Black Creek Crossing Read Online Free PDF Page A

burned over a weekend, Mr. Feinberg shook his head and said, “You’d better get a digital camera, Seth. At the rate you’re taking pictures, you’re going to need a student loan just for film.”
    So when his birthday came around, all he’d asked for was a digital camera, and his mother had come through.
    His only problem then was the small memory in the camera, which he’d dealt with by setting the resolution as low as possible, so he could take as many pictures as he wanted, and reshoot the good ones at a higher resolution.
    Until today, it had been working out pretty well. But on his way home from school, he took pictures of some of the oldest houses in Roundtree, and when he got home and looked them over on his computer, he saw that most of them weren’t good, that the lighting hadn’t been right. But he expected that and knew he could go back another day and take the good ones at a higher resolution. It was the shot of the old house at Black Creek Crossing that presented a problem he couldn’t resolve.
    When he brought it up on the screen, there was something wrong with one of the upstairs windows. It looked out of focus, though the rest of the picture was in focus. How could one window on the second floor not be? As he looked closer, he wasn’t sure. Maybe it wasn’t out of focus; maybe it was just a shadow, or a reflection. But the sun wasn’t shining on the front of the house, and even if it was, where would a shadow have come from? And if it was a reflection, it should have been mirroring something outside the house. But what?
    Seth fiddled with the picture, using the controls in the program first to zoom in on the window, then to try to sharpen the image and increase the contrast. But no matter what he did, the area of the window wouldn’t come into focus, wouldn’t sharpen up like the rest of the picture. Not that the rest of the picture was all that sharp once he’d blown it up, because of the low resolution, which was fine if he was just going to look at the pictures on the computer screen. They might even print okay, if he didn’t try to make them much bigger than three-by-five; they weren’t much different, after all, from the contact prints he’d made from the innumerable rolls of 35mm film he shot before he got the digital camera, most of which he’d never bothered to blow up at all. But with film, if he’d found something like he was now seeing in the photo of the house on Black Creek Road, he’d have been able to enlarge it until he knew exactly what it was, instead of having it turn into a bunch of pixels that didn’t form into anything at all.
    Seth began experimenting with the color controls, thinking the image might be clearer in black and white, when his father’s second rap on the door—much louder than the first—broke his concentration. Then the door opened and his father came in.
    Blake Baker’s eyes darkened. “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.
    “Just working on some pictures.”
    “ ‘Just working on some pictures,’ ” his father repeated mockingly. “What kind of pictures?” He moved closer to the computer, and Seth could see the suspicion in his eyes.
    “Just some houses,” he said.
    “Houses? For God’s sake, Seth! You’re fifteen! What are you doing taking pictures of houses?”
    Seth said nothing, knowing that whatever he said would be wrong.
    “Chad Jackson and a bunch of his buddies are out in the street playing softball. How come you’re not down there with them?”
    “I was just working on my pictures—” Seth began, but his father didn’t let him finish.
    “Not anymore you’re not,” he said, reaching out and switching off the computer. As Seth helplessly watched his unsaved images vanish from the monitor, his father said, “You’re going to go down there and play ball with your friends like a normal kid, understand?” Seth felt his eyes begin to burn, and he bit his lip. “Understand?” his father repeated.
    Knowing