked if there was anything more he could tell us, but he said it was an active police investigation, and he couldn’t give us any details. Then he asked if he could see Lara’s loft. We said yes, of course. He searched the loft and didn’t find anything. Then he thanked us and left. That was all.”
“Did you ever see him again?” I asked. “Did he ever come back?”
“No.”
“And you never heard from Lara?”
Betty’s eyes grew wistful. “Never. I always thought the day would come when she’d knock on our door again. Or send us a letter. But I guess she didn’t want to put us at risk. All these years, and we had to live with the mystery. Until today. Until the two of you showed up.”
THIRTY
Kate asked to see the loft where her mother had lived.
Betty led us out of the house and around the back of the detached garage, where a set of stairs in bad need of fresh paint led up to a windowless door. We climbed the stairs, and Betty let us inside with a key. The loft had no air conditioning and was warm, with shut-up dusty air that smelled of fertilizer from the garage below. There were tall narrow windows on three sides, casting geometric shadows. The floor was made of oak panels, adorned with a couple of multicolored rugs, and the walls were covered in matching light wood. It was studio space, all one room except for a small bathroom.
“Has it changed much since Lara lived here?” Kate asked.
“Hardly at all,” Betty told us. “It’s almost exactly like it was. Call me sentimental, but I kept it this way deliberately. Jay and I didn’t need the space for ourselves. As time passed, I knew Lara probably wasn’t coming back, but I always had this idea in the back of my head that someday she’d show up at my door, and I’d have her old room ready for her.”
The loft did look frozen in time, as if Lara might come walking in at any moment. There was still a makeup mirror on the dresser. A toothbrush in the bathroom, a bar of soap on a ledge in the shower. But anything personal was long gone. Lara had taken her life with her, and she’d been thorough. The drawers in the dresser were empty of clothes. Nothing remained in the closet or in the nightstand next to the twin bed. The only thing that showed Lara’s identity was a series of nearly two dozen photographs framed in plastic cases, taking up most of the loft’s far wall.
“Did Lara leave those behind?” I asked, pointing at the wall.
Betty shook her head. “No, she had boxes of photographs going back for years, and she took them all with her.”
And burned them, I thought.
“Then what are those pictures?” I asked her. “Where did they come from? Are they Lara’s?”
Betty sighed and nodded at Kate. “You can take them, if you’d like. I haven’t been up here in a long time—not since I lost Jay three years ago, actually—so there’s really no need for me to keep them. Yes, they’re Lara’s.”
I felt a strange tingling sensation climbing my spine. It was that chill I feel when the smallest detail is about to reveal something of huge importance. Call it instinct. Call it sixth sense.
“But where did the pictures come from?” I asked again.
Betty stood by one of the windows, looking outside at the street. “Well, you remember I said it was raining that morning. It had rained all night. Lara came back early, and she had an old black rain slicker with her. She’d hung it in the bathroom to dry, and she was in such a hurry that she forgot all about it. She left it behind. I didn’t find it until later that day, and I brought it into the house.”
I waited.
There was more to the story.
“It stayed in our downstairs closet for months,” Betty went on. “I think it was a year or more before I even noticed it there. At that point, I figured I would just donate it to Goodwill. I went through the pockets before I took it over there, and I found a little plastic container. Inside was a roll of film. Lara had obviously finished up a roll and rewound it and shoved it in her pocket. I don’t know, maybe I made a mistake, maybe she would have wanted me to just throw it away. But I didn’t. We had hardly anything left to remind us of Lara, so the idea of having some of her photographs—well, I needed a reminder of her. So I took the roll to the nearest photo shop and had it developed. Then I had the pictures enlarged into eight-by-tens, and I put them in cheap frames on the wall here. I liked having something of Lara’s in the room. But ever since I lost my husband, I haven’t had the courage to come up here. Too many memories, too much loss, if you can understand that.”
I could.
But as I stared at the photographs in the shadows on the far wall, I realized their significance. These were the last pictures Lara had taken, other than the film that had been left in her Konica camera, the film that included the photograph that made its way into Millennium Memories.
Had Lara changed film that evening?
Were these photographs from the night of the murder?
I crossed the loft on my way to the wall. The oak timbers groaned under my feet. Kate called to me—a question—but I didn’t hear what she said. I stood in front of the two dozen photographs, hung on the wall in four squares of six, three up, three down. All black and white. They’d been here a long time; they’d faded as sunlight swept through the space. The plastic had yellowed.
But the first picture I saw told me I was right. Lara had taken a twilight photo from the highway, showing the rain pouring across a neon sign, one of its lights dead. The sign read: thunder mountain motel, with the capital I dark. It was like a message from the grave.
My breath caught in my chest.
I felt Kate come up beside me, and she gasped, too, as she saw it. Together we began to examine the photographs on the wall, each one a masterpiece by Lara Lovell. I knew what I wanted to see—another picture taken by the Coke machine, but this one with the girl facing the camera, this one with the photograph uncropped and the mystery man standing at the edge of the frame.
Quickly, I realized we were going to be disappointed.
With a glance along the wall, I could see that the picture of the neon sign was the only photograph taken at the motel. The others were all classic Lara Lovell shots of lonely roads and corn fields.
And yet there had to be something more.
I tried to work out the timeline in my head. There was a photograph of the motel on this roll and also on the roll that Kate had found years later. Did the photographs reflect the end and the beginning of two rolls? But that didn’t make sense. Kate had found other pictures on the roll in her mother’s Konica camera. Lara had taken multiple photographs on that roll, not just at the motel. Plus, the photograph on the wall showed the motel sign in waning daylight, whereas the photograph in Millennium Memories had clearly been taken at night.
Where had Lara gone in the interim?
