Chapter 5: All the Way

Miss Eugenia called me Wednesday morning while I was brushing my teeth.

"Haley, dear, I owe you an apology," she said. "I was short with you at the shop."

I spat in the sink and didn't answer.

"The photographer for the wedding has let us down," she said. "I'd like you to do it."

"Bridal portraits here at the house on Friday, then the rehearsal, then the day."

"Why me?"

"Because you're very good, and because I'd like us to be friends." She paused. "Come up at eleven and we'll talk."

Jesse said not to go.

"She wants you in that house," he said on the phone.

"I want to be in that house."

"Haley."

"I'm not sitting for anything," I said. "I'm going to look."

He was quiet for a second. "Text me when you're inside and when you're out."

The Rountree house sat at the top of the hill with its white columns facing town.

The round tower stood on the river side, three stories of white brick with one window at the very top.

A housekeeper in a gray uniform let me in and showed me to the parlor.

In daylight the room looked smaller, and the velvet chair was gone from in front of the fireplace.

Over the mantel hung a portrait of an old woman in a high lace collar.

She wasn't smiling.

"Price's grandmother," Miss Eugenia said behind me. "Taken the night before my wedding, on the old camera."

She came in with a tray of coffee and set it down herself.

"Is that a tradition too?" I said.

"The night before a Rountree wedding, the groom's mother sits, and the groom takes her picture."

She poured. "My husband took that one. Price will take mine on the sixteenth."

"Nobody smiles," I said.

"The old plates need you still for a count of eight. Nobody can hold a smile that long."

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