cuddle. Your idea of afterglow is developing six rolls of film.”
Her laugh was watery, but it was a laugh.
“Now, that really is better.” He pulled back, kissed the tip of her nose, and said with deliberate lightness, “Go swish prints around in trays. I’ll cheer from the sidelines.”
They were both silent in the red light as Jordan processed the most recent roll, comforted slowly by the familiar motions. One by one, she hung the prints, gave them a chance to drip as she cleaned up. She came back to the line, bracing herself, and Tony moved to stand at her elbow. Silently they looked from print to print.
“They’re good,” he said quietly.
Not all of them. Some were blurred, focused on people moving too fast. But that one . . . and that one . . . “Yes,” Jordan said. “They’re the best I’ve ever done.”
She took down a shot of Anneliese leveling the pistol straight at the camera lens. Eyes like lake ice from Nina’s frozen, unknowable home. Jordan knew where it belonged. Going to the folder with her photo-essay prints, she laid them all out in a line, starting with her father, ending with Anneliese and her cornered, merciless gaze. “I couldn’t find the right image to finish it,” Jordan said. “A Killer at Work.”
Tony looked from print to print. “You’ll sell it,” he said. “You do know that?”
“Maybe.” And she could even see this shot as the start of a new essay entirely focused on Anneliese, the progression of a demure bride to an ice-eyed murderess to a prisoner on trial. Shades of a Murderess. Portraits of a Huntress. Something like that might help Ruth understand the many faces of the woman who had stolen her and raised her and cared for her. But Jordan turned away from the worktable, rubbing her temples. “Ruth has to come first, now. I don’t know how much time I’ll have for this. I can’t work the way I was planning to.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m all Ruth has.” Once again Jordan felt the panic of that, the fear of failing her sister. “I’ll have to do it all, now.”
“As long as I’m in Boston, I’ll help. Not because of you and me, because the team owes you, Jordan. This hunt blew your world to bits.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” Jordan stated. “Dad was already gone before you even came here, and once you began tracking Anna, there were going to be other consequences no matter how she ended up caught. I’ll gladly take them, if it means she’s out of Ruth’s life.”
“That doesn’t mean it sits right with me to swan off and leave you picking up the pieces. It won’t sit right with Ian or Nina either.”
“You’d help us?” The fierce common bond between them all had been Anneliese—what was left when that was gone?
Could it be Ruth?
Tony wrapped his arms around her waist. “Count on it, J. Bryde.”
They stood for a long time, silent under the red light. Jordan’s thoughts were a jumble, exhaustion and relief and cautious hope. The thought of going on entirely alone, carrying Ruth into the coming storm of the breaking scandal, had felt like that hair-raising moment when Nina cut the engine and the plane began to drop. Now it felt like Tony and his partners had reached around, flicked the switch, turned the engine back on. The plane had leveled.
Jordan twisted her head, kissed Tony lightly. “Come upstairs and stay the night.”
“Are you sure? Nosy neighbors take note when gentlemen callers leave in the morning.”
“My family is about to become notorious all through Boston.” Jordan slung the Leica’s strap over one shoulder and tugged him up the darkroom steps, switching on the overhead light. “I don’t really care if the neighbors think I’m a hussy.”
“Jordan?”
She half turned. Click. Standing two steps below, Tony lowered the little Kodak he’d taken out of his pocket, smiling. “I want a picture of my girl.”
Sometimes you got great pictures with skill, Jordan later thought, and sometimes great pictures just happened. That cheap Kodak snap was the best picture of Jordan McBride ever taken, in its subject’s opinion. Blue jeans and a ponytail, caught in motion halfway up a staircase, slinging the Leica casually over one shoulder as she looked back at the camera. A woman on the move, with a gleam in her eye like a lens.
It was the photo most used by J. Bryde, in her byline.
Chapter 59
Ian
October 1950
Vienna
The story was a razor in print form.
Ian had thought he’d