When she entered his room, Beth saw the extent to which Hal Rhoads had cooperated with his daughter’s delusion. Despite two months at Bayshore Oaks, it still looked like he had yet to fully move in. Some residents could fill suitcases with photo albums and tchotchkes, but packing up Mr. Rhoads required only one small cardboard box. He had a half-empty dresser, a couple spy novels, an almanac, a stack of papers, a wall calendar with each day slashed through, and two photographs in heavy silver frames.
Beth picked up the larger picture. A family shot. Mr. Rhoads was in his fifties, strong and sunburned, with his pretty, proper daughter and his dark-haired teenage son, squinting into the sun. The three of them stood amid a crowd of cattle, calves maybe, with an upside-down R branded on their back left flanks. Diana stood apart from the two men, in spotless riding clothes, the English kind. There was no wife to be seen.
The wife was in the other picture, the smaller frame. It was a formal photograph of a young couple, black-and-white, him in a naval uniform, her in dark lipstick and tight pin curls. They were sitting close, her almost on his lap, his hand gently claiming her waist. They were smiling, him broadly at the camera, her slighter, facing toward him, as if she hoped he’d go out in the world and make a name for them both.
Beth wondered what had happened between the two photographs. Mr. Rhoads had told her he’d been on his own for a long time, but she didn’t know the particulars. Had his wife died? Run off with a farmhand? Gotten tired of the strong, stoic type?
She looked back at the family photograph. Martin Rhoads couldn’t have been much older than Jack was now. Beth knew what it was like to raise a kid alone, to have people constantly ask about the parent who wasn’t in the picture. When Jack was little, it was especially brutal. Pushing her in the shopping cart, debating whether to answer when the cashier asked about “daddy” or throw a box of Cheerios in his face.
Beth took one last look at the family photo before she flipped the picture frame over to place it in the box. And paused. There was something wedged into the cardboard backing, a corner of waxy paper peeking out. For a moment, Beth told herself it wasn’t her place to investigate. But then the emptied room reminded her. Mr. Rhoads was dead. There was no more harm that could be caused.
The cardboard slid easily from the frame under Beth’s fingers. Behind it, she found another snapshot, a thin piece of tissue paper separating it from the family photograph.
The picture was a funny shape, a narrow vertical slice, as if someone had cut it out from a larger photo. Hal Rhoads was standing stiffly next to a short, dark-skinned woman with a toddler in her arms. They were outside, at the edge of a patch of dead grass that spread behind them like a shadow. Mr. Rhoads looked about the same age as in the family photo. The woman was young, early twenties. She looked tired, her eyes dull, hands maintaining a tight grip on the wriggling boy. They were posed in front of the open doorway of a smart wooden building, but the woman hunched away from it, as if she didn’t want to acknowledge its existence. The back of the snapshot had the words “new barn” in Hal Rhoads’s spidery script. No identification of the woman or the child.
Beth frowned at the snapshot. What kind of story did it tell? Had Hal Rhoads traded in his first wife for a younger model? Beth didn’t want to believe it. But maybe Mr. Rhoads was no different from her own father, chasing younger and younger women the older he got. The last time Beth had heard from her dad, he’d been in Bermuda with a twenty-five-year-old dental hygienist.
Beth tucked the snapshot back into its frame, trapping the mystery between cardboard and tissue. She put both picture frames in the box with Mr. Rhoads’s books and papers and layered his clothes on top, folding his faded flannel jacket with care. Whatever his past, Mr. Rhoads had meant something to Beth. When things felt upside down the past couple months, with Lana sick and driving her up the wall, Mr. Rhoads was someone she could rely on, someone solid.
And Beth could use some solid ground right now. She realized, half-guilty, half-glad, that Mr. Rhoads’s death had made her temporarily forget Jack’s predicament. But now the fear rose up again, a wave crashing at the back of her throat. Mr. Rhoads would have known how to handle the detectives the night before, how to garner their respect. He could have calmed them down instead of riling them up like Lana probably had. Beth checked her phone for the fifteenth time that morning. Still no callbacks from any of the lawyers. There was a text from Lana telling Beth “Don’t worry!!!” But that only made Beth more stressed-out.