The Photographer's Return novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Tahoe City

At the camera shop where she worked at twenty-two, the owner recognizes her photo on his wall, his daughter adopts her, and he offers her a job and the darkroom key.

I didn't answer him.

I turned the phone face down on the rental counter.

I signed for the cheapest car they had, a little white hatchback with a cracked cup holder.

The drive up Mount Rose took an hour.

Then the trees opened, and there was the lake.

I pulled over at the vista point and sat with both hands on the wheel until a tour bus honked at me.

The motel on the highway in Tahoe City was eighty-nine dollars a night.

The carpet was brown, and the ice machine screamed every few minutes.

I loved it immediately.

I slept fourteen hours with my phone in the bathroom.

On Saturday I woke to sun on the curtains and a text from Mackenzie, sent from the departure lounge at SFO.

A photo of three boarding passes fanned in her hand.

"Last chance to be a team player," she'd written, with a little wave.

I deleted it.

I took a shower that ran hot the whole time, and I walked down to the lake for film.

Lakeshore Camera was still on the corner across from the pier.

The bell above the door rang.

The shop smelled the way it had when I was twenty-two. Dust, coffee, chemicals, warm cardboard.

Old cameras lined the shelves behind the counter. Rolleiflexes, Pentaxes, a Polaroid shaped like a dog.

A man was bent over the glass case with a jeweler's loupe in one eye, swearing softly at a light meter.

He was tall, in a flannel shirt over a gray T-shirt, reading glasses pushed up into short dark hair going gray at the temples.

"Be right with you," he said, without looking up. "I'm losing an argument."

"With a Sekonic?"

He looked up.

"It thinks the whole world is one stop darker than it is," he said.

"Mine did that. The battery door was bent. It wasn't closing all the way."

He frowned at it, pressed the little door shut with his thumbnail and pointed the meter at the window.

The needle swung and settled.

Then he stared at me.

"Okay," he said. "That's annoying. I've been at this since breakfast."

"Sorry."

"You're not."

I asked for five rolls of Portra, and he turned to get them, and stopped.

He turned back around.

He looked at me, then at the wall behind me, then at me again.

I knew what was on that wall before I turned around.

It had hung there when I was twenty-four. My mentor had insisted.

Emerald Bay, First Light. A twenty-by-thirty print in a plain black frame.

My signature was in pencil in the corner. S. Harrow.

"You're Harrow," he said.

"I was."

"Sylvie Harrow." He came around the counter. "That print came with the shop. The old man said if I ever sold it, he'd haunt me."

"He would, too."

"He talked about you all the time. Said you were the best eye he ever had behind this counter." He held out his hand. "Casey Hollingsworth. I bought the place from him four years ago."

His hand was warm and stained at the fingertips.

Developer. I'd had those same fingers once.

"Dad," said a voice from the floor. "Is this the lady from the picture?"

A girl was sitting cross-legged behind the counter, surrounded by camera parts on a towel.

She was maybe ten, with two brown braids, scabbed knees and a hoodie that said LAKESHORE CAMERA down to her shins.

"My daughter, Marlo," Casey said. "Everyone calls her Bean. She's not supposed to be taking that apart."

"It was already broken." She stood up and inspected me. "Are you famous?"

"Not for a long time."

"Do you know how to fix a Kodak Brownie?"

"Maybe. What's wrong with it?"

"Everything."

She took my hand without asking and pulled me behind the counter to show me.

"Bean," Casey said. "Customers aren't allowed back there."

"She's not a customer," Bean said. "She's the picture lady."

I spent an hour on the floor with her.

We got the Brownie's shutter to fire once.

She screamed so loud a man browsing the postcards dropped one.

On Sunday I came back for more film, and Bean was waiting on the front step with a list.

Twelve broken cameras, ranked by how sad they were.

Casey brought out two coffees in chipped mugs.

His was black. Mine was too, because I didn't say otherwise.

It was terrible.

"I know," he said, watching my face. "The machine came with the shop too. I think it's haunted."

I laughed.

It came out rusty.

Bean looked up at the sound and smiled.

By closing time on Sunday I'd sold a disposable camera to a honeymoon couple and talked a teenager out of a scratched lens.

Casey watched me do it from the doorway of the darkroom.

When the last customer left he flipped the sign to CLOSED and leaned on the counter.

"My counter guy quit Friday to go be a raft guide," he said. "I can't pay much. Eighteen an hour and all the film you can eat."

I opened my mouth.

He held up a hand.

"And this."

He took a key off the ring on his belt and set it on the glass between us.

An old brass one, with green tape around the head.

"The darkroom's empty after six," he said. "Nobody's printed back there in a year. It should be someone who knows what she's doing."

Bean held her breath beside me.

I looked at the key.

I'd carried one exactly like it when I was twenty-two.

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