We got married six weeks later, in the Chapel on the Hill. He and I exchanged vows in the very same spot where you and I saw his ashes yesterday.
I moved from the dorm to the house on the ridge that Novak was entitled to, as a senior scientist. “Snob Hill,” everyone called it, even those of us lucky enough to live on it, because we knew we didn’t necessarily deserve to live so much better than the people down in the valley. The difference between the ridge and the valley was amazing — down among the dormitories, trailers, and hutments, there were no trees and very little grass. During wet weather, the valley floor was a sea of mud — cars would get stuck up to their axles, and if you had to walk somewhere that didn’t have a raised boardwalk, you’d sink so deep your shoes would get sucked right off your feet. During hot, dry spells, it was like living in the Dust Bowl — dust got into every nook and cranny, you’d choke if you didn’t breathe through a handkerchief, and your face would be caked with red dust and streaks of sweat. Up on Snob Hill the roads were good, the yards were nice, and crime was virtually nonexistent.
Happily ever after, right?
Except that it wasn’t.
But that’s another story, Bill. Another story for another day.
CHAPTER 15
Beatrice deflected all my follow-up questions about Novak. “I’m tired,” she said. “It’s too sad to talk about right now.” And then she added, “Tell me your name again?” The sudden, vague hint of senility might just be a ploy, I realized, but if I backed her into that corner, she might never come out of it again. Given that Emert and Thornton had both struck out with her, I decided a strategic retreat was in order.
I checked my unreliable wristwatch. “I’ve probably overstayed my welcome,” I said, “and I’d better be getting back to the university. It was so nice talking with you, Beatrice. You reckon I could come visit you again?”
She eyed me sharply, as if to size up my intentions or assess my sincerity. I smiled at her then, and it was a genuine smile — she really was a remarkable woman — and the smile seemed to tip the scales in my favor. “Of course, Bill,” she said, “if you can tear yourself away from those comely UT coeds long enough to listen to an old woman rattle.”
I held out my hand to shake goodbye but she ignored it, leaning a cheek toward me for a kiss. I brushed the pebbled skin lightly with my lips. She smelled of face powder and perfume and vodka, and I briefly imagined a different Beatrice, a young and beautiful Beatrice, offering her cheek or her lips to a soldier or a scientist. She would have been an irresistible force.
I was halfway back to UT when my cell phone rang. The display read THOMPSON PHOTO. It was Rodney Satterfield, and I hoped he had good news about the film from Novak’s freezer. “So,” I said, “what did you find on the world’s oldest undeveloped film? Girlie pictures of some cute young calutron operator, circa 1944?” As soon as I heard myself make the joke, two images of Beatrice — young Beatrice and old Beatrice — popped into my head, and I felt doubly embarrassed.
“Actually,” he said, “we didn’t find much of anything. A clear strip of film. Looks kinda like it hasn’t been exposed. Back before everything went digital, we used to get two or three unexposed rolls a week. Somebody would load the film, then put the camera away without using it. Six months later, when they got the camera out to use it, they couldn’t remember whether it was a new roll or a shot roll. So they’d rewind the blank film and bring it to us to develop. And then they’d be pissed off at us because there weren’t any pictures.”
“Oh well,” I said, “it’s not like there was a note taped to the package saying, ‘develop this if you want to see who killed me.’ We just thought it was worth checking, since he’d gone to the trouble to wrap it up and keep it in the freezer all those years. Anyhow, thanks for trying. I’ll need to take the film back to the police, just so they’ve got custody of it, even though it doesn’t do them any good. I’m on my way to UT now; how about I swing by and pick it up on my way?”
“Actually, I said it looked like it hadn’t been shot,” Rodney corrected. “But it had. The images are just really faint. Either it’s horribly underexposed, or the film’s been faded by radiation.”
“You mean because the guy whose freezer it was in was a walking radiographic camera?”
“Well, maybe,” he said. “Or maybe just decades of background solar radiation. Over time, solar radiation can dissipate the images, even if the film is stashed in a freezer. I tried overprocessing it — letting the film soak in the chemicals about fifty percent longer, which usually helps with old film. Doesn’t seem to have made much difference. But I’m not quite ready to give up on this,” he said. “Mind you, the prints might not turn out black-and-white; they might turn out black-and-black. But it can’t hurt to try. How far away are you?”
“I’m nearly to I-40,” I said. “Ten minutes? Maybe twenty.”
“You want to go in the darkroom with me? If you’ve got time, I’ll wait till you get here.”
Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot of Thompson Photo Products. Rodney met me at the counter and led me to a darkroom at the back of the building. I felt privileged; although I’d brought hundreds of rolls of crime-scene photos here over the years, I’d never before been ushered into the inner sanctum, the darkroom.
The film, cut into several one-foot strips, was hanging from the photographic equivalent of a clothesline. Rodney unclipped one of the strips and held it so I could see through it. The darkroom was lit by a single red bulb, so — not surprisingly — the room was…dark. Still, despite the dimness, I could see that the cause looked hopeless.
“You weren’t kidding,” I said. “It’s like variations on a theme of clear. Clear, clearer, clearest. How do you know where to even begin? Which one’s the least bad?”
“I looked at them again on a light box after we talked,” he said. “I had to put a few layers of paper over the glass to dim the light, just so it wouldn’t blow everything out completely. But once I got it dimmed down, I could see a little more — not much, but enough to tell that several of them seemed to have a similar smudge of image at the center. This one right here”—he pointed to the middle of the strip—“seems about a millionth of a percent less horrible than the others.”
“That good, huh?” He nodded glumly. “Well, if it takes any of the pressure off you, the bar of my expectation is about six feet under, so there’s no way it can be worse than I’m expecting.”
Rodney laid the film on the stage of an enlarger — a downward-pointing rig labeled BESELER that looked like a cross between an industrial lamp and an old-fashioned bellows-type camera — and slipped the film between the lamp and the lens. Then he took a sheet of 8-by-10 photo paper from a metal box and clipped it to an easel at the enlarger’s base. “I’m guessing at this,” he said, “but we need as little light going through this as I can get, so I’ve stopped the lens down all the way. Oh, and I’ve got a number-five contrast filter in there to pump up any trace of contrast we’re lucky enough to have.” He flipped a switch, and light streamed downward out of the lens and through the film, illuminating the white, empty rectangle of paper. Let there be light, I thought, Novak’s funeral hymn echoing in my head.