A Photographic Death

by Judi Culbertson

  He might have been reading my thoughts, because he added, “You don’t know what it was like, we needed the money. They didn’t pay her squat at the company, they told her she had to ‘work her way up.’ My dad didn’t pay what he was supposed to. We could have lost the flat.”

  It was too warm in the room. I stared at the dots of sweat on Nick’s forehead and realized he was still wearing his sweatshirt and leather jacket. The stale odor I had been smelling was a mixture of alcohol and lack of a good shower. Just how marginal was his life now?

  Soon I would have to take off my own jacket. “How much more money did she get?”

  “None!” He was furious again. “They promised her more, they knew she’d go to the police if they didn’t. But this time they wouldn’t send it through the post, they said she had to meet them.” He lowered his head and pressed his fists into his eyes. “Micah wanted to go with her, but she wouldn’t let him. She should have! It was out in the country; they sent a cab to bring her. We waited all night for her to get back, but she didn’t come. Then next day some constable banged on the door and said that she was dead. He told me my mother was dead!”

  “That was me,” Sampson said. “I came to your flat.”

  “That was you? Jesus! You said it was an accident.” Now Nick was the accuser. He craned his neck to try and meet Sampson’s eyes.

  “Why would I think anything else? You wouldn’t tell us what she was doing out there. If you had, it would have changed everything. We could have found her killers and Ms. Laine would have been reunited with her daughter.”

  Don’t think about that. Don’t think about it now. The idea of what had almost happened, how different the past twenty years would have been, threatened to swamp me. Don’t think.

  “Who were these ­people she was going to meet?” Sampson demanded.

  “You think I know? You think they’d be alive if I knew?”

  Hands grabbed Nick’s shoulders roughly. “What did she say about them?”

  Nick jerked away. “Nothing! Why would she tell me anything? I was eleven-­fucking-­years old.”

  “She must have said something.”

  “Well, she didn’t. You can throw me in the hole for twenty years and I still won’t know.”

  “Stop watching American cinema. We don’t have ‘holes’ in Britain.”

  I pressed my fingers against the table until the tips glowed white. “Did she say it was a ­couple? Or a single woman?”

  “Yeah, there were two of them. She said them.”

  “A man and a woman?”

  “Them.”

  “Why did you want to hurt my mother?” Jane demanded. “She didn’t do anything to you.”

  Nick glanced at me with a hate that made me feel his arm crushing my throat. “Because if she hadn’t come here with her brats in the first place, none of this would have happened. My mother would still be alive. I was curious to see who she was. Then she started insulting my mum, and I wanted her to shut up.”

  DCI Sampson motioned to me not to answer.

  Nick pushed against his chair. “Can I go now?”

  In your dreams. “Where’s Micah?”

  “Leave him out of this! I don’t know anyway.” He lowered his eyes sullenly to the table. “We lost touch ages ago. He thinks I’m just a bum. Someone told me he emigrated to Australia.”

  He started to rise, but Sampson clamped his hand on his shoulder again. “Not so fast, laddie. Stick around. Ms. Laine may have more questions later on.”

  “No! You said I could go.” Nick reached across the table to me, thrusting his body forward as I jerked back. “You gonna press charges or what?”

  I shook my head. He had done what we had agreed on. “Not if you promise to e-­mail me if you remember anything else. Anything at all.an”

  “I won’t,” he assured me. “Remember anything.” Then he seemed to think about who I was, where we were. “Yeah, okay. If I think of something, I will. Whatever.”

  I sensed that DCI Sampson didn’t approve of such contact without his involvement. “If you ever approach Ms. Laine or her daughter again, it will be a long time before you’re out bothering tourists on Henley Street.”

  Close to his chest where Sampson couldn’t see but I could, Nick raised a menacing middle finger, then spat.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I HAD TO be alone. It was too overwhelming, there was too much to think about before I could talk about it with Jane or anyone else.

  Outside the police station the snow had stopped falling, leaving a pale slushy gleam on the cobblestones. Water dripped in slow motion from the signs and street lamps. ­People moved briskly as if it had all been a false alarm.

  “I still can’t believe it. I heard it but I still can’t believe it,” Jane marveled. “She was actually in his apartment. Wait until we tell Dad! And Hannah.”

  “Umm.”

  “It’s okay to tell them, isn’t it? I mean, this changes everything.”

  “It’s fine.” I couldn’t think about them now. “I need you to do something. Go to Anne Hathaway’s Cottage and interview that retired actress. See if she can tell us how to get in touch with Micah Clancy.”

  “You don’t think he’s in Australia?”

  “No. “

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I need to think.”

  “Okay, let’s get coffee or something.”

  “I mean by myself.”

  “I won’t say anything. It’s not safe; what if Nick comes after you again?”

  “He won’t. He’s shot his wad.” Now that DCI Sampson knew the story, there was no reason to try and keep me from exposing his mother as a criminal—­if that had ever been his intention.

  “Sampson called him a ‘wildcard.’ Even his voice gives me the creeps.”

