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look at the photo.
    “He was a fine-looking man,” he said, and something about these words made red flare across the woman’s wide cheeks and new tears tremble in her swollen eyes, though she smiled, too, pleased with the comment all the same.
    These were the things he would remember: that woman’s smile with her swollen eyes. The way his father carried the clothes carefully back into the other room and showed the picture to Poe, both of them discussing how they’d put that flattened face back into the visage looking out at them from the photo.
    After they were finished and the body had been carefully placed in the burnished wood coffin with gleaming handles that the company would pay for, the boy crept into the empty viewing room to take another look. Moving swiftly past the rows of folding chairs, he placed his small hands onto the box and carefully lifted the lid.
    The face of the miner looked peaceful, clean, his eyes shut as if he were just resting, his arms folded across the breast of the cheap blue suit that had been his best. A wreath of lilies sent by the company stood on one side of the coffin, a cross of roses on the other. The scent of flowers was powerful in the closed room.
    Later, much later, he would find the drawer filled with photos, dozens of snapshots of corpses dressed and made up to look like they were living. “I like to keep a record of my work,” Poe said with a little smile when he caught the boy. “Best not to tell your mama.” He let the boy play with them, sifting through the dead like they were a set of playing cards.
    The man took another sip of coffee and watched a young police officer wearing gloves carry a manila envelope out of the antique store. Did the officer remember the last time they’d found a photo like the one he was carrying, or was he too young? Eight years was a long time to live on memories. It was time to create some new ones.

Chapter Five
     
    When Ian and Grace left each morning, Kate double-checked the lock on the front door before retreating to the kitchen to prepare a pot of tea. While waiting for the water to boil, she flicked aside the curtains on the kitchen window several times to scan the backyard and driveway. A new talisman of sorts. In the months before they’d left New York, she’d taken to checking the peephole in their front door multiple times a day. Obsessive. She knew that, knew what spurred it, knew what Ian would say about it if he saw her.
    When the tea was ready, she poured it into a thermos and carried it out the kitchen door, pausing to lock the door carefully behind her.
    It was no more than ten steps from the back door to the door of the studio, but it often felt like a gulf. She unlocked the studio with a silver key, trying not to hurry it so that it stuck in the lock, and when the door opened she stepped in and slammed it closed behind her, breathing hard as she turned the bolt to lock herself in.
    There were wooden blinds on the windows, and she turned the rods on them just enough to look out. If Ian or Grace were home, she would pull up the shades themselves, but not when she was alone. Too much like being in a fish bowl, though she realized that there was no one there to look in at her. Well, except their next-door neighbor. She had a clear view of the back of his house, and sometimes saw him sitting out there alone petting a large yellow cat.
    He was odd, that one. Apparently he owned a floral shop in town, but she found it hard to picture someone so dumpy-looking creating anything beautiful. He gave her the creeps, the way he skulked from his house to his van when he left the house, scuttling along the sidewalk like some overgrown bug. Ian said he was just shy, and she could tell from the look on his face that he thought she was hardly one to talk about someone else’s reclusive behavior.
    Kate sighed and stepped back from the windows. She poured some tea from her thermos and wrapped her hands around the steaming mug, remembering