Chapter 8

Iris did not raise her voice. That was the thing people remembered afterward. She talked about the ceiling the way she always talked about the building - plainly, with dates.

She said the lobby ceiling was painted in 1927 by two men, A. Marchetti and T. Brennan, and that their initials were still in the southeast corner panel, and that the theater had been proud of that for ninety-eight years. She said the ceiling had been restored in 1984 by a crew of nine, including a master carpenter named Dutch Mueller and a scenic artist named Emmett Doyle. She said the current restoration had been contracted in 2022 at two point four million dollars, and that the board had been told it was hand work.

Then she turned to Fabian Cross, who was standing at the front of the crowd with his hands clasped, and asked him one question.

"Mr. Cross. Describe the southeast corner panel for me. The technique."

Cross smiled. It was a good smile. "There are four hundred details in a restoration of this scale."

"Just the corner," Iris said. "You billed it as hand-painted."

"A layered glazed finish. It required a great deal of patience."

"What ground did you use?"

"I'd have to check my notes."

"What size did you cut the gold leaf?"

"I'd have to check my notes."

"Who mixed the bole?"

"I'd have to check my notes."

His hand went to his pocket square, then to his watch, then nowhere. He was still smiling. He looked like a man waiting for a plane that had already left.

The room had gone completely quiet. Three hundred people, and you could hear the rain on the marquee outside.

Iris opened the folder and held up the clipping.

From the third row, nobody could read it. So she did the thing that broke the evening in half. She walked down off the stage, across the marble, to the front doors, where Officer Pryor still had one hand on Emmett Doyle's elbow - and she held the yellowed photograph up beside his left hand.

The burn scar across the knuckles. The same shape. The same hand. Forty years apart.

Someone in the front row said his name out loud. Not Cross's name. Emmett.

That sound rolled through the lobby like something moving under the floor. One voice, then three, then the whole room.

Cross found his voice before anyone else did. "Anybody could stand on a scaffold in 1984," he said.

Iris turned around with the folder still open.

"Then tell me," she said, "why the corner panel is signed twice. And why one set of initials is still wet."