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away. Her stomach had quieted as she concentrated on the puzzle before her. She saw the remains of her teacher, but she knew she must not think of him as that person—for now, he was evidence in a possible crime scene, the shell left behind, the remains, the victim, the corpse. She couldn’t allow herself to feel what that loss meant, not yet. It was important that she copy her father’s impassive face and Jacobs’s cool manner. If her veneer cracked, they would ask her to leave. Unzipping the death bag, she pulled out her camera and removed the lens cap.

    “Good, Cammie, get lots of pictures,” her father said. “I have a feeling we’re going to need them.”

    She began at the bottom of the bed, concentrating at first on the feet, snapping one picture after the other in rapid succession as she worked her way up. A down comforter, encased in a navy duvet and leaking feathers, had been tossed to one side. Raised knees made a tent of a pale blue sheet that stopped midway up the corpse’s chest. His right hand clutched a fistful of sheet in a knot so tight the fabric made pleats, accordion style, that rippled all the way to the floor. The left side of his chest still sported three white EKG pads where Del Halbrook had attached the leads. Del had been careful, she knew, to disturb the scene as little as possible . Snap, snap, snap —Cameryn took picture after picture of her teacher’s hands, his face, his ash-blond hair, the empty sockets, recording his remains—the remains of his life, she told herself, not just his death.

    Above his head, on the wall, were two black-and-white nature prints, one depicting a snowfield glittering in the sun, the other a mountain waterfall. A white porcelain vase filled with more wildflowers bloomed from his nightstand, the same flowers that she’d seen on the desk in his office. Here, once again, were the lavender petals of the aspen daisy, the orange-red Indian blanket flower, and the delicate sky-blue flax. But there was a difference: These blossoms had withered. Each flower head drooped on a flaccid stem until the heads almost touched the nightstand’s surface.

    That’s odd, she thought. In his classroom, Mr. Oakes hadn’t been one to keep any blossom past its prime. Everything there, as in his home, had been neat and shining clean, because, he’d told them, thoughts die in chaos. The only hint of dissention in Mr. Oakes’s ordered universe came from his own dark blond hair, which always fell in his eyes when he read poetry. It had been the one part of him that refused to submit. Against her will, Cameryn’s teacher sprang to life in her memory, breathing and laughing and once again alive in her mind’s eye.

    “Remember, kids,” Mr. Oakes had said, propped on the edge of his desk, “it’s your job to drink in life. The poet Richard Wilbur wrote one of my favorite lines of all time. ‘I die of thirst, here at the fountainside.’” He’d paused, then wagged his finger at them, smiling a crooked half-smile. “Think of what it means to live, and never waste a moment of it.”

    You didn’t waste it, did you, Mr. Oakes? Cameryn thought now as she snapped pictures of the flowers before moving her lens to capture the top of her teacher’s head. Because it’s gone now. You were right about living, since you never know when your time will come. . . .

    “That’s good, Cammie, that’s good,” her father told her.

    He’d held the clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other as he busily checked things off, but now he came over to stand beside her. Reaching down, his gloved fingers gently grasped Mr. Oakes’s jaw and moved it from side to side, which caused the gel from the sockets to gleam in the light. “He’s just going into rigor now. When’s the last time someone saw him alive?”

    “Last night at some Scout thing. Kyle said Oakes left the group at about ten thirty P.M. That means at the most he’s been dead less than . . .” Jacobs’s eyes searched