A Photographic Death (7 page)

Chapter Thirteen

“I
HAVE TO
meet someone at Staller. I’ll walk you over with you, but I don’t know anything about getting into the lab. I have a feeling it’s just for faculty and students.”

“That’s okay. I know where it is. I’ll be fine.” But I was disappointed; I’d imagined Bruce as so powerful, so all-knowing, that he could say the magic password and get me into the darkroom. If I couldn’t get in to develop the film myself, I would have to find a specialist somewhere. The film was too old and too important to mail it to some Internet site and hope for the best.

As it turned out, Bruce ran into a colleague outside the Staller Center for the Arts and I went on into the plain concrete building. I saw by the directory that the darkroom was on the fourth floor, and the photography department on the level below. I went to those offices first and found one that was dark, its door locked. The name on the placard outside said “Annalisa Merck.”

When I reached the brighter, open area, a secretary was just arriving. “Oh—you startled me!”

“Sorry. Is Ms. Merck in yet?”

The secretary, younger than I was, consulted a schedule. “She has a studio class at noon. You could try a little before twelve.”

That gave me three hours. Maybe.

Feeling the way I had when I was in junior high about to steal a lipstick from Rexall Drugs, I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, and worked my way through the pale green cinder-block corridor. What was I
doing
? If I got caught sneaking into a darkroom . . . If they found out I was Colin Fitzhugh’s wife  . . .

Before I reached the reception area, I came to a door that I was sure led into the darkroom. I moved to it and tried the knob.
Locked
. But of course it would be. They couldn’t risk people opening the door by mistake and spewing light everywhere.

Like riding a bicycle, darkroom techniques are second nature once you’ve learned them. I was sure that the past twenty years had brought new techniques, new chemicals that could ruin fragile celluloid, but how hard could developing this film be?

As my father used to say with a chuckle, “Fools rush in and don’t know what to do when they get there.”

I entered the reception room and smiled at a young Japanese student who had papers spread out on the desk behind the counter. He jumped up and came over to me.

“Is Annalisa inside?” I asked.

“Ms. Merck? No, not yet.”

“I’m developing some sensitive film with her. Very old.” I showed him, and his eyes widened at the dented yellow canisters. “Is it okay if I go in and get started?”

He hesitated. “You should wait for her.”

“I’m in kind of a hurry. I’d like to get things started.”

Come on, come on, come on.

“Are you in her class?”

“No. Just a colleague.”

Perhaps because I looked old enough for that to be true, perhaps because he couldn’t imagine any other reason for me to be there, he asked if I needed take-up reels.

“Yes. Three, please.”

“Sign here.” He pushed a clipboard with a lined page toward me. Mine would be the first name.

I wrote “Delhi Laine” as illegibly as I could and dated it.

He handed me the black plastic reels and then I was standing in front of a life-sized tube, the type you stepped into to be X-rayed.

“A gift from the medical school,” he said with some pride. “Total darkness so you can extract the film. I guess.”

Holding the empty reels, I stepped inside the cylinder. I knew I wouldn’t like the narrow tube, but it was worse than I expected—as bad as waking up in a coffin and realizing there were several tons of dirt on top of you. No wonder George Washington had left instructions not to bury him for three days after he died.

I fumbled around for the end of the film in the first canister and couldn’t find it. I couldn’t see my hands or the reel either. Pushing everything else into my jacket pocket, I concentrated on bringing one hand to the other. With shaking fingers, I managed to find the piece I needed and wound the first roll of film onto the empty spool.

You won’t die. Just do the other two.

I finally threaded two more rolls of film onto the reels, then was shaken by a new fear. How did I get out of here? I ran my hands along the smooth surface but could not feel a handle. Eventually Annalisa Merck and her class would come to use the darkroom and find my crumpled, oxygen-depleted body. Frantically I started trying to slide the partition in front of me to one side and finally created an opening. Breathing hard, I half-fell into the darkroom. It was blessedly familiar. No lights except for the usual red bulb that glowed as dimly as a signal at the end of a runway. In its glow I could see nine or ten enlargers, several sinks, and other apparatus.

