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A long silence followed. “Excuse me,” Miss Jackson said and left the courtyard.

Miss Jackson seldom made speeches. She never, ever referred to her losses and I only knew about them because Patwin, who’d worked with her three seasons now, had heard from gossipy Mallick. Patwin had hinted that she was sleeping with Mallick, but I’d seen no signs and hoped it wasn’t true. Miss Jackson was not a young woman, nor a pretty one, but she was too young and too pretty for Mallick. Few women would not be.

I thought back on how she’d also told us she’d seen the face of God in the sky and how that speech too had been uncharacteristic. Perhaps we’d come up on the anniversary of something or other. Or perhaps Miss Whitfield was responsible. Miss Whitfield might make me edgy and snappish, but perhaps Miss Jackson had melted in the sympathetic presence of another female.

“Well,” said Miss Whitfield. “I hope it wasn’t something I said.” She wrote a few words in her notebook and then addressed me. “You’re very quiet. Are you in love with the dead?”

Since I’d been thinking about Miss Jackson and not about myself, I had nothing prepared to say. “I’m not sure I do like a dig,” I answered. “I’m still deciding.” My heart was thudding oddly; the question had unnerved me more than I could account for. So I kept talking, just to demonstrate a steadier voice. “I wanted to see some things I wouldn’t see in Indiana. Mallick gave a lecture at the university and I asked some questions that he liked and he said if I could make my own way here, he could use me.”

Miss Whitfield was staring at me through little eyes. I could see that she didn’t believe me and, from that vantage point, I could also see how defensive I’d sounded, how unresponsive to the actual question, and how unlikely my sequence of events was. Mallick in Indiana! Me, asking such good questions from the audience that I was hired on the spot. In fact, it was all true, but pointing that out would be the most suspicious move of all. I felt unjustly accused, but also terribly, visibly guilty. There was a letter opener on a table by the doorway. I pictured myself picking it up and opening Miss Whitfield’s throat in one clean swipe.

All of a sudden Patwin laughed.

“What?” Davis asked him. “What’s so funny?”

“I was just remembering when you fell off your chair,” Patwin said. He was still laughing. “How your arms flew up!”

I had begun visiting Tu-api’s tomb at night when no one would know. I would like to say that there was nothing at all odd in this, but how defensive would that sound? Let’s just skip that part.

In fact I was disturbed by the murderous images coming over me and the tomb seemed a quiet place to figure things out. I wasn’t the sort to hurt anyone. People rarely upset or angered me. I’d never been a bully at school, didn’t fight, didn’t really engage much with people at all. Didn’t care about anyone but myself, my mother had said once after my father died. She’d never said it again, but she hinted it. Buried it in the subtext of every letter. Her own grief had been an awful thing for an eight-year-old boy to see.

But I thought of myself simply as a typical photographer. A watcher, a recorder. Transparent. And I thought how these violent images had begun shortly after Miss Whitfield’s arrival, so they might be put to her account. But they’d also begun shortly after Tu-api had shown me her face. In fact, if I remembered correctly, at the moment I had taken my picture the word murder had been hanging in the air. There was the smell of smoke. “If you were to murder someone,” Miss Whitfield had been asking, “who would it be?” Was it possible that the word itself had brought Tu-api back? Perhaps what I saw in her face wasn’t longing after all, but remorse. Patwin was always pointing out how she was a murderess.

Yet I found it easier to think Miss Whitfield was to blame than that Tu-api wished me ill. I’d begun to carry the print of her face in my pocket so