The light bends strangely. Straight lines appear fragmented. The perspective is off, and each one has a hazy, unnatural glow. Anytime we cometo a photograph of a person, the face is blurred, like the subject moved too fast to catch. One is entirely black, except for a pair of off-centered glowing red pinpricks that give me the heebie-jeebies.
I shuffle past it, quicker than the others, to the first photograph that’s come through.
Simon Vandenberg, smiling as he reaches for the camera, like Daisy had taken it without his permission and he was objecting, but flirtatiously. I stare at this boy, frozen in time, shortly before he would vanish, and I wonder if Len Ebely knew who this was when it came through in his dark room. There’s a second picture of Simon from a different angle, his attention cast downward.
Then I shuffle to the final image and a gasp tumbles from my lips.
Simon must have reclaimed the camera and turned it on Daisy. He snapped a picture of this girl he met in a library and traveled with through a supernatural doorway. This girl he so obviously loved. The mysterious Daisy Buchanan.
Only she’s not a mystery any more.
I may not have seen her face in years, but I would recognize it anywhere for its strong resemblance to my own.
Daisy Buchanan was my mother.
I sit on Dad’s recliner waiting for him to come home, my mind unable to process. There’s the picture in my hand and everything it means on one side, and all that I thought to be true on the other.
Like my nightmare when I was a little kid. A trauma dream. The monster wasn’t real. According to Dr. Penny, it was a visual representation of my mother’s addiction. I tried to save her from it, but I wasn’t strong enough. Addiction won. But what if it didn’t? What if that dream I had so long ago was every bit as real as the dream I had about Jude’s mother?
A gust of wind pushes against the window panes. I haven’t bothered with the lights, and the day is cloudy. So when Dad steps inside, it takes him a minute to notice I’m here, sitting in the dark.
“Hey,” he says. “What are you doing over there?”
I don’t move.
Dad grabs a soda from the fridge and cracks it open. “Everything okay, kiddo?”
“Mom lived here,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“She lived here, in Foggy Hollow.”
Dad cocks his head.
“And you didn’t tell me,” I say.
“Selah, sweetheart, what are you talking about?”
I stand from the chair on shaky legs and hold out the photograph. “She lived here, and you lied about it.”
He said we needed a fresh start.
But this was never about a fresh start.
He was chasing her ghost. While getting me therapy.
“Selah, I don’t understand what you’re ...” But before he can finish, his attention snags on the picture, and his words slide into oblivion. He takes the photo from my hand. “Where did you get this?”
“Simon’s bedroom.”
“Who’s Simon?”
The question cracks through the numb shell around my brain, and out from the fissure leaks a tremble of indignation. I can’t believe he lied to me.
“Vandenberg.” I jerk my hand toward the manor. “This whole time I’ve been obsessed with the cold case and you didn’t think I’d want to know Mom was friends with him? That they were?—”
More than friends?
