Then Dad grew antsy. At its onset, he would walk around with his hands in his pockets, never quite able to settle down. When it worsened, he would find fault with Monopoly, shout snide answers to Trivial Pursuit from across the room, pontificate on the superiority of William Faulkner to whatever we were reading, and if we were on the beach doing nothing at all, he would complain about that.

Margo likened him to a caged bear. I remember that image clear as day. I didn’t entirely agree with it—even at his worst, Dad was more disciplined than a bear. I did agree, though, that he seemed to dislike his life.

Not that he would write about that in a Lawyer’s Diary. The page of Aldiss-MacKay is blank, as is the entire week that followed. On the pages for the week after that, his sprawling script refers to a national meeting of judges—Dallas, it says, though I don’t see any sign that he actually went.

The investigation was in full swing by that time, and with his being on top of the detectives and the detectives being on top of him and the local press watching it all, he hadn’t gone far. But I see no reference to any of that. It’s like he saw this diary as his legacy, and didn’t want it tainted by even the slightest untoward scrawl.

Did that make him guilty of a crime? Of course not. Closing the diary, I return it to its slot and glance at the ones he’d been holding when he fell. Those may tell more. But more of what? I don’t know what I’m looking for, which makes the search absurd.

Whatever, there is no gun in these books. Determined, I quickly search behind other bookshelves and between stacks of files. I run a palm over brown folders with the label of Dad’s law firm on the front, but all is smooth and flat. I feel through Dad’s old suits, hanging on a metal rack, but find nothing resembling a gun in any pocket.

There are other boxes. Mom was organized. She used to label cartons for us to fill—ANNE’S SCHOOL PAPERS, MALLORY’S PHOTOGRAPHS—and though Margo took her own things when she left, ours remain.

The stuffiness is starting to get to me. I’m also thinking I ought to head into town. But how to resist MALLORY’S PHOTOGRAPHS? Just for a second?

Pulling the top flap free of the opposite corner under which it’s wedged, I pull it open. The faintly vinegar-y smell takes me right back. It’s from the fixer I used to print pictures, lodged as deeply in my memory as in these prints. When I used a darkroom, in those days before digital, my hands chronically carried this smell.