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Ten minutes later, the father returned and held out a flash drive.
“It’s on here. The only file.”
“Thank you, Father, I appreciate it. I’ll bring your memory stick back the next time I’m in Tillamook City.”
“That’s fine. Don’t worry about it if you don’t. It’s only a one-gigabyte drive and cost six dollars if you bought ten or more, which the church did. We bought fifty.” As she left, he called out, “Don’t forget to go to Mass. I’ll ask Father Telman next time I see him.”
Greta cringed. Father Telman was the junior priest who held services at the Cloverdale Church, and she hadn’t seen him for more than six months.
At home that evening she opened the PowerPoint presentation file. The first slide had the heading “Church of God Arising” on the first line, and “Sevite, Peru, Mission” on the second. Subsequent slides gave a brief history of the Tillamook church, the mission in Peru, the goal to witness to the people of South America, and then a series of photographs of the church, the school, and the village, plus numerous shots of the local populace. She looked through the slides a second time, then a third.
It started to rain. She first noticed the beating rain on the skylights. She wasn’t hungry at the moment but figured she would be in another hour or so. Planning for that eventuality, she took a Marie Callender chicken pot pie out of the freezer and put it in the oven at 400 degrees. Instructions said to bake for forty-five minutes, so she set the timer for fifty minutes because her oven baked low. She poured herself a glass of sauvignon blanc, finishing the bottle she’d started the previous night. After changing out of her uniform into a pink terrycloth top and bottom and hot pink socks, she sat at the table in the kitchen nook. She sipped the wine, listened to rain as it beat harder against the windows, and went through the slides again on her laptop.
By the sixth time, she spotted the first thing to bother her. The photos had come from different cameras. The shape of the pictures, the resolution, and the light all indicated multiple cameras. There were always reasons why this could happen, but Father Merstory said Balfour showed pictures that he, not multiple cameramen, had taken. Although it could be a misunderstanding, nevertheless it was curious.
The second problem arose when she noticed a small sign in the background of a village scene. The locals seemed a little darker-complexioned than in other slides, which could have been caused by the camera settings. Greta herself had never learned to adjust her own camera. Any pictures she took were simple point-and-shoot attempts; she took a number of shots and hoped a few came out okay.
She looked carefully at the slides again. She zoomed in slightly on the sign in the background. Just before the lettering became totally unrecognizable, she wrote down four of the words on the sign. She frowned. She remembered enough from her two years of high school Spanish to know that none of the four words looked right. When she did a Google search with the words, the hits were not related to Spanish but to Malagasy, the main language of Madagascar.
She then looked at Internet photos of the people of Madagascar. Many lived in villages with small dirt-floor dwellings, and some of the different ethnic groups were not dissimilar looking to South Americans who had native Indian ancestors.
“This isn’t a picture of any village in South America,” she said aloud. “I bet it’s something he grabbed off the Internet.
The beeping oven timer reminded her about the pot pie. She had meant to make a salad to go with it, but she ate the pie as quickly as it cooled and opened another bottle of wine—this one a dry pinot grigio from the Columbia Valley in Washington to the north.
She went through the slides very slowly this time, carefully examining each photo. Nothing new hit her, but she thought, There must be some way to find out if the other photos are fake, too.
She thought of Simpson. He had been helpful before, so maybe he would be again. The Marshal Service must have access to all kinds of software. Maybe someone could identify the photos.
She found Simpson’s phone number and called him.
“Robert, it’s Greta. I know you’ve already helped, but could I impose on you one more time?” She held her breath.
“And what might it be this time?” he asked cautiously.
“I have some photos . . . part of a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. I think at least some of them were copied from somewhere, maybe off the Internet. Does anyone you know of have software, computers, whatever, that could identify photos?”
“I . . . might. Let me make a call, and I’ll get back to you.”
“Thanks, Robert, I really do appreciate it.”
Now all she needed to do was wait to see if he came through.
Thirty minutes later, her phone rang.
“Greta, I called someone I know. You don’t need the details. They said they’d run a small number of photos and see what comes up. You say they’re images within PowerPoint slides?”
“That’s right. It’s about twenty or so photos total.”
“That’s too many. Narrow it down to three or four. That few should be okay.”
Definitely the one with the Malagasy sign, she thought. She’d have to choose three others.
“That’s great. So, how do I get you the photos? Do you have a computer and an Internet connection?”
“No, for reasons you might imagine. I’ll need to send the photos myself, so I’ll need access to the Internet. Probably it’s easiest and fastest if I come to your place and use your computer and email account.”
The suggestion made Greta uneasy. She hadn’t invited many people to her house since she’d moved to Oregon, only Bruce, Emily, several neighbors, Alex Boylan and his wife once, and Jasmine. Theoretically, Simpson was a colleague, but she didn’t really know him or even his real name. The idea of having him in her home made her feel . . . unsettled.
