The Double Bind

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

WHAT DID THE neighbors think? Sometimes Laurel tried to imagine. Did the Buchanans care? First, in 1922, there was that nastiness near the ash heaps, the hit-and-run car accident, followed by the investigation and the inquest. There had to have been newspaper articles noting that Daisy was in the passenger seat of that bootlegger’s car when he slammed into Myrtle Wilson and left her to die in the street, her left breast literally ripped off by the front of the vehicle. Surely, the neighbors must have pondered, why was she with him? Most, Laurel presumed, came to the most likely of conclusions. Then, a few years later, there were the allegations that it was actually Daisy who had been behind the wheel that steamy dusk. Not Jay. The neighbors must have discussed those stories, too.

Likewise, Laurel was sure that they whispered about Tom Buchanan’s extramarital dalliances. The girl in Santa Barbara (a chambermaid), the woman in Chicago. And those were merely the affairs that occurred in the first three years of Tom and Daisy’s marriage. Even Pamela Marshfield had wondered that morning over tea why her parents had never moved.

And yet, somehow, the marriage had endured.

Saturday night, Laurel stared at the snapshot of Pamela and Bobbie as children beside the tan coupé, the portico towering high above their small, entitled shoulders. For the first time, it dawned on her that Bobbie might have been a reconciliation baby. A child conceived and birthed to show the world that the Buchanans’ marriage was fine. Rock solid. And the neighbors needn’t waste any energy at all wondering whether it could or it should be saved.

THE CHURCH SAT ATOP a small ridge perhaps a mile and a quarter beyond the village of Bartlett. Laurel stopped at a gas station on the main street to ask for directions, and found it easily within minutes. It was a classic New England church with a pair of tall, stately sugar maples out front, their colors just starting their transformation into what soon would become a phantasmagoric rainbow of reds. It had a modest, unadorned steeple, and clapboard the color of bone. The stained glass was more ornate, with most of the windows depicting crowns and scepters and crucifixes. The deacons, an elderly man and woman, welcomed her warmly when she arrived: They smelled fresh young blood.

She sat in the back, both because she knew no one and because her family had never been big churchgoers. She was, she realized, slightly overdressed in her lone white blouse and the black broomstick skirt she had found in the back of her closet, since everyone else who was there who was even close to her age was wearing blue jeans or khakis or (in the case of a couple of girls who looked to be seniors in high school) the sort of retro-looking miniskirts that Laurel herself often picked up at the vintage clothing stores near the Burlington waterfront. She felt badly that she was here under what had to be considered a false pretense, guilt that was only exacerbated when the family in the pew before her-a salt-of-the-earth farmer and his wife, a schoolteacher, and their four unkempt but well-behaved children between the ages of, she guessed, five and fifteen-greeted her with unnecessary but completely sincere handshakes and embraces. Even the littlest girl, a shy thing with a sticky palm, insisted on pumping her arm wildly during the moment in the service when the pastor asked everyone to say hello to the parishioners around them.

She restrained herself from asking them how well they had known Marcus Gregory Reese or a man named Bobbie Crocker. She knew she should wait until the coffee hour that, according to the program, would immediately follow the benediction.

When the service was over, the schoolteacher, a woman named Nancy, asked her how long she had lived in Vermont. The woman was simultaneously handing quarters to two of her children to bring to their Sunday school classes, while gathering up their crayons and coloring books and sweaters. The older kids had shot from the sanctuary to their classrooms the moment the service had ended.

“Eight years,” Laurel answered. “And you?”

Nancy kissed her remaining children on the tops of their heads and then watched as her husband brought them across the large, suddenly noisy room to their teachers.

“My whole life. I was born here. What did you say your name was?”

“ Laurel.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you. Did I hear you right earlier: You live up in Burlington?” “I do.”

The teacher stiffened just the tiniest bit, as if she sensed that Laurel wasn’t here entirely because she was shopping for a church to call home.

“What brings you to Bartlett? It was probably a pleasant drive this morning. But it won’t be come winter.”

Laurel smiled in a way that she hoped was at once ingratiating and honest. “I want to learn about a member of this congregation who recently died-and a friend of his.”

The woman nodded, and then rested a finger-the nail a near-perfect oval, the white at the tip a crisp sickle moon-on her chin. “And that would be?”

“Marcus Gregory Reese. He-”

“Oh, I knew Reese. That’s what he went by. Reese.”

“Can I talk to you about him?”

“Sure, but I didn’t know him well. I mean, I rarely saw him other than Sundays. A couple of Thursday mornings in the summer, maybe, when the seniors would get together here at the church to play games. Sometimes I’d join them-you know, add a little youth to the mix? Pour the juice, brew the coffee? And I might have run into him once or twice at the grocery store. But that was really about it. Which of his friends do you want to meet? Perhaps I can introduce you.”

“That’s the problem. He died, too.”

“I see.”

“Bobbie Crocker. Ring a bell?”

“Huh, Bobbie died? I’m really sorry. I’d wondered what happened to him. He just disappeared off the face of the planet, didn’t he? When did he die? And how?”

“A couple weeks ago. A stroke.”

“They sat over there,” the schoolteacher said, extending one of her long fingers with the lovely nails in the direction of the pews on the other side of the sanctuary. “Bobbie and Reese. I think they might have lived together, but I’m not sure. Why are you interested in them? Are you related to one of them?”

“No.”

“Then why? May I ask? I don’t want to pry.”

Laurel thought for a moment before answering because there were just so many reasons. There was her curiosity about how Bobbie had gone from the Buchanan estate in East Egg to a single room at the Hotel New England. There was her sense that the two of them were connected since he had grown up in a house across the cove from the very club where she had spent a sizable chunk of her childhood, and then, perhaps, been photographing up in Underhill on that grim, tree-canopied dirt road on the day she had nearly been killed. There was her respect for his talents as a photographer and her desire to annotate his work properly, both for a show and for posterity. And, pure and simple, there were the mysteries: Why had his family cut him off years ago, and why was his sister insisting upon the fiction that they were unrelated today? Why was she claiming that her brother had been dead for so many decades? It was all too much to explain to this sweet woman in the back of a church on a Sunday morning, however, and so she simply told Nancy what she did for a living and that she was researching some photographs that were found in Bobbie’s apartment after he died. She left it at that.

“Well, if you want to talk to someone who knew them better than I did, try that lady over there. Her name is Jordie.”

