Sue came back with a folder and tenderly removed a black-and-white photograph, laid it on the table in front of me. The storage conditions must have been poor, too humid, because there were flecks of mold along the edges of the frame, but the correspondence to the painting was immediately clear. The painter had adjusted the angle of the diving girl’s face, gave us more of her expression, adjusted the focus on the crowd so the expressions blurred, save for a few leering smiles.

“This is one of my favorite images in the collection, but maybe the painter worked from others. It would take a long time, though, to look through the whole collection and see if there are any other matches. I can try, but it might take a few weeks. We also have photos of the Thomas England Hospital, but none of those look familiar to me.”

“I’m mostly curious about figuring out who they are—the painter. Do you have any sort of record of who else has looked at these?”

“You can’t check them out, like a library book, so we don’t have the same information we would with a book or DVD, unfortunately. The collection, as far as archives go, is small, and we get so few visitors who ask to see them, unfortunately—I guess that’s just as well now that I’m only here two days a week.”

“Do you remember anyone coming to look at this photo in particular?”

She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “Not this one, no. We had a man who’d come in quite often, but he was a professor over at Stockton and was researching something for a book. Stiff sort, strictly a historian. And there was a woman who used to come in, every now and again. Sometimes she’d bring her grandson with her, and she’d just look through things. She’d been a nurse, so not sure how artsy she was.”

“How long ago are we talking?”

“Oh God, this is the seventies. She and I got to chatting a few times. Her name was Maria. It’s a shame—if I remember this correctly, she died in a house fire a few years after I met her. The boy got out, but Maria and her husband didn’t. Such a sad thing. She was a lovely woman.”

I felt deflated, depressed. For a moment I had thought that this woman could have been my painter—a woman, too. God, I would have loved that. But if she died in the seventies or eighties, it wasn’t possible—some of those pictures were from the late eighties, early nineties. The big hair, the bulky costume jewelry, bright as candy, the saturated colors, then the entropy, the slow creep of decay. She would have missed all of that.