Ronnie found himself again standing before the cherry-red door. He knew he would have to knock loudly to be heard by either of the two hearing-impaired inhabitants of the home, so he chose a knock style somewhere near "police raid breach and clear." After a moment, he heard the wheezing cry of Phoebe as she made her way to the door, and Martha DeLange was only moments behind.

"Ronnie!" she called, a warm smile on her face. "A pleasant surprise, as always!"

They sat and again Ronnie waited as she prepared tea for the both of them. As she poured, she said "again, I am so sorry to hear about your friend. Still no news, right?"

Ronnie shook his head. "No sign."

"Well it's just so upsetting, I tell you. How could they not know a thing about it? It's like the boy just went poof! and vanished right into thin air," she said. "And then for them to just go and add on to the hurt by dragging you boys to the station like you were some kinds of suspects… were they decent to you?"

Ronnie nodded. "Nearly pleasant, even."

"Nearly," Martha repeated, a hint of a youthful smile on her lips. Ronnie immediately remembered the photographs of his grandmother as a younger woman, and, in that smile, the gnarled old woman and the vibrant young one were momentarily bridged in time. Ronnie tried his best to hold on to that connection.

"Tell me, dear, what did they ask you about?" Martha asked, raising her cup for a dainty sip.

"About what you'd expect from a police interview where they've got nothing concrete," answered Ronnie. "They asked about where we'd been, what we'd been doing—"

"Alone, or with your friends?"

"Alone, one at a time."

She seemed incensed at that answer. "I ought to go to the station and lambaste them for that," she said. "What were they thinking, terrorizing you boys like that. You know, the Chief, that Pemberton… I knew him when he was hardly your age. I could go give him a stern talking to."

Ronnie chuckled. "Thanks for the offer, but I think that won't be necessary. They're as worried as we are, and were just running with the only connections they could find."

"Still, that Clyde Pemberton… he used to be such a model officer, only working with certainties. I sure hope the years haven't made him paranoid…"

* * *

"Jesus Christ, Nora, you're sounding as paranoid as the Trents." Clyde Pemberton eyed her critically, looking for obvious signs of stress. Her eyes weren't particularly baggy or wide, nor was her appearance markedly disheveled. "What you and they are describing sounds absurd."

"And yet, sir, it fits with the witness description at the Johnson's General robbery… I saw it myself."

"Well, you didn't see it, right? Isn't that the problem with witnesses to something invisible?"

"The door was kicked open by nobody!"

"It could've been the wind."

"And the Trents' fight with the thing?"

"A fiction for attention. I don't know… people manage to find the wildest reasons to lie."

"Sir, this was something different. Please. Just let me run point on the sting they came up with."

"I should be laughing you right on out of my office. You know that, right? What about that lineup? Good, traditional policework, the type that's tried and true."

"All due respect, sir, but you know that's not likely to work with Trent missing. Anyone wearing masks might well have put on a voice… when's the last time a lineup has gotten us anywhere against a masked perp?" Nora asked.

"There was that Oddkins fellow a few summers back," Coulter replied.

"He had a prosthetic arm, and that was the major factor in a positive ID."

"I know, I know I know… but you know what I mean. Your story, frankly, is absurd, and I'm worrying the stress of this whole situation with your son's involvement has you pushed past your breaking point."

"I won't lie, I am feeling the stress. I'm a mom, how could I not? But we have three eye-witnesses to something extraordinarily weird, one of those witnesses being police—me—we've got the Trent connection, we've got the story of the clerk… if all that isn't enough to motivate the op, then I've got no clue what could have been."

The chief frowned, eyes searching Nora's face. Finally, with a stretch, he relented. "Fine, you can do your sting. But this goes on you, you got that? Anything goes wrong, or if anyone cries entrapment, or whatever surprises might wait down the line… you're taking responsibility for this op. Got it?"

"Yes, sir."

"One more thing, Campbell." Pemberton reached for a folder on his desk and pulled out a photo, which he then pushed it forwards to Nora.

