Free What the Dead Want by Norah Olson Page B

time she was just so crazy . The nonsense about the house, her obsession with family history, but then not doing anything to care for the journals and artifacts, the fact that she looked like she was a million years old and Gretchen had just watched her drink a fifth of gin and smoke a half a pack of cigarettes in the course of a few hours. The woman was a force of nature. Or a force of chaos.
    When Esther asked if she wanted to see her studio, Gretchen paused for a few seconds and reluctantly said yes.
    â€œThere are no animals in it, are there?” Gretchen asked.
    â€œHow the hell would I know?” Esther said. “There might be. C’mon.”
    The room was just above Gretchen’s but twice the size. When Esther opened the door, Gretchen’s jaw dropped.
    Every inch of wall space was covered in photographs, so many photographs it would take a month to get a goodlook at every one. Some were only a square inch in size, and some were larger, glossy prints. A few appeared to be portraits, but most were landscapes, and figures. Gretchen could see nothing distinctly, only the hundreds and thousands of images becoming a single impression; people and places, history, time, the blur of life distilled into a series of moments. This display was the result of either a highly disordered or a highly meticulous mind.
    Then Gretchen’s gaze fell on the camera at the center of the room. It sat on a tripod, and its lens was pointed in the direction of the window, out onto the woods behind the estate. A Nikon F2AS Photomic. She stepped over to it, and had to restrain herself from reaching out and touching it. She’d never seen one in real life, but had talked about it plenty. Janine had had a friend who was a war reporter in the eighties in Central America and he still shot with nothing other than his Nikon.
    It might have been the most sensitive camera ever invented. And only the surest photographer could manage the F2AS.
    â€œOh my God,” Gretchen whispered. “You’re a professional.”
    Esther laughed at her. “No shit.”
    â€œThat camera . . .”
    â€œThat camera respects light,” Esther said, taking it offthe tripod and holding it easily in her strong knobby hands.“Lots of folks think it’s the subject of the photograph that matters, but some of us still understand that photography is capturing light, and this camera can see all that fast light for you.”
    She held it up to her eye and shot Gretchen’s astonished face, in the room full of photographs.
    â€œI always felt like this camera understood,” she said, snapping two more pictures of her great-niece, “that light wasn’t always what could be seen, but also what could be felt—temperature, and pressure. I felt like a hunter when I was working with this thing. A hunter stalking hunters.”
    Gretchen looked closely at her aunt. And something began to shift and fit together in her mind. Axton. Their family name. Esther Axton. E. E. Axton. The war reporter. She’d never even thought to ask her mother if E. E. Axton was a relative—probably because she was ten the last time she talked to her. And she’d always thought that E. E. Axton was a man.
    Esther looked at her face and started laughing. She walked over to the small desk in the corner of her room and pulled out an old Life magazine. Gretchen had seen tons of these magazines in thrift stores sold for twenty cents apiece, dusty boring rags from the sixties. Esther handed it to her niece and Gretchen opened it to a bookmarked page.
    There, in a quarter-page black-and-white photograph, was a woman crouching down, holding a Nikon, this Nikon, while a tank drove behind her and thick black smoke rose in the distance. She appeared to be maybe forty years old, with little round glasses, dressed in combat fatigues.
    A WILL OF STEEL:
    E. E. AXTON PHOTOGRAPHS ANOTHER WAR
    Gretchen looked from the page to her aunt, whose eyes were