Chapter 1
“Tomorrow, you’ll be wearing those sunglasses for the rest of your lives.”
Lorraine stopped breathing.
Gavin was still tangled beneath the fallen portrait backdrop, one shoulder buried under collapsed studio fabric. My mother sat beside the overturned camera cart, one hand against her cheek.
Neither answered.
Good.
Maisie was already behind two of my guards.
Safe.
That came first.
I took Adrian’s camera.
“Forty-three minutes.”
He nodded.
“That’s the last picture where she was completely fine.”
I scrolled backward.
Maisie beside the staircase.
Maisie laughing with another child.
Maisie holding a cookie.
No swelling.
No gauze.
No sunglasses.
Then I moved forward.
Forty minutes ago.
Thirty-eight.
Thirty-five.
The images changed.
Not Maisie.
The room.
A decorative frame near the staircase had fallen from the wall.
One photograph showed Gavin crouched near it.
Another showed Lorraine looking over her shoulder.
Then came a blurred image.
Maisie in the background.
Holding something red.
Small.
Rectangular.
A memory card case.
Gavin lunged from beneath the backdrop.
“Delete that.”
I slowly looked at him.
There it was again.
Not concern about my daughter.
Concern about the camera.
I zoomed in.
Maisie was standing beside an old portrait of my father, holding a red memory-card case no larger than two fingers.
In the next image, Gavin was walking toward her.
In the one after that, Lorraine was blocking Adrian’s view.
Then the photographs stopped for twelve minutes.
I looked at Adrian.
“Why?”
His face tightened.
“Mrs. Valenti told me to photograph the dining room.”
Lorraine closed her eyes.
Of course.
Move the witness.
Then Maisie whispered from behind me:
“Grandma said red thing was bad.”
Every head turned.
I crouched.
“What red thing?”
Her lower lip trembled.
“The one Grandpa hid.”
My father had been dead nine years.
I stood slowly.
Lorraine stared at the floor.
May you like
The swollen eye was no longer the only thing they had tried to hide.
My four-year-old daughter had apparently found something my father concealed inside his own portrait.
