Chapter 5

By 9:15 the lobby had a story, and the story was good enough that almost everyone believed it.

Fabian Cross told it quietly, one small circle at a time, and it spread outward the way a story does - through a board member, then a donor's wife, then the whole marble floor. The night watchman had been here in 1984. The night watchman had worked under Dutch Mueller on the old restoration. And when the new restoration came, and the old work came down, and the man who had taught him was erased from the building's history - well. Cross didn't have to finish the sentence. He just looked sad about it.

Grief. That was the word moving through the room. A grieving old man who couldn't bear it.

And it was half true, which is what made it stick. Emmett had worked under Dutch in 1984. Dutch had died twenty-two years ago of a heart attack in the scene shop. Emmett had kept the man's framing square in his locker ever since. And when the vinyl came down off the truck last spring and the old panels went into crates, Emmett had stood in the basement and looked at them for a long time.

The other half of the story was the part that put handcuffs on him: that a man who could not bear the loss had gone up there with a blade and cut the new work down, and now, tonight, when he was finally seen, he had tried to carry a panel out through the loading dock.

Iris Falk stood at the edge of a circle and listened to it, and she felt the story take hold in her own chest, which frightened her more than the accusation had. She was an archivist. She dealt in proof, not in the way an old man held a brush. She told herself she had imagined the shape of the scar. She told herself she had wanted to see something.

In the alcove, Emmett sat with his hands on his knees.

He was thinking about the corner panel. Not the room, not the officers, not the eleven months a lawyer would tell him he was facing. The corner. The last of the forty-two, the one with the bad edge, the one he had started in September and finished at three o'clock that morning and still was not satisfied with, because the shellac had gone cloudy along one side and he knew how to fix it and he needed ten minutes and a warm room.

Dutch had a rule about nights like this. A painter doesn't argue with a man holding a microphone. He shows him.

Emmett had lived by that for forty years. It had never once cost him anything he couldn't afford.

He was still sitting there when he heard footsteps on the north stair, going up, fast. He didn't know it was Iris. He wouldn't know that for another twenty minutes.