"There's a lot more to this, Hugh," Renee said. "I found something really creepy. I don't know what to do. I need somebody I can trust. But I know it's not fair of me to ask you. So if you want to leave, go ahead. Just please don't say anything to anybody."
That was a lot to take in during those few quick, breathy sentences.
I was gun-shy about a lot of things these days and I'd started looking at people more warily, for good reason. But my sense of Renee's sincerity hadn't faltered.
I decided to go ahead, but to step very carefully.
"I'll listen, Renee, and I've gotten pretty good at keeping my mouth shut," I said. "I can't promise more than that."
She gave me an anxious smile. "That's a lot."
I walked with her back to the main house, this time noticing the many rock outcroppings on the mountainside that boundaried the property's rear-the primary homes of pack rats. There must have been a thriving community in there, aggressively expanding its turf.
Renee had gotten the bigger house pretty well cleaned up from the tenant's trashing. It was a splendid old place-nine-foot ceilings, oak floors, and the kind of finely wrought trim that had become as extinct as gaslight streetlamps.
She left me in the kitchen and went to another room. A minute later she came back with a manila envelope and shook out its contents on the table-a dozen bits of ragged-edged paper, ranging in size from a postage stamp to a playing card.
"I found these when I was trying to clean, mixed up in the rat gunk," she said, arranging the scraps and flipping some over.
I was puzzled, and more so when I realized what they were: fragments of photographs. The images were unclear-the colors had faded with time, and the rats had both chewed them up and stained them-but when I started to make them out, the strangeness factor of this day took another jump.
They appeared to be nude shots of a young woman. In a couple of them, she was wearing a costume-cowboy boots, a fringed leather vest opened to bare her breasts, and, in the only one that showed a complete face, large dangly earrings and a cowboy hat tipped rakishly low above her mischievous smile. It was hard to judge their quality; about all I could guess was that they weren't from a magazine or straight computer download-they were printed on photographic paper. There were no markings on the back, no clue as to who the photographer might have been.
I'd started to understand why this would upset Renee. Her father had always seemed a dignified, somewhat austere man, and no doubt that was how she wanted to remember him. Finding his study despoiled by vermin had to be yet another blow that she had suffered since coming here-a cruel trick of fate that mocked and underscored his ruined life. Learning that he'd kept a stash of cheesy porn would cheapen his memory further. But the way she was treating this like a nuclear secret seemed a bit overblown.
Just as I was thinking that, Renee touched the fragment that showed the model's full face, with the earrings and hat.
"This is Astrid," she said.
Her words took a few seconds to register, but when they did, they hit hard.
Astrid was Professor Callister's second wife, the one who had been murdered.