After a longish pause, Alida was gracious enough to mumble, “Cool.”
It took the landlord an age to leave. Then Lucy realized he’d never gotten around to taking measurements for the damn video monitor.
FINN’S EMPTY CHAIR was the focal point in Social Studies. They were meant to be doing this new project about George Vancouver and the Northwest Indians, but no one was paying attention. His absence from the room only made the cyberterrorist more present in everybody’s mind. In the minutes before the eight o’clock bell, all the talk was of Finn’s scarifying future. Most thought he’d spend years — behind bars! — in a juvenile detention center. Alida tried to say roughly what her mom had told her, but that wasn’t nearly exciting enough for the other kids.
“If he doesn’t talk, they’ll probably torture him,” Alex said in a matter-of-fact voice.
“He’ll go to trial.”
“He’ll be incarcerated.”
“He’ll have to spend the entire rest of his life paying for what he did. They’ll take it off his salary every month. He’ll never even have a car!”
“He’ll have to work on road gangs, wearing a yellow jacket with Prisoner on it. He’ll be picking up litter.”
“Can you imagine Finn like really, really thin?”
In class, Mrs. Milliband was saying, “Then Lieutenant Peter Puget and his men rowed ashore, and that was their very first meeting with the people we now call the Coast Salish Indians.”
Who cared?
MIRACULOUSLY, the FedEx package arrived mid-morning. Given the time difference, Marjorie Tillman must have moved like greased lightning to copy the photo and deliver it to the Norwich FedEx office. Lucy tore the flap of the package twice in her haste to get it open.
Two sheets of stiff cardboard enclosed a dust jacket of Augie’s book, a print of Mrs. Tillman’s original photograph, and four pages of small, old-fashioned, scrolly, blue-ink handwriting. Lucy grabbed the photo and immediately saw that it wasn’t — quite — identical to the one on the book, but could easily have been the next picture on the rolclass="underline" boy, barbed wire, grass in the foreground, dirt in the background. The light had changed between the two shots, though. In Marjorie’s version, the boy — who sure looked like Augie — was squinting into the sun, and his shock of pale hair had changed shape a little, probably because of the wind.
She went to Alida’s room to dig out the magnifying glass that had been Alida’s constant companion when she was eight and deeply into Harriet the Spy. She found it in the third drawer down in the homework desk: Alida, the neat freak, always kept her drawers in perfect order.
It was hard to be sure, but under the glass she thought she saw discrepancies. Marjorie’s copy was nearly as good as an original, but both had clearly been taken with a Box Brownie’s crappy little lens. Even fresh from the processors more than sixty years ago, their resolution would have been smudgy. The dust jacket version wasn’t helped by its multitude of creases — creases that both served to authenticate its age, and now made it infuriatingly more difficult to read. But, look, wasn’t that barbed wire more widely spaced, and somehow spikier, in the photo on the book than it was in the copy?
And the boy himself: on the book his features were relatively sharp, but in the other they were almost whited-out from overexposure. The rule in those days — reverently observed by Lucy’s dad long afterward — was that the photographer had to keep the sun over his left shoulder to get the best picture, so a smidge too much sunlight could reduce a human face to a cipher. The boy — if it was the same boy — had obviously moved. In the first, his feet were hidden in the grass; in the second, Lucy could see the tops of a pair of sandals.
Suppose, now, that she were looking at two Latvian boys, both the same age, both Oxfam starvation cases. Substitute Chinese or African-American for Latvian, and would she expect to be able to securely tell them apart? How do you tell one munchkin from another?
It was the setting that was so damning. But then again, weren’t dirt and barbed wire part of the basic vocabulary of wartime, like Augie’s and Wilkomirski’s rats? A single fencepost would’ve helped confirm that the fence was the same fence, but in both shots there was only wire.
Maddening, since Lucy had expected the new photo to either convict or acquit at a glance. Her feeling was that both pictures were of Augie, taken a few minutes apart, but there were just enough differences to allow — no, to enforce — a wedge-shaped sliver of doubt.
She thought of showing them to Tad, who was interested in photography and might know more than she did about boys, but of course he’d confidently place Augie on the chicken farm and delight in seeing his book trashed by the world.
She turned to the letter. Marjorie’s notepaper was embossed with a letterhead printed in red—Mrs. Peregrine Tillman, 3, The Broadwalk, followed by her phone number and e-mail address, where, rather surprisingly, she was informally marjiet@ somewhere or other. Peregrine, how quaint! Peregrine must have died, though, since everything about Mrs. Tillman suggested a widow with too much time on her hands.
“Dear Miss Bengstrom,” it began, the women’s movement having apparently bypassed Thetford, Norfolk. The neat lines of immaculately legible writing ran on and on, peppered with words like “liar,” “ungrateful,” “deceitful,” and “cad.” Mrs. Tillman’s sea-blue fountain-penmanship uncannily conveyed her speaking voice — precise, imperial, and loud. She appeared to have the memory of an elephant: sentences would start “In early April 1944…” and “Sometime around the 15th of February 1945…” Perhaps she’d worked from her schoolgirl diaries. Lucy didn’t doubt her facts, but whether they were facts about Juris Abeltins or August Vanags she simply couldn’t tell. She learned more than she’d ever wanted to know about the symptoms of coeliac, and was in a position to draw a detailed map of Major Vickers’—Mrs. Tillman’s father’s — farm in all its hundred and fifty superior acres. The tone of the letter was of one conspirator to another: Marjie T. and Lucy B. had the author of Boy 381 pinned squarely to the ground. All that remained was to disembowel him in public.
The letter ended:
I am most grateful for your assistance in this matter, and will be happy to supply you with further information as required. Please do not hesitate to phone or write. When your magazine article appears, I would much appreciate it if you could send me a dozen copies at the above address, preferably by your “Federal Express” service. This nonsense has gone on for far too long.
Yours very sincerely,
Marjie Tillman
“SEIZE THE DAY!” was a phrase he’d glommed onto from his audio books. Seize the day!
All morning, Charles O had ridden around town in his pickup, practicing his lines. Driving from parking lot to parking lot, he felt a mounting certainty and masterfulness. Today was the day to seize; if he left it till tomorrow, his confidence in his own power might falter.
Banking $3,461 in cash at United Savings and Loan on Jackson, he said to the teller, “You beat the virus, huh?”
The teller, looking puzzled, said, “Yes, I had the flu a couple of weeks ago.”
“Never mind,” he said, stuffing the receipt in his wallet.