reached the top of the stairs, half-hoping to find some cramped Gothic oubliette of a space, she discovered instead a vast, sunny room that spanned the entire length of the house. Light streamed from garret windows onto oak beams and honey-colored walls. Like the blacked-out pupils of Miranda’s eyes on the catalog cover, the room seemed strangely flat: every surface wore a furry coat of dust, which turned the light milky and dense. There were a few scuffled lines of footprints, presumably Theo’s, and although Kate tried to stay on these tracks, her first step forward sent up a billow of dust that drifted through the sunbeams.
The north end of the room was almost empty. Wood plinths and wide rolls of fabric indicated the rudiments of unmade canvases, but there were no finished paintings. Kate paused, realizing now that she hadn’t seen any of Jake’s paintings downstairs, either. He had taken all his own work even as he had left behind all his wife’s.
The scale of the waste struck Kate anew. Okay, so Jake hadn’t been able to bring himself to move Miranda’s photos in the immediate wake of her death. Too many memories, like Kate’s mother had said. But he could have come back any time in the last twenty-four years—a year after Miranda’s death, two years, five—and saved so many pictures. Instead he had let them decay. He had set up a new life miles away and continued selling his paintings, all while his wife’s legacy rotted in the house they had once shared. And now he was dead, too, his intentions gone with him, and there was no knowing whether he had left Miranda’s work behind out of too little love or too much.
Kate turned to the other half of the room. Two drafting tables held piles of small objects that were nearly unidentifiable beneath the thick layer of dust. Kate thought she saw film canisters, a cutting mat, a box cutter. The surfaces looked like topographic models of an island chain, bumpy and unrecognizable. Behind the tables was a door with a low, brocade-upholstered sofa next to it. The center of one cushion had split open, and foam extruded from the rupture. Chew marks around the edges, small dark droppings: the telltale signs of rodents nesting. There was a sour smell coming from that general area, like a small animal had died in the wall a long time ago.
Looking around at the untouched room, Kate was suddenly, horribly aware of her own aliveness, her beating heart and her recently showered skin starting to perspire in the stuffy air, and the awareness made her feel sick. Like she had passed over a patch of ice on a highway without incident, only to see in her rearview mirror the car behind her spin out and tumble over a cliff.
She steeled herself and walked over to the door beside the sofa. Like many doors in the house, it required some physical effort to open; the house’s sinking and shifting over the years had warped the frame just past the point of functionality. When Kate finally wrenched the door open, she was briefly confused: instead of a room, she saw only a solid black rectangle, like one of those inky holes Bugs Bunny moved around to thwart the Roadrunner. She reached out to touch it, and her hand met heavy velvet. It was just a curtain. Feeling stupid, she pushed through the curtain into darkness and fumbled for a light switch on the other side. Two safelights came on, bathing the room in red.
To Kate’s surprise, the darkroom was neatly organized, with equipment stacked on metal utility shelves and a long stainless-steel table in the middle of the room. The precautions that had kept the light out had also kept the dust at bay, so that there was only a thin film of disuse. The air had the faint, sterilized tang of a swimming pool locker room. The safelights were hung on cords from the ceiling, and everything above them was a black void, giving Kate the peculiar feeling of having stepped onto a TV soundstage.
She moved slowly around the room, inspecting its contents. Supplier’s bottles of undiluted chemicals, funnels, thermometers, glass sheets. One box spat out a crumpled rubber glove, half-dragged from the plastic opening when the previous one had been removed. There was an array of devices that looked like the microscopes Kate remembered from her high school science classes, rows of plastic tubs, and shelves filled with