Chapter 7

The silence went through the rotunda like water through a cracked seam. Four hundred people turned their heads at once.

Bennett Halloway stood at the lectern with both hands flat on the wood. He was looking down the marble stairs - not at the crowd, not at the trustees' tables, but at the small group on the red carpet near the door, and specifically at the fist of the man in the midnight-blue dinner jacket.

"Whose badge is that?" he said.

His voice came out of the speakers over the whole room.

Frear turned. His face assembled itself into a smile, and the smile didn't hold, and everyone who had ever worked for him saw it.

"A former staff member, Bennett. He came in without a ticket. We're handling it."

"I asked whose badge."

"Museum property. Old. It's been recovered."

"From whom?"

Frear's jaw worked. "From him."

Bennett came down three steps. He was seventy-one and he moved like a man who had been waiting all evening for an excuse. The guests parted along the base of the stairs without being asked.

"You," he said to Walt. "What's your name?"

"Walter Kimbrough."

Bennett stopped on the fourth step. He repeated it, quietly, to himself. Walter Kimbrough. Then he put his hand flat against his own breast pocket and left it there.

"Mr. Halloway," Frear said, "I'd suggest we do this after the toast. I'll have him escorted out, and we can involve the police if the property isn't accounted for."

"The police," Bennett said.

"He's refused to explain how a 1979 badge came into his possession. He's carrying a sealed envelope he won't open. In my judgment-"

"Your judgment," Bennett said, "is that a man should be arrested at my father's centennial for standing on a carpet."

"I'm not arresting anyone. I'm protecting the institution."

Walt spoke then, and his voice was not loud, and it carried anyway, because the room had gone that quiet.

"I'll go."

Frear's shoulders dropped half an inch.

"I'll go," Walt said again. "I came to give the badge back and to say one thing to Mr. Halloway, and I've done the first. The second can wait. Or it can't, and that's all right too." He looked at Imani. "Put the log back where it belongs. File it under the flood. Somebody should know the number."

He looked at Bennett and inclined his head, a small formal courtesy from a man who had spent thirty years nodding to people on stairs.

"I'm sorry to have disturbed your evening, sir."

He turned.

"Wait," Bennett said.

He came down the rest of the stairs. His hands were at his sides, but his breast pocket was no longer flat, and he reached into it the way a man reaches into cold water.

"I found this in September," he said. "In my father's desk. In an envelope addressed to Walter Kimbrough, Night Watchman, Halloway Museum of Art. It was never mailed. There's no stamp on it. It's been in that desk for thirty-one years."

He unfolded the page. The paper had gone soft at the creases. The handwriting was upright and careful, the handwriting of a man who had taught himself to write well and had never stopped being pleased about it.

The room waited.

Bennett Halloway read the first line out loud.

"'Walt - I have three weeks left, and one thing I have never once said out loud.'"

Nobody moved. The caterers stopped. The photographer lifted her camera, then lowered it again, because whatever this was, it was not hers.