Laura’s attention was caught by a sewing machine, modern vintage, on a table. Another sewing machine that looked exactly like the first one except smaller—a child’s machine?—sat on a shorter table.
Laura’s throat felt dry as her latexed hand pulled open the many drawers and searched alcoves neatly stacked with patterns, thread spools, bobbins, measuring tapes.
Him and his mom, sewing together in the good old days?
But it still confused her.
This room confused her.
A Bible stand in the corner of the room, old and well-used. On the inside it said, “This Bible belongs to Alene Davis.”
His mother’s maiden name.
This room had a surreal quality, as if all she had to do was close her eyes and when she opened them again she’d see an abandoned house with plywood windows and cracking plaster.
She ran an index finger across an oval rosewood table. Dust. Several layers. But other than that, the place was clean. The dust was the only sign that Lundy had not been here for a long time. Everything was neatly displayed, a tableau.
A shrine?
She bent to look at the underside of the rosewood table: Ethan Allen—the store.
Not an antique then. An
She flashed her light on the ceiling. It might have been stamped tin, or plastic made to look like stamped tin.
Watching where she walked, Laura went down the hall.
She looked in on a bedroom. It, too, looked frozen in time. A single bed with lace and eyelet Victorian linens, a down comforter, heaps of satin pillows. A wooden rocking horse. Enormous dry flower arrangements in tall vases. Dolls on a window seat.
A little girl’s room, but Dale Lundy was an only child.
Onward, farther down the hall.
A boy’s room. This one had Darth Vader sheets and posters from the seventies. A hooked rug on polished floorboards. Cowboy-and-Indian wallpaper, cornflower blue.
Dark in here. On an impulse, Laura walked to the window. Carefully, she moved aside the cowboy-and-Indian- patterned drapes with her latexed hands. She was right. Black-out curtains.
He’d used plywood to cover up the windows, but he’d added black-out curtains as well. Why? It was as if this house had to remain a secret. As if it embarrassed him in some way. Maybe the kids at school had called him a mama’s boy.
But he had been home-schooled—isolated from other kids.
Lonely?
At the end of the hall was what Laura assumed was the master bedroom.
She opened the door.
From every wall, Marisa de Seroux stared down at her.
Eight-by-tens, four-by-fives. Posters, blown up and fuzzy. Photo after photo after photo, a collage from floor to ceiling. Mostly black and white. All of the same girl. Most of them candid shots, where the girl wasn’t posing or even looking at the camera. Many of them had been blown up to catch her face. But the majority of them were good, professional quality. Taken with a telephoto lens, pictures of the girl, unaware, going about her life in the small town of Apalachicola. As if she were being followed around by paparazzi.
The photos were cracked in places, as if they had curled up at one point and then been flattened again and again, glued in place.
She called Chief Redbone in.
“What does this look like to you?”
“I’ll be damned. He sure had a thing for her, didn’t he?”
“So this is definitely Marisa de Seroux?”
“Oh, I’d say so. That’s Misty.”
“Misty?”
“That’s what everyone knew her by.”
Laura walked to the first wall. “She didn’t know he was taking them.”
“This makes no sense.”
“Maybe it does. It looks to me like he was obsessed with her.” Enough to come back to town and pretend he was a member of her family? She had seen stranger things in her career.
She inhaled. It was musty in here; the place had been closed up for a long time.
“Hey, look at that.” Chief Redbone motioned to a shelf crammed with books. “That one on the end. Looks like a scrapbook.”
She walked over to the shelf and gently lifted out the scrapbook. More dust, like a blanket. The scrapbook was