“Jordie…”

“It’s short for Jordan. She’s another senior in the church, and she moved here from New York, too. She was also part of that Thursday morning seniors’ game day I told you about. When Bobbie was living here, he and Reese and Jordie were real staples,” Nancy said, and abruptly called over to a slightly stooped old woman in an elegant cardigan with pearl buttons and a short crop of platinum hair impeccably coiffed and slightly feathered. Her face was deeply furrowed, but Laurel couldn’t tell for a moment if the wrinkles were all due entirely to age or the way she was laughing in response to something a nearby parishioner had said. She looked more like a peer of Pamela Marshfield than a dowager in a small town in Vermont. Laurel could imagine the woman in a spa or a country club or jauntily waving to a doorman as she passed beneath an immaculate awning on Manhattan ’s Upper East Side. Nancy called again, this time starting down the aisle toward the woman and dragging Laurel with her. Jordie finally noticed them and smiled at Nancy as they arrived at her side.

“Jordie, I have someone here who wants to meet you,” the schoolteacher said. “This is Laurel. She’s interested in Reese and Bobbie, and I thought you might be able to help her. Do you have a moment?”

The woman eyed her, bobbing her head and scrutinizing the girl. Appraising her. The seemingly good-natured laugh Laurel had witnessed a moment ago had evaporated completely, and the social worker assumed it was because of the subject of her inquiry.

“I have a moment,” said Jordie carefully. “What do you do, young lady? Are you a writer?” She said the last word almost scornfully. Are you a pornographer? “I’ve had some bad experiences with reporters in my day, and I’d rather not have another.”

“I’m a social worker,” Laurel answered. “I work for BEDS. Up in Burlington?” She had surprised herself by turning a simple declarative into a question. Was she that intimidated? She reminded herself that in the last week she had confronted Pamela Buchanan Marshfield and T. J. Leckbruge, and hadn’t backed down from either.

“Yes, I’m familiar with BEDS.”

“Well, that’s how I got interested in them. Bobbie Crocker was one of our clients.”

At first she thought Jordie was nodding her head in recognition, but then she understood it was the bounce of a person with Parkinson’s. “One of your clients?” she asked, and that glacial veil, part suspicion and part condescension, thawed in an instant.

“Yes.”

“He was…homeless?”

“He was. He passed away two weeks ago.”

“Oh, I feel horrible,” she said, her voice growing soft. “Just horrible. I didn’t know he had wound up on the streets. I didn’t know he had died.”

“Jordie,” Nancy said, wrapping one arm around the old woman’s shoulder consolingly, “don’t feel bad. None of us knew.”

“He’d been living with Reese, you see,” Jordie said, so shaken by the news that she lowered herself carefully down onto the back wall of the pew.

“Yes, that’s what I thought.”

“It was Reese’s house. And when Reese died, his sister said he could stay there till she sold it.”

“When was this?” Laurel asked.

“At his funeral.”

“And his sister’s name is Mindy, right? And she lives in Florida?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“So Bobbie was at Reese’s funeral?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“Did he say whether he was going to take Mindy up on her offer?”

“This was all such a long time ago. Two years ago, at least. Maybe three.”

Briefly, Laurel considered correcting Jordie, reminding her that it was only a little over fourteen months ago that Reese had passed away. But there was no reason. “What do you remember?” she asked, though her faith in the woman’s memory had been shaken a tiny bit by this lapse.

“Well, we discovered that Bobbie’s mother and my aunt were friends. Isn’t that a small world?”

“Jordie, you never told us!” Nancy said lightly, as her youngest daughter abruptly reappeared in the sanctuary. Apparently, the drawing the girl had made for her Sunday school teacher was still in their car and she needed her mother to help her retrieve it. Nancy shrugged apologetically and said she’d be right back.

“Bobbie didn’t like to talk about his family,” Jordie continued. “I guess they had some sort of falling out.”

“Did he tell you his mother’s name?” Laurel asked, waiting for the confirmation she could share with David and Katherine and Talia-with everyone who seemed to be doubting her.

“Crocker, I assume,” Jordie replied, and Laurel felt a sharp spike of disappointment. “Ladies of that generation-heavens, ladies of my generation!-always took their husbands’ last names. That’s just the way it was done.”

“What about a first name?”

“Oh, I can’t remember anymore. If only you’d asked me six or seven months ago. But I’m honestly not sure if I ever knew. I told him my aunt’s name, but I’m not positive he ever told me his mother’s. Lord, growing old really isn’t for the faint of heart, is it? You forget so much.”

“Well, then, tell me, please, anything you can remember,” said Laurel. “Anything at all.” Perhaps, she thought, there would still be a surprising, corroborative detail.

“Okay. He lived on Long Island. He grew up there, you know.”

“I did know that, yes.”

“And he had a sister.”

“Did he tell you her name?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m sorry. But she was older, I am quite sure of that, and…”

“And?”

“And my aunt gave that girl a putter once, Bobbie’s sister, that is, when the girl was little more than a toddler. A tiny golf putter. It was a present. Bobbie said that his mother had always liked my aunt very much. Yes, very, very much. They didn’t always travel in the same social circles because his mother was married and my aunt wasn’t, but they went to an awful lot of parties together-including some at that famous bootlegger’s estate. You know the one.”

“Gatsby’s?”

“Well, that wasn’t his real name, of course. But, yes, that’s who I mean. When Bobbie found out who my aunt was, he said that his mother and my aunt spent a lot of time there together. Really, a very good amount, especially when they were in their early twenties. I don’t remember exactly what he said-I don’t remember anything exactly these days-but one time he implied that his mother had liked that awful man more than my aunt had. Gatsby. Gatz. Whatever. Can you imagine? I’m sure that wasn’t true. People just went to his parties because they were great big festivals. Circuses. No one actually went because they liked him. Good heavens, how could they?”

“What about your aunt? What was her name?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ve heard of her, young lady. Her name was Jordan Baker, and I’m named after her. She was a famous golfer on the women’s pro tour. A real pioneer. But there are still some people out there who think she was some sort of cheat on the golf course. A sneak! Well, that wasn’t my aunt, I promise you. And that’s why I wanted to know if you were a reporter. I can’t tell you how many people I have had to talk to over the years about my aunt as a result of some malicious and completely untrue story about a tournament she was in as a very young woman.”

“Oh, no one thinks badly of your aunt,” Laurel reassured her, though she certainly had: She had indeed viewed the golfer as a cheat and a sneak. And, she realized, she was incapable of mustering much respect for anyone who had sided with Tom and Daisy Buchanan that summer of 1922.

Jordie looked up at her now, her venerable head still quivering slightly, and repeated, “Really, Bobbie could have stayed with me. You believe that, don’t you? I have so much empty, dusty space. He could have had his own little wing with a room and a bathroom! All he had to do was ask!”

“I’m sure he could have stayed with half the people in this church, if you’d known,” Laurel said. “He was…”

“Yes?”

She had started to tell her that he was schizophrenic, but at the last moment had reined herself in. Jordie didn’t need to know. “He was private,” she said simply.

Jordie seemed to think about this. Then: “Did he come straight to you?”

“You mean after he left Reese’s house?”

“Yes.”