Moving to the center of the lab, I felt exhilarated. I was back in a darkroom, the place I belonged, the place where I hoped today to discover something crucial. If only we had all come safely back from England and I had gone on with my own photographic visions  . . .

No time for regrets now. I had to work fast.

I raced mentally through the steps. Pour developer into a tank, agitate the unrolled film, swish it around with plastic-coated tongs. Lay the film in the first bath for ten minutes, then into the stop, the fix, and a final rinse in the sink. The acrid smell of the chemicals calmed me.
I can do this.

Before I put the strips of film in the drying cabinet, I craned my neck to look at the tiny negatives. I could tell there were photos, real images, though I didn’t know how clear they would be. Several seemed to be of the little girls, their faces inverted dark as coal miners with eerily lighter eyes, and I realized the pictures would show what Caitlin was wearing that last day. I braced myself the way I had when we’d opened the cartons at Thanksgiving, but at least now I had hope.

It was hard to see if any of the strips showed a woman dressed as a nanny.

When I was sure the film was dry, I took the negatives out and brought them to the light table. The photos that showed people rowing on the Avon ambushed me with sadness and guilt. Why hadn’t I been paying attention to what truly mattered? I’d been so anxious to capture the two old ladies in frilly white hats and the young man at the oars that I’d ignored everything else.

I plowed on. One photo, just one, seemed to hold a woman in a white uniform at the edge of the frame.

My hand was shaking again as I cut the strip of negatives to fit in the enlarger. Why had I taken only one of her and so many of that damn statue of Shakespeare? The one photo I had would be blurred. The woman had evidently turned her head when she realized she was in my sights. She must have been constantly aware of where I was, what I was doing, knowing when to approach the girls. No one but me would have paid attention to a kindly nanny talking to them.

I placed the negative strip in the slot, turned on the machine, and waited.
Come on, come on.
The red light buzzed above my head, and I breathed in the chemicals. Waiting for the images to develop on the paper was excruciating. One precious hour was already gone.

When there was enough deep contrast, I took the photo through the steps of stop, fix, water. Almost there. I prepared myself to be disappointed. Discoloration could have crept in or white spots speckling everything. The woman could be too blurry to be identifiable. There were a hundred ways to go wrong, and only one to go right.

I let myself look down at the eight-by-ten photo. The nanny was off to the right. Dark curly hair. A white uniform with a cardigan around her shoulders. Some blur when she realized my camera was focused on her? At least I had her profile. But I was shocked. She was so young and pretty. I had been imagining her as a caricature of a nanny, somewhere past middle age and using a falsely sweet voice to entice little children.

She looked barely forty. Had she been a desperate childless woman masquerading as a nanny to find a child of her own? I had heard of kidnappers dressing as nurses and stealing babies from hospitals, but what had happened in those cases was discovered almost at once. The disappearance of a child from a park with a river was open to interpretation.

I had captured only a corner of the stroller, only enough to see how high its plaid sides were.

Moving rapidly back to the machine, I enlarged her face further. I knew it would be grainy but I had no alternative.

A dryer in the corner of the darkroom, shaped like a pasta maker, looked newer than the other equipment. I knew it dried resin-coated photo paper more quickly than hanging the print up the old-fashioned way. I hesitated. I had never used one. Suppose I singed this picture? Yet time was an issue. If Annalisa Merck arrived early and was told I was waiting inside for her . . . I didn’t want to imagine the scene.

Holding my breath, I slipped the paper through the narrow slot and waited. It came out the other side clear and dry and gave a better sense of the woman. Her nose was sharp and distinct. There was a dark spot below her lip that could have been a beauty mark or a flaw in the film. But I was sure I was looking at the woman who I now believed had stolen my daughter. Jane’s arguments about the timing and the way a normal person would have reacted had finally persuaded me. The plaid stroller she was resting her hand against seemed to clinch it.

We’ve got you now.