"When we were processing the girl from the general store robbery this morning, she was given her possessions back on transfer. She immediately noticed something strange with her bag." Pemberton pointed at a photo from evidence of her handbag. "See that wide black smudge there?"

"Sure."

"Yeah, well, she says she never had that thing before. On a hunch, I sent Gomez to the store to survey around, and he said he found a similar smudge of black on the floor near where Delacroix was apprehended."

"What is it?"

"Paint, it looks like. And it gets better. Forensics says there's a partial palm print in the wide smudge on her bag."

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

Nora raised her eyebrow.

"Usable forensics," the Chief clarified. "Perp either touched a painted wall or spray painted something too close to crimetime. You can run your sting, but anyone you catch gets immediately printed. And, in the likely event your sting turns up empty, I'm putting it on you to start collecting prints elsewhere. Your boy and his friends first among 'em."

Nora swallowed nervously and nodded.

* * *

"Do you think," Ronnie began, "we could take a look at more of those photographs again?"

Martha's face lit up. "Oh, of course!"

"I've been thinking a lot lately on how most of them were total strangers to me… family I knew nothing about. I'd like the chance to hear more of their stories."

"Well, if nothing else, I am certainly a keeper of stories. Let me go grab the box and then we can take a look."

In less than a minute, she returned to the sitting room, clear plastic box of albums in-hand. Ronnie could see a genuine eagerness to share the box's contents. He watched as she opened the lid and began to unpack its contents gingerly. "It's like taking a walk through the years," she said.

"What a feeling that must be," Ronnie said, thinking of Parker's watch. "If you could go back, but it was only a one-way ticket… would you?"

Martha fell silent as she continued unpacking the photos. She laid a book on her lap and pulled the vellum cover open with a delicate touch, smiling wanly at the scenes that greeted her on the first page. Ronnie was about to repeat the question, assuming she had simply not heard him. However, her silence was revealed to be deep consideration as she finally spoke up.

"I love you and your mother, you know I do. And I have friends here… Mrs. Jacobson down the road, and Kenny at the grocer's. It's hard to choose to say goodbye to folks like that and leave on a trip you won't come back from."

"How's Kenny doing, by the way?"

"Oh, he's fine, right arm's healed up faster than the doc expected. But what I was getting at is this: I've spread roots here, and I have plenty of reasons to stay. But, and here's the important bit, a person tends to know when their era has passed. I'm yesterday's edition—last year's—hell, last century's, it feels like."

She began to flip through the pages, eyes flitting across page to page among the scenes frozen in black and white. "These are my people—were my people—but now they're just photos and I'm just the last one left over, waiting for the book to finally close. Truth be told, Ron, I'd go back. I think I would. I'd miss you dearly, and some parts of the life I've got here—oh, and Phoebe would be coming with me, that's a necessity—but these days hardly anyone comes to visit me. And it's not your fault, I know you're busy, and your mother is as well… but I miss having loved ones close. These days, all I've got for comfort are memories, and I'm forgetting more and more each day. Once I'm gone, well, then they'll all be gone too. I'm sorry, that got grim-sounding and sad out of nowhere." She dabbed at the corners of her eyes, forcing a smile back onto her face.

"Share them with me?" Ronnie asked.

"The photos?"

"The memories," said Ronnie. "Let me guard some myself. Keep them close, and, maybe one day, when I'm as old as you are, I can pass those stories down some more. Keep them alive."

She eyed him, surprised by the boy's sudden interest in her life over the past few days. A cathartic smile then broke through, marked by something resembling gratitude, almost as though passing the stories on would lessen some burden she had carried many of these past lonely years. She began to pass him photographs, and, like the cracking of some great and ancient dam, the stories began to pour out and flooded the space between them.

There were marriages and there were reunions, elopements and infidelity. There were tragedies: a young boy who died of an unknown illness in the night, and a train wreck that killed two distant relatives of Ronnie's in 1937. "This is the last photo of them that we've got," Martha said. "Two weeks from now, they get on a train, and then that's it. Lives cut short."

