I turned those prints face down and picked up my phone, not to call the police like my racing heart wanted, but to start tracking down the family in the pictures, because when I made myself look again, slow, at that last crooked frame, I understood, and I laughed out loud alone in my kitchen with tears in my eyes.
The young woman in the photographs had not met any dark end. She had gone into labor.
Look at the roll the right way and it tells the whole happy story. The early frames, the family, the backyard, the lake trip, the young woman laughing and squinting into the sun, her hand resting on a belly I had not even noticed the first time through. And then the last few frames, fast and crooked, the camera grabbed in a hurry, because the day came, and everyone dropped everything, and in the rush of getting a laboring woman to the hospital, somebody snapped a couple of wild blurry shots, and the very last frame was her, doubled over, not in fear, in a contraction, laughing even through it, on her way out the door to go have her baby.
The camera got set down in that chaos and never picked up again, because when you bring a newborn home, nobody finishes the old roll of film. It got packed in a box, forgotten, and forty years later ended up at a yard sale for five dollars, half its story untold.
She did not vanish, I realized. She just became a mother, and a mother has no time to develop the last four pictures of who she was before.
I found them. A name on the back of one print, an old church in the background, a little detective work, and I tracked down that family. The laughing young woman is a grandmother now, in her sixties, hale and happy. The baby she was rushing off to have in that last crooked frame is a grown man with children of his own.
I sent them the photographs. All of them. The family called me, and the woman herself got on the phone, and she cried, because she had no pictures at all from that summer, the summer she was pregnant with her first, the roll never developed, the camera lost. She thought that whole golden season was gone forever.
It was not gone. It was wound up in a five dollar camera in a box for forty years, waiting for somebody to develop it and see, in that last frame, not a woman disappearing, but a woman about to become a mother, laughing all the way out the door. Sometimes the scariest-looking roll of film is just the happiest day of somebody life, caught mid-laugh, on the way to the hospital.