"You're right," I said. “I have to explore something with you."
"You were going to show me those folders." Her crisp voice rose wonderfully to the challenge. Laurie sounded like an army poised at the top of a hill, pennants flying and weapons at the ready. I felt nothing but admiration.
"First you have to hear about the past two days. I owe that to you. You introduced me to Hugh Coventry, and you helped me learn about Edward Rinehart."
"That's what you want to explore?" The pennants rippled beautifully in the wind.
"That's what we have to explore," I said.
•123
•I began with Buxton Place and Earl Sawyer. After leaving the cottages, I said, I had come to Blueberry Lane and seen the caretaker's name in Posy's Lovecraft collection.
"That's why you got so strange?" Laurie said. "Posy and I couldn't understand what happened to you."
“I know, I'm sorry. I had to get away and think."
"Well, thank God, you came back. What then?"
"At Toby's funeral, someone implied that Stewart owned my aunts' block on Cherry Street. It didn't make sense. All along, I never understood why they pretended not to know anything about my father."
"Me, neither," she said. "But I don't see the connection."
“I did something I shouldn't have. I looked through Nettie's closet. That's where I found one of those folders. The other one came from Stewart's house."
"You broke intoStewart's house?"
“I didn't have to break in. I took the folder, but he stole it first. I was reclaiming it."
"He had your aunts' pictures?"
"He wanted to keep them out of the exhibition."
"The other ones were at Nettie's? Well, at least you got that settled. They were holding them for ransom. Nettie and May, they're not stupid."
"Nettie and May know how to get what they want." I grinned. "The question is, what did they want?"
Laurie gazed imperturbably back. "They must cherish those photos."
"Let me show you some of them."
“I can hardly wait." She set down her glass and leaned toward the coffee table.
I slid the photograph of Omar and Sylvan out of the folder. "Remember these faces." Next came the photograph of Howard Dunstan I had put before Cordwainer.
"He looks like you." She turned to me with a shining smile and looked back down at the picture. “In a way. You don't have those heebie-jeebie eyes."
"That's Howard Dunstan. Nettie and May were his daughters."
"Complicated so and so, wasn't he? What's this?" She took another photograph from the pile. Under the eye of a squat foreman in a derby hat, two men pushed wheelbarrows toward a lattice of scaffolding and girders rising from a muddy lot. From the right side of the frame, two others carried an armload of two-by-fours across Commercial Avenue. A Model T Ford and a slat-sided truck were parked a little way down from the site. A well-upholstered onlooker in a seersucker suit and a boater like the one worn by the young Carpenter Hatch took in the excitement from a few feet behind the supervisor in the derby. The angles of their hats and their postures matched with the neatness of a rhyme.
"That's Merchants Hotel, under construction in 1929. Hugh Coventry liked this picture."
“It's good, isn't it? There's a lot of movement in it, and the two guys in hats are like a joke."
"Here we have baby me." I put down the photograph from my third birthday.
"God, what a beautiful child." Pleasure and humor shone from her eyes. “I mean, of course you were a great-looking kid, but you were areally great-looking kid. You should have been on billboards."
"My mother would have agreed with you. Now, here are some from the Hatch folder." I showed her the photographs of Carpenter showing off his new car and Ellen's graduation.
"Who are these people? Stewart's grandparents?"
"Right."
"She was a nice-looking girl, wasn't she? On the other hand, he looks like an excellent source of ham steaks. Look at those soon-to-be ponderous thighs."
I pulled out the image of bow-tied Cordwainer Hatch peering from beneath his bangs.
Laurie bent forward. She took a swallow from her nearly empty glass and looked back at me. “Is that you? It can't be. You weren't even born when this was taken."
"This is the black sheep of the Hatch family," I said. "Stewart's Uncle Cordwainer."
"He looked like you."
“I look like him. Laurie, back when the first submissions were coming in, did you see any of these pictures?"
Her lower lip tucked under her front teeth. “I honestly don't remember."
"Rachel Milton did. She told me to look for them."
“I don't understand." Her eyes showed nothing but innocent confusion. "Did Rachel say that I had seen them?"
"No. Just that you could have."
"Maybe I did. I wouldn't have paid much attention. I didn't even know you then."
"Stewart knew who I was the second he saw me. Cordwainer was supposed to have died before Stewart was born, and I don't imagine he ever saw any pictures of his disgraced uncle while he was growing up, so he didn't even know what Cordwainer looked like until he collected the family pictures for the exhibition. He couldn't have missed the resemblance between his uncle and Howard Dunstan."
Laurie shook her head. Her hair sifted over her cheek, and she brushed it back. “I have to say. . ." She shook her head again. “I think I need another drink. How about you?"
I propped my head against the cushion. I felt completely uncertain. A voice in my mind said:I want to be uncertain.
Laurie circled back into the room and moved around the table rather than sliding in over my legs. She sat down about a yard away and took a swallow from her amber, ice-filled glass. “I'm trying to figure out what's going on with all these pictures. Your aunts took Stewart's pictures as ransom, but why would Stewart hide theirs?" She moved Cordwainer in his bangs and bow tie next to me in my striped T-shirt. "Oh. Because the black sheep uncle was your father?"
I picked up the studio portrait of Howard Dunstan and placed it beside the other two. "Does anything else occur to you?"
She leaned forward, looked at Howard, then at me.
“If you want, I can show you some other pictures of Cordwainer."
She pushed herself back into the sofa and smiled at the nice white emptiness in front of us. “I don't have to see any more. I guess I understand why Stewart wanted to squirrel these away."
“I think he gave my aunts a lot of money," I said.
She laughed. "Stewart isn't exactly an egalitarian, you know. He would not be overjoyed by a blood connection between his family and the Dunstans. In fact, he'd do everything he could to hide it." An idea moved into her eyes, and she edged toward me, radiating conviction. "Your aunts knew it right from the beginning!"
“I guess so, but they claim they never met Edward Rinehart. Even if they did, how would they know who he was?"
“It doesn't matter how! They knew! Of course they could never tell Star—it was their secret. And Stewart tried to have you run out of town before you could even begin to learn anything."
"But why would he give my aunts a fortune for three old houses? I can't believe he cares that much about his grandmother's reputation."
"Stewart's a snob. He likes being a high and mighty Hatch. He'd spend a fortune to protect that."
“I feel like I came to the end of something, only it didn'tend."