Impossible Things (9 page)

“What did they do with the picture?” I asked.

“They took it into the chief’s office. I tried to call up the originals from composing, but the chief had already sent for them
and
your vidcam footage. Then I tried to get you, but I couldn’t get past your damned exclusion.”

“Are they still in there with the chief?”

“They just left. They’re on their way over to your house. The chief told me to tell you he wants ‘full cooperation,’ which means hand over the negatives and any other film you just took this morning. He told
me
to keep my hands off. No story. Case closed.”

“How long ago did they leave?”

“Five minutes. You’ve got plenty of time to make me a print. Don’t highwire it. I’ll come pick it up.”

“What happened to, ‘The last thing I need is trouble with the Society’?”

“It’ll take them at least twenty minutes to get to your place. Hide it somewhere the Society won’t find it.”

“I can’t,” I said, and listened to her furious silence. “My developer’s broken. It just ate my longshot film,” I said, and hit the exclusion button again.

“You want to see who hit the jackal?” I said to Katie, and motioned her over to the developer. “One of Phoenix’s finest.”

She came and stood in front of the screen, looking at the picture. If the Society’s computers were really good, they could probably prove the jackal was already dead, but the Society wouldn’t keep the film long enough for that. Hunter and Segura had probably already destroyed the highwire copies. Maybe I should offer to run the cartridge sheet through the permanganate bath for them when they got here, just to save time.

I looked at Katie. “It looks guilty as hell, doesn’t it?” I said. “Only it isn’t.” She didn’t say anything, didn’t move. “It would have killed the jackal if it had hit it. It was going at least ninety. But the jackal was already dead.”

She looked across at me.

“The Society would have sent the Amblers to jail. It would have confiscated the house they’ve lived in for fifteen years for an accident that was nobody’s fault. They didn’t even see it coming. It just ran right out in front of them.”

Katie put her hand up to the screen and touched the jackal’s image.

“They’ve suffered enough,” I said, looking at her. It was getting dark. I hadn’t turned on any lights, and the red image of the tanker made her nose look sunburned.

“All these years she’s blamed him for her dog’s death, and he didn’t do it,” I said. “A Winnebago’s a hundred square feet on the inside. That’s about as big as this developer, and they’ve lived inside it for fifteen years, while the lanes got narrower and the highways shut down, hardly
enough room to breathe, let alone live, and her blaming him for something he didn’t do.”

In the ruddy light from the screen she looked sixteen.

“They won’t do anything to the driver, not with the tankers hauling thousands of gallons of water into Phoenix every day. Even the Society won’t run the risk of a boycott. They’ll destroy the negatives and call the case closed. And the Society won’t go after the Amblers,” I said. “Or you.”

I turned back to the developer. “Go,” I said, and the image changed. Yucca. Yucca. My forearm. My back. Cups and spoons.

“Besides,” I said. “I’m an old hand at shifting the blame.” Mrs. Ambler’s arm. Mrs. Ambler’s back. Open shower door. “Did I ever tell you about Aberfan?”

Katie was still watching the screen, her face pale now from the light-blue 100 percent Formica shower stall.

“The Society already thinks the tanker did it. The only one I’ve got to convince is my editor.” I reached across to the phone and took the exclusion off. “Ramirez,” I said, “wanta go after the Society?”

Jake’s back. Cups, spoons, and Sanka.

“I did,” Ramirez said in a voice that could have frozen the Salt River, “but your developer was broken, and you couldn’t get me a picture.”

Mrs. Ambler and Taco.

I hit the exclusion button again and left my hand on it. “Stop,” I said. “Print.” The screen went dark, and the print slid out into the tray. “Reduce frame. Permanganate bath by one percent. Follow on screen.” I took my hand off. “What’s Dolores Chiwere doing these days, Ramirez?”

“She’s working investigative. Why?”

I didn’t answer. The picture of Mrs. Ambler faded a little, a little more.

The Society
does
have a link to the lifelines!” Ramirez said, not quite as fast as Hunter, but almost.
“That’s why you requested your old girlfriend’s line, isn’t it? You’re running a sting.”