Again Laurel decided there was no point in telling the truth. The woman felt terrible enough as it was. And so she lied. “I think so,” she said. “He was very happy. I want you to know that. And we found him a nice apartment in Burlington and he made friends there very quickly. He was okay. Really, he was.”

“We used to play bridge on Thursday mornings right here at the church,” Jordie continued. “That’s when the seniors get together to play games. There was Reese and Bobbie and Lida and me. It was always great fun.”

“Yes, Nancy told me.”

“No, it wasn’t bridge,” Jordie corrected herself. “I used to play bridge with Reese and Lida and Tammy Purinton. Bobbie hated bridge. Really, my memory has just gotten so bad!”

“I think that’s true for all of us,” Laurel said, partly to be polite and partly because there were events in her own life that she imagined she remembered incorrectly. Even at her age the brain was an imperfect mass of gray and white tissue; even at her age there were moments in her past that her own mental health demanded she forget. Or, at the very least, revise. Everyone did that, didn’t they?

“I just don’t know why he didn’t go home,” Jordie went on. “He must have had family left somewhere. I think his sister was still alive. At least she was a couple of years ago.”

Laurel smiled supportively. “His sister’s fine. I’ve met her. She lives in East Hampton.”

“Of course, he did like Vermont. That’s why he came back. That, I guess, and Reese.”

“Came back?”

“He had come here once before to see his son. One autumn.”

“His son?” The surprise and the incredulity had caused her to raise her voice, and the old woman recoiled slightly. “Bobbie had a son?” she continued, trying to soften the sudden reediness in her tone.

“I think he did. Maybe I’m mistaken.”

“What did he say?”

“He just…”

“Yes?”

“He just mentioned him the one time. Maybe twice. But it was clear Bobbie didn’t want to talk about him because he had been in some kind of trouble.”

“How old was he? His sixties? Fifties?”

“Younger than that. And the first time that Bobbie had come to Vermont must have been six or seven years ago-when Bobbie had been younger, too.”

“Six? Or seven?”

“Please, you’re asking too much.”

“It matters.”

“But I don’t know, Laurel.”

She thought the lights in the church, already sallow, were growing dimmer still. But she understood this wasn’t really the case. It was because the light-headedness was returning. She felt herself swaying in place and looked down at the burnished pine floor to try to regain her equilibrium.

“Do you know what kind of trouble?” she asked finally, carefully articulating each word. “Was he in trouble with the law? Had he committed a crime?”

“Yes, I think that’s it,” said Jordie carefully.

“What kind of crime?”

“I don’t know. That I never knew. But Bobbie came to Vermont to visit him. Wait…”

“Go on.”

“I think Bobbie came to Vermont to see him, and then something happened-”

“To Bobbie or to his son?”

“To his son. And Bobbie left. Bobbie didn’t come here because his son had done something. But then he left after the boy got in trouble. He returned to…to wherever it was that he came from.”

“And this was seven years ago?”

“Or six. Or eight. I just don’t know. I can’t trust my memory-and neither should you. But it was the autumn. I can tell you that. When Bobbie mentioned his child, he said he had come here that first time because he had wanted to see the leaves change colors before he died.”

“Did he say where he was in Vermont?”

“Underhill,” she said, and a moment later Nancy returned from the wing of the church with the Sunday school classrooms. The teacher raised her eyebrows quizzically at the two of them, now ruminating silently together, the girl stooped over as if she, too, were desperately old. Laurel reached for Jordie’s tired, gnarled hand, the flesh a little cold, and thanked her. Said good-bye. She tried to stand up a little straighter, to regain her composure. Then she found it within herself to smile for Nancy, tell her about Bobbie’s son, and allow the schoolteacher to lead her downstairs to the coffee hour that followed the service.

“I DIDN’T REALIZE Bobbie had any children,” Nancy was saying, as they wandered downstairs from the sanctuary into a large room filled with folding metal chairs and folding metal tables and posters on the walls for the church’s different mission offerings. There was a big crowd of adults here, milling about and sipping coffee, senior citizens and the parents whose children were in Sunday school.

“Me, neither. He certainly hadn’t told his friends in Burlington. He hadn’t told any of us at BEDS.”

“You sound angry-like he should have.”

“If I had known who Bobbie’s son was, we would have had a very different relationship.”

“You knew his son? From the little Jordie just told you? How?”

Laurel quickly backpedaled: “I did not definitely know him. But I might have.” She was unprepared to explain who Bobbie’s son was both because she was still reeling from the discovery and because she didn’t want to discuss what had happened to her up in Underhill. Not with this new acquaintance. She never even discussed it with her mother or her closest friends.

“But how?” Nancy asked again.

“His son might have been a drifter. Or a bodybuilder.”

“There’s more. I can tell.”

“I guess I just want to know why this child wasn’t taking better care of his father. Or, at least, trying.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all,” Laurel lied. Then: “I’m sorry I made Jordie sad when I told her that Bobbie had been homeless.”

“See, isn’t Jordie sweet? Some people find her a little unapproachable, a little off-putting, because there is just so much blue blood in her veins. But she’s actually very kind-though she used to be a killer when she played bridge. It’s too bad her mind isn’t as sharp as it was even a year ago. Trust me: You wanted to be her partner if you played.”

“She told me Bobbie hated bridge. But I could have sworn his sister said he loved it when I talked to her last week in East Hampton.”

“You drove all the way out to East Hampton?”

“It wasn’t a big deal. I was already on Long Island anyway. I was visiting my mom. She left for Italy yesterday, and I thought I would drop in before she left.”

Nancy eyed her carefully. “Is this really just about those photos that were in Bobbie’s apartment?”

“That’s how it began,” she answered. “There is more to it now.”

The schoolteacher reached for a pair of mugs beside a metal coffee urn and handed one to Laurel. Then she motioned for the social worker to help herself to the containers of cream and milk and the dish overflowing with packets of sugar and Splenda. “Well, here’s what Bobbie told me about bridge. He said his parents used to fight when he was a boy, and one of the ways his mother dealt with a pretty poor marriage was to play bridge-but not with her husband. It sounded like it was a ladies’ league. She started playing the summer before Bobbie was born. She’d disappear most afternoons, leaving his older sister alone with the nurse. Apparently, the game became an addiction for her. Years later, she wasn’t even home the day-or the night, for all I know-when Bobbie had some huge blowout with his father and left for good. He said he never saw the man again.”

In some ways, Laurel thought, the pieces were fitting together as precisely as a jigsaw puzzle. She wondered what this perfectly nice woman would say if she were to inform her, Bobbie’s mother was Daisy Fay Buchanan. And she wasn’t playing bridge that first summer. She was disappearing those afternoons to be with Jay Gatsby. Bridge was just her ruse. Her cover.

