Retirement Can Be Murder

CHAPTER 18

Jake took the gear out of the trunk: the lenses, the tripod, the case, and the camera. Gary walked to his mailbox and pulled out a flier before heading in the direction of his garage.

“Jacob, you’ll finally see my darkroom!”

Jake breathed heavily, already sore from carrying the gear.

“Can you open the garage?”

“There’s one problem. We don’t have one of the doodads.”

“What doodad?”

“You know,” he said and gestured. “A remote control.”

“You mean a garage opener? Just go inside and open it then.”

“We don’t have one inside either. It’s a manual door. The doctor says the exertion of opening a door wouldn’t be good for me, in my damaged condition.”

Jake put down the lenses, the tripod, the case, and the camera and lifted open the garage door. He noticed the windows were taped up with black paper.

“This is your darkroom, isn’t it? Your garage.”

“Meryl didn’t want me to use the bathroom anymore. Once I switched the developing solution and shampoo.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, everything grew back in a month or two.”

They walked inside. Gary had hung notable photographs on the wall, attached with electrical tape. A cruise ship leaving a harbor. Sunset on a beach. And palm trees. Lots of palm trees.

“Do you like my gallery?”

“I actually do.”

Someone yelled through the closed door from inside the house, their voice totally muffled by the wood.

“Meryl, I know!” Gary yelled back. “We’ll put it out tomorrow!”

“Wait, you could hear that?”

“Of course not. But we’ve been married long enough that I can guess.”

Jake went back outside, dragged all the equipment in, and pulled down the garage door. Gary turned on the light so it wasn’t totally dark. Jake noticed the different stations, perfectly organized. Everything was labeled in glow in the dark pen, which made the labels shine softly in the light.

“So you got some good shots today?”

“Definitely. Do you want to shoot any other banquet halls for this story?”

“I’m going to interview some people, but I won’t bother asking you to photograph them. To be honest, the Palmstead’s as good as it gets. And Thompson just wants a good picture. He doesn’t care if it’s comprehensive.”

“That’s good.”

Jake sighed. He took a quick look at his notebook and then put it away. He was ready to talk about Charlotte.

“The real reason I wanted to come here today is that we have more important work to do. Gary, it’s a little beyond what I’m supposed to be writing. A little beyond my job description. But it’s the right thing.”

“I see.”

“I want you to help me. We need everything we have to try and make this work. Are we on the same page?”

“Of course!” he shouted. His cane was propped against the wall and he kicked it up to his hand. “I’ll be right back. I know just what we need to get started.”

He opened the door to the house and Jake smelled a mixture of garlic and Febreeze. He looked around the dark room. Large, but practical. A whole wall full of different cameras and film. Different types and vintages. A collage of Polaroids, arranged in a circle, each image overlapping the next. It was a nice room. He shrugged. Maybe the man knew what he was doing.

Gary opened the door.

“Jacob, I’m ready to begin.”

He was wearing his 3-D glasses. He waved his arms and whistled.

“Gary, that’s not what I was talking about.”

He was already walking around the room, pitching his head forward and backward at different photographs.

“Jacob!” he screamed. “This palm tree looked like it was grabbing me!”

“Don’t they have to be 3-D images?”

“I don’t think so,” he mumbled. He brought a picture of a vintage car close to his face and then let it fall to the ground. Jake reached forward and took the glasses off his head. Gary’s voice pitched high like a child’s.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

“Gary, when I said all that, I was talking about Charlotte. I think something happened to her.”

“Right. You said she died.”

“No, I mean that I don’t think that she died of natural causes. And I want to find out what happened.”

“Oh.”

“I know that we can figure it out.”

“I don’t think the 3-D glasses will help with that.”

“I know. We’re done with them.”

“Then why did you take them from me?”

“Gary, focus.” He put the glasses in his pocket. “Now I don’t know how to find out what really happened to Charlotte. But I think a good starting point is to go with what we have. I went to the beach and took photographs there. Can you get the ones you took of her apartment?”

Jake took his digital camera out and put it on the table. He turned it on and set the viewfinder upright. It showed the footprints on the beach, dark and random indentations. Gary came back with three different photographs in his hand, printed on large floppy sheets.

“It was a good experiment.”

“Why do they look like this?”

Each photograph was printed in brilliant color. The yellows looked like chrome and the blues were like the side of a freshly painted car. But they all had a fisheye perspective, centered on Charlotte’s face. Gary shrugged.

“That was my special lens. A fisheye lens. I hadn’t used one in years and thought this would be a good chance.”

“Great,” Jake said. “We need to find a clue and we have a fisheye.”

“You can still see the room.”

He could. In all the photographs, everything in the room seemed to converge on Charlotte’s pale face. She had no expression. Her mouth was flat. Not smiling. Not frowning. She was frozen there, inside the fisheye, and Jake didn’t know how to thaw her out.

“Now, honestly, I have no idea how to go about this.”

“What do you want to find?”

“I want something that tells us what happened.”

“How much do you need?”

“Not much. We just have to have something. Something that shows that Charlotte didn’t die of natural causes.”

“Something.”

“If we don’t, I’ll just decide that she was just crazy, that it was just her time. Unless…”

He stared into the photograph and started making a list. Her hair, her eyes, the fabric of her purple dress. Nothing. He didn’t know what she’d looked like when she died, so he couldn’t infer anything from that. He tried indexing each item in the room, but it all seemed obvious and plain.

“What about this?” Gary asked. He held Jake’s digital camera, which was showing the pictures of the beach.

“It’s the beach. Where she was found. I took a picture of the footprints, but it’s not like we know anything about Charlotte’s brand of shoes. And they didn’t find anything else on the beach.”

“I see why they have me do your photography.” He let out a whistle. “Even if we knew her shoes, we wouldn’t be able to tell which ones were hers. All these footprints are the same…”

Jake looked back at the fisheye picture again. There she was, in the center, her old life spiraling around her. The duck her husband made her. The coffee table where she read. The blinds she’d been afraid to open. The pills she always took. And then he saw it.

“Gary.”

“Yes?”

“You’re right. The footprints do all look the same.”

“So?”

“That’s the problem.”

He ran his finger along the trail of color in the fisheye photograph. Away from Charlotte’s purple dress and around her body. He pointed.

“Now look at the tracks.”

“I see them.”

“So, everyone says that Charlotte just went on a walk. She went for one last stroll on the beach because she knew it was her time. Well, Gary, these tracks show a lot of people walking on the beach.”

“So?”

“Right here,” Jake said and tapped the picture. “You saw her go from the living room to the kitchen. If Charlotte took a walk on the beach, how did she do it without making tracks? The tracks she would have to make?”

“But we can’t tell which shoes are hers.”

“No,” Jake said. “Where are the tracks from this? They didn’t find it on the beach.”

Swirled in color, next to Charlotte’s head, Jake held his finger still. He was pointing at Charlotte’s walker.