I had been wondering how to get Ramirez off Katie’s trail, and she had done it herself, jumping to conclusions just like the Society. With a little effort, I could convince Katie, too: Do you know why I really came to see you today? To catch the Society. I had to pick somebody the Society couldn’t possibly know about from my lifeline, somebody I didn’t have any known connection with.

Katie watched the screen, looking like she already half believed it. The picture of Mrs. Ambler faded some more. Any known connection.

“Stop,” I said.

“What about the truck?” Ramirez demanded. “What does it have to do with this sting of yours?”

“Nothing,” I said. “And neither does the water board, which is an even bigger bully than the Society. So do what the chief says. Full cooperation. Case closed. We’ll get them on lifeline tapping.”

She digested that, or maybe she’d already hung up and was calling Dolores Chiwere. I looked at the image of Mrs. Ambler on the screen. It had faded enough to look slightly overexposed but not enough to look tampered with. And Taco was gone.

I looked at Katie. “The Society will be here in another fifteen minutes,” I said, “which gives me just enough time to tell you about Aberfan.” I gestured at the couch. “Sit down.”

She came and sat down. “He was a great dog,” I said. “He loved the snow. He’d dig through it and toss it up with his muzzle and snap at the snowflakes, trying to catch them.”

Ramirez had obviously hung up, but she would call back if she couldn’t track down Chiwere. I put the exclusion back on and went over to the developer. The image of Mrs. Ambler was still on the screen. The bath hadn’t affected the detail that much. You could still see the wrinkles,
the thin white hair, but the guilt, or blame, the look of loss and love, was gone. She looked serene, almost happy.

“There are hardly any good pictures of dogs,” I said. “They lack the necessary muscles to take good pictures, and Aberfan lunged at you as soon as he saw the camera.”

I turned the developer off. Without the light from the screen, it was almost dark in the room. I turned on the overhead.

“There were less than a hundred dogs left in the United States, and he’d already had the newparvo once and nearly died. The only pictures I had of him had been taken when he was asleep. I wanted a picture of Aberfan playing in the snow.”

I leaned against the narrow shelf in front of the developer’s screen. Katie looked the way she had at the vet’s, sitting there with her hands clenched, waiting for me to tell her something terrible.

“I wanted a picture of him playing in the snow, but he always lunged at the camera,” I said, “so I let him out in the front yard, and then I sneaked out the side door and went across the road to some pine trees where he wouldn’t be able to see me. But he did.”

“And he ran across the road,” Katie said. “And I hit him.”

She was looking down at her hands. I waited for her to look up, dreading what I would see in her face. Or not see.

“It took me a long time to find out where you’d gone,” she said to her hands. “I was afraid you’d refuse me access to your lifeline. I finally saw one of your pictures in a newspaper, and I moved to Phoenix, but after I got here, I was afraid to call you for fear you’d hang up on me.”

She twisted her hands the way she had twisted her mittens at the vet’s. “My husband said I was obsessed
with it, that I should have gotten over it by now, everybody else had, that they were only dogs anyway.” She looked up, and I braced my hands against the developer. “He said forgiveness wasn’t something somebody else could give you, but I didn’t want you to forgive me exactly. I just wanted to tell you I was sorry.”

There hadn’t been any reproach, any accusation in her face when I told her she was responsible for the extinction of a species that day at the vet’s, and there wasn’t now. Maybe she didn’t have the facial muscles for it, I thought bitterly.

“Do you know why I came to see you today?” I said angrily. “My camera broke when I tried to catch Aberfan. I didn’t get any pictures.” I grabbed the picture of Mrs. Ambler out of the developer’s tray and flung it at her. “Her dog died of newparvo. They left it in the Winnebago, and when they came back, it was dead.”

“Poor thing,” she said, but she wasn’t looking at the picture. She was looking at me.

“She didn’t know she was having her picture taken. I thought if I got you talking about Aberfan, I could get a picture like that of you.”

And surely now I would see it, the look I had really wanted when I set the eisenstadt down on Katie’s kitchen table, the look I still wanted, even though the eisenstadt was facing the wrong way, the look of betrayal the dogs had never given us. Not even Misha. Not even Aberfan. How does it feel to be responsible for the extinction of an entire species?

