The Double Bind Read Online Free PDF

when he was brought in off the street last year, he had this old canvas duffel with photos in it that he insisted were his. I assume most of these were in it. He wouldn’t take a bed until he was sure that the lockers were safe—that his locker would be safe. He was literally going to sleep with them, but there were only top bunks left in the shelter, so he couldn’t.”
    The homeless often brought an object or two into the shelter of totemic (and, to them, titanic) importance—that single item that either reminded them of who they were or what their life had been like before it began to unravel. A certificate from a spelling bee they’d won as a child. An engagement ring they’d been unwilling to pawn. A teddy bear—and even the veterans from the Vietnam and Gulf wars sometimes had a stuffed animal with them. Laurel had seen plenty of family snapshots in the mix that was checked into the lockers, too. But she’d never before seen anything that resembled either serious art or professional accomplishment. And she had taken enough photography courses and snapped enough pictures herself to know with confidence that these photographs were interesting from both a journalistic and an artistic perspective. She thought it was even possible that somewhere she had seen the image of the teen girls with their Hula-Hoops—if not this exact photograph, then perhaps one from the same shoot.
    “Couldn’t someone else have taken the photos and given them to him?” Laurel asked. “A brother or sister, maybe? A friend? Maybe somebody died and left them to him.”
    “Go talk to Sam,” Katherine said, referring to the manager who had been on duty the night Bobbie Crocker had arrived. “He knows more about Bobbie than I do. And talk to Emily. I’m pretty sure he’d told them both he was a photographer. Of course, he wouldn’t show them the pictures. Not ever. Apparently, no one could see them—or else.”
    “Or else what?”
    “Oh, who knows? Welcome to Bobbie’s World. Emily managed to sneak a peek at the pictures pretty soon after he first arrived, just to make sure that he wasn’t some horrid child pornographer. But you know how busy Emily is. The woman’s life is chaos. Once she saw they were innocent, she didn’t think about them again until she was going through his room with me yesterday.”
    Laurel considered this for a moment and then glimpsed another photograph. A pair of young men playing chess in Manhattan’s Washington Square, surrounded by a half-dozen onlookers all watching the match intently. She guessed this one couldn’t have been later than the early 1960s. Something about it definitely felt pre-Johnson to her. Pre–Lee Harvey Oswald.
    Beneath it was an image with a completely different sensibility: a dirt road she recognized in Vermont. A girl in the distance on a mountain bike. Black Lycra shorts. A wildly colorful jersey with an image on the front she couldn’t quite make out, but that might very well have been a bottle. It was perhaps a half mile from where she had been attacked, and instantly she was back on that road with the two violent men with their masks and their tattoos and their plans to rape her, and her heart was starting to palpitate. She must have stared for a long moment, because Katherine—her voice sounding as if she were speaking underwater—was asking her if she was all right.
    “Yes, uh-huh,” Laurel heard herself murmuring. “I’m fine. Can I hang on to these?” she asked. She knew she was sweating, but she didn’t want to draw attention to it by wiping her brow.
    “Do you want some water?”
    “No. Really, I’m okay. Honest. I’m just…it’s just hot out.” She smiled for her boss’s benefit.
    “Well, when you want to go through them—and there’s no rush, Laurel—I’d love to know what you think.”
    “I can tell you what I think right now: They’re good. He—or whoever took them—had legitimate talent.”
    Katherine dipped her chin just the tiniest