I sat down at the old computer desk I’d put in the driest corner of the basement, across from the stairs, and took my camera apart. I stuck all the parts in the zipper bag with the silica and sealed it up. If any water had gotten inside, the silica should draw it out. Hopefully.

Then I sat there, feeling tired and down.

Panic attacks are a drag in many ways, but one of the worst was how they made me feel afterwards: exhausted, like I’d run a marathon, but combined with sadness and embarrassment instead of pride.

I’d been having them all my life, and I’d never understood them. Crowded places were bad, yeah, but sometimes they happened when I was alone in my house. Sometimes they woke me out of a deep sleep. There was no consistency, no predictability. It was some unknown thing that lurked just under the surface, and when it got hungry, it sank its teeth in and dragged me down. No treatment had helped. I’d certainly tried enough of them. Therapy, meds, strange diets, supplements — everything my mother could afford, and probably some stuff she couldn’t. Finally, I’d gotten to a doctor who looked over my history, shook her head, and told me that sometimes panic disorder just doesn’t respond to treatment.

It was a horrible thing to hear, but also oddly freeing: it released me from the effort of hoping for more. After that, I could see my life in Dorf stretching out before me, just like everyone else’s. My goal became accepting and appreciating what I had.

I climbed the stairs to the kitchen and turned the flame on under the kettle. What I needed was a cup of tea, a grilled cheese sandwich, and some tomato soup. And a good book. That’d give my camera time to dry out, and maybe take my mind off my embarrassment, too.

That can’t be right.

I was down in the basement, looking through the pictures I’d taken. But the one I had open made no sense. I closed the image and went back to the folder I’d downloaded from the camera. There were only two pictures of J.T.’s: the one with Jim coming out of the bar and the one without him.

But the one without Jim showed somebody else walking along the sidewalk. It was a short, slight person — probably a man, given the flat chest. He was sort of hunched over. After a few seconds, I realized what I wasn’t seeing: clothes. Weird. It’d be pretty remarkable to walk through downtown Dorf naked any time of the year, but in early April it was particularly bizarre. It’d been no warmer than the mid-forties that afternoon. It’s one thing to get arrested; it’s another to get arrested and freeze off your naughty bits at the same time.

Speaking of which …