its cover, her eyes fell on the first picture she’d put into the book.
It was an eight-by-ten enlargement of a picture that had been taken at the Fourth of July picnic sixteen years earlier, which she’d captioned “Last Days of Freedom—Of course I can barely walk!” She smiled at the image of herself in the last days of her pregnancy with Sharon, sitting on the picnic table, Craig beside her.
They’d looked so young then, all of them.
She began looking at the people in the picture. Some of them had changed so much that she hardly recognized them.
There was Arlette Delong, wearing the same beehive hairdo then that she still wore today. Except in the picture, Arlette’s elaborate coiffure didn’t have the look of desperation about it that it had taken on lately. Back then Arlette had been a pretty young woman—now, sixteen years later, her figure had thickened, and her middle-aged features had hardened from the long hours in her café. But her hair had remained the same—teased and back-combed, then sprayed solid. The only thing missing in the picture was the pencil that Arlette was now in the habit of implanting in the platinum mass.
There, too, were Billy-Joe and Myrtle Hawkins, Myrtle almost as pregnant with Buddy as Barbara had been with Sharon. Billy-Joe’s handsome features had all but dissolved since then, his nose now puffy from the long years of drinking, his once-flat stomach having long ago given way to a beer belly.
Barbara frowned, her eyes coming to rest on Warren Phillips, who was standing with a group of other men under a pine tree to the left of the picnic table at which Barbara herself was sitting.
The doctor didn’t seem to have changed a bit. His strong chin was as well-defined now as it was in the picture, and his dark hair, shot through with gray, was unchanged as well.
Barbara paused, thinking.
Back then she had always thought of Dr. Phillips as being much older than she, but now, sixteen years later, they seemed to be closer to the same age.
But how old was he?
She studied the picture, finally getting a magnifying glass from the kitchen drawer.
If she’d had to guess, she’d have said he was around forty-five in the picture, fifty at the oldest.
Which would make him at least sixty-one now. Maybe older.
And yet he still looked forty-five.
She began looking at some of the other men in the group around Phillips.
Carl Anderson was instantly recognizable, for he, like Phillips, hadn’t changed at all in the last sixteen years.
Nor had Fred Childress, or Orrin Hatfield.
She found Judd Duval, lounging on a blanket.
He, too, looked exactly the same then as he did now.
She kept studying the picture, searching for more of the faces that seemed not to have changed in nearly two decades. She looked up as a shadow passed over the album.
Craig, his eyes worried, was looking down at her. “Honey? What is it?”
Barbara smiled wanly. “I couldn’t sleep,” she told him. “So I finally just gave up. Want a cup of coffee?”
Craig shook his head. “What are you looking at?”
“Pictures,” Barbara replied. “I—I just wanted to look at Jenny again. But I couldn’t.”
Craig reached over and closed the album, then pulled her up from the chair and held her close. “Things are going to be all right, honey,” he whispered into her ear. “I know it doesn’t seem like the pain will ever go away right now, but it will. I promise.”
Barbara let him lead her back to the bedroom, but as she tried once more to go to sleep, she knew he was wrong.
The pain of her loss was only going to get worse.
And yet, despite her grief, sleep finally came, and with sleep came dreams.
Dreams of searching for her lost daughters, who were calling out to her in the darkness.
She could hear them clearly, both Jenny and Sharon.
She followed their voices through the darkness, and at last, coming upon a circle of bright light, she found them.
They were together, smiling at her.
But when she ran to gather them in her arms and comfort them, then hold them away to look into their faces, something had changed.
Jenny—her beautiful Jenny—was the same as she had always been, smiling and laughing.
But Sharon had changed.
She wasn’t Sharon at all.
She was Kelly Anderson.
Carl Anderson was awake that night, too, lying in bed, a book open on his lap. He heard a sound, like a door closing, frowned, then put the book aside and got out of bed. Putting on a