On the other end Crow was barely cognizant. “Is it daytime?” he kept saying.
“Now, if you want to shoot it,” Llewellyn said.
“What time is it,” said Crow. “Lee Edward? Is this Lee?”
“Come now.”
She woke to find two men standing over her, watching her. She touched her face. One of the men was Llewellyn and the other she didn’t recognize, though she remembered the camera as a source of rituals at the pyramids of Mexico. The men were staring at her intently; they didn’t see the glass still in the sink after a week’s time, or the kitten sleeping in the drawer of the chest, or the outline of her naked form beneath the bed sheet. They motioned for her to come with them. She wrapped the sheet around her and went into the kitchen; she was surprised to see that outside it was still dark.
Crow set up the camera. Llewellyn was looking out the window. Crow looked back and forth from Llewellyn to Catherine with a strange expression on his face. These aren’t exactly ideal circumstances, he said to the other man. Five in the morning in a kitchen, I don’t know what I can make her look like. Llewellyn said, after several long moments, Don’t make her look like anything. Crow spent thirty minutes moving Catherine nearer and farther from the wall, under his lights. He touched her hair to arrange it and she jerked away. Llewellyn said, watching from the corner of his eye, Don’t make her look like anything I told you. Just shoot it.
Maddy came in. She was wearing a robe. She looked at Llewellyn and Catherine and Crow and said, What’s going on? Her voice was little when she said it, as if it were the voice of only half of her. Llewellyn? she said, and he didn’t answer. Her voice kept getting smaller, and when he finally glanced in her direction, he saw the look on her face she had the first time she made his heart melt. He turned back to the window, and she brushed her red hair from her eyes and looked straight into Catherine’s eyes and backed out of the room silently, through the door, never taking her eyes away.
Crow took a long time. At five-thirty the sky was a shade lighter. Finally Crow took a picture and then set up for a few more. I think I fucked that one up, he said to Llewellyn, who realized Crow was procrastinating. He realized Crow was afraid, maybe for the first time he was ever afraid, that he had a picture he couldn’t get. Llewellyn never turned from the window. The sky grew lighter and lighter, and after an hour Crow finished. In all the time he had taken the pictures Catherine just remained with her eyes open, in the same place; neither man understood she was sleeping.
When Crow returned late that afternoon Llewellyn knew he had something. If he didn’t have something, Llewellyn told himself, he wouldn’t have had the nerve to come back. Crow was moving around the room, excited; he’d come straight from the lab via an agency on Wilshire Boulevard. He carried an envelope which he emptied on the coffee table; he began sorting its contents. Screwed this up in development, he said, and this and this. He was throwing aside the misfires. Maddy, on the stairs, crept down several steps and stood watching them. Crow got to the last photo he’d taken as dawn had shone through the window. Llewellyn looked at it.
Took it to the Harris people on Wilshire, Crow said. “They flipped.”
“Forget it,” Llewellyn said.
“Forget it?”
“She’s not modeling for anybody.”
“What are you talking about,” said Crow. “What did I drag myself over here at five in the morning for?”
“Sorry if you got the wrong impression.” Llewellyn laid the picture on the table.
“The wrong impression! What’s the right impression? What’s going on here? You know, Lee,” he said angrily, “this is a seriously weird scene you’ve—” He stopped, for the first time seeing Maddy on the stairs. Llewellyn turned to Maddy too. Maddy was looking at the kitchen doorway, where Catherine stood with her bowl of cold water for the living room carpet.
Not to be discouraged from what had become a point of honor for her, the excision of her blood from the Edgar house, Catherine came into the room and set to work. There she saw the pictures on the table. She stood up from the floor and went over to the table and picked up the picture Llewellyn and Crow had been studying. She looked at it and then looked at Llewellyn. He has taken, she said to herself, the image of my father’s murder and made a map of it.
“Have it,” Crow said to her. “I can print a zillion.”
She crumpled it into her fist, still staring at Llewellyn.
She backed away from the two of them and something else caught her eye. It was one of Crow’s discards, lost in the lab in a blur of light: it had come out a large black spot. Catherine picked it up and turned it from
