Chapter 3

Thursday, ten in the morning, nine trustees around the refectory table, and Delia in the back of the library on a chair that didn't match the others.

Bunny sat at the head with her stick across her knees and her small leather notebook open, writing things down during arguments, which everyone in the family had learned to fear.

Ward read the motion himself. Termination of the curator's contract for cause. Acquisition freeze. The collection closed to outside researchers until the insurer's examination closed in October. Then he read Dr. Voss's preliminary report aloud in his pleasant voice: attribution error, compounded by an unexplained amendment to the catalogue entry, made eight months ago, without notification, by the curator.

Nine faces turned toward the back of the room.

Delia did not defend herself. She asked for one thing. Permission to finish the season's condition reports - every object in the house, by hand, before the collection closed.

Ward looked at the board. Refusing looked worse than granting. He granted it, with conditions: weekdays, nine to four, signed in and out at the lodge, escorted in the library.

At the door, Al Cerrone handed her the visitor's log and a pen.

She went to the front hall first, because she had asked for the reports and the reports were true.

The case stood on the mahogany console opposite the stairs, glass front, brass frame, green velvet board. Four brass mounts. Three keys. She took out her phone and photographed it the way she photographed everything - flat, square, straight on, no flash.

The fourth mount's velvet, under the glass, held a dark unfaded bow shape. A key had sat there for decades. A key had been lifted off it and never put back, and the velvet had kept the outline the way velvet does.

She was still standing there when Ward came out of the library with the last of the trustees.

"My office," he said.

The estate office was the old butler's pantry, and he had put a glass desk in it. He did not sit down. Neither did she.

"Resign," he said. "Sign the release. You keep the pension, you keep the cottage through the winter, and I write you a reference that will get you any job in Philadelphia."

"And if I don't?"

"Then the audit names you, and the society sues you, and you spend your sixties explaining a plywood backing board to people who don't care."

Delia looked past him, through the pantry door, down the short corridor to the library's north end, where the muniment room door sat behind its steel plate with the brass escutcheon around the lock.

There was a bright scratch on the bottom edge of the escutcheon. Fresh. A key going in and out, low, by somebody who didn't do it often.

"Who else has a key to that room?" she said.

"I do."

"And?"

"And nobody."

"Then why is the escutcheon scratched?"

Ward's face did not change. That was his gift. "The locksmith came out in May."

"There's no locksmith invoice in the payables binder."

"You're on the grounds on my permission, Delia."

She went to the lodge at three o'clock and asked Al Cerrone for the gate log.

Al was seventy-one and had worked the gate for thirty years and had never once lied to her. He went into the back room and came out with the binder and his mouth already unhappy.

"The December quarter's gone," he said. "Mr. Ashcombe took it up to the house in June. Said he needed it for the insurer."

Delia stood in the lodge with the visitor's log under her arm and the smell of Al's coffee and the sound of a truck going by on the township road.

She had photographed page 214 in October.

One line, in her own handwriting, on the ninth of December, eighteen months ago: 1 crate - conservation loan, Wilmington. No return logged.