Chapter 6

She had come out of the west corridor with a records box on her hip. Gray suit, close-cropped hair, reading glasses pushed up into it. On the box lay the long flat binder with the yellow tape on its spine.

Imani Osei had been the museum's registrar for eleven years. She had spent the last five days in the conservation wing doing the part of a centennial nobody photographs: verifying dates for the wall text.

"Mr. Kimbrough," she said again. "Walter Kimbrough."

Walt turned.

"I thought so," she said. "I've been reading your initials for a week."

Frear stepped between them. "Imani. Not now."

"Now," she said, and set the box down on the marble.

She opened the binder on top of it. The pages were the old kind - ruled columns, a stub of pencil on a string. The museum's night log, 1979. She had tabbed a page with a strip of yellow tape, and the tape had been there long enough to curl at the ends.

"You've been cataloguing the east wing," Mrs. Bayard said.

"For the exhibition. The flood is in the timeline. 'A near miss, February 1979.'" Imani's mouth thinned. "That's what the last three histories call it. A near miss. Ellen Marsh used to say the timeline was wrong, and nobody ever asked her why."

"Ellen Marsh retired in 2004," Frear said.

"She was the registrar before me," Imani said. "She trained me. She said there was a night in this building that the records remembered and the museum forgot."

She turned the binder so the chandelier light fell across it and ran her finger down the page.

"February ninth. Eleven fifty-two p.m. Pipe failure, east storerooms B and C. Water rising." Her finger moved. "Eleven fifty-eight. Storeroom B breached. Twelve twenty. Assistance requested, no response. Twelve forty. Works being moved."

"Whose log is this?" Frear said.

"The watch desk's."

"There's no name on it."

"No," Imani said. "There's an initial."

She turned the binder a little more. There, in the margin beside the four a.m. entry, in pencil, small and even: W.K.

Walt looked at it. He didn't reach for the book.

The four a.m. line read: Last of the works removed to gallery four. Two hundred and twelve items. East storerooms cleared. Water to the second step.

"Two hundred and twelve," Mrs. Bayard said.

"Up four flights," Imani said. "Alone. According to the log, the elevator was out."

Frear's hand came down on the binder's edge. "This hasn't been accessioned for display. I'll take it."

"It's already museum property," Imani said. "I'm the registrar. I'll take it."

She looked at Walt.

"Mr. Kimbrough. Are those your initials?"

Walt opened his mouth to say the thing he had said for forty years - the thing that cost him nothing and everything.

He never got the sentence out.

On the landing above them, the chairman's voice stopped in the middle of a word.