  “I’ll see you back at the room.”

  The details of the interview were already fading. I had to get away.

  WHEN I REACHED the Avon River, I was able to find the bench we had camped out on so long ago. It was farther from the river than I remembered. Seeing the distance between the bench and where I had been standing by the river that day made me realize just how foolhardy I had been. Someone could as easily have come along and scooped up the sleeping Hannah. But because it had been England, because nothing tragic had ever happened to me before, I had felt invulnerable. Until I wasn’t.

  The water was the smooth, dark gray of a well-­tailored suit. Summer’s ducks had flown away and nothing moved except for a woman in a yellow jacket walking a black Scottish terrier. If the snow had continued to fall it would have been a Christmas card. Now the scene looked unfinished, as if the artist had packed up his brushes and gone home.

  I sat down and the slats of the bench felt like strips of ice through my jeans. But I needed to come here and revise that final memory, discarding the old pages and replacing them with the truth. I stared at the spot where I had plunged into the water, screaming Caitlin’s name, thrashing around wildly to try and feel where she was.

  All I had managed to do that afternoon was roil the water further, adding to the murk stirred up by oars and paddleboat wheels. Even while I was thinking, This can’t be happening, and groping like someone blindfolded, I could hear voices from over the water, laughter and music from someone’s radio, the endless chirping and calling of birds. Life had not stopped even for that moment.

  And all the time I was panicking and looking for her, my daughter was being wheeled into a different life. We had started the day together as a family, me dressing Caitlin in her well-­loved shirt and pants and feeding her Cheerios and a banana—­the only breakfast she would eat. But remembering her breakfast plunged me into despair. From that afternoon on, nothing was the way she expected it to be. They had dressed in unfamiliar clothes, given her strange food to eat, made her play with toy
s she had never seen before. They were strangers too. Her cries for “Mama” had brought her nothing.

  I pressed my fists against my thighs. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand how terrible it must have been for her. The devastation of her mommy and daddy never coming to rescue her. The kidnappers had not been as cruel to us, but cruel enough. Besides stealing my daughter they had, with a few misleading words sentenced me to years of guilt and regret. There was something deliberate about this punishment, something personal. Something about the way I was with the children had created the desire to lash out. If I could figure that out . . .

  Yet if they had not misdirected us to the water, the search would have gone in a whole other direction. There would have been a manhunt, a careful searching of Stratford. The water would have been a possibility, but since no one had seen her fall in, it would not have been assumed. I hugged myself against the wind that had risen. We were just as far from finding Caitlin as before. I had expected it would end when we found Priscilla Waters. Instead it was just beginning.

  For the first time I could understand Colin’s objection. Caitlin would have finally adjusted to the trauma of being uprooted from everything she once knew and settled into what I hoped had been a good life. Assuming she had been loved and been raised with tenderness, was it fair to destroy that world and force her to face yet another reality? And if she had been treated badly? That was the darker side Colin feared, that she was fatally damaged. If we found her would she cling to us like someone drowning and pull us under water too? I pushed that thought away immediately. No matter what had happened or would happen, she was my daughter.

  I sat frozen under the choppy gray sky, unable to leave the bench. It was impossible to imagine the last day I had spent here, the dense green grass of August, the beds of red and orange flowers, knots of excited tourists.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw something white move on the water. Who would be sailing a toy boat on such a raw day? I turned to look and saw that it was not a triangle of sail, but a swan. Not a baby wrapped in downy fluff, but not full-­grown either. Perhaps it had been born last spring. I remembered from some child’s nature book that not all swans migrated, that if they found a sheltered cove they would winter there. Soon there might be ice patches on the Avon, but right now the bird glided unimpeded.

  As I watched the young swan, there was a honking from the direction she had come. For a moment she stopped, as if considering what it meant. Ahead lay opportunity and adventure. A new world to explore. Yet with a jerking motion she turned around and glided back to the call.

  Was this a message? I had been raised by a clergyman father in a household familiar with biblical signs and portents. No one around me found it strange that a young man blew a trumpet and a city’s walls crumbled like toy blocks. Or that a leader raised a hand and the Red Sea parted and stood at attention to let the Israelites pass. Doves were a favorite symbol at floods and baptisms, and even a rooster had its moment. Did a winter swan, responding to her mother’s signal, mean that Caitlin would want me to find her too?

  The trouble with religion is that you have to believe it all the time to have it work for you. Why would God bother to give reassurances to lapsed Methodists? Maybe it was a signal from my parents instead, or a benevolent universe trying to tell me not to give up.

  Whatever it was, it freed me from the bench and gave me the impetus to walk back into town.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  WALKING UP SHEEP STREET, I knew I wasn’t ready to go back to the hotel, though I wasn’t sure what else to do. Christmas was bearing down like the Polar Express, but I was in no mood to think about shopping. Then up ahead I saw a hanging sign, “Garnet Hill Books,” the name painted around a bucolic meadow. I gave the sigh of someone dropping into an easy chair after an all-­day hike. A bookstore was the one thing I needed.

