But Peter had one more surprise for me. As I came down the stairs I saw he was hurrying out of the door carrying what looked like a cookie tin, a deep one.

“Hey,” I snapped.

He stopped, looking comically guilty, and actually tried to hide the damn tin behind his back.

“Where are you going with that?”

“George, I’m sorry. I just—”

Instantly my innate suspicion of Peter the school weirdo was revived. Or maybe I just wanted to act tough after crying in front of him. “You said you wouldn’t touch anything personal. What’s this, theft?”

He seemed to be trembling. “George, for Christ’s sake—”

I pushed past him and snatched the box out of his hands. He just watched as I pulled the lid off.

Inside was a stash of porn magazines. They were yellowed, and of the jolly skin-and-sunshine Health and Efficiency variety. I leafed through them quickly; some were twenty years old, but most of them postdated my mother’s death.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“I wanted to spare you.”

“He hid them in the kitchen?”

Peter shrugged. “Who would have thought to look there? He always was smart, your dad.”

I dug deeper into the box. “Smart, but a randy old bugger. It’s porn all the way down—wait.”

Right at the bottom of the tin was a picture in a frame. It was a color photograph, very old, cheap enough for its colors to have faded. It showed two children, age three or four, standing side by side, grinning at the camera from out of a long-gone sunny day. The frame was a cheap wooden affair, the kind you can still pick up in Woolworth’s.

Peter came to see. “That’s the house. I mean, this house.”

He was right. And the faces of the kids were unmistakable. “That’s me.” The girl was a female version of me—the same features, the blond hair and smoky gray eyes, but more delicate, prettier.

Peter asked, “So who’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

“How old did you say your sister was?”

“Ten years older than me. Whoever this is, it isn’t Gina.” I carried the photograph toward the daylight, and peered at it long and hard.

Peter’s voice had an edge to it. Perhaps he was taking a subtle revenge for my accusation of theft. “Then I think your father was hiding more from you than your comics.”

A click sounded from the living room. It was the video recorder. The machinery of my father’s home continued to work, clocks and timers clicking and whirring mindlessly, an animated shell around the empty space where Dad had been.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3