Morgan brushed crumbs off her desk. She’d swiped two Linzer cookies and brought them down to her basement lair, before her mom delivered them all to Silver Maple, the assisted living center where Grandma Daisy had spent her final days and where Grandpa Teddy still, as far as her parents knew, played cribbage twice a week.
Earlier this evening, the kitchen had been invaded by piles of sugar cookies and gingerbread men, peanut-butter blossoms, thumbprint cookies with orange marmalade, snowballs, fudge, and her mom’s famous Linzers. Carved with Grandma Daisy’s biscuit cutter, a primitive heart cutout in the top of the cookie to show off the bright raspberry preserves, and dusted with powdered sugar, Lynette Mori’s Linzer cookies were the stuff of legends. They were Morgan’s favorite, and had been the centerpiece of her mother’s bakery, Lynette’s Linzers. Now, her mom’s baking had evolved into a black-market operation in her kitchen. Some residences in Black Harbor sold cocaine out the back door. The Moris’ sold cookies.
Morgan peeled her eyes from her computer to look at her money, which she’d separated into two equal stacks, one on each side of her keyboard. Her trip to the Reynolds estate had panned out better than anticipated. Not only did she get to keep the money from the Christmas party, she had now gotten another inside look at the lives of Black Harbor’s most mysterious family.
On the floor beside her was a large Rubbermaid filled with loose photographs and albums whose floral covers were faded like old wallpaper. Eleanor had been storing them for years, protecting them from oxygen and light in this forest-green tub. Now, she wanted Morgan to immortalize them—scan them onto a USB drive that she could keep forever. Some of the photos could use some restorative edits, Morgan diagnosed when looking over Eleanor’s shoulder at the collection, but for the most part, they just needed to be scanned and organized into the appropriate folders: family vacations, parties, sporting events, etc. All things that Morgan had never had. She couldn’t help but feel a little taunted.
An eerie thought wormed its way into Morgan’s brain, then, as she considered how quickly Eleanor had pivoted from the lost Christmas photos to this project. What if the photos had been saved for her? What if Eleanor wanted Morgan to study them and learn her family’s secrets?
Morgan crawled under her desk and plugged in her new toy: a scanner. Upon leaving the Reynolds estate, she’d mustered up her courage to venture to Walmart on Christmas Eve and purchase the only scanner on the shelf. The checkout lines were obnoxious. It had taken her almost an hour to get what she needed and leave. By the time she returned home, her mother had already begun her cookie delivery, Grandpa Teddy was asleep in his chair, and her dad was working overtime.
Now, it was late and Morgan had traded in the ambiance of the Christmas tree for the blue light of her computer and the infernal glow of her red lava lamp. She pinched a photograph between her thumb and index finger. In it, she recognized a young Bennett holding a line of fish caught off a dock. Clive was crouched next to him. There it was again, that twinge. She studied Clive’s face: the proud smile, the laugh lines. His eyes gleamed and she could see the familial resemblance between him and Bennett. They had the same straight nose, the same hairline that was higher on the left and swooped down toward the right. They both looked at the camera as though they were the ones giving the photographer direction, not the other way around. A small shed stood behind them at the opposite shore of the pond. She wondered where the photo had been taken. It looked remote, in an intentional way. Not like Black Harbor, whose curbside appeal was attractive only to cretins and criminals looking for a place to hide.
She set the photo of Bennett and Clive aside and dug another one out of the container. This one was a family photo, showing Eleanor and Clive sitting on a blanket with all four children surrounding them. She studied the children. They looked to be a bit older here than in the mantel portrait. Carlisle stared lazily at the camera lens. Freckles dappled her bare shoulders; she had the full pouty lips of a preteen. Bennett looked awkward with acne and braces. Cora was slim with a stretchy elastic choker around her neck that, at first glance, looked like stitches. David raised an eyebrow. Eleanor’s hair had tamed considerably from the do in the mantel photo, and Clive looked the same. He had one of those timeless faces. Judging by the ages of the children, the photo could have been taken just days before his disappearance. She looked at the back of the photo. July 2000 was written in what she presumed to be Eleanor’s loopy cursive. Morgan homed in on Clive again, the print mere inches from her face. So close she could smell the faint almond scent of the paper, she searched his eyes for a spark, a glint, an omen that he knew this was his last outing with his family. But the photo was grainy and of poor quality. His expression betrayed nothing.
If she scrutinized every photo like this, she would never make any headway on Eleanor’s digitization project.
Okay, one more.
Clive and Christopher grilled burgers in this photograph. Although Christopher wasn’t nearly as handsome as his brother, his muscles bulged beneath a “Kiss the Cook” apron.
How different he looked from the old man she remembered sitting on Eleanor’s couch. Morgan barely recognized him. The Christopher Reynolds she knew was a shrunken version of the man in the photograph. His skin was wrinkled now, his muscles deflated. His hair, though thinning in the photo, had deteriorated into a spiderweb stretched across his mottled scalp.
She wondered what Clive would look like today if he were alive. Would age have been as harsh to him, or would it treat him kindly, as it had Eleanor? It was difficult to pair them together sometimes: Clive, who was forever frozen in his mid-forties, with dark hair and a bright smile; and Eleanor, silver and well into her sixties, though no less enchanting than the younger version of herself seated at the edge of the picnic table in the same photo. She stared at Clive with what appeared to be pure, unadulterated adoration. If Morgan could only be sure of one thing, it was the fact that if Eleanor really did kill Clive, she deserved a slow clap for her acting abilities.
In an hour, she had the whole album scanned and saved onto her computer, with each original photo returned to its designated sleeve.
Morgan cracked open the next album. It was wrapped in green leather. The smell of old books wafted toward her. The musky, woody, vanilla-y scent that reminded her a little of perusing a library. Not that she could remember the last time she’d engaged in that kind of behavior. Talking with Hudson the other day reminded her how much she missed the escapism books offered. The answers, the conclusions. Real life didn’t offer any of that.
The photos in the green album showed rolling emerald hills, heavy rain-filled storm clouds, and the Reynolds clan all wearing slickers as they explored what appeared to be the ruins of an old stone castle.
Morgan flipped through the pages slowly, feeling a foreign longing for a home she’d never been to. Her fingers traced the letters of a wooden sign: Welcome to Dublin. FÁILTE ROIMH DUBLIN. Her lips stumbled over the letters, her tongue tying itself into a knot.
The ache in her chest spread. To her stomach, her shoulders, down her forearms. Her hands shook as she struggled to turn the pages, allowing herself the brief and false nostalgia of placing her childhood self at the pub table between Carlisle and Cora as they snacked on fish and chips. Running down a hillside beside Bennett. Hands cupped as she fed a baby lamb. Getting her face painted at a festival with David. Arm in arm with the Reynolds children as they posed for a photo with a raven-haired boy and girl. She slid the photo out of its sleeve and read the note on the back. Written in Eleanor’s cursive was: With cousins Saoirse and Cillian (Uncle Gerry).
So they had family over in Ireland. Cousins, at least. Must be Clive’s side, she thought. Reynolds. That was an Irish name, wasn’t it? And then she remembered the coat of arms she’d seen above the fireplace: two mirrored tigers, a sword separating them, and the name Reynolds underneath in gothic lettering. How she’d admired it for its symmetry.
Morgan turned her wrist and studied the top of the key. Three circles clustered together to rest above a diamond shape. It looked like a clover, something that belonged over in a place like Ireland or at least had come from there. But how did you get here, she wondered.
She flipped to the next page, determined to find out.