THE MISSING PHOTOGRAPHS
Polly
I’d never have told Rose this, but I really did wonder sometimes if she was a bit nuts. She was just so WEIRD. When she shut her eyes and started chanting and taking really deep breaths I thought maybe she was finally going crazy. Driven mad by ghosts! The very thing she was afraid of.
Whatever she was doing, it did calm her down. And she said I could do it too, if the Door Jumper came back. I should just say it over and over again and imagine the white light.
“Like an angel?” I suggested. “Like a guardian angel, all white?”
She looked doubtful. Obviously she hadn’t been to Sunday school as much as I had. But she said whatever worked for me.
The good thing was, the mumbo-jumbo made her feel better. She went downstairs to look for her grandmother’s photo album while I lay back on her bed and watched the shadows flickering on the far wall. They were made by the tree branches outside her window, swaying up and down in the cold November wind. What I really wanted to do was get my hands on her grandmother’s shoes, but a few more minutes wouldn’t hurt. I closed my eyes.
I must have drifted off because it seemed like the next minute Rose was back, dumping a big heavy book on the bed.
“What did you find?” I said, sitting up. “Any pictures of Winnifred?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
We opened the book together. It was a big, leather-covered album full of faded pictures of people in old-fashioned clothes: long summer dresses and fancy hairdos. The same people kept turning up: a little boy with a solemn expression, a man with thick curly hair, glasses, his mouth clamped firmly shut, and a small woman with a slight smile and eyes that looked out of focus.
“My grandmother,” said Rose. “And my grandfather. And my father. But no Winnifred.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, turning a page. “Look at this.”
Beside a picture of her father holding a bike that looked too big for him, I could see the faint outline of a square, half hidden behind the photograph.
“I think there was another picture here before,” I said.
We both peered at the page. The outline was quite clear. It looked as though there had been two photos side by side, then one had been taken away and the other one pasted back in the center of the page. Flipping back and forth through the album, we found the same light indentations beside several pictures.
Rose looked at me. “You think they were pictures of Winnifred?”
“Who else?” I said.
“Why would they get rid of her pictures?” I asked Polly.
“Because she died?” said Polly, slowly turning the pages of the album. “Look, here’s your dad when he was a teenager. He was cute!”
I looked over her shoulder. My father was definitely good-looking, with dark hair and eyes. But he wasn’t smiling in any of the pictures. He looked sad.
I shut the album.
“Okay, she died. But why take her pictures away?”
“Maybe they couldn’t bear to look at them,” said Polly. “Maybe they were so filled with pain and anguish they didn’t want to be reminded of her.”
“Well, yes, that’s a possibility. But it’s almost as if she never existed. Except for the note in the Bible, there’s no trace of her.”
“Maybe Winnifred did something so terrible they wanted to pretend she never existed,” said Polly, a faraway look in her eyes. “Maybe she murdered someone!”
“Polly! Stop being so dramatic! I don’t think my aunt went around killing people.”
Polly started counting on her fingers.
“Number one: you say the Door Jumper wants to kill me. Number two: you say the Door Jumper is Winnifred. Therefore Winnifred wants to kill me. If she succeeds, she will be a murderer. Maybe that’s how she became an entity—because she was so evil. An evil murderer.”
“Don’t act like that makes any sense, Polly! You’re just guessing.”
“How do you explain it, then? How come nobody ever talks about her? How come there are no photographs of her?”
I couldn’t.