There was more Jesse wasn’t telling her. He went over to the wall and lightly traced his fingers over the image. “Here’s the thing, Mira. No one was in the room with me. I was alone. This is a picture of someone who wasn’t there.”

This was what Jesse had been leading up to. It was why he’d shown her the swamp, why he’d brought her to his house, all for this story he was trying to tell her now. “Who is she then?” Mira asked, but she already knew the answer. Last night when she left Celine’s room she’d heard a child laughing. A beckoning meant for her, but she’d waited and no one ever came. She never saw a girl, but maybe she should have waited a little longer.

“Her name’s Lucy,” Jesse said. “She was sort of a pet of the Woodsmans, mainly for the wife.”

Jesse told Mira to sit down while he went into another bedroom. When he came back he carried a scrapbook full of photocopied pages, notes, and scribblings on Post-its stuck on photographs. He placed it on the table while explaining it was a collection of all the material he’d been able to gather about the Woodsmans. As Mira looked through it, he told her the story of what he’d learned about Lucy. She was a slave Roman Woodsman bought his wife, Annabelle, and served as a sort of de facto daughter. “Lucy was kept in the house and at night slept on the floor beside her.”

“How did you find all this out?”

“In a journal Annabelle wrote. She was very detailed, keeping records of everything—names and birth dates, deaths. Here, see?” Jesse skimmed through the book, pulled out what he wanted to show Mira, and placed it on the coffee table. “The script is kind of hard to read at first. It took me a long time to get a sense of reading the handwriting from that era, but you get used to it after a while.”

“This is so much research. It must have taken a lot of time.”

“I wanted to know more about the Woodsmans. There’s a whole Woodsman collection in the archives of the library. I never thought to look through it when we were kids. I found the journal there, and some other things. Look.”