Read Online A Photographic Death by Judi Culbertson - Free Book Online

I’m sure she had. I think she wanted people to get used to seeing her in the park so they would not remember her as something unusual from that day.”
    I nodded. “No one would have noticed a nanny with a carriage in the park. Even if they heard Caitlin crying, they wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Babies cry.”
    The moonlight shone on Jane’s face through the windshield. “I didn’t really believe it before. But this means she’s alive somewhere. My sister’s alive!”
    She sounded so sure.
    I wanted to believe it. I almost believed it. And then I thought of the note: YOURDAUGHTERDIDNOTDROWN .
    Could it have been sent from the nanny herself, a deathbed confession to try and make things right?
    An explosion of reds, yellows, and blues seemed to light up the sky around us. The fireworks felt so real I could see them reflected in the water. But the lifting of great guilt can cause that. An unfamiliar lightness, a feeling as tangible as throwing off a heavy coat and welcoming the sun.
    “Daddy and Hannah will have to believe us now,” Jane said.
    “I hope so.”
    “We should post Hannah’s picture on Facebook. You know, ‘Have you seen this woman?’ ” Jane said. “If they’re identical twins, someone has to recognize her.”
    “But not without Hannah’s permission. And I thought you could only post pictures to people who were your ‘friends.’ ”
    “That’s true. But we can ask them to send it to their friends. You know how things go viral on the Internet.”
    A car came along the main road, its headlights playing over the pond.
    Jane kept thinking. “The nanny said to tell ‘mum,’ so she was probably English. She had a British accent, I know that.”
    I thought of something else. “If she came to the park on more than one day, I may have photographed her as part of a group scene. I took a lot of photos trying to get a few good ones.”
    We stared at each other.
    “Really? You think so? That would be amazing. Where are those pictures?”
    “Packed away as rolls. Not developed.” I prayed that I had brought all the film back with me, that I hadn’t tossed it out in a fit of remorse. I told myself I wouldn’t have done that since those rolls would have also held my last pictures of Caitlin.
    “You don’t have a darkroom anymore.”
    “No. But I think there’s still one at the university.”
    “Great! Drop me at the train,” Jane ordered, “and go find that film.”

 
    Chapter Twelve
    I T T O O K M E until midnight to find the film from our last week in Stratford. The basement was cold, and with the overhead bulb burned out, I had to use a flashlight. I finally located the three undeveloped rolls wrapped in a yellow plastic supermarket bag, hidden under a stack of tax returns. I held the tiny yellow canisters against my chest and closed my eyes. Dear God, make them still good. Make them have the pictures we need.
    It wasn’t a prayer, not exactly, but more than a passing thought.
    I was up again at dawn, sipping espresso and wondering how to safely develop the film. It was so old . If I still had my own darkroom and chemicals—but as soon as we returned from England I had turned the room into Jason’s nursery and flushed the chemicals away. It hadn’t seemed safe to keep them around.
    Asking Colin for access to the university darkroom was out of the question. The only person who could help me, I decided groggily, was Bruce Adair. Bruce, a long-tenured literature professor with a specialty in the Victorians, was the smartest man I knew. He was a giant in the poetry world, a kingmaker who could, with one favorable review, set a needy young poet on the path to a Guggenheim. He had been congratulatory when Colin’s second volume of poems, Voices We Don’t Want to Hear , was shortlisted for the Pulitzer, but I wasn’t fooled. The two men circled each other like rival chieftains.
    Asking Bruce for help brought certain complications, but I decided I could live with them.
    I