Who Is the Boy at the End? (Part 3)

The letter came from Adelaide, in Australia, and ran to three pages in careful handwriting.

The man who wrote it had never seen the photograph. His cousin in Bangor had described it to him on the telephone — eleven people outside a cannery, and a boy at the end that nobody in the town could name — and that description had been enough.

His great-uncle, he wrote, had spent three summers traveling the coast with a photographer, carrying the tripod and the glass plates and the water bucket. If the boy at the end was hatless and standing half out of the line, then somebody should look at his right hand. There would be a dark cord in it, running down past his knee and off the edge of the picture.

The family had always said the same thing about him: he was in a great many photographs by accident, and in none of them on purpose.

The copy on the wall showed nothing of the kind. Rhona had made it on the library machine, and the machine had eaten the dark edges, the way it always did.

So Everett went down to the original.

He was gone most of the afternoon. Rhona stayed at the desk and answered the phone twice and did not follow him, because Everett did not like company when the lamp was on and the magnifier was out.

When he came up he was carrying the original print flat in both hands, the way you carry something full.

“Right hand,” he said. “It runs down his leg and off the corner. I’ve looked at this photograph a hundred times and taken it for a crease in the paper.”

A cord like that ended in a rubber bulb. You squeezed the bulb and the shutter opened. It meant the photographer could stand out beside his camera, where the whole row could see him, waving his hat, getting eleven tired people to look in the same direction at the same moment, while somebody else made the exposure.

“He took it,” Everett said.