Dark Rivers of the Heart

guns.
        In front of him, the men at the Chrysler had guns too. Somehow that didn't come as a surprise.
        The final picture had been kept in a white envelope, which had been fastened shut with a length of Scotch tape.
        Because of the shape and thinness of the object, Roy knew that it was another photograph before he opened the envelope, though it was larger than a snapshot. As he peeled off the tape, he expected to find a five-byseven studio portrait of the mother, a memento of special importance to Grant.
        It was a black-and-white studio photograph, sure enough, but it was of a man in his middle thirties.
        For a strange moment, for Roy, there was neither a eucalyptus grove beyond the windows nor a window through which to see it. The kitchen itself faded from his awareness, until nothing existed except him and that single picture, to which he related even more powerfully than to the photos of the woman.
        He could breathe but shallowly.
        If anyone had entered the room to ask a question, he could not have spoken.
        He felt detached from reality, as if in a fever, but he was not feverish.
        Indeed, he was cold, though not uncomfortably so: It was the cold of a watchful chameleon, pretending to be stone on a stone, on an autumn morning; it was a cold that invigorated, that focused his entire consciousness without friction. His heart didn't race, as it would have in a fever. Indeed, his pulse rate declined, until it was as ponderously slow as that of a sleeper, and throughout his body, each beat reverberated like a recording of a cathedral bell played at quarter speed: protracted, solemn, heavy tolling.
        Obviously, the shot had been taken by a talented professional, under studio conditions, with much attention to the lighting and to the selection of the ideal lens. The subject, wearing a white shirt open at the throat and a leather jacket, was presented from the waist up, posed against a white wall, arms folded across his chest. He was strikingly handsome, with thick dark hair combed straight back from his forehead.
        The publicity photograph, of a type usually associated with young actors, was a blatant glamour shot but a good one, because the subject possessed natural glamour, an aura of mystery and drama that the photographer didn't have to create with bravura technique.
        The portrait was a study in light and shadow, with more of the latter than the former. Peculiar shadows, cast by objects beyond the frame, appeared to swarm across the wall, drawn to the man as night itself was drawn across the evening sky by the terrible weight of the sinking sun.
        His direct and piercing stare, the firm set of his mouth, his aristocratic features, and even his deceptively casual posture seemed to reveal a man who had never known self-doubt, depression, or fear.
        He was more than merely confident and self-possessed. In the photo, he projected a subtle but unmistakable arrogance. His expression seemed to say that, without exception, he regarded all other members of the human race with amusement and contempt.
        Yet he remained enormously appealing, as though his intelligence and experience had earned him the right to feel superior. Studying the photograph, Roy sensed that here was a man who would make an interesting, unpredictable, entertaining friend. Peering out from his shadows, this singular individual had an animal magnetism that made his expression of contempt seem inoffensive. Indeed, an air of arrogance seemed right for him-just as any lion must walk with feline arrogance if it was to seem at all like a lion.
        Gradually, the spell cast by the photograph diminished in power but didn't altogether fade. The kitchen reestablished itself from the mists of Roy's fixation, as did the window and the eucalyptuses.
        He knew this man. He had seen him before.
        A long time ago…
        Familiarity was part of the reason that the picture affected him so strongly. As with the woman, however, Roy was unable to put a name to the face or to recall the circumstances under which he had seen this person previously. He wished the photographer had allowed more light to reach his subject's face. But the shadows seemed to love the dark-eyed man.
        Roy placed that photo on the kitchen table, beside the snapshot of the mother and her son at poolside.
        The woman. The boy. The barn in the background. The