Was there time to print up a photo of Hannah and Caitlin? Caitlin had been wearing red corduroy pants and a striped shirt with a smiling goldfish appliquéd on the front. If I’d let her, she would have worn the shirt every day. I wanted that photo.

But I heard voices in the hall outside the door. It could have been anyone, just students passing, but I felt a flare of panic. I had what I’d come for. I had to get out. Covering the two prints I had made with tissue paper and wrapping the negative strips quickly, I slipped everything into my woven bag. Then I pushed open the outside door.

As I did, a fair-haired woman close to my age, passed me and gave me a startled look. Was it Annalisa Merck? I smiled and walked quickly toward the stairs.

Chapter Fourteen

O
UTSIDE IN THE
early December air, I stopped and took several calming breaths, then started back toward the parking garage. I couldn’t wait to call Jane. Yet when I saw the brick social sciences building, I decided to see if Colin was in his office. I thought of Jane’s prediction, “Daddy will have to believe it now!”

Fingers crossed.

Colin’s division, archeology, was part of the larger anthropology department. I rode the elevator to the fifth floor and walked to the Institute for Long Island Archaeology, not stopping to look at the color photos of local excavations. I knew they would show mostly Native American sites. There was a race to discover them before they were lost forever under developers’ machinery.

Colin’s office was empty, so I sat down in a cushioned alcove to wait.

I had taken out my phone and was about to press the button to connect me to Jane when Colin came around the corner, accompanied by two worshipful young women. The student in red tights was asking him what appeared to be a life-or-death question.

He stopped abruptly, seeing me. “Delhi! What—is everything okay?”

I knew his first thought was always the children.

“It’s fine. I was on campus and thought I’d come by. We have to talk.” It felt good to be the one using that phrase for a change. When Colin said, “We have to talk,” it was never to find out what I wanted for my birthday.

He frowned, and the students melted away. “This isn’t a good time.”

“It won’t take long.”

“I have fifteen minutes before I’m meeting a grant representative.”

“That will work.”

“Not here. I’ll walk you to your van.”
And make sure I get into it?

T
H
E
W
I
N
T
E
R
S
U
N
played over the benches on the quad, the grass a pale, defeated green. There was a deep chill whenever you crossed into the shade. Students eddied around us on their way to the library or their next class.

“We’ll get coffee,” he decided.

“Is it private enough to talk?”

“Upstairs.”

We bought our coffee in the cafeteria. I looked longingly at the cupcakes, decorated with red and green holiday sprinkles, but I had already eaten a scone. I remembered Patience in her pin-striped pants and left the cupcakes on the wire shelf.

As Colin had predicted, we were the only people on the second floor. The long room was dedicated to musicians who had performed on campus, and we sat down underneath a Janis Joplin poster.

He glanced at his watch. “So what brings you to campus?”

“I needed to develop some film in the darkroom.”

“You’re taking photos again?”

“No. These were some old rolls.”

“I hope you didn’t use my name to get in.”

“No.” I took a sip of coffee and looked at him. “Why are you so against trying to find Caitlin?”

“Because it will only lead to more frustration.” He sighed. “I don’t have time to go through my reasons again. Is that why you brought me here?”

“No.” I cast about for the most persuasive way to tell him about last night. “Jane remembered what really happened that day,” I started. “Remember how she kept talking about a ‘bad lady’ who would get her too? Well, it turns out there
was
a woman, someone dressed up like a nanny who talked to the girls. She asked Jane to go pick a flower for her, then hid Caitlin in a carriage when Jane’s back was turned, and told her to tell me she had fallen into the water. That’s what she was trying to tell us that night!”

He flinched as if resisting being pulled back into that scene. “And she suddenly remembered it all? All those details?”

“Well,” I admitted, “she had some help.”

“Some help? Delhi, no! Please don’t tell me it was under hypnosis or some damn thing like that.” He gave me a disbelieving look. “Next thing you’ll tell me, she went to a séance.”

“It was nothing like that. This was a psychologist from Columbia University. He’s hardly some quack.”

