“Ma’am, can I help you sit down somewhere? I know this is a bit much.”
“Come in. Come in,” she said, and she let herself be led to the couch, where she sank into a corner.
Kate walked back over and closed the door. “I’m sorry. It’s been such a shock.”
“You just never know, do you?” she said. “My name is Alice. And I’ve been alone for a long time, so I love to take an interest in my neighbors, though I find most people don’t really like to have an interest taken in them.”
“I think most people prefer privacy these days,” Kate said, with a smile.
“It’s very sad. Nobody does anything for each other anymore.”
“Well, in this case, it’s quite possible that your neighbor had something to hide.”
“I won’t sleep now, thinking about the children I saw him with.”
“Maybe you could describe those children to me,” she said.
The old lady looked at her for a moment, concentrating on something. “You know what? I think I might have a picture of them too.”
Kate sat back, her heart slamming against her chest. “If you could show us any pictures you have, that would be a huge help.”
“Let me take a look,” she said. “I have a bunch that are unsorted.” She got up and disappeared. While she was away, Kate got up and walked around the living room, checking out the photos on the wall. They were obviously of an era gone by. There was her husband and what looked like two children of her own.
When Alice walked back in, she pointed at the picture Kate was looking at and said, “That’s my husband and two sons. They are all gone now.”
“Even your sons?”
Alice nodded sadly. “Yes. I didn’t realize it, but I had passed down a rare disorder to them,” she said. “They both had it and were gone before thirty.”
Such sadness and grief were in her voice that Kate couldn’t speak for a moment. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “That’s got to be difficult.”
“It’s even worse when you find out you’re responsible,” she said, “but there was no testing back then, no way to know.”
“That must have been emotional,” Kate said gently. “But what if you had known? Surely that wouldn’t have been easier.”
Alice looked at her, understanding. “Isn’t that the truth? Maybe I’m blessed as it is.”
“You at least had them for a time,” she said. “It looks like you were all very happy then.”
“Indeed,” Alice said, with a smile. “My husband died about ten, eleven years ago now,” she said. “God rest his soul. He found the loss of the boys even more difficult to bear than I did.”
“I think every man wants a son,” Kate said.
Alice sat down, placing a thin six-inch-long plastic bin on the coffee table.
“Where are these photos from?”
“I had a camera for a while,” Alice said. “I was trying to fill my time after my husband’s death, and I thought maybe I could pick up a hobby. So I started taking pictures, but I found that, once we moved into the digital photos, it was so much cheaper, yet I had nobody to show the photos to anyway,” she said. “So it didn’t seem to make any sense to even take them, you know? I’d look at them once and never look at them again.”
She pointed at the ones in the bin. “Originally I started printing off some of the digital pictures,” she said. “I had a photo printer, though you can see that they aren’t very good. But here’s what I have.” There were some full-size sheets of photos in the bin and a bunch of smaller ones too. Some were film paper, as if she had had them done at a store, and others were, indeed, just on plain printer paper.
Kate looked at Alice and asked, “Do you mind if I look through them?”
“I’ll give you half, and I’ll take half,” she said, “to see if I can find the ones I was thinking of.”
And that’s what they did.
Kate went through them, noticing that the pictures were everything from flowers to vehicles to storms and the odd person. When Kate got down to the bottom of her pile, there were more photos of people, and she studied them, as she tried to figure out which ones might be Ken and which ones might be other people. She stopped at one and tapped her finger on it. “That’s Ken, isn’t it?”