The Photographer's Return novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Gallery

There was a long pause on the line.

A fork set down on a plate.

"Who told you that?" Warner said.

"Nobody," Milo said. "Mom has all of them on her computer. Four thousand. Even the one where she ran."

"Ran where?"

"From the camera. So I wouldn't wake up."

Warner laughed, the big laugh, the one that used to set the whole kitchen off.

Nobody laughed with him.

"Bud. Mom gave those pictures to me. That's what married people do. They share everything."

"She didn't put her name on them."

"Because she didn't want to be famous. Mom doesn't like people looking at her."

"She liked it when I laughed at her goose," Milo said.

Another pause.

"Her what?"

Then, closer, sharper: "Is that your watch? Is that thing on?"

The line went dead.

I sat in the dark parking lot with the phone against my chest.

Then I drove four hours home and didn't turn the radio on once.

On Monday morning Warner's post about Casey was gone.

Nobody said why.

By the end of August I was living two lives, one week at a time.

On my weeks, Milo and I lived in a furnished studio over a dry cleaner in Mountain View, ten minutes from his school.

Two more heron prints had paid for it.

The whole place smelled faintly of steam and starch, and Milo said it was a hot shirt.

On Warner's weeks I drove back up the mountain to the cabin and the shop and the darkroom.

He ate my pancakes now, if he could pour the batter himself.

Nothing else yet. I didn't push.

On the last Thursday in August, a woman walked into Lakeshore Camera.

She stood in front of the heron in the window for ten minutes without moving.

She was in her sixties, silver hair cut very short, in a black linen jacket that hadn't come from anywhere near Tahoe City.

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