She showed Ronnie photos of toddlers and of families and of homes and of large holiday dinners. "Michael, there, he had the most jovial laugh. Cancer got him, but he laughed that laugh of his right up until his final day, defiant as ever."

She then showed him photos of children in a field, photos of a family at a parade, photos of a man in military uniform, photos of—

Ronnie stuck up a hand, pausing his grandmother's recollections.

"Who's that one?" he asked, gesturing at a photo. The bald man in the picture was pushing a wheelchair, a stern look on his face as he looked straight at the camera.

"That's your great-uncle Horace, actually, and a relatively recent photo at that. Can't be more than ten years old."

"Do you have more photos of him? I want to know more about him," Ronnie asked, brow furrowed. There was something undeniably familiar about the face… he racked his memories for the connection. His expanded mind now seemed to retain information better, including an improved memory, but it was still hard to sift through the sheer volume of information that he now absorbed.

"Wait, I remember now," Ronnie said. "I could've sworn I saw him at the search for Skinny. When we went out into the woods. Is he around here?"

Martha frowned. "No, dear, he lives in New York. He would've certainly stopped in to say hello if he was in town… but let me see what else I can find of him."

She rummaged through the box for particular albums and loose photos. She then set them out on the glass table in a vague grid and began to select certain ones. "These are the most recent," she said, handing them to Ronnie. He held one up to the light and scrutinized it closely. It wasn't a perfect match, but the man's resemblance to what he remembered was uncanny. Ronnie then lowered the photo and started looking through the wider grid. Many of the photographs featured Horace gripping the handles of a rickety wheelchair, inside which sat a scarred, old man with crooked posture and a major gash along the face and neck that twisted his look to a permanent rictus of pain.

"That man in the chair, is he family too?"

Martha picked up another photo from the table and turned it over, reading the date on the photo's back. "Well, in a way, I suppose. Name was Jim Duncan, so not a DeLange by blood, but he was adopted by the family. Your great-great-great-grandfather found him on his land when Jim was a young man, savaged by a bear attack or something and bleeding to death. They took him in and cared for him, but his wounds were real grim, as you can see in the photos. Anyways, always a religious lot, they prayed to God every day that the boy would pull through, and, by some miracle, he did. When he came to, he didn't remember how he'd gotten onto the DeLange land, or even where—or who—his family was. Your great-great-great-grandfather saw it as providence he'd been on a walk that day to find the boy, and so he adopted him to the DeLange family."

Ronnie pawed his way through the photos, focusing on the strange pair. Why was Horace DeLange in town? Despite his grandmother's doubts he was here, Ronnie was becoming increasingly certain with each successive photo. It was the same brow line, the same default frown held on that hard face. And the twisted old man in the chair, why was Ronnie so drawn to him? There was some pattern he felt he was missing, a big something his subconscious was screaming at him to recognize. "Do you have more photos of Jim?"

"He was ever the misanthrope," Martha replied. "Wasn't around usually when most pictures were taken… hated his own image. I'm sure I've got some more, though… let me see if I can find any."

One by one, she selected additional photos from the bin and began laying them on the table. These photos were older and faded, browning deeply as the contrast sapped away with age. Even still, Ronnie's stomach twisted in tighter and tighter knots as each successive photo was set on the table.

"Here's one of him at fifty," Martha said. She dealt the photo onto the table with a flick. "Oh, and here's one at probably forty-five." Flick. "This one looks like thirties." Flick. "I think this one is mid-twenties." Flick.

To Ronnie, the world seemed to move in slow motion. The teacup that had formerly been in his hand sailed gracefully to the floor, arcs of airborne tea streaking downwards in pursuit. When the cup kissed the wooden floor, shattering shards of porcelain danced outwards in twisting patterns. He saw his grandmother get up, mouth gasping. He saw the dog begin to bark, excited by the commotion. He felt himself sink back in his chair, but the world felt very, very distant. "No," is all he managed to stammer, his mind swimming. "No."