Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) by Margaret Maron Read Free Book Online Page A

get away on time for a change.”
    She watched as Anne Harald briskly aligned the edge of a picture then pulled down cleanly on the blade. Her mother’s expertise often surprised strangers. Someone this decorative was not usually expected to be competent as well. And even in jeans and sneakers and a shaggy old gray sweater, with most of her lipstick eaten off and chemical stains on her fingers, Anne Harald remained a thoroughly decorative woman.
    She examined with a critical eye the picture she’d finished blocking then handed it and another over to Sigrid. “You said you wanted copies. Happy birthday.”
    Sigrid took the top one and looked down into her own eyes. Not really, of course. Her eyes were a slate gray that could look silver under certain conditions but Leif Harald’s had been a clear light blue. This black-and-white photo turned his blue eyes silver, though. Spaced as widely as hers, too, and shaped the same. Over the years, so many family friends and relatives had pulled her features apart one by one in an attempt to explain how someone so physically plain and awkward could have sprung from two such attractive parents that Sigrid knew exactly which attribute she’d inherited from each.
    From Leif had come the eyes, thin nose, high cheekbones, silky straight hair, and her height, five ten in her stocking feet. From Anne came the changeable gray of her eyes, the darkness of her hair and a jutting chin. Neither side of the family claimed the mouth that was too wide, the neck that was too long, nor the crippling self-consciousness that had kept her tongue-tied with shyness even after she grew up.
    The first picture was a three-quarters view of her father, dressed for patrol in what would have been winter blues, the jacket unbuttoned and half open. He had his hand in one pocket, his hat and nightstick in the other, and she could see the big handle of his holstered service revolver as he leaned against a door frame and smiled into Anne’s camera—a confident young Viking, off to tame urban dragons, captured on film by his young wife. He couldn’t have been much more than twenty-six or twenty-eight himself.
    The next picture must have been snapped a moment or two later.
    The jacket was buttoned now, but she had crawled into the picture, a solemn, wide-eyed infant, who looked up into his laughing, indulgent face and reached for his hat with the shiny badge.
    “You’re sure five-by-seven is what you want?” asked Anne. “No problem to make them eight-by-tens.”
    “No, these are perfect,” said Sigrid. “Thanks. But I thought you said you didn’t have negatives.”
    “I didn’t,” she said shortly. “I had to copy the positives and make new negatives. That’s why they’re not as crisp as they should be.”
    They looked fine to Sigrid. When she’d flown down to North Carolina for a cousin’s funeral back in October, she’d found these two wallet-size pictures among her grandmother’s albums and had asked to borrow them. “I don’t have any pictures of Dad,” she said. “Photographers’ spouses must be like shoemakers’ children.”
    “You may have them to keep,” Grandmother Lattimore had said.
    She seemed puzzled though. “There should be boxes of pictures. Anne was always taking Leif. I suppose it’s all those moves. They say seven moves are equal to one fire. If that’s true, it’s a wonder your mother hasn’t lost everything she ever owned.”
    Anne gave her a stiff protective envelope and gathered up her own things while Sigrid slid the photographs inside and tucked the envelope into her pocket.
    “Ready?”
    Anne nodded and they said goodnight to the Bensingers, then plunged out into the icy wind and hurried down the crowded sidewalk to Sigrid’s car.
    Inside, Anne shivered on the front seat beside her. “This is as cold as the night you were born. At least it’s not snowing, though.”
    “Supposed to before morning,” Sigrid warned, edging the car into the stream of heavy