To my disappointment, it appeared empty. But even more alarming was the fact that the key was still in the ignition, the car running as if Jack had exited in such a hurry that turning off the car and shutting the door were the least of his worries.
I reached over to turn the key, spotting a photograph facedown on the floor of the passenger seat. Holding the umbrella so I wouldn’t drip more rain onto the interior, I reached down to pick it up carefully along the edges. To avoid ruining it with my wet fingers, I placed it on the seat before flipping it over. It was an old Polaroid like so many of the photos we’d found in Button’s albums, making me believe that this one might have slipped out of one of them. Probably the album Jack had brought to me at the office, because it would have been in his car. It was a photo of a baby, a newborn. The baby was small, but plump and ruddy-cheeked. Healthy. It was wrapped in a blanket and sported a dark fringe of hair swirling around the top of her nearly bald head, a tiny bow made from yarn clinging to a few wisps. On the white border at the bottom of the photo was a single date written in fading blue ink: May 30, 1984.
I dropped the photo back on the floor and jerked back as if I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t. I knew that date—it had been written on the saltshaker from Lake Jasper. I recalled the conversation I’d had with my mother when I asked her about it. May thirtieth was the baby’s birthday. But that baby had died and been secretly buried. I looked again at the baby’s face in the photo, her pink rosebud lips wet with saliva, her eyes wide and curious. She looked very much alive.
A loud meow erupted from the back of the van, followed by a black blur as the cat flew past me and out the door into the rain. I stumbled backward, dropping the umbrella. Leaving it where it was, I slammed the van door, then ran toward the front door of the house, my mother following behind me with the wrapped album tucked beneath her arm.
We stood for a moment under the portico, dripping water and breathing heavily.
“Where did the cat come from?” my mother asked.
“From inside the van. I didn’t see it, and I probably didn’t hear it because of the rain pelting the roof of the van. I don’t know about that cat, but if I had nine lives, it just scared away one of them.”
My mother reached behind me and grabbed the large brass knocker and banged it against the wooden door two times. It vibrated inside the empty house, but although we waited for a full minute, there was no sound of approaching footsteps from inside. She reached behind me and rapped again, but I was already searching inside my purse for the house key Jayne had given me.
Before I could find it, the door flung open, ripping the knocker from my mother’s grasp, and slamming against the inside wall of the inky black foyer. The wind howled, sending slashing rain into our faces, pushing at our backs until we stumbled into the house, the door slamming closed behind us.
It was still and quiet inside, like being inside a cocoon, the rain and thunder oddly muted. I slid my hand toward where I knew the light switches were and flipped them all, but nothing happened. “The electricity’s out,” I said.
I sensed we weren’t alone, but the curtain had been pulled down again, blocking me from seeing. Whatever had been here opening and slamming doors was gone. I only knew that for certain because the hair on the back of my neck had settled, the gooseflesh on my arms gone.
“Jack?” I called out, my voice eerily reed-thin, as if it had been whispered through a metal pipe. We held our breath for a moment and then I pulled out my phone, not surprised to find No Service in the top left corner of the screen.
“At least the flashlight on my phone works,” I said with forced cheerfulness as I pressed the app button and flooded the space with light.
“That means I have one, too, right?” my mother asked as she began to fish through her raincoat pocket, the album hampering her movements. “Why on earth did Jack want us to bring this tonight? I hope he has a good reason.”
“I’m sure he does,” I said, reaching for the bag. She let go just a second before I had a good grasp on it, and the album slid from the bag and onto the floor, its splayed binding facing up, its position like that of a dead bird crashed to earth.
She guided her light to help as I knelt down to pick up the album and gather anything that might have fallen from it. The flashlight glinted off the gold-embossed number of the year on the spine and my hand froze—1984. The missing album. Slowly, I picked it up and turned it over, relieved to see that nothing had shaken loose. I closed it quickly, but not before I saw two pages filled with photographs of a small baby with a bow in her hair and swaddled in a blanket. I stood to face my mother.
“Jack said he’d visited the housekeeper of the lake house in Alabama, who admitted to taking a few things from the house before it flooded.” I placed the album on the hall table. “I think this is one of them.”