Double Image by David Morrell Page B

where Packard’s photograph didn’t do justice to its subject. For one thing, the house had a presence, a solidity, an immediacy that the photograph, even using tricks of perspective and shadows, only hinted at. For another, Packard’s photograph had been in black and white, leaving Coltrane unprepared for the greenish blue of the hammered copper trim along the corners, or for the coral tint of its stucco and the red and yellow of the flowers on the terraces.
    After so much effort trying to find the sites from which Packard had photographed the other houses, he had chanced upon the exact spot he needed for this house on his first try. He couldn’t get over it. Excitement swelling in him, he got out of his Blazer, opened the back hatch, and arranged his equipment. Waiting for a truck to pass, he set up the view camera in the street (he was amazed by how efficiently he was now able to handle it), made the necessary adjustments to match the image with the perspective in Packard’s photo, inserted an eight-by-ten-inch negative, and took the picture.
    His chest relaxed with satisfaction. To make sure there hadn’t been a mechanical failure, he decided to take a dozen more exposures, but basically he had gotten the job done — and there wasn’t any need to find details that commented on the difference between the past and the present, because in this case there
wasn’t
any difference. Although the neighborhood had become overgrown, the house had been maintained exactly as it had once looked in Packard’s photograph. It was as beautiful as ever.
    A horn sounded behind him. He waved for a station wagon to squeeze around him, then redirected his attention to the house below him. After retrieving the exposed negative, he decided to check that the camera hadn’t shifted slightly, and he stooped to peer beneath the black cloth, concentrating on the upside-down image on the focusing plate.
    Movement caught his attention — someone coming out of the house’s front door, a portly man carrying a large cardboard box to a Mercedes sedan, then returning to the house. The man wore a green sport coat and had a distinctive rolling gait.
    No. Coltrane frowned. It can’t be.
     
2
     
    HE WAS WAITING AT THE MERCEDES when Duncan Reynolds again came out of the front door, carrying another cardboard box. As heavy as the last time Coltrane had seen him, his face as ruddy, Duncan set down the box beside an azalea, closed the door behind him, picked up the box again, and only then noticed Coltrane at the curb.
    Duncan hesitated, concealing his surprise, then walked down a sloping concrete path to the street. “I don’t suppose I need to ask what you’re doing in the neighborhood.”
    “Want some help?”
    “Why not? Since you’re here.” Duncan, his eyes a little bloodshot, surrendered the box and unlocked the Mercedes’s trunk.
    When Coltrane set the box inside next to three others, he got a look past an open flap, seeing binders of sleeve-protected photographs and negatives.
    Coltrane stepped back from the car. “So we know why
I’m
in the neighborhood. . . .”
    “I’m just taking care of the final details,” Duncan said.
    Coltrane shook his head, not understanding.
    “The movers were here earlier, carting away the furniture. But I didn’t trust them to handle the photographic materials.”
    Coltrane continued to look perplexed.
    “Of course.” Duncan gestured with realization. “You didn’t know.”
    “Know?”
    “This house belonged to Randolph.”
    “Belonged to . . . This was
his
?”
    “After Randolph photographed it, he couldn’t get it out of his mind. He was so haunted by the unusual design that he bought it.”
    Coltrane continued to feel amazed. “None of his biographers ever mentioned that.”
    “Well, as you must have gathered by now, Randolph liked to keep many details about his life confidential. He bought the house through an intermediary and put the title in the name of one of the corporations