No doubt the schoolteacher would, like everyone else, smile on the outside while believing on the inside that she was either mistaken or nuts. Nancy would probably conclude that she was more paranoid than some of her clients if she knew that the man’s photographs and contact sheets and negatives were locked in a case right now in the back of her car-if the woman knew that she was going to hand them off to a waitress at a Burlington diner because there were people who wanted those pictures as much as she did and so she had to hide them some place safe.

“You said you wanted to meet the minister,” Nancy was saying, gently leading Laurel over to him. “I don’t know what he can tell you about Bobbie, because Bobbie wasn’t with us very long. But he can probably tell you something about Reese.”

Laurel thought the minister looked to be about David’s age. He had a high forehead beneath a brush cut of reddish-brown hair. His eyes were a little sunken, but he had a strong chin and a wide, infectious smile. His name, she knew from the program, was Randall Stone, but everyone seemed to be calling him Randy. After Nancy had introduced them, she explained to him why the young social worker had driven to Bartlett that morning. His face grew solemn when she told him that Bobbie had passed away.

“And you met him through your work with BEDS,” he said to Laurel, not a question but a statement. He was, clearly, enduring precisely the sort of guilt that Jordie had experienced just now when she had learned what had happened to Reese’s friend after the old editor had died.

“Yes. But he didn’t stay long in the shelter before we found him an apartment. His place wasn’t palatial, but it was a bed and it was warm and it was his own.”

The minister ballooned his checks in exasperation, then exhaled. “He told me he was going to move in with his sister.”

“Did he say where she lived?”

“ Long Island. East Hampton, maybe. The last time I saw him was at Reese’s funeral. I really should have gotten a better handle on his plans. We all knew he was more than a little off.”

“Off?”

“I’m not sure where he’d been living for most of the years before he showed up at Reese’s doorstep like a stray cat, but his address immediately before moving in with Reese was the Vermont State Hospital.”

Laurel had chosen not to tell Jordie the specifics of Bobbie’s mental illness, but she saw no reason not to share these details with the pastor. “Bobbie was a schizophrenic,” she said. “When he was medicated, he could more or less function. Not completely, of course. And like most schizophrenics, he didn’t believe he was ill-and so sometimes he would stop taking his medicine when he wasn’t supervised.”

“Do you know if he ever married?” he asked. “I couldn’t get a simple yes or no answer when I asked him that one day when he was here playing Scrabble.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I don’t think he did,” Nancy answered. “He and Reese had some inside joke about a ballerina he was seeing in the 1960s, but I guess Bobbie wasn’t exactly the commitment type.”

“But he might have had a son,” said Laurel. “Jordie Baker believes that he did.”

“That’s a news flash for me. I had no idea.”

“So he just appeared in Bartlett one day? Reese had no idea he was coming?”

“As I understand it, Bobbie came to Vermont looking for Reese a little over two years ago, but something happened and he wound up at the state hospital. Reese wasn’t expecting him. While he was there, someone on the hospital staff located Reese, and Reese was extraordinarily magnanimous. He invited Bobbie to move in with him when the hospital team said he was ready. I gather Bobbie had lived with him once before-years ago, when Reese was married. Reese grilled him a couple of times about where he’d been since then, but the answers were inconsistent. Sometimes Bobbie said he had been in Louisville, sometimes he said he had been in the Midwest. At least once he said he had been near his sister on Long Island. I’m sure he had other answers, too. But in all of his stories, he never once mentioned a son.”

“Did he say why he was always on the move?”

“I asked him that when we met. He made a joke about having to stay one step ahead of the hounds.”

“It probably wasn’t a joke. He might really have thought he was being pursued,” Laurel said. And, she thought, it was possible that someone really was trailing him for those photos.

“Is that a symptom of schizophrenia?” Nancy asked.

“Paranoia? Often.”

Randy jumped in. “Whoa, I don’t know if Bobbie actually meant anything by that remark. It might have been just a joke. I mean, another time when we were chatting he said something like ‘Guests are like fish. You keep them around too long and they start to smell.’”

“As far as I know, Reese was a photo editor and Bobbie was a photographer,” Laurel said. “Bobbie used to work for Reese. Is that how you believe they knew each other? Or is there more to it than that?”

“Reese was a successful photojournalist, too,” the pastor said. “He worked for newspapers, magazines, even Life in its heyday. This was the Life that my parents-and your grandparents-pored over weekly.”

“And what about Bobbie?” she asked.

“Well, like you said: He took some pictures for Reese. For Life. The problem was that he wasn’t very dependable. Both Reese and Bobbie made jokes about that, too. The man was his own worst enemy in terms of a career.”

“Because of the schizophrenia,” she said.

“And the drinking. He was an alcoholic, and he was irresponsible. He’d get into trouble.”

Nancy glanced quickly at Laurel. When their eyes met, the schoolteacher looked down at the tile floor.

Laurel turned back to the pastor and asked, “Did you ever see any of Bobbie’s photographs?”

“I saw the ones he took when he was living here. When he was staying with Reese, Reese would loan him his camera and chauffeur him around. And I saw a bunch Bobbie said he took in Vermont years before that. Fall foliage stuff. A batch of a dirt road up in Underhill-one that might have had a bicyclist in it, I think.”

“Was he living with Reese when he took those?”

“Oh, no. He only reappeared in Reese’s life the year before last,” the minister said, as two other parishioners, an elderly couple, descended on him. Laurel had the distinct sense that she had monopolized the pastor long enough and so she allowed him to be pulled into their conversation.

“I hope you’ll come back,” Randy said to her.

“I will,” she said, though she honestly wasn’t sure whether she meant Bartlett or the church.

“I just thought of one more thing.” This was Nancy, speaking softly although the nearby parishioners were so engrossed in their conversation that they couldn’t possibly have heard what she’d said. Laurel understood this was an invitation of some sort. It was why Nancy had looked at her so seriously a moment earlier.

“Yes?”

“Maybe it was the word trouble that made me think of it. That same day we were playing Scrabble-right over there, as a matter of fact-Bobbie said something about jail. It came up right after he’d turned the word fine into confine. You know, by adding c-o-n? Something about the connection and the moment, I don’t know, it made me sure that he was talking about a prison.”

“And you thought Bobbie was talking about himself…”

She nodded. “I did at the time. But now I learn that his son may have been a criminal. Maybe that’s what Bobbie was thinking about. It wasn’t Bobbie who had ever been behind bars. Maybe it was his son who had once gone to jail.”

“Or, maybe,” Laurel said, thinking aloud, “his son is there now.”

THAT AFTERNOON, SERENA told Laurel that she, too, had never heard Bobbie Crocker mention a son. She said she could barely imagine such a thing. Now she was gazing at the photographs Laurel had made from the negatives Bobbie Crocker had left behind at the Hotel New England, as well as at the handful of fading, dog-eared prints he had carried with him for years. The waitress was working in Burlington that day, and so she and Laurel were meeting in a booth in the back of the diner, a slightly incongruous world of train-car-slick chromes and panels of dark heavy wood, Bobbie’s pictures carefully stacked in a black portfolio case that-when open-took up virtually the entire top of the table. The restaurant was half filled, but the real rush was over, and so the waitress who was working with Serena that day, a matronly middle-aged woman named Beverly, had insisted that her younger associate join Laurel in the booth.

