The Shape of the Missing

By ten the next morning, June had made three enlargements of the photograph and pinned them to the corkboard above the microfilm reader. In each one, Elena stood near the pump house, her face turned toward the camera with an expression Mara had never seen on her before—not fear exactly, but the moment before fear became useful. Walter Mercer stood beside her. Between them, where the light had caught a third body, someone had scraped the emulsion from the negative.

“Whoever did this knew what they were doing,” June said. “It wasn’t age. It wasn’t water damage. The negative was abraded.”

Mara leaned closer. The blankness had a shape. A shoulder. The angle of a head. One hand hanging down, fingers curled around something pale.

“A child,” she said.

June glanced at her. “That’s what I thought.”

Outside, a delivery truck groaned against the curb. The museum’s front windows trembled in their frames. In six weeks, the building would be emptied. The county had already approved the sale of the old courthouse annex, and the collection was being divided among three institutions that had never once asked what the objects meant to the people who had touched them.

Mara took the photograph from the board. “I’m going to see Walter.”

“I assumed you would.”

“You could tell me not to.”

“I could,” June said. “But then you’d go anyway and resent me for being right.”

Walter Mercer lived in a white ranch house behind the elementary school, where the lawns had been cut close and the trees stood in obedient rows. He opened the door before Mara knocked twice. He was wearing a cardigan despite the heat and holding a dish towel in one hand.

“I wondered when you’d come,” he said.

Mara looked at him. “Did you?”

“No.” His mouth tightened. “But I hoped you wouldn’t.”

He let her in. The house smelled of coffee and furniture polish. On the mantel were photographs of children who had become adults, then old adults themselves. Walter had arranged them in a line according to height, not chronology.

Mara placed the enlargement on his kitchen table. “Who is this?”

Walter did not touch the paper. His gaze settled on the white scar where the third figure had been.

“That was my son, Raymond,” he said. “And the child was his boy.”

“Your grandson?”

“Daniel.”

“What happened to him?”