Kate herself had a bad burn across her stomach, from a cooking oil accident when she was a child. It had healed badly, and the skin was swollen rigid, purple and white. An ex-boyfriend had dragged his fingers across it pityingly. You poor thing. But Kate barely remembered her body without it.
She turned the page roughly to the catalog’s next chapter. This one was about The Threshold, a self-portrait in which Miranda was standing in a doorway in a floral minidress. Her legs were slim and dimpled, her breasts high, her face terrified. She had lifted her knee as if to step over the jamb, and the photo caught her there, in that perfect moment before she stepped, her bare foot hovering inches above the threshold. Down one leg, out from under the hem of the minidress, snaked a long trail of blood.
The Threshold was Miranda’s most famous photograph. The catalog said that in 2005, one copy had sold for $650,000 at auction. Kate had found a signed miniature print of the image the previous week. If that one sold for as much as the one in 2005, her bonus would net her $3,250. All that, for just one photograph. The thought made her dizzy, and she scrambled to her feet, suddenly needing air.
Her knees cracked as she stood: she had been sitting for much longer than she realized. Looking down at the catalog from this higher vantage point, something about the image on the page jogged her memory. She picked up the catalog, carried it into the foyer, and held it up to compare. Yes—it was definitely the same doorway. The Threshold had been taken right here, between the foyer and the hallway, in the same door Kate passed through every day.
She knelt down to inspect the floor where Miranda would have stood for the photo. There it was. A brownish stain in the wood grain, right below where Miranda’s foot would have been in the photograph. The stain looked like blood.
Footsteps coming down the stairs. Kate slammed the book shut. She must have successfully scrubbed her face of any guilt, because when Theo came into the foyer and saw her, he just said, “Huh,” and sat down on the entryway bench to put on his shoes.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“To pick up the kids.”
Kate checked her watch discreetly. It was 2:45. “Where’s their camp?”
“Stinson. It’s run out of a surf shop there. But they spend most of the day going on excursions, looking at wildlife and stuff. It’s a nature camp.”
It was more words than she had heard out of him all day, and she blinked down at him. When he looked up at her, his handsomeness surprising her all over again, some unreadable emotion skittered across his face. Maybe he regretted his outburst in the stairwell after all.
She folded the book into her chest and crossed her arms over it.
“I wanted to ask you a question about categories,” she said. “Do you want correspondence between your mom and dad grouped together, or separate?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well, your mom and your dad will have different correspondence series that go in different boxes. If I split them up, for example, and put all Miranda’s letters to Jake in with Jake’s stuff and Jake’s letters to Miranda in with Miranda’s, it would be more consistent with the rest of the system, but harder for people to see the whole back-and-forth.”
“What kind of back-and-forth?”
“I found some notes from when they were in New York together. When they had just met. They’re kind of cute, actually. Do you want to see them?”
His forehead creased, and he bent over his shoes again, so that she couldn’t see his expression. “No.”
“I don’t mean right now.” She had intended the letters as an olive branch, and his dismissal rankled. She let her arms fall to her sides. “I meant later. Or anytime.”
“Maybe.” He finished tying his shoes, stood up. “I better get going.”
When the front door clicked shut behind him, Kate tapped the catalog against the outside of her thigh. Rude or not, he had unwittingly solved one of her problems. It would take him at least fifteen minutes to get to Stinson and fifteen more to get back again. That meant she would have a solid half-hour chunk alone in the house every day. Plenty of time to get up to the attic.
* * *
It was Thursday when Kate finally felt confident enough about Theo’s schedule to put her plan into action. When she