“And you want me to hang on to these,” Serena said, her voice hovering on an edge between incredulity and mere bewilderment. She looked older to Laurel in her beige uniform. The dress was too tight across her breasts, and she had pulled her rich mane of hair back in a styleless bun.

“I do. There are still negatives I haven’t finished working with, and so I’m hanging onto those. For the moment, anyway. But as I print those pictures I’ll bring them to you, too.”

“I like this one,” she said, stalling for time as she processed Laurel ’s request. She was staring at the image of the Mustang in front of Bobbie’s childhood home. “I know a person up in Stowe who collects vintage cars. He has a Mustang just like that one: White with the black hardtop. Very classic.”

“Bobbie was a talented guy.”

She nodded and then looked up at Laurel gravely, her face a vessel bracing for bad weather. “Okay, why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want me to keep these for you?”

Laurel took a sip of her soda. She had expected this question, but in a diner in the light of day-away from the darkroom and people like T. J. Leckbruge-she feared that whatever she said might sound a trifle insane. Maybe more than a trifle. But she knew this wasn’t the case. It wasn’t as if she had made up Leckbruge or Pamela Buchanan Marshfield. It wasn’t as if she had manufactured the connections between Bobbie Crocker and a house in East Egg, Long Island. She had the pictures to prove the connection was real, and they were right there between them on the Formica-topped table.

“Well, his sister wants them,” she answered. “That woman I told you about on Friday. I met with her lawyer yesterday, and I came away with a very bad feeling.”

“Meaning?”

“I don’t think they’re safe with me.”

Serena leaned forward across the tabletop. “What are you really saying, Laurel? Do you honestly believe Bobbie’s sister or this lawyer is going to send some goon to break your legs for a couple of ancient black and whites of dudes playing chess? Do you really believe someone wants a picture of a Mustang that badly?”

Laurel considered tapping the side of the portfolio case and correcting her: This was far more than a couple of images. But that wasn’t Serena’s point. “I don’t think anyone would hurt me,” she said evenly. “I wouldn’t ask you to hang on to them for me if I thought someone would hurt you or your aunt. But, yes, I do think it’s possible they might have someone try to steal them-or resort to more aggressive legal tactics.”

“Which would be?”

“I’m not sure.”

“So my having the pictures would be a secret? No one would know?”

“No one but us.”

Serena sat back in the booth and rested her hands in her lap. “You know, if I didn’t know you and what you did for a living, I might have thought you were the one who had just stumbled in off the streets-or come here from the state hospital.”

“Look, I know I seem a little irrational. But I’m not. And until I know why Bobbie Crocker changed his name or why his sister wants these pictures so badly, I need your help. Okay?”

“Of course it’s okay. Of course I’ll help you. But, Laurel, doesn’t this all seem a little, I don’t know, beyond irrational? A little…”

“A little what?”

She smiled sheepishly. “I’m just worried about you. That’s all.”

“Why does it seem that strange and absurd? Good Lord, Serena, you were homeless. I would have thought you would have understood as well as anyone just how strange and absurd life can get!” She was aware that her tone sounded defensive and sharp and just a little bit whiny.

“I was only saying-”

“I know what you were saying. You and David and my boss and my roommate are all treating me like I’m insane. Like this is all something I’ve completely made up!” She hadn’t planned on raising her voice, but she had, and she could see that the other customers were now watching them.

“I didn’t say you’d made anything up,” Serena murmured.

The waitress was trying to pacify her, and this only made Laurel ’s frustration more pronounced. But she didn’t want to get Serena in trouble by making a scene in the woman’s restaurant, and so she tried to make light of her outburst. “I didn’t sleep well last night,” she said, making a conscious effort to keep her voice friendly and calm while acknowledging that in Serena’s eyes (though most certainly not in her own) she had overreacted.

“I understand,” Serena said, and then she looked past Laurel, over her shoulder. Laurel turned and saw arriving at her side a short, older man with milky blue eyes. He was wearing a red V-neck sweater with a white polo shirt with an unfashionably large, pointed collar beneath it. The collar looked like the wings on a paper airplane. Although he had little hair left on his scalp, he had dwarf topiaries emerging from his nostrils and his ears. Laurel knew she had seen him somewhere before, but she wasn’t sure where. Almost instantly he ended the mystery.

“So, I saw you at church just now, talking to my friend Jordie,” he said. “Ain’t she a peach?”

“She is a peach,” Laurel said, glancing quickly at Serena and then starting to rise to be polite.

“Don’t get up. Not for an old wolf like me. Are these Reese’s or Bobbie’s?” he asked, sweeping his hand over the portfolio case as if he had a magic wand in his fingers.

“They’re Bobbie’s,” she answered. “I’m sorry. I must have missed your name.”

“Hey, I’m the one who should be sorry. It’s Shem. Short for Sherman. My name is Shem Wolfe. I go to the church you were just at. It’s a nice church. I used to like a place closer to Burlington. But now I go to Bartlett Congregational. I don’t mind the drive. What are your names?”

The two young women introduced themselves. Then, one at a time, he surrounded their fingers and palms with his own oddly meaty, age-spot-ridden hands. “So tell me, how is Bobbie doing? Where is he these days?”

Laurel wondered if the news that Bobbie had died would be a blow, because it was possible that he and Bobbie had been friends. But Shem was old and Bobbie had been even older, and so she simply forged ahead and told him. “He died. But he died quickly-a stroke-and so he didn’t suffer. He was living in Burlington. Only five or six blocks from here, actually.”

He nodded, absorbing the news. “Oh, that’s too bad. I’m sorry. When did he pass?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“I wish I’d known. You know? I woulda gone to the service. There was a service, right?”

“A small one.”

“I bet Jordie woulda gone, too. Really, I’m sorry. Still, I always say you should be a man’s friend when he’s living. Not after he’s passed.” He made a clicking sound with his tongue against his dentures, then sighed. “I’d join you two beautiful girls-well, I’d ask to join you, I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to suppose you wanted more company-but I was just leaving. I teach a journalism class at the community college. I know, I know, I’m too old. I shoulda retired. But I wrote for newspapers when I was younger and I love a good story. Finding one, telling one. Teaching others how to tell ’em. Anyway, I still have lots to do before class tomorrow.”

“And I should go help Beverly,” Serena said, rising. “That’s a pretty big family that just pulled into the parking lot. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes, Laurel, okay?”

“I’m not driving you away, am I?” Shem asked.

