Dark Room

DARK ROOM The whole town thinks she imagines things. Someone is counting on it. Dana Ellery photographed three wars. The last one followed her home. Now she lives alone in a dead lighthouse at the edge of Wrack Cove, photographing seabirds, and enduring the pity of a town that read about her in the papers. They think they know what was done to her over there. They are nowhere close. Then, on a storm-black April night, she watches two men haul a heavy shape to the cliff below her tower. She watches them swing it out into the dark. Before they go, they turn, and they look up at her window. The police find nothing. The detective files her report in a drawer with her name on it. The town has a word for women like Dana, and it isn't witness. Dana knows her mind lies to her. Her ears invent voices. Her nerves find danger in empty rooms. But her eye, the eye that made her famous, has never once been wrong. This time, she needs it to be.