“Found it?” Katherine asked.
The woman with the gun made a tsk-tsk sound, tongue against teeth, and shook her head. “These girls seem to have a talent for finding stuff that used to be owned by the dead and the missing,” she said. “So where’d you find the bag, girls—was it in the hall closet? Where you just told me there was nothing but the wallets?”
Ruthie shook her head. “It was in my mom’s closet. Upstairs. We just found it tonight. I don’t know why my mom had it. I tried turning the camera on, but couldn’t make it work.”
Katherine nodded. “The battery’s probably dead.”
“Will it still have photos stored?” the blond woman asked. “Could we put new batteries in it to check?”
“We can plug in the charger, get it going, and take a look,” Katherine said. “If no one’s erased them, it should have the last photos he took on it.”
The last photos Gary took. Katherine’s hands were trembling.
The woman nodded. “Let’s do that. I think we’re all a little curious.” She kept the gun pointed at Katherine. “I’ll take the bag and camera into the kitchen, and we’ll get the battery charging. While we’re waiting, you can tell us just who you are and how the hell you figured out your dead husband’s camera stuff would be in this house.”
“I’m not sure where to start,” Katherine confessed once they were all at the table. The blond woman had ordered the older girl to get them coffee and now sat with her gun pointed at Katherine. It was all very bizarre, being held at gunpoint while coffee was being served—“Cream or sugar?” the teenaged girl asked politely. It felt like she’d stepped into a scene from some art house film, the kind she and Gary might have gone to see back in college.
“At the beginning,” the woman ordered.
“Okay,” Katherine said, taking in a breath and trying not to think about the gun pointed at her chest. She began by telling how Gary was killed in a car accident, how she got the last credit-card bill, how that led her to West Hall.
“So you really moved to West Hall just because that was the last place Gary visited?” the older girl—Ruthie—asked, disbelieving. “I mean, no one ever moves to West Hall. Not willingly.”
“Don’t interrupt her,” the blond woman said, then gestured at Katherine with the gun. “Go on,” she ordered. “And don’t leave anything out. You never know what might be important.”
Katherine told them about findingVisitors from the Other Sidehidden away in Gary’s toolbox, and Lou Lou’s telling her about Gary’s lunch with the egg lady.
“Egg lady?” Now it was the little girl who spoke, her eyes two huge brown saucers. “You mean our mom?”
So she’d been right! These were the daughters of the egg lady. But where was she? And what was her connection to Gary?
“I guess so. Lou Lou didn’t know anything about her—just that she sold eggs every Saturday at the farmers’ market. I went today looking for her, but she wasn’t there. Then I found pictures of your house in a book I picked up at the bookstore.”
“That Historical Society book? Oh God, Mom was so pissed that our picture was in there,” Ruthie said. “She tried to get them to take it out, but they’d already printed hundreds of copies.”
Katherine went on. “When I saw that picture of you three in the garden, I wondered if the gray-haired lady could possibly be the egg lady I’ve been looking for, so I decided to take a ride out. I parked by the road and came in on foot to get closer. I saw you holding a gun on these girls,” she said, eyeing the woman with the gun, “and knew I had to act.”
The woman laughed. “You did one hell of a job, lady,” she said.
The girls stared at her, wide-eyed. Katherine was sure she saw a trace of disappointment there.You? You were our last chance! And look what happened.
“But why would this lady’s photographer husband be meeting Mom at Lou Lou’s?” asked Ruthie. She rubbed her eyes, which haddark circles beneath them. “And why does Mom have his bag? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“He had his backpack with him when he left the house the day he was killed,” Katherine told them. “It wasn’t in the car after the crash. I asked the police and paramedics, but no one remembered seeing it.”
There was silence. They all looked down into their cups of untouched coffee. The little girl clutched her bundled doll tight against her chest.
“So the camera will have a record of the last pictures taken?” the woman with the gun asked.
“Yes,” Katherine explained. “They’ll be stored there. Unless someone wiped it clean.”
“Well, let’s turn on the camera and check it out,” the woman said.
“What is it you think might be on the camera?” Katherine asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe a clue about where Alice Washburne has gone and what she’s done with the pages.”
“Pages?”
