“There’s a rock down there,” she called to me. “It’s a piece of granite. Get the key out of the back.”
I looked at the base of the steps and discovered the rock. Beneath it was a hinged panel, like the one in the cigarette box. This was how the Milton girls all retrieved the key, letting themselves into this room. I took the key up the stairs to Anne, and she opened the door and flipped a switch. The snow that fell in the light that came on was fluttery—flakes that seemed to have lost conviction.
“This is his,” Anne said. She stepped into the studio and leaned against a wall, as if she were usually prohibited from entering the room. A mattress covered in a white sheet lay in the center of the floor. If I hadn’t seen the photographs the setup would have struck me as odd. The photographs felt far more organic—their play of shadows, the sensual poses, and that he’d managed to create them would have seemed like a feat if you didn’t know the girls were drugged, that he could move their lifeless limbs into any configuration he wanted. After the dimness of Anne’s house, the room felt overbright, dazzling. A worktable stood against a far wall, and on it was a light box.
“Over there,” I said, and I crossed the room to the table.
Anne stayed behind near the door. “I don’t usually come here,” she said.
I had no fear of William catching us, but Anne seemed worried he might.
“Do you want to see these or not?” I said.
Anne, usually a forceful presence, looked small and helpless in her flimsy scarf. “I don’t know if I want to see them,” she confessed.
I set the negatives on the surface of the light box. When I looked through the loupe I could enter each image, its shadow and light reversed, the depth of each scene three-dimensional, like a diorama.
“It’s definitely her,” I said over my shoulder. “I can see her necklace.”
Anne made a noise from across the room. It was a sound like a sob or a gasp. She stood against the wall, both hands over her mouth. I had given something away—and I was usually so careful. Anne stared at me and let her hands drop.
She crossed the room in a rush, and I handed her the loupe and she bent to look at the images.
“These weren’t taken here,” Anne said.
“The light is different, and the wall, and the wood floor,” I said. I hoped that if I talked about something else she would forget I’d mentioned the necklace.
“And these at the bottom,” I said. “Some field. Do you know where this is?”
Anne’s eyes were terrified and bright, her face chalky and lined in the studio lighting.
“The Peterson field,” she said.
Anne went to the door of the studio, and I gathered the negatives and followed her. In her hurry she neglected to turn off the light. We went down the snow-covered stairs and then back to the house, Anne scuttling along. Inside she dug through her bag, searching for something.
“I can’t find my keys,” she said. “The keys to the Jeep.”
“Where are we going?” I asked her. “What about the Wellington?”
Anne ignored me. “We’ll just take the Mercedes,” she said. “It will have to do.”
I couldn’t understand Anne’s reaction to the negatives. We stepped out into the night. The snow had stopped falling but the cold was piercing and viselike. I worried about Anne in her thin scarf, but she seemed even less concerned about the cold air than I was.
We got into the little car and the space filled with our exhalations—white clouds ballooning out from our mouths. The windshield was hoary with ice. Anne turned on the heat and used the wipers to scrape it clear. I trembled in my coat, but as the heater did its work I felt my alertness overtaken by a dreamy malaise. “I have to cancel our plans for dinner,” she said, finally. “I’m going to take you home.”
“Why are you so upset?” It didn’t seem as if she planned to explain anything to me.
The tires slid a bit as we took off from the driveway.
“I’m a fine driver under any circumstances,” Anne said, her gloved hand fumbling with the dashboard gauges. “I’m sorry about this. I really am.”
“You haven’t told me what’s wrong,” I said.
Anne drove on and passed under dark trees, the moon occasionally appearing between the boughs, the only sound the hum of the engine. Her demeanor had changed—from friendly to preoccupied, almost severe. I felt a slow, building dread. Her gloved hands clung to the wheel. We drove for a long time, it seemed to me, but I had become a poor judge of distance and of time. I grew warm in the little car, my unease building. I watched the side of the road but saw nothing familiar.
“This doesn’t seem the way,” I said.
“I gave Mary Rae that necklace,” Anne said.
I’d admitted I knew about it. I suspected that the next thing Anne would ask me was how I knew. But she didn’t.