The Man Who Made the Call

Thomas was waiting in the museum’s darkened lobby when Mara and June returned from the pump house. He sat beneath the suspended canoe, his hands folded over the head of his cane, though Mara had never seen him use one before. The emergency lights gave his face the color of old paper.

“You found the envelope,” he said.

June stopped beside the locked front doors. “That saves us the trouble of asking whether it exists.”

Thomas looked at Mara. “I wondered if Elena had left it there.”

The sentence entered the lobby and seemed to settle among the cases. Mara thought of the message in the service room, the uneven capitals pressed into paper: MARA DIDN’T TAKE THE PICTURES.

“You knew about the room,” she said.

“I knew there was a room. I didn’t know what she put in it.”

“You knew enough to sign a demolition permit for the building.”

Thomas’s mouth tightened. “The pump house has been condemned for twenty years. The county finally found money to remove it. My signature authorized the museum’s access to the records, not the demolition itself.”

“Convenient distinction,” June said.

“It’s an accurate one.”

Mara placed the envelope on the reception desk. She did not open it. “Who called me there in 1989?”

Thomas closed his eyes.

Outside, a truck passed on the county road, its headlights sliding through the lobby windows like a searchlight. When they were gone, Thomas said, “I did.”

June swore softly.

Mara felt no shock. The answer had been waiting in her for years, not as a memory but as a shape around which the missing memory had grown. She had remembered the ringing telephone, the receiver slick against her palm, a man’s voice telling her Elena was hurt. She had remembered running barefoot through wet grass. She had never remembered the voice.

“Why?” she asked.

“Elena called the museum first. I was still working late. She said there had been an accident and that Daniel Mercer was bleeding. She said she needed you because you had the camera.”

“I didn’t have the camera,” Mara said.

“You did.”

“I had Elena’s camera.”

Thomas looked toward the display of the dance shoes, their satin dulled by decades of handling. “You had a camera. That isn’t the same thing as taking all the pictures.”

June leaned forward. “What happened when you got there?”

Thomas’s fingers tightened around the cane. “Raymond Mercer was there. Daniel was sitting against the wall. Walter was trying to stop the bleeding. Elena had taken photographs. You were photographing Daniel, too.”

Mara saw it then—not a full memory, but the white flare of the flash and Daniel’s small hand pressed against his thigh. She saw Elena standing behind her, saying something urgent. She saw another flash from the darkness beyond the doorway.

“Someone else had a camera,” she said.

Thomas nodded. “I heard it. I didn’t see who held it.”

“Did you see Elena leave?”

“No.”

The word was almost inaudible.

Mara’s anger, which had seemed solid enough to carry her through the night, altered its weight. “You called me into that place and then let everyone say she ran away.”

“I thought she had.”

“You thought?”

“She told me she was going to bring the photographs to the sheriff. Raymond heard her. He told me if the story became public, Daniel would be taken from the family and the county would be blamed for the pump house. I was twenty-eight, Mara. I thought keeping the museum out of it would protect the institution. I thought the adults would handle the rest.”

“And did they?”

Thomas looked at the envelope. “No.”

June took a small recorder from her coat pocket and set it on the desk. “Start again. This time, include what happened to the photographs.”

Thomas stared at the device. “Elena gave me one roll. She said the other was with you. I put the roll in the museum safe because she asked me to. The next morning it was gone.”

Mara’s breath caught. “You told the police it never existed.”

“I told them I had no photographs.”

“That is not the same thing?”

“It was the same thing to the county.”

A telephone began ringing in the archive room. No one moved at first. Then June went to answer it, her footsteps quick across the dark floor.

Mara opened the envelope. Inside was a single photograph, newly printed on thin, glossy paper. It showed the pump house doorway in 1989. Elena stood in the foreground, turned toward someone outside the frame. Mara was beside her, camera raised. Behind them, reflected in the black window of the service room, stood a third figure holding a camera.

The face had been scratched away.

June returned with the receiver still in her hand. “That was Samuel,” she said. “The film has finished developing.”

Mara looked at the damaged face. “What did he find?”

June’s expression had lost its skepticism. “He says there’s a photograph of Elena taking this one.”

From somewhere beneath the museum, a pipe knocked once, hard enough to sound like a fist against a door.