On the other hand, it might be entirely prosaic–a family picnic, a generic street scene, awkward photos of unidentifiable strangers. Perhaps it might yield pictures of a long-gone loved one whose face his widow longed to see one more time. Camille still remembered the feeling of pain-filled joy when she’d looked at pictures of Jace after he’d died. Her final shots of him remained in the dark, still spooled in her camera. The vintage Leica had been her favorite, but she hadn’t touched it since that day.

And only last week, a different storage box had yielded a rare collection of cellulose nitrate negatives in a precarious state. The images had been clumped together, fused by time and neglect. Over painstaking hours, she had teased apart the film, removing mold and consolidating the image layers to reveal something the camera’s eye had seen nearly a century before–the only known photograph of a species of penguin that was now extinct.

Another time, she had exposed canned negatives from a portrait session with Bess Truman, one of the most camera-shy first ladies of the twentieth century. To date, the project that had gained the most attention for Camille had been a picture of a murder in commission, posthumously absolving a man who had gone to the gallows for a crime he hadn’t committed. Write-ups in the national press gave her credit for solving a long-standing mystery, but Camille considered the achievement bittersweet, knowing an innocent man had hanged for a crime while the murderer had lived to a ripe old age.

Touching the digital timer, she scarcely dared to breathe as she prepared to launch the special alchemy of the darkroom.

The moment was interrupted by a ringing phone, located just outside the door. She couldn’t have a phone in the darkroom, due to the keypad that lit up when it rang, so she kept the volume turned on loud to hear incoming voicemail. Ever since her father’s cancer diagnosis, her pulse jumped each time the phone rang.

She waited through several rings, chiding herself for panicking. Papa’s disease was in remission now, though his doctors wouldn’t say how long the reprieve might last.

“This Della McClosky of the Henlopen Medical Center, calling for Camille Adams. Your daughter Julie has been brought into the ER–”

Julie. Camille ripped open the door of the darkroom and snatched up the phone. The film can clattered to the floor. Already, fear thudded through her. “This is Camille. What’s Julie doing in the ER?”

“Ma’am, your daughter has just been brought by ambulance to the ER from her surf rescue class at the Bethany Bay Surf Club.”

Ice cold terror. It took her breath away. “What? Is she hurt? What happened?”

“She’s conscious now, sitting up and talking. Coach Swanson came with her. She got caught in a riptide and aspirated some water. The doctor is checking her out.”