But I knew. She’d left the motel. She’d taken a photograph of the neon sign when she arrived, and then she’d driven out to the highway with her camera to capture the lonely landscape as the sun set. Photography was what relaxed her and gave her peace. Photography was her escape. She was scared for Dawn; she was stressed about what to do and how to save her. So she’d spent the evening in the rural lands outside Devil Creek doing what she loved most.
Taking photographs.
But where was the man? Where was the girl?
They didn’t show up in any of the pictures.
I examined each framed photograph on the wall, looking for people in the background. Looking for shadows. Looking for clues. Somewhere amid the glistening wet pavement of the highway, amid the golden fields waving in the breeze, Lara must have taken a picture that would show me what had happened to her out there. She’d gone off alone, and yet somehow, later that night, she’d ended up sharing her motel room with a man and a little girl.
Like a scientist with a microscope, I studied them one by one.
Picture after picture.
The dark sky. The lonely road. The fields and woods hiding ghosts.
Then I saw it. There it was, waiting for me. The answer to everything. In the final set of framed photographs, I found what I was looking for. I’d like to tell you that somewhere in my mind, I already knew what I would find, that the truth was a treasure chest of memories I would unlock sooner or later. But that’s a lie. It came out of nowhere, totally impossible, totally unexpected. When I saw it, my whole body began to shake uncontrollably.
“Shannon?” Kate asked, her voice low and concerned. She saw what was happening to me, my eyes white and wide, my skin drained of life, my lip trembling in horror, my brain racing through all of the implications of what I was seeing. “Shannon, what’s wrong?”
I lifted my arm from my side, muscle and bone feeling as if they weighed a hundred pounds. I pointed a trembling finger at the photograph. Kate leaned forward, staring at it, trying to see what I saw. It was a nighttime shot near a light post that cast a weak glow through the rain, showing a melancholy intersection of two roads. One was an empty highway; the other was a wet dirt road, leading like a dark ribbon into distant trees.
Parked at that intersection was a car.
A car as old and decrepit as its surroundings. A wet, dented, rusting, always-breaking-down beige Impala.
“That’s our car,” I murmured.
Kate didn’t understand. Of course, she didn’t. Why would she?
“Shannon, what are you talking about?”
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the picture. I could still so easily remember the peace of sleeping in the backseat, of the radio playing piano music, of the rain thumping on the roof. These were things that were gone from my childhood and could never come back again.
“That’s my father’s car,” I whispered under my breath. “We were there. Don’t you see? The car broke down the way it always did. Lara picked us up, me and my father. That little girl in the photograph? It’s me.”
THIRTY-ONE
The two of us drove south on the long road back to Devil Creek.
An hour passed in absolute silence; neither Kate nor I said a word. Then another hour passed, as slowly as the previous one. It was evening now, the daylight waning, much as it would have on that night twenty-six years ago. It even began to rain to make the lost memory complete. Somewhere along the highway, where I saw a dirt road leading into the woods at a lonely intersection, I pulled my SUV to the shoulder and stopped and shut off the motor.
I got out into the drenching rain. I walked into the middle of the dirt road, which was messy with puddles and mud. The door opened behind me, and I heard the splash of footsteps as Kate joined me. We were alone under the dark, thunder-cloud sky. No cars or trucks came and went; no houses broke the long stretch of fields and trees. If your car broke down here, back in the days when cell signal didn’t reach the rural lands, you’d wonder if you would ever be rescued.
Unless a lovely young woman came by and gave you a ride in her warm car.
“Was it here?” Kate asked softly, as if sensing I was finally ready to talk.
I shook my head. “No, the terrain’s not an exact match for the picture. But it was somewhere around here. It looks right, although I suppose most miles look like every other mile in this part of the state.”
“What do you remember about it?”
“Almost nothing,” I admitted. “I mean, what could I have been, three years old? All I know is that there was a time when my father and I took a driving trip. We went to see his parents. It was just the two of us, because they didn’t get along with my mom. That was the only time I ever met my grandparents, and I really don’t remember anything about them. But they lived in Canada; I recall that now. I couldn’t have told you where, but I have a feeling it was near Sault Ste. Marie, which would have been a few hours north of here. My father didn’t like interstates. He liked the back roads. He said they were more authentic, more American. He must have been driving somewhere along here, late in the evening, in the middle of nowhere, when the Impala died.”
“You were stranded,” Kate said. “A father and his little girl.”
“Yeah.”
“So my mother must have come by. She found the two of you here, and she rescued you.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have a picture of him?” Kate asked. “Your father?”
I knew why she was asking.
“Sure.”
I took out my phone and found the best picture of my father in close-up. It wasn’t hard, because he always took good pictures.
“He’s a very handsome man,” Kate said.
“Oh, yeah. Handsome and charming.”
“He’s aged well, but I suppose he would have been even more handsome back then. How old would he have been at that point? In his thirties?”
“Late twenties.”
“Wow.”
We stood there in the mud and rain, dancing around the things we needed to say to each other. I mean, we both knew. It wasn’t just the circumstances, the timing, the nine months between a broken-down car on an empty road and the birth of Kate Selby. When I stared at the photograph of my father, I saw it so clearly now that I wondered how I had missed it before. You couldn’t escape the likeness in the eyes, the shape of the nose, the expressions on her face. And it made the instant chemistry between us so easy to explain.
Sometime during that night, my father had slept with Lara Lovell. Out of that tryst came a child.
Kate was my sister.
We didn’t need to say it out loud or tell each other how we felt. We didn’t need to say that something beautiful had sprung out of terrible events. She stared at me, and I stared at her, and then we embraced in the rain, two lonely orphans finding each other in the wildest, strangest of ways. We smiled, we laughed, we cried. We held on fiercely, not wanting to let go.
