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Thorney looked from the photo to Barbara’s face and shrugged. “It’s an old photo, dear, a Victorian mourning photograph. I don’t know the identity of the young woman.”
    “It’s Lily Slocum!” Barbara cried, but Mrs. Thorney continued to stare at her. She felt like shaking the old woman. “The student who went missing in May!”
    Mrs. Thorney looked affronted, but then recognition seemed to dawn. She grabbed the frame from Barbara and peered through coke-bottle glasses at the photo. “It can’t be,” she said. “This is an old photograph. Over a hundred years.”
    Barbara could barely hold onto the frame she was shaking so hard. “It’s Lily,” she said. “It’s got to be Lily.”
    “But it’s an antique, dear.”
    “Where did you get it?”
    “I don’t know,” Mrs. Thorney looked helplessly around the crowded store and then up at Barbara. “I’ve had it for a long time, haven’t I?”
    The dim and dusty shop seemed far less romantic now to Barbara. She pushed past Mrs. Thorney to hold the frame under a lit reproduction Tiffany lamp. Under the clear light she was even more convinced that it was Lily, but she flipped the frame over anyway.
    “What are you doing?” Mrs. Thorney demanded. “You can’t do that to my property!”
    Barbara ignored her, pushing the brackets out of the way and taking off the frame back. She removed the paper backing with shaking hands and carefully lifted out the photo. There was no writing on the back, but the photograph didn’t look so old close up. She held the photo under the light and scrutinized the face. It was definitely Lily Slocum. And there was something else, something she hadn’t noticed when it was behind glass.
    Lily Slocum wasn’t sleeping, she was dead.

Chapter Four
     
    The man who left his calling card in the antique store window watched from the coffee house across the street as the police arrived. He sat in the sun at a small corner table and sipped iced coffee through a straw, delicate beads of sweat dotting the glass and his upper lip.
    Two middle-aged women at the table next to him discussed what was going on, craning their necks to see over the squad cars, one of them actually standing up and shading her eyes to get a clear look. She had a runner’s legs, the tendons taut against lightly tanned skin. Well preserved, he thought, and smiled at the irony. The girl in the picture was well preserved. He’d seen to that.
    From his father he learned everything about death. The man had been the funeral director in their small West Virginia town, a job title that couldn’t begin to convey the messy and intricate work of preparing the dead for their final journey.
    Half of the boy’s house had been a normal family home, the other half devoted to the business, which his father had inherited from the boy’s dour grandfather.
    Living around people who regarded any talk about the human body as perverse and where death, especially unexpected death, was talked about in whispers, the boy grew up in a world divided in two: above and below the thin floorboards of the old house.
    Downstairs, in the cool basement, were two great porcelain tables suspended on large metal cranks. There were shelves filled with bottles and jars that held embalming fluid, and tubs of putty-colored skin enhancer, and even flat tins of hair crème and thin tubes of vermilion lipstick. There were blue cardboard boxes filled with syringes, and red ones bursting with rubber gloves, and a large glass apothecary jar filled with cotton balls.
    The floor had a drain in it, and there were lengths of rubber hosing coiled in a corner, and hanging from metal hooks on the far wall were dark oilskin aprons.
    Without the bodies it reminded him somewhat of the drugstore in the main street of town, the same medicinal smells and shelving, the same orderliness, and while the shop had penny candy and magazines for sale, the main business of the place was the care and treatment of the body.
    The