DETECTIVE JIM EMERT peered at one of the prints through a magnifying glass, then laid the lens down in exasperation. “Hell,” he said, “with all that grain in the image, magnifying it just makes it worse.”
I’d done exactly the same thing an hour before, in my office under the stadium. Magnifying the print was like enlarging a newspaper photograph into a meaningless cloud of dots. “The prints aren’t great,” I said, “but it’s amazing there’s anything there at all.” Considering how faint the images on the film had been, I wasn’t sure whether to think of the guy at Thompson’s as a darkroom tech or a psychic medium. After conjuring up that first startling image of the young soldier’s body, Rodney had spent most of that night and all of this morning experimenting with different exposure times, contrast filters, and developer baths. He’d tried burning and dodging, which sounded like an arsonist’s modus operandi, but which actually meant using masks and screens to increase or decrease the amount of light falling on different regions of the photo paper. He’d also scanned the negatives into a digital-processing computer. In short, he’d tried every trick in the book to coax every speck of image out of that ghostly film. By the time he was through, he had used a hundred sheets of photo paper…and produced a sequence of prints that hinted at a chilling story.
The first image showed the rear end of an antique-looking car—late 1930s, I guessed, by the black paint, bulbous fenders, and small windows. The trunk lid was raised, and a pale bundle filled the cargo space. The detail left a lot to be desired, but over the years I’d seen enough blanket-wrapped bodies in enough trunks to recognize one. The second image showed the bundle lying beside a shallow, circular hole that appeared to have been freshly dug. In the third and fourth pictures, the body—no longer wrapped in the blanket or sheet, and wearing what appeared to be dark clothes—lay in the center of the depression. It was this third exposure Rodney had printed as I’d looked over his shoulder in the darkroom. But the fifth and sixth prints were even more haunting, for they showed close-ups of the man’s head and his face, the vacant eyes staring at us across the gulf of time.
Emert laid aside the last of the close-ups. “The weird thing,” he said, “besides who the hell’s this dead guy and what the hell’s going on here, is why Novak would take the photos in the first place? And why would he go to such trouble to preserve the film all these years? And why would he leave the film undeveloped, for Christ’s sake, if he wanted to keep the images?”
“That’s a whole bunch of weird things,” I pointed out. “You’re a man of many questions.”
“That’s what my mom used to say when I was a kid,” he said. “Since that’s the way I am, might as well get some good out of it. The way I see it, you ask enough people enough questions, enough times, sooner or later you might get an answer that tells you something.”
I’d been wondering about the same weird things as Emert, plus a few others. “Maybe it’s not Novak the pictures incriminate,” I said. I thought of the crumpled note outside Novak’s front door. “Maybe it’s somebody else. Somebody whose secret he knew. Maybe Novak was blackmailing whoever the pictures incriminated.”
“He was a pretty lousy blackmailer if he threw away the blackmail note,” Emert pointed out.
“Maybe he was still getting the hang of it,” I said. “Maybe he considered sending the note, then had second thoughts.”
“Come on, Doc—he’d had that film on ice for a long damn time. If he were gonna put the screws to somebody, he’d have done it decades ago, while his target was still alive, and while Novak was young enough to enjoy the money. Besides, you saw his handwriting on that legal pad. It doesn’t match the note.”
The detective was right. Novak’s handwriting was small and precise. The lettering on the note was large and blocky. “Okay, I give,” I said. “You got any theories?”
“Not really,” he admitted. “All I can come up with is that maybe he wanted an insurance policy of some sort, leverage he could use if he needed to. But he wanted to reduce the risk somebody might just stumble across the pictures—the maid or the home-health nurse or whoever—so he left the film undeveloped. It’s not a great theory, but it’s all I’ve got so far.”
The last three pictures in the series were different. They showed tree trunks and thickets of foliage, and—off in the distance, through a gap in the trees—a small barn. Here’s the view from the grave, I thought, trying to think like Leonard Novak might have. Here’s how to find it again someday.