piano, I would have been impressed, but after all the rest, I shrugged it off as no big deal, though the wood gleamed with years, maybe decades, of polish and care. There were more pictures on top of the piano, but these were photos. Some looked like women in nineteenth-century clothes. Others had men posing with what might have been some of the specimens in the room, but the animals were freshly killed and limp with death. The tiger’s head was propped up so it was looking at the camera. The black leopard that a mustached man had just caught was hung upside down like a fish. It looked so terribly dead. The man’s arm was in a sling, and there were bandages along one side of his face. It looked like the leopard had given him a run for his money and for both their lives. It made me strangely happy that the leopard had cut the man up before it died. I’d grown up hunting with my father, but we’d hunted deer and rabbits, never predators. He’d raised me with the belief that if you couldn’t eat it, you didn’t need to hunt it. I tried not to feel like I was on the leopard’s side as I looked at that long-ago man standing so upright beside the animal that he’d hung by its hind legs like a deer. I guess dead meat is dead meat, and certainly the animal had been beyond caring, but it seemed like an insult. The leopard had marked him, hunted the hunter. To me that made it a foe. You should respect your opponents even in death. Hanging them up like a big fish for a photo just felt wrong to me.
The pictures went through the centuries. A lot of the family was blond. There were a couple of redheads, then a brunette or two, but they were predominantly pale of hair, skin, and eye. I guessed if you kept marrying among your white-bread roots, that was what you ended up with, but it bothered me. Maybe I was letting my own personal issues interfere? Probably. I’d been dealing with my family more than normal because of the wedding planning. My stepmother, Judith, was as blond and blue-eyed as her daughter, as my father, and as their shared son, my half brother. I was the only dark, ethnic note in their German white bread, and Judith had never, ever let me forget it. She’d been so rude about it that by the time we were teenagers, Andrea, Judith’s daughter from her first marriage, had started correcting the racism in front of her mother and whomever she was talking to. Andrea and I had never really gotten along that well, so I’d been surprised that she’d come to my defense. In hindsight I wasn’t sure she’d been defending me as much as she was just embarrassed by her mother’s obvious white-supremacy leanings. Either way, it had left me with an ethnic chip on my shoulder that I never let Judith forget.
“Here’re Bobby and his parents,” Newman said, pointing.
There was a smiling couple with a baby and then a picture of them with a slightly older version of the baby. The next picture of the baby was with a man alone, just him and the baby.
“Is this Ray Marchand with baby Bobby?” I asked.
“Yes, those are the last of the older photos.”
Newman led me back to the office area. There was a smaller corner table between the file cabinets and the desk that I’d overlooked, too busy looking at the blood and mayhem. There were pictures of Ray with a progressively older boy. Bobby at somewhere between six and eight, holding up a bigmouth bass almost as big as he was, a huge grin showing that he was missing some of his baby teeth. Ray was helping him hold the fish, a look of pure happiness and pride on his face. There were pictures of them with skis someplace cold, and then there was a wedding photo: Ray Marchand with a statuesque woman so beautiful, she didn’t look real. From cheekbones to carefully waved hair, she was model perfect, movie-star gorgeous. Her hair was black, her skin the color of coffee with cream in it. Bobby stood beside her in a tiny tailored tuxedo complete with tails that looked to be a match to the one that Ray was wearing. His smile was flashing the same missing teeth as the fishing photo. He had