The woman cracked the album and began to page through its contents.
At first her expression was fond and serene, as she encountered artefacts and tokens of her long-departed childhood. But this serenity soon vanished, replaced by flushed indignation. Margali Gueths slammed shut the album, reshelved it, then took one from considerably farther down in her sequence. She hastily opened this binder, flipped through its pages, then plucked from it a single large daguerreotype.
The brief flash of the print that I received from my vantage revealed a tangle of bare fleshy limbs, plainly belonging to more than two persons.
Margali Gueths hastily descended the ladder to stand before me. Gazing at me contemptuously, she snapped the daguerreotype in half with a crisp crack, then snapped the fragment