“No, not at all. I’ll be back.”

Shem bent over the table to stare at the top picture in the portfolio case, the one of the Mustang beneath the Buchanan portico. He studied the photograph and then exhaled loudly.

“That Bobbie sure grew up with one big silver spoon in his mouth,” he said.

Laurel was taken aback. Had this Shem Wolfe really just implied that he knew this was the home in which Bobbie Crocker had grown up?

“You know this was Bobbie’s parents’ house?” she asked him, wishing she could rein in her enthusiasm and make her voice sound more casual.

“Well, it was his mom’s house. The old Buchanan place, right? But Bobbie’s old man-his real dad, anyway-lived over the water in West Egg.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, I guess I’m slicing hairs, you know? Very fine hairs. But maybe not. Tom Buchanan raised Bobbie for a while and put a roof over his head. Bobbie lived with the man for what, sixteen, seventeen years? Something like that. But his real allegiance, once he figured it out, was always to his real dad. Or, I guess, to the ghost of his real dad. Because, of course, they never met. But Bobbie told me twice-really, two times-that he’d never stopped wishing he’d got to meet that Jay Gatsby.”

SHEM WOLFE WAS indeed a remarkable storyteller, and that afternoon he told Laurel what he knew of Bobbie Crocker’s youth. Apparently, Reese had been aware all along of who the periodically homeless man’s father had been, and in the year that Bobbie had lived with Reese in Vermont, Bobbie had grown sufficiently comfortable with Reese’s friend, Shem, to share with him his life story, too. The three of them-the two old photographers and the one old reporter-reminisced often.

“Reese always cut Bobbie a little extra slack,” Shem said. After Serena had left, he had taken her seat across from Laurel, deciding that his class preparation could wait another half hour.

“He was an addled man, and I guess he had been an addled boy,” he told her. “Sometimes even voices-in-his-head-addled. And always a little unfocused, a little edgy.” Shem had learned that Bobbie hadn’t been much of a student and he’d never been much of an athlete. As a result, he had never had much of a relationship with Tom Buchanan, the man he assumed was his father. The family rarely mentioned the baronial estate across the cove, and no one ever dared bring up the car accident. Adult neighbors and schoolteachers never discussed it around Bobbie when he was a child. The other boys, however, occasionally would flaunt the rumors they’d heard, for no other reason than the reality that boys can be cruel. Usually, the tales bordered on the fantastic and had only the most tenuous connection to the all-too-prosaic truth. At least one first-grader liked to insist that Bobbie had Martian blood coursing inside him. A third-grade boy announced to the class that the man Bobbie still believed was his father-Tom Buchanan, of all people-had made his fortune with a string of speakeasies. In the fourth grade, there were stories swirling about him that his mother had killed a man-a tale that Bobbie would later realize had at least a semblance of truth, since his own father might not have died if his mother had told Tom Buchanan who had been driving that tragic afternoon. And, though it was an accident, his mother really had killed Myrtle Wilson.

It first dawned on Bobbie in the sixth grade that he had been conceived in the summer of 1922: the summer of his mother’s alleged dalliance with that dead criminal who had once lived across the cove. He wrote this off as coincidence on a conscious level, and for a time even viewed it as corroboration that his mother could not possibly have been involved with Jay Gatsby. Back then, he presumed, his parents had still loved each other.

It was, perhaps not surprisingly, a photograph that had set in motion the final fight with Tom that would cause him to leave home. When he was sixteen he found a greeting-card-sized image of a young soldier in one of his mother’s ragged old books. The lieutenant was a little older than Bobbie at the time, but the teen couldn’t help but notice an uncanny resemblance between himself and the officer. He could see it in the hard, solemn cast of the man’s face, the high cheekbones, the firm jaw: the restlessness and ambition in the fellow’s dark eyes. There was a note on the back of the photograph in a handwriting Bobbie didn’t recognize:

For my golden girl,

Love, Jay

Camp Taylor , 1917

For years now, Bobbie had known the specific allegations about his mother and Jay Gatsby. Sometimes he had given the tawdry claims more credence than at others. But he had still been too young to accept with certainty the notion that his mother could be so deceitful and, ironically, that his father could be so magnanimous-at least when it came to raising Jay Gatsby’s bastard son. He just couldn’t quite believe the lurid stories could be true, though he had felt his relationship with his mother begin to change. He had found himself looking upon her differently. Less the victim in a turbulent marriage. Less the frivolous Louisville belle, still years short of serious middle-age. Less unreservedly innocent. But he had nonetheless remained confident that his father-or, to be precise, the man who was raising him-was far too arrogant and cruel to raise his wife’s lover’s baby. It wasn’t possible.

But this picture he had discovered in the old book suggested that it was. No, this picture proved to him that it was. He was an aspiring photographer, he knew that pictures didn’t lie. At least in those days they didn’t. And Tom Buchanan had to know. If he hadn’t known for sure in 1923, he had to have figured it out by now. The resemblance was unambiguous. Why then did this conceited, brutish man abide having him under his roof, within a stone’s throw of his precious polo ponies and his half acre of roses? And the answer, Bobbie realized, was clear. Pride. Precisely because Tom Buchanan was so arrogant, he was never going to acknowledge aloud that his wife had slept with Jay Gatsby-and thus the rest of the story, including the awful ways George and Myrtle Wilson had died, might be true, too. Tom might allude to the affair, he might allow the subterranean truth a glimmer of sun in a catty remark when he and Daisy were fighting-odd comments Bobbie had witnessed or overheard suddenly made sense-but he would never give public credence to the notion that he had been cuckolded by the low-rent criminal across the way.

In hindsight, Bobbie told Shem, he wished that he had waited until his mother had returned from her card game before demanding to hear what had really occurred in 1922. It wasn’t as if he didn’t already know. But he was filled with such adolescent rage that when he saw Tom in the kitchen-the very room in which this man and his mother had reconciled mere hours after Myrtle Wilson had died on the street near the ash heaps-he exploded. Here was the man who, in essence, had had his father killed. He took a swing at Tom, but the punch was well telegraphed and Tom decked the boy. Asked him if he wanted to climb up off the tile and take another. His sister made an attempt to calm both men down, but her efforts were doomed to fail because Bobbie knew where her loyalties lay. He understood now why his father always treated her so differently from him. Besides, she had always tried to defend her parents, and their behavior was indefensible. He wanted as little to do with her as he did with Daisy and Tom.

“And after he left?” Laurel asked Shem. “What then?”

“Then the story grows sketchy.”

“How so?”

“Sometimes I couldn’t tell what were the things Bobbie had actually done and what were the memories he was making up. But Reese knew some details, and between what Bobbie had told Reese years ago and what Reese recalled from the days they worked together at the magazine, you could get glimmers.”

“Such as?”