I pointed at the eisenstadt. “It’s not a briefcase. It’s a camera. I was going to take your picture without your even knowing it.”

She had never known Aberfan. She had never known Mrs. Ambler either, but in that instant before she started to cry, she looked like both of them. She put her hand up to her mouth. “Oh,” she said, and the love, the loss was
there in her voice, too. “If you’d had it then, it wouldn’t have happened.”

I looked at the eisenstadt. If I had had it, I could have set it on the porch and Aberfan would never have even noticed it. He would have burrowed through the snow and tossed it up with his nose, and I could have thrown snow up in big glittering sprays that he would have leapt at, and it never would have happened. Katie Powell would have driven past, and I would have stopped to wave at her, and she, sixteen years old and just learning to drive, would maybe even have risked taking a mittened hand off the steering wheel to wave back, and Aberfan would have wagged his tail into a blizzard and then barked at the snow he’d churned up.

He wouldn’t have caught the third wave. He would have lived to be an old dog, fourteen or fifteen, too old to play in the snow anymore, and even if he had been the last dog in the world, I would not have let them lock him up in a cage, I would not have let them take him away. If I had had the eisenstadt.

No wonder I hated it.

It had been at least fifteen minutes since Ramirez called. The Society would be here any minute. “You shouldn’t be here when the Society comes,” I said, and Katie nodded and smudged the tears off her cheeks and stood up, reaching for her carryit.

“Do you ever take pictures?” she said, shouldering the carryit. “I mean, besides for the papers?”

“I don’t know if I’ll be taking pictures for them much longer. Photojournalists are becoming an extinct breed.”

“Maybe you could come take some pictures of Jana and Kevin. Kids grow up so fast, they’re gone before you know it.”

“I’d like that,” I said. I opened the screen door for her and looked both ways down the street at the darkness. “All clear,” I said, and she went out. I shut the screen door between us.

She turned and looked at me one last time with her dear, open face that even I hadn’t been able to close. “I miss them,” she said.

I put my hand up to the screen. “I miss them, too.”

I watched her to make sure she turned the corner and then went back in the living room and took down the picture of Misha. I propped it against the developer so Segura would be able to see it from the door. In a month or so, when the Amblers were safely in Texas and the Society had forgotten about Katie, I’d call Segura and tell him I might be willing to sell it to the Society, and then in a day or so I’d tell him I’d changed my mind. When he came out to try to talk me into it, I’d tell him about Perdita and Beatrix Potter, and he would tell me about the Society.

Chiwere and Ramirez would have to take the credit for the story—I didn’t want Hunter putting anything else together—and it would take more than one story to break them, but it was a start.

Katie had left the print of Mrs. Ambler on the couch. I picked it up and looked at it a minute and then fed it into the developer. “Recyle,” I said.

I picked up the eisenstadt from the table by the couch and took the film cartridge out. I started to pull the film out to expose it, and then shoved it into the developer instead and turned it on. “Positives, one two three order, five seconds.”

I had apparently set the camera on its activator again—there were ten shots or so of the back seat of the Hitori. Vehicles and people. The pictures of Katie were all in shadow. There was a Still Life of Kool-Aid Pitcher with Whale Glass and another one of Jana’s toy cars, and some near-black frames that meant Katie had laid the eisenstadt facedown when she brought it to me.

“Two seconds,” I said, and waited for the developer to flash the last shots so I could make sure there wasn’t
anything else on the cartridge and then expose it before the Society got here. All but the last frame was of the darkness that was all the eisenstadt could see lying on its face. The last one was of me.

The trick in getting good pictures is to make people forget they’re being photographed. Distract them. Get them talking about something they care about.

“Stop,” I said, and the image froze.

Aberfan was a great dog. He loved to play in the snow, and after I had murdered him, he lifted his head off my lap and tried to lick my hand.

The Society would be here any minute to take the longshot film and destroy it, and this one would have to go, too, along with the rest of the cartridge. I couldn’t risk Hunter’s being reminded of Katie. Or Segura taking a notion to do a print-fix and peel on Jana’s toy cars.

It was too bad. The eisenstadt takes great pictures. “Even you’ll forget it’s a camera,” Ramirez had said in her spiel, and that was certainly true. I was looking straight into the lens.