“He had a purpose.” He did turn away now and strode into the kitchen to drag a bottle of Scotch from a cupboard. “You could never call it a reason.”
He splashed the liquor into a glass, tossed it back quickly, and hissed through the sting. With his palms braced on the counter, he waited for his blood to settle.
“I loved him, Jo. He taught me how to ride a bike, how to field a grounder. He paid attention. Whenever he traveled, he’d call home not just to talk to my mother but to all three of us. And he listened—not just the pretense of listening some adults think a child can’t see through. He cared.”
He turned back to her, his eyes eloquent. “He would bring my mother flowers for no reason. I’d lie in bed at night and listen to them laughing together. We were happy, and he was the center of it. Now I have to face that there was no center, that he was capable of something monstrous.”
“I feel carved out,” she managed. Her head seemed to be floating somewhere above her shoulders. “Scraped out. Raw. All these years.” She squeezed her eyes tight a moment. “Your lives just went on?”
“He was the only one who knew, and he was very careful. Our lives just went on. Until his ended and I went through his personal papers and found the journal and photographs.”
“Photographs.” The floating sensation ended with a jerk. “Photographs of my mother. After she was dead.”
He had to say it all, no matter how even the thought ripped through his brain. “ ‘The decisive moment,’ he called it.”
“Oh, my God.” Lectures heard, lectures given, whirled in her head.Capturing the decisive moment, anticipating when the dynamics of a situation will reach peak, knowing when to click the shutter to preserve that most powerful image. “It was a study, an assignment.”
“It was his purpose. To manipulate, to cause, to control, and to capture death.” Nausea churned violently. He downed more Scotch, pitting the liquor against the nausea. “It wasn’t all, it can’t be. There was something warped inside him. Something we never saw. Something no one ever saw, or suspected. He had friends, a successful career. He liked to listen to ball games on TV and read mystery novels. He liked to barbecue, he wanted grandchildren.”
It was tearing him apart, every word, every memory. “There is no defense,” he said. “No absolution.”
She stepped forward. Every emotion inside her coalesced and focused on one point. “He took photographs of her. Of her face. Her eyes. Of her body. Nudes. He posed her, carefully. Her head tilted down toward her left shoulder, her right arm draped across her midriff.”
“How do you—”
“I did see.” She closed her eyes and spun away. Relief was cold, painfully cold. An icy layer over hot grief. “I’m not crazy. I was never crazy. I didn’t hallucinate. It was real. All of it.”
“What are you talking about?”
Impatient, she dug her cigarettes out of her back pocket. But when she struck the match, she only stared down at the flame. “My hand’s steady,” she muttered. “It’s perfectly steady. I’m not going to break now. I can get through it. I’m never going to break again.”
Worried that he had pushed her over some line, he moved toward her. “Jo Ellen.”
“I’m not crazy.” Her head snapped up. Calmly she touched the flame to the tip of her cigarette. “I’m not going to shatter and fall ever again. The worst is just the next thing you have to find room for and live with.” She blew out smoke, watched it haze, then vanish. “Someone sent me a photograph of my mother. One of your father’s photographs.”
His blood chilled. “That’s impossible.”
“I saw it. I had it in my hands. It’s what snapped me, what I couldn’t find room for. Then.”
“You told me someone was sending you pictures of yourself.”
“They were. It was with them, in the last package I got in Charlotte. And afterward, when I was able to function a little, I couldn’t find it. Whoever sent it got into my apartment and took it back. I thought I was hallucinating. But it was real. It existed. It happened.”
“I’m the only one who could have sent it to you. I didn’t.”
“Where are the pictures? The negatives?”
“They’re gone.”
“Gone? How?”
“Kyle wanted to destroy them, them and the journal. I refused. I wanted time to decide what to do. We argued about it. His stand was that it had been twenty years. What good would it do to bring it all out? It could ruin both of us. He was furious that I would even consider going to the police, or to your family. The next morning he was gone. He’d taken the photographs and the journal with him. I didn’t know where to find him. The next I heard he’d drowned. I have to assume he couldn’t live with it. That he destroyed everything, then himself.”
“The photographs weren’t destroyed.” Her mind was very clear and cold. “They exist, just like the ones of me exist. I look like my mother. It’s not a large leap to shift an obsession with her to one with me.”
“Do you think I haven’t thought of that, that it hasn’t terrified me? When we found Susan Peters, and I realized how she’d died, I thought ... I’m the only one left, Jo. I buried my father.”
“But did you bury your brother?”