Shem rested his head in his hands, his mind a wardrobe of Bobbie’s reminiscences-some real, some imagined. He told Laurel how Bobbie had claimed to have traveled, but the picaresque paralleled his father’s in so many ways that at least some of it, Shem believed, had been fabricated. Ostensibly, Bobbie was looking for Jay’s family. He insisted he had been to wintry upper-plains cities in Minnesota in search of his grandfather, and eventually to Saint Olaf, a Lutheran college in the southern part of the state where Bobbie had heard Jay had spent two weeks as a student and janitor. Like his father roughly three decades earlier, Bobbie said he had worked as a clam digger and salmon fisherman on Lake Superior. He’d tracked down the remnants of Camp Taylor, scrupulously avoiding his cousins and his grandparents who still lived in that corner of Kentucky. (He said that years later he had returned to Louisville to see what remained of the Fays, and there he had participated in-and chronicled-a freedom march an hour to the east in Frankfort.) As a young man, Bobbie had briefly considered taking his real father’s name, but he wanted anonymity as he visited the states and towns that had even the smallest cameos in the story.

When the United States entered the Second World War, he enlisted. This was, after all, what his father had done. His real father, the one who was a captain, fought in the Argonne, and eventually would be given command of the divisional machine guns. The man who had raised him, on the other hand, had spent most of 1917 playing polo and most of 1918 romancing Daisy.

This entered Bobbie’s mind when he signed up to join the Army. He felt he couldn’t be a Gatsby given the preconceived notions people had of his father, but he no longer wanted to be a Buchanan. He no longer wanted to be the son of a patrician and bully. He no longer wanted to be Robert. On his way to the recruiting station on a main street in Fairmont, Minnesota, he passed a grocery store which had a window display with a poster of a fictional housewife named Betty Crocker and decided, almost on a lark, to commandeer the name. Why couldn’t he be Bobbie Crocker instead of Robert Buchanan? Hadn’t his own father changed his name, too?

Moreover, he realized that if he changed his name, it would be that much more difficult for them to follow him-though who, precisely, they were Shem couldn’t say. Still, it wasn’t merely nascent schizophrenia and paranoia that caused him to shed the skin of a Buchanan: It was also a desire to distance himself from the whole hollow, sullen, and morally insolvent little clan.

If the Army had any doubts about the mental health of a recruit whose moniker must have reminded them of a cake mix, they weren’t sufficient to prevent them from allowing him to wade ashore at Omaha Beach in one of the very first waves behind the demolition teams. Bobbie would fight that year and into the next in France and Belgium and Germany, somehow escaping the war unscathed. Physically, anyway. He had an affair with a French woman who was in many ways even more scarred than he was, given how much of her family had died in the first German offensive in May 1940 and then fighting in North Africa in 1943. She lost two brothers, a cousin, and her father. He wanted to bring her back with him to the United States, but she wouldn’t leave her family-the living and the dead.

And so he returned alone to America with his unit, and after his discharge got work in a photography store in lower Manhattan. He sold cameras and film, and in the evenings he took pictures himself. Sometimes he’d visit nightclubs, largely because he was living alone in a squalid apartment in Brooklyn and wanted to spend as little time there as possible. He didn’t have a lot of money, but he spent what he had to keep his seat warm at places like the Blue Light, the Art Barn, and the Hatch. He drank heavily-which only intensified his isolation and exacerbated his mental illness-and found that he could drink on the house if he took the performers’ pictures. He didn’t have a studio, and so these were all shots of the musicians and singers while they were on stage or relaxing in their dressing rooms. They loved the photographs and (more important) their managers loved them, especially the candids, and in 1953 he took his first assigned photograph of Muddy Waters, a profile of the musician for Chess Records that showed the master with the head and tuning pegs of his bottleneck slide guitar resting against the tip of his elegant, aquiline nose.

Eventually, Bobbie’s work came to the attention of editors at Backbeat and Life, and soon he had become friends with a young photo editor who called himself Reese.

From there, Laurel realized, she could almost tell the story herself. She didn’t need Shem’s help. He was merely corroborating her suspicions and the details she’d already gleaned: Bobbie’s mental equilibrium had never been one of his cardinal strengths, and his instability and schizophrenia were amplified by the alcohol. He grew less dependable. Over the next decade, he would make some deadlines and miss others. He was immensely talented, which only made working with him that much more frustrating. There were seasons in the 1960s when Bobbie actually would vanish off the radar screen so completely and for so long that Reese would finally conclude that this time Bobbie had died. Usually when he reappeared, Reese would insist that Bobbie find a place where he could dry out once and for all. Shem guessed that Bobbie probably had been hospitalized during some of those disappearances. During others, he was in all likelihood trying to find his family. That meant scavenger hunts in odd little towns throughout the Midwest and Chicago, and brief conversations with the sons and daughters of people who may (or may not) have met the strange men his father knew and who passed, specterlike, through Jay Gatsby’s life: Meyer Wolfsheim. Dan Cody. A boarder named Klipspringer.

Occasionally, Shem said, Bobbie had girlfriends. The photographer was, when he was sober, eccentric and talented and interesting-looking-though not traditionally handsome because the alcoholism had reddened his skin and his mental illness caused him to care less and less about hygiene. Still, there was a backup singer who never quite made it and a dancer who never quite made it and a secretary at Life magazine who actually would make it, joining Helen Gurley Brown to help edit Cosmopolitan, and each time Reese had high hopes that this was the woman who would provide Bobbie with the grounding he needed to settle down. It never happened.

“And his son?” Laurel asked. “Which of these women was the mother of his son? Do you know?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know much. I know she wasn’t one of those more serious relationships he had. She did something in theater, I think-but not on the stage. A costumer, maybe. A seamstress. She died a long time ago.”

“Do you know anything about the boy?”

“Bobbie didn’t like to talk about him. It was one of those subjects-and Bobbie had a lot, of course-that were off-limits.”

“But he said something.”

“His son was homeless. I know that.”

“Like Bobbie?”

“Worse. Did drugs. Didn’t work much.”

“Might he have been a carny?”

“Like in a circus?”

“Like at a county fair. At a midway.”

“It’s possible.”

“And eventually he wound up in Vermont?”

“So it seems. Seven or eight years ago. But by the time Bobbie returned two years ago, he must have been long gone. Bobbie never mentioned going to see him.”

“There were two men who…”

“Go on.”

She shook her head; she couldn’t. She was surprised that she had even begun to reveal what had happened to her seven years earlier, and guessed that she had spoken only because Shem was such a wondrous and unexpected resource, and because his face was so unthreatening and kind. Even the deep lines around his lips were patterned like the ridges on a scallop seashell. Still, she had to know if Bobbie’s son was indeed one of the two men who had attacked her, and-if so-which one.

“Do you believe his son might be in jail?” she asked instead. “Jordie thought he might have been a criminal.”

