Chapter 5: Will Byers, Age Twelve, Last Seen

The photograph was four inches by six. School portrait, autumn backdrop — the kind of artificial amber that American educational institutions apparently favored as a stand-in for warmth. Will Byers looked directly at the camera with the expression of a child who has been told to smile and has produced instead something more interesting: a considered steadiness, as though the camera were a question he was weighing before answering.

Holmes had been looking at it for eleven minutes.

He did this sometimes with portraits — not the soft unfocused contemplation that people mistook for sentiment, but a systematic sweep, quadrant by quadrant, cataloguing the involuntary information a face provides when it believes it is merely being recorded. The jaw angle. The tension in the orbital muscles. The asymmetry of the shoulders, which spoke of habitual posture rather than photographer's instruction. Will Byers carried his right shoulder fractionally higher than the left. He had, Holmes noted, the hands of a boy who drew things: the index and middle finger of his right hand were slightly more developed at the proximate joint, callused at the fingertip in the specific way of pencil pressure maintained over years. There was a faint ink stain on his left wrist that the school photographer had not thought to ask him to scrub away.