We reached the museum after just a short walk. Word must have spread about all the excitement earlier this morning, because the museum was now packed with people.

We weren’t able to just slip inside this time. We each bought a ticket, which would be good for the entire week, and headed over to the exhibit to try and look at the photographs. But this was more difficult than it sounded. There were people everywhere. The few benches inside the exhibit room were all crammed full of museumgoers, practically sitting on each other’s laps, and it was difficult to even move around the exhibit’s small space.

The most crowded sections by far were the spaces in front of the two photographs containing the missing people. Everyone seemed to want to see the impossible pictures, and I was sure the upset this morning must have really boosted ticket sales.

“Hey,” I said, turning to face Bess and George. “How about I try and get a closer look, and you two can just hang back? It’ll be easier for one person to make it through that crowd than three.”

Bess and George both looked relieved at that suggestion. They were hunching into each other and unsuccessfully trying to dodge the shoulders of all the people around them.

“Sounds great,” said Bess.

“Yeah,” George added. “Thanks, Nancy.”

“No problem,” I said as I left them behind and headed into the densest part of the crowd.

From everything I’d researched about Christopher DeSantos’s work, I knew he mainly focused on landscapes. He was especially well known for capturing national parks and other parts of the natural world not many people were able to actually visit. But the photographs in this exhibit were different. These were all of Shady Oaks in the 1940s, mainly images of the streets and the storefronts and portraits of the people who must have been living there at the time. They seemed to me less like professional work and more like a personal portrayal of the town where this man had lived, both when he was young and after he had retired.

Even though I don’t know much about photography, I could quickly tell that the photographs where DeSantos captured people were my favorites. It was almost like each image contained clues about who that person really was, and each person had been made into a mystery to be solved.

Eventually I managed to get close enough to the photograph containing the image of Grace Rogers to get a good look at it. Like the image of the crying girl’s boyfriend, this photo showed Grace in the background of the photograph, like she had just happened to be walking through it when the picture was taken. She too was wearing modern-day clothing. The image wasn’t very clear, but it looked as though she was wearing a blazer, which would make sense, since she was a museum employee.

The image of Grace also seemed to have the same coloring and texture as the rest of the photograph. It didn’t look like a separate image at all. Finally, I could also see that there appeared to be a lock on the side of the frame, preventing anyone from taking the photograph—which made sense for an art museum. I couldn’t tell how someone might have tampered with the photograph, but I tried to commit every detail to memory just in case they would prove helpful later.