Museum of Little Ladies- 6

Part 1 

Part 2 

Part 3 

Part 4 

Part 5 

My reluctant face and repeated misgivings did nothing to deter Paige's mother, nanny or Nadia. I went through the process with a sinking heart and the able assistance of Thomas. Thomas pulled faces, brought out props and did everything he could to put Paige at ease. Despite the great shots I got, I had a good mind to close down the studio and run away from this escalating nightmare. I worried about it so much that by the end of it, I had a tension headache. Thomas insisted I make my way home," I'll take care of the prints and Nadia will close up today." 

Lisa and I sat across from each other, over a very awkward silence. It had been a long and exhausting 3 months for her. Repeated interrogations, allegations and suspects, all leading to nothing. We sat with the album between us. We had been over the sequence of events. some 3 times now. Anne had gone to the park with her baby sitter. She had been playing on the swing set and had requested a snack since she was hungry. The baby sitter had gone to the car, having forgotten the snack bag, this being a regular occurrence with her and come back to find Anne gone. This all pointed to a planned abduction. Someone must have been following her around for a while, hoping on the off chance that something/ someone would be careless. I got a better idea of the location and a refresh of Anne's schedule from Lisa.

After a late evening snack, I sat down at my computer and opened up some files. My window display of Anne's photos and all the photographs in my portfolio and finally her schedule. I scanned through the photographs, especially those I took of her in the playground and adjacent to the swing set. I had used them in my montage for the window. Suddenly, I saw it, a shadow in the far right corner, a jacket and a shock of dark hair was all I could see when I zoomed in. Like all good portraits, the background was not really capable of being sharpened beyond a point. I called two people. My friend Sandra who uses photographs for forensic research and the second Jimmy, after I observed the shots of all the other girls which I used for my window displays. They all had a presence in the background and it was time to figure out who.

Museum of Little Ladies- Part 2

Read Part 1 Here

I walked into the cool confines of my dark room, I bent my head over the latest prints I had to work on.  It was time to work on my window display for the week. I liked to use this time, before Nadia, my secretary came in to get my thoughts together. I was sure that it was only my window ideas which kept me from going bankrupt. This week's collection of vintage frames with my latest portraits of Cecilia could not fail to be to hit with the local audience.

The wind-chimes rang out as the door opened and I stepped out to find Nadia unwrapping herself like a giant Christmas present. The cold weather in Gorgon was getting to her Californian roots and freezing her up like an ice cube. Sometimes, I suspected that the only reason that she came to work with me was thanks to her outsider origins. She sympathized with me and it was wonderful that she could also do the books and my appointment planning and even wield my back up camera when required. She was the closest to a friend I had in this town where I had grown up and lived for 15 years of my life.

"Clara! Good morning! Sorry, I overslept, this weather- I can never get used to. Have you been holing up in your dark room once again? Today is our interview for the assistant photographer job. Do you have all your questions ready?" She fired off one question after the other like a quick loading cannon. "Yes, I am ready. I am going into the kitchen for some coffee. Can you send him into the back room when he arrives? Did you say 10?" As she nodded her assent stuffing a croissant into her mouth, I walked into the kitchen to brew my special coffee.

The windchimes chimed again, as I moved into the backroom. A gust of cold wind hit my face as the door swung open and then it looked like some ancient God of Ice and Snow had walked in.

Lost and Found- Part 1

Meet Don, 30 years old. He's about 5 feet 6 inches tall, short compared to the rest of his clan. If you were kind, u would call him broad shouldered. If you weren't, you would approximate a rectangle.

He likes taking walks in the summer sun just as much as in the pleasant rains. So you would find him nicely bronzed off on a good day and badly sun burnt on others. The first thing everyone noticed about his hair was never the color. You just saw that there seemed to be too much of it on that little head of his. But for purposes of your imagination it was coffee grounds brown. If you met his eyes, which you inevitably did, because he always did talk that way, was a softer ice tea brown.

Before he starts sounding like one of those stock photos on the internet or a safe date on an internet dating website, let's see what Don was getting upto now. He was sitting on the edge of his seat on the 10:30 subway going downtown. "Ping!" went his phone. He scrolled through it absentmindedly.

"Not another of these reports!" he thought to himself," I should never have subscribed to this alert service." Though it wasn't really much of a choice anyway. His job as a hot shot financial expert demanded this at a minimum. He had never borne the brunt of a bubble bursting around him, but it would be good to be in the loop when it did. 

So, now that he was 30, in fact that very day was his birthday, Don was thinking very deeply about nothing in particular. Especially not what he was going to do next. He wasn't much of a philosopher, but he hadn't gotten away unscathed from the kind of situations he had been in. Introspection was dangerous, so he tried not to indulge.

He tried to look fascinated again as he caught sight of the skyline. Another day, another dollar!