Free Bone by Bone by Carol O'Connell Page A

surrounding carpet with manila folders, large envelopes and banded bundles of paper.
    Oren leafed through a stack of typed interviews. Each one was clipped to a photograph. “My brother took these pictures.” Some of these same compositions were framed on the walls of the judge’s house. “But Josh didn’t make any of these prints.”
    They lacked the crisp perfection that Josh had achieved by manipulating his negatives. The boy’s attic darkroom had been a place with a language of its own, words like dodging and burning to play down bright lights and coax lost details from areas of gray. Other things came back to Oren, a memory of that room bathed in red light and the array of bottles, some of them intensifying chemicals. And there were special grades of paper and filters to push the contrast of every picture into the darkest shadows, the brightest highlights.
    Almost magic.
    He looked down at the print in his hand. This was—ordinary.
    “It’s a bad job, I know,” said Swahn. “Miss Rice loaned me the negatives, and I ordered these prints from the drugstore in town. No comparison to Josh’s work. He was gifted in a dying art form. I don’t think he would’ve cared for the age of digital cameras.”
    Oren picked up a photograph of a birthday ball. In this shot, the stout hotelier, Evelyn Straub, was in her thirties, still lean and fine, her short skirt showing the endless long legs of a former Las Vegas showgirl.
    Swahn leaned over to glance at it. “Your brother was probably ten when he took that one, and I’m not just guessing by Mrs. Straub’s age. It’s the perspective of a child looking upward. That angle changes subtly as he gets taller.” He looked down at the other pictures spread out on the rug. “Even though Josh doesn’t appear in any of these pictures, it’s like watching the boy grow up.”
    Oren noticed that only his brother was referred to by his given name. Even Hannah, a longtime acquaintance, was always called, more formally, Miss Rice. Was Swahn only comfortable with the dead, or had he lied about never meeting Josh?
    “I think your brother knew his killer.”
    The photograph fell from Oren’s hand.
    “According to your housekeeper, the boy was carrying a camera the last time she saw him.”
    “He always took one of his cameras when he left the house.”
    “But this one wasn’t his pocket camera,” said Swahn. “It was the old Canon FTB, the heavy one. Why would he carry that dead weight on a hike in the woods? The boy wasn’t a nature photographer. Look at these images—only people. That was his subject. Did he take pictures of you that day?”
    “No.” Oren saw no need to mention the picture Josh had taken before they left the house, the portrait of two brothers that Hannah had framed in silver.
    “Miss Rice said she packed a lunch in Josh’s knapsack . . . but nothing for you.” Swahn waited a moment for the explanation. It never came. “I understand that you and your brother went your separate ways after a while. So Josh had his own plans for the day. And he obviously intended to take pictures in the woods—but the boy only photographed people.” Swahn allowed the import to settle in for a moment, and then he said, “Beer?” Without waiting for a reply, he slowly rose to his feet, using the cane as a climbing pole, and limped out of the room.
    Oren emptied a bulky envelope containing pictures that had not been married up with interviews. Nowhere in this lot was a standard print of the photograph that Hannah had enlarged for his homecoming present. Every detail pictured in that silver frame was fixed in memory, and it brought to mind the interview with Cable Babitt shortly after Josh had gone missing.
    “Talk to me, son,” the sheriff had said to him then. “I need to account for your time.” The judge had answered for Oren, saying, “Cable, you can’t expect the boy to know where he was at this hour or that hour. What teenager wears a watch on a