  The shop had a brick facade with deep blue trim, its windows filled attractively with books, though not with a Christmas theme. I looked at the titles to make sure the shop sold secondhand books, and went inside.

  In many used and rare bookstores, the proprietor does not acknowledge you when you walk in, does not look up from the counter or the computer or whatever else he is busy with. Sometimes ­people take this for arrogance, as if their presence is an imposition. In most cases it is to allow customers the freedom to explore, so that they will not have to say defensively that they are “just looking” or feel that the gloom in the atmosphere will lighten only when they buy a book.

  It was no different in Garnet Hill Books. A man in his early fifties with a head of gray curls and a red plaid shirt kept placidly pricing books until I went over to him.

  “Are you on BookEm?” I asked.

  Now he did look up at me, his brown eyes friendly behind gold-­rimmed glasses. “The Internet dealers’ group? I used to be. I’ve fallen by the wayside lately, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m Delhi Laine from Secondhand Prose. I think I’ve seen your postings.”

  “Ah. Likewise. What brings you to Stratford?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Try me.”

  BACK AT HOME, Marty would be attending the odd sale and Susie just unlocking the shop. I had forgotten it was the Saturday of the Dickens Festival and the streets would be filling up with visitors and residents in Victorian costume. I had always wanted the children to dress up as old-­fashioned urchins and even offered to make costumes for them, but they never would. Caitlin would have.

  I reminded myself not to do that.

  Stratford was quiet by comparison. The bookshop owner, Thad Daniels, produced a young woman Jane’s age to stand behind the counter and ring up sales, then led me to a stiff brocaded settee in front of the fireplace. He handed me a cup of Earl Grey tea.

  The first time I ever drank milk in tea was one afternoon when I was at an auction and a chair hanging on a barn rail above me came loose and grazed my head. I wasn’t seriously hurt, but one of the helpers rushed to get me tea and handed me a cup heavy with milk and sugar. At first I hadn’t wanted to drink it. And then I had.

  That’s the way I drink tea now when I need comfort.

  I told Thad the story of what had happened here nineteen years ago, gave him a summary of my life since, and explained why I was in Stratford now. He was a good listener, smiling once or twice, nodding with understanding, filtering everything through a sharp intelligence.

  “Do you have a copy of your flyer?”

  “Sure.” I reached in my bag and unfolded a sheet for him.

  He studied it for a long time, then shook his head. “No, I’ve never seen her. Beautiful child. I would have remembered.” He turned around to the counter. “Susan? Come here a minute. My daughter might have met her in school or at some sporting event.”

  But Susan didn’t recognize Caitlin either.

  It was to be expected, though I was disappointed. It would have been an enormous risk to keep Caitlin in Stratford, the place where she had disappeared. Still, Susan might have seen her at some regional teenage event or even university—­but she hadn’t.

  “Have you spoken with the older Clancy boy? His mother might have confided in him the way she wouldn’t with a younger lad.”

  “We’re trying to reach him. My daughter’s at the Hathaway Cottage talking to someone who’s kept in touch with the family.”

  “Good. And you’ll have the police investigating now.”

  I hoped we would. “This is going to change our lives,” I said. “Even if we don’t find Caitlin. My husband has always blamed me for letting her drown, and now it turns out I didn’t. I’m not blameless, but I was set up. It’s just—­if only. If only Nick and his brother had told the police the truth, our lives would have been entirely different.”

  “How so?”

  I ran my finger over the silky pattern on the settee arm, trying to find the words. “We we
re so carefree before. Colin wanted six or seven children, he envisioned a whole tribe. His only sister lived on the West Coast—­she’s dead now—­and he was in love with the idea of a big family. We assumed we could pack them up and take them anywhere, that it would be good for them to see the world.”

  Thad set down his mug of tea, his third, and watched me.

  “When we came home without Caitlin, we didn’t feel that way anymore. Jason was born a month later and Colin insisted I go on the pill. The pill! He never changed his mind about that, and I never got pregnant again. Three children was okay with me, but it wasn’t the life we had planned.” I leaned back against the carved wood top of the settee and closed my eyes. “We still traveled to archeological digs and universities, of course, but he never seemed to take me seriously. It was as if I hadn’t turned out to be the woman he thought. He was okay with the kids, but they weren’t the family he’d envisioned.” I thought of something else. “Except for my oldest daughter, they never lived up to his expectations either.”

  Suddenly teary, I stopped. Why would Thad want to know my life story?

  “It’s Delhi, isn’t it, Delhi like the city? Delhi, why would either of you expect life to turn out the way you’d planned? It never does, you know.”

  “It must for some ­people.”

  “Maybe one or two out of a hundred. But there are always complications—­illness or death, divorce, unemployment, even war. That doesn’t include ­people maturing and wanting something different. My wife wanted a whole tribe of children too, but she found morning sickness so unbearable we only managed Susan. Instead, she fell in love with interior design and now she creates sets for the BBC.”