Colin set his mug down hard on the table, making me jump. “I don’t care if it was Sigmund Freud resurrected from the dead. You let someone play with her mind?”

I leaned toward him. “It was perfectly safe. Really. You have no idea what hypnosis is like.”

He closed his eyes, exasperated. “Do you know how many false memories it generates? All those abuse allegations about the day care centers? You subjected Jane to that!”

“It wasn’t like that at all. Nobody coached her. He took her back to that day and she told us what she saw. That’s all.”

“What she wanted to see.” He was momentarily distracted by two students who passed our table and spoke to him, then said, ”Speaking of memories, you have a short one. Don’t you remember what happened the last time you tried second-guessing the British police? You turned into their prime suspect. It’s a good thing I was down at Boxgate that day or they’d have accused me too.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Oh, really? They questioned the woman who ran the hostel to make sure you went out that day with all three girls. They asked her questions about whether or not you were abusive.” He picked up his cup, changed his mind, and set it down more softly. Apparently something in my face made him add, “You really don’t remember?”

I shook my head. I had spent hours at the police station, answering questions. There
had
been insinuations about how overwhelmed I must have felt, being so pregnant and with three young children. Far from home without any emotional support. But I had mistaken their comments for sympathy.

“They really thought I had done something to her?” I felt sucker-punched.

“I don’t know. No one actually thought you were abusive. They found people in the park who saw all three girls.”

“They actually thought I had done away with her and made up a story,” I said flatly. Against my resistance it was coming back.

“They had to check out everything when you insisted she hadn’t drowned. And you cost me my best friend,” Colin said suddenly.

“Who? You mean Ethan?”

Ethan Crosley and Colin had known each other since graduate school. “After it happened, he and Sheila never spoke to me again.”

“But why blame you? If anything they should have blamed me and sympathized with you. That doesn’t sound like much of a best friend to me.”

I remembered the Crosleys only vaguely. Ethan rangy and mocking with tight red curls, and a face that just missed being handsome. Sheila had been slender with Irish-black hair in spiky bangs around her porcelain face and large blue eyes, a woman so intense that I didn’t remember her ever laughing. A woman always on the verge of grievance.

“They were upset that we were so careless. They were trying to have a baby themselves and it outraged them that you could let something so dumb happen. Especially when you were pregnant and could easily replace one child with another.”

“What? That’s outrageous! As if any ‘baby’ could replace Caitlin! That’s
insulting
. It’s a good thing you didn’t tell me then. I would have punched them.”

He shrugged.

“No one else felt that way.”

Five American couples had been living at the residence while the husbands, archeological colleagues from around the country, visited nearby English sites. We socialized constantly, and the mothers exchanged toys and advice. Our children played together every day. When we lost Caitlin, they were quick to babysit and offer any support they could. It solidified my friendship with one of the other wives, Rebecca Deitz, who had lost a child to crib death. We were still in touch.

Should I try to contact Rebecca or the others now, to see if they remembered anything else? Unfortunately, none of them had been in the park with me that day.

“Delhi, I’m serious about not upending this girl’s life—if she is alive, which I doubt. Not to mention what it would do to our own lives. Suppose she’s psychologically damaged—we have no idea what she’s been through. We’d end up taking that on too.”

“But she’s our child!”

“She
was
our child. For two short years, a long time ago. You have this sentimental idea that genes trump everything. I don’t.”

I gripped my cup as if it were the only means of escape from his words and stared at him. It was the coldest thing I had ever heard him say.

“Anyway, Hannah is against it. How she feels is the most important thing.”

“No. It’s not.” Her fears of inconveniencing her life did not match my need for Caitlin. “I’m the one who gave birth to this child. I’m the one she was stolen from. And if I have any chance on earth of finding her, I will!”

“Delhi.” He reached across the table and stroked my lower arm. “How can I make you stop picturing her as a two-year-old and realize she’s an adult who doesn’t know us at all? Who may hate you for blowing her world apart? I care just as much what happens to you.”

Blindsided by his unexpected tenderness, I couldn’t answer.