Tentatively, I moved into the house, turning on every light switch I passed. The broadloom, with its upgraded underpadding, allowed me to roam about noiselessly. I peeked into the kitchen, the living and dining rooms, the family room where we watched TV. Then I eased the door of my study open, my crumbled Robot still on the carpet. So far, no guests.

I turned the knob on the door to the ground-floor laundry room where I had stashed Stefanie Knight’s purse in the washing machine. I opened the lid, worked the purse out from around the agitator, and took it back into the study. There, just as Rick had done, I dumped its contents out onto the floor, just beyond the range of Robot debris. On my hands and knees, I started sorting.

I put the envelopes to one side. Ditto for makeup items, tampons, car keys, change, expired coupons.

And my eyes settled on the black plastic film canister. I gave it a shake to see that it wasn’t empty. A roll rattled inside. I popped the gray plastic lid off and dumped the roll into the palm of my hand.

There was no strip of film extended from it, so it was clearly one that had pictures on it. It was high-quality, black-and-white film. Twenty-four exposures.

Time to go downstairs and develop some pictures.

Chapter 19

19

by the time i had the negatives developed and hanging up to dry, I had some sense that this film was, in fact, what Rick might have been looking for. These were not pictures from someone’s trip to Disney World. The twenty-four images were not from an excursion to Mount Rushmore. While I couldn’t yet see who, exactly, was in these images, I could tell that there were two people, and that one of them was a man, and the other was a woman. And that these were not taken out on the street, or looking down from the Eiffel Tower, or at a baseball stadium. These were definitely indoor shots.

I had a lot of time to think in the darkroom while the negatives developed. My eyes adjusted to the near-total absence of light and sound, and I thought back to the trip Sarah and I had taken to the grocery store only a few hours ago, and how much our lives had changed since then. So far, only I was aware just how much.