That’s when I noticed the coolers: brand-new, vacuum-sealed, five of them, piled up next to the freezer. It didn’t matter, for Tyler, if there were police on the property. He was planning to move everything.

*  *  *

I let myself into Marlin’s studio. She was in progress on something—another series of bodies. The lines were unruly, printed over and over, the registration deliberately off. She didn’t have any locked doors or locked freezers or anything. There were banker’s boxes filled with paperwork, but it was all hers. No film.

Jack’s studio was nearly completely overtaken by his net—it had almost doubled in size in the past two weeks. There was so much stuff everywhere, detritus, and I couldn’t imagine rooting through it or that he would be the one to keep such a thing. Simply looking at the room made me feel overwhelmed. I told myself that I would come back only if there was nothing anywhere else.

I locked the door and walked the path to the Theatre, Jes’s studio. My stomach clenched tighter with each step. After trying six different keys I landed on the correct one.

The double doors opened into the musty foyer with the ticket counter and the Persona poster. The heavy wooden doors on either side were no longer propped open, but they weren’t locked.

I followed the beam of my flashlight down the aisle, toward the stage, to where the orange extension cords stretched away and to the left. They snaked through the side curtains of the wings, the flashlight illuminating the dirty wooden floors beneath, until plugging into a wall. Next to the outlet, a small spiral staircase led to the upper level.

Up here a small walkway, the brass railings smooth and shiny from decades of touch, led to a closed door, where I fumbled again with the keys, nearly dropping them, the hard plastic of the flashlight between my teeth, until I found the right one.

A library waited for me on the other side: racks of plastic film reels in different widths, a dozen different kinds of cameras, rolls and rolls of vintage film stock, and reels labeled with marker and masking tape along the seams.

The next room was the projectionist’s suite. Two manual projectors were pushed to the side and a digital projector was wired to the aperture, facing the stage, with a metal folding chair placed behind it.

The third room had a light switch outside the door. I flicked it, and after fumbling for another key, cracked it open. The unmistakable sour chemical smell of fix and developer hit my nostrils. It was a darkroom, recently used, though the plastic basins were empty and the dry lines were clean, their clothespins vacant.

Two metal canisters sat next to the enlarger, their blank, unlabeled tape cut right down the middle. They were empty.