“If he was, he was no petty thief. Bobbie spent serious time on the street, too, remember. He wouldn’t have cut his kid off for stealing a sandwich or because he had a substance-abuse problem. It woulda had to have been something much worse.”

She gathered herself. Then: “Rape? Murder?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Is rape really a possibility? Or attempted rape?”

She felt him studying her intently, sympathetically, a grandfather’s anxious gaze. “I guess anything’s possible,” he said after a moment.

“Did Reese know?”

“About the son? Or the possibility that the boy may have grown into a very bad person?”

“Either.”

“He knew Bobbie had a son. But not much else. Don’t forget, it’s not as if Bobbie was a great father himself. He had his own devils, his own mental illness. He told Reese and me that the boy’s mom had kept him away from the child when he was growing up. Didn’t want Bobbie to have anything to do with him. Maybe this saddened Bobbie. Maybe he just wrote it off to one of the many conspiracies that surrounded him. Maybe he understood he couldn’t help the boy. Who can say? Reese probably thought this was a wise course of action on the part of the mother. He knew Bobbie’s limitations.”

“But he liked Bobbie…”

“Very much. Oh, very much. Years ago-before you were born-he made it clear to Bobbie that if he ever needed anything, he shouldn’t hesitate to ask. And so one day, decades later, Bobbie did. That would have been a little more than two years ago now,” Shem said, his voice growing rueful. He explained that Bobbie had come to the Green Mountains in search of Reese. He was old and out of options. But he didn’t find Reese right away. First, there was an incident of some sort in Burlington, and Bobbie was brought to the Vermont State Hospital. It was from there that he asked a member of the staff to track down his old editor; two months later, he was released into Reese’s care. Bobbie’s attention span had diminished to the point that he could barely sit through a half-hour sitcom on the TV Land channel, and Reese had the impression that Bobbie had been in and out of state hospitals in New York and Florida and North Dakota. But he no longer drank. And, properly medicated, he was the same good-natured, well-intentioned, not wholly presentable misfit he’d been thirty-five and forty years earlier.

“What are you gonna do with those pictures?” Shem asked when he had finished this part of the story. He was staring at the print of Julie Andrews as Guinevere and seemed startled by the image, even touched. “I saw this show. It was 1960. The Majestic Theater. I was a newlywed. Has Julie Andrews ever looked prettier?”

Laurel assured him that she hadn’t. And she added that unlike most women her age, she actually knew the words to “The Simple Joys of Maidenhood.” Then she told Shem of her boss’s plan for a retrospective, the idea of giving Bobbie Crocker the show that he had never had in his life.

“Oh, I’ll bet his sister will just love that,” Shem said, a small wary chuckle punctuating his remark. “She still living? Or did she pass, too?”

“She’s still alive. But she tells people her brother died when he was a teenager-at least that’s what she told me. She even dared me to fly to Chicago to see where he was buried. Do you think she knows about Bobbie’s son?”

“I doubt it,” he said. “You know, she won’t be happy about your show. I got the impression from Bobbie that she was very loyal to her mother and father. Very loyal. Not just a daddy’s girl and not just a mommy’s girl. Both. Bobbie and Reese thought it was a stitch the way she worked so hard for so much of her life to rehabilitate her parents’ reputation. She’ll go to her grave telling anyone who will listen that all those stories about her mom and Jay Gatsby were a lot of malarkey-and all completely unprovable.”

She laced her fingers together on the table before her and thought about this. “What are you suggesting? Do you think there’s a picture in this pile that somehow proves Jay Gatsby was Bobbie’s father?”

“Maybe not in this pile, but in some pile! Absolutely! That’s what our paranoid schizophrenic was doing, don’t you see? View those pictures like a crazy man’s Post-it notes. Post-it notes in a code. Those pictures Bobbie kept with him? They’re like a treasure map.”

“Or an autobiography.”

“Exactly! You remember that old program, This Is Your Life? Actually, you probably don’t. It was way before your time. It was an old TV show. From the 1950s. Ralph Edwards was the host. Guests would be paraded out-Nat King Cole, maybe, or Gloria Swanson-and friends and family would come out one by one to surprise them. Well, Bobbie was sort of doing his own This Is Your Life with his pictures. He was taking photos of the Gatsby side. Reese told me it was like an obsession with Bobbie.”

“Did Bobbie himself ever tell you he was doing this?”

“No. But I do know this: You know that day back in 1939 when Bobbie found the picture Jay gave his mom? The one where Jay’s decked out as a soldier boy? Bobbie took it with him. Reese saw it many, many years ago, when he and Bobbie were still working at Life. Said Bobbie was still young enough that you could see the resemblance. It was unbelievable. After that, the photos Bobbie took are like the clues in a scavenger hunt. At least some are. You know, maybe you find the house. Then maybe you find the bureau. Then you open the drawer. And there it is-the picture.”

“There what is? The photo of Jay from Camp Taylor?”

He put out his hands, palms up. “Oh, I don’t know for sure what’s in the drawer. I don’t even know if it is a drawer. Or a bureau. Or a box. I was just using that as an example. But Bobbie told Reese and Reese told me that it’s all in the pictures. That’s why he took them with him, no matter where he went or how bad things got for him. They were the proof of who he was, the proof that his old man was that good old sport we’ve heard all about-better than the whole damn bunch on the other side of the cove.”

“I have some snapshots Bobbie had with him at the end. There’s one of Bobbie and his sister, and there’s one of Jay beside a flashy car. But that photo you told me about-the one of Jay in his uniform. I don’t have that one.”

“Maybe the boy knows where it is,” Shem said. “Or maybe the boy knows how to find it. Maybe that’s the real reason why Bobbie came here seven years ago. To plant that final clue.”

Laurel knew where the two men were serving their time. The more violent of the pair, the one who had murdered a schoolteacher in Montana, was in the maximum security compound of the state prison forty miles northwest of Butte. The other, a fellow with no previous criminal record, was still in Vermont, at the correctional facility just outside of Saint Albans. She hadn’t anticipated ever seeing either of them again once they had been escorted from the courtroom after their sentencing, one to a prison in Vermont and one to be tried next for a murder in Montana.

“It’s possible that his son has the picture, isn’t it?” she said. “Or some proof of some kind?”

“Sure. But how do you even begin to find the boy? All you know is that he might have done something awful. You don’t even know for certain he’s in a jail somewhere.”

Oh, but I do, she thought. I just don’t know whether the jail is in Montana or Vermont.

PATIENT 29873

I brought up the book this morning. I expected enthusiasm, but patient was defensive and derisive instead. Eventually settled down. When I asked for elaboration, was told I didn’t know what I was talking about.

At this point, the benefits of discussing the book outweigh the risks.

From the notes of Kenneth Pierce,

attending psychiatrist,

Vermont State Hospital, Waterbury, Vermont