The keys to the Maritime Museum came with a probationary contract, and clause four gave Evelyn Sterling ninety days to prove the place could pay for itself. She had read that clause twice on the drive up from Wisconsin and signed it anyway, twenty-two thousand dollars a year poorer than she had been at the university.
Port Clement, Michigan, sat on the south shore of Lake Superior: one square, one main street, and a museum that had spent its first life as a Coast Guard station at the end of the shore road.
Doreen waited on the front steps with a ring of keys on a green boat float.
"You must be Evelyn." She jangled them. "Doreen. I have forty minutes, so we'll move."
"Forty minutes is the whole orientation?"
"It's more than I got. Betty handed me these in the parking lot and left."
"Then I'll take notes."
"Don't." Doreen got the door open on the second try. "Nothing in here is worth writing down."
Inside smelled like a coat closet. Somebody had painted the old station white, hung a sign over the desk, and stopped there.
"Lobby," Doreen said. "Gift shop, in theory. We sold nine dollars in postcards last month."
"And spent?"
"Sixteen. That's this museum in one exchange. Pay attention."
She walked fast for a woman who had already quit. Restrooms, a classroom, a hall of glass cases.
"Exhibit hall. This is the good part."
"This is the good part?"
"Forty years old, and the bulbs keep burning out." Doreen tapped the case. "There's a model of the lighthouse in the corner with a broken finial."
"Why is it broken?"
"It broke a long time ago. We have the finial. Nobody ever put it back."
"You noticed."
"I noticed everything. Nobody else did. Now. The archives."
The archives had a door with a brass plate and a window in the top half. Doreen unlocked it and stood aside the way you stand aside for a dentist's chair.
Boxes on shelves, boxes on the floor, boxes stacked on boxes. A dead wasp lay on the windowsill and dust moved in the light.
"There's your wasp," Evelyn said.
"Volunteers started this in the eighties," Doreen said. "Then that volunteer died. Then the next one moved to Marquette."
"How many boxes are there?"
"Nobody knows. That isn't a figure of speech."
Evelyn read a label out loud. "Miscellaneous. Good." The next box said Photos, Some.
"Is this what I'm inheriting?"
"It is."
"Who's been accessioning it?"
"You'll want to sit down. Nobody."
Doreen handed over the keys, then a clipboard, then a manila folder with last month's electric bill inside.
"The furnace is temperamental. It likes to be asked nicely."
"And if I don't ask nicely?"
"Then you wear your coat indoors, like the rest of us did all winter."
"Is there a budget for supplies?"
"There's a budget for stamps."
"Anything else?"
"There's a donation jar by the register. It had eleven dollars in it in April. I counted."
Evelyn set the folder on the desk. "You're quitting."
"I'm finished at the end of the month. My sister in Escanaba needs someone, and I'm the someone." Doreen pulled on her jacket and looked around the room once, the way a person looks at a house she's leaving. At the door she turned back. "One more thing. The board meets the third Wednesday. Bring them something."
"What do they want to see?"
"Numbers."
"I'm an archivist."
"I know what you are. I read your résumé." She smiled. "Good luck, Evelyn Sterling."
The door clicked shut. Evelyn set her bag on the desk, took out a legal pad, and wrote Tuesday's date at the top of the page. At the university she'd had four assistants and a vault with its own thermostat. Here she had a wasp on the windowsill and a budget for stamps. She was fifty-four years old, starting over, with nobody to say so to.
Her phone rang before she wrote anything else.
"Did you sign it?" Paula never said hello.
"Friday."
"Ninety days, Evie."
"Ninety days is enough to survey a collection. Not to catalog it. To survey it."
"And the apartment?"
"There's a bed and a coffee maker. The rest is still in the truck."
"Is the apartment awful?"
"It's above a closed yarn shop."
"Of course it is."
Evelyn carried the phone to the window. Out past the breakwater a freighter was making for the ore dock, long and low and the color of a nickel.
"Your ex called the department looking for you."
"What did you tell him?"
"That you'd moved to the Arctic."
"Michigan."
"Same difference in February."
"Tell me you kept the house."
"I kept the pension."
Paula laughed. Then she didn't, which was worse.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm employed."
"Call me when you open the first box."
"I'll call you when I find one."
At noon she walked up to the square, past a hardware store with a hand-lettered sign and a bank with a flag. Coffee from the Kwik Trip in Escanaba had carried her through the morning. She wanted something from a kitchen.
The Superior Scoop sat on the corner with a hand-painted sign and six people at the window. Inside, a woman in a red apron worked the scoop with her whole arm. The apron said Brenda, stitched in yellow.
"You're the new museum lady."
"Word travels."
"Sweetheart, word doesn't travel here. Word already arrived and sat down." She held out a paper cup. "First one's on the house."
"I'd rather pay. I'd like to be a customer, not a cause."
"Fair enough." Brenda rang it up. "Four seventy-five."
"What do you recommend?"
"Everything. That's why I'm still in business." She wiped the counter. "Pasties at the co-op on Third. Tuesdays only. Beef and rutabaga."
"Pasties."
"You said it like a flatlander. Pass-tee. Rhymes with nasty."
She ate the ice cream walking back down the shore road. Fog came in off the lake, cold and low, and by the time she reached the museum the automated light up the coast had come on.
She worked the rest of the afternoon without sitting down.
At the back of the archive room, behind a rolling coat rack somebody had used for shelving, sat a trunk.
It was a seaman's trunk, dark wood banded with iron, salt-stained where the lake air had got into the grain and stayed. A name had been burned into the wood and then sanded back, and the sanding hadn't worked.
Evelyn dragged it into the light and crouched beside it. The lid came up on a smell of tar and old rope. Empty but for grit and a length of line coiled in one corner.
She wrote on the pad: Trunk, wooden, iron-banded. Then she ran her palm along the inside bottom and stopped.
The boards gave under her hand, a soft give that should not have been there.
She fetched the flashlight and knelt again. The bottom was lined with pine, and one board, the second from the left, moved when she pressed her thumb against it.
Her pocketknife was in her bag. She worked the blade into the seam and leaned on it. The old nails let go one at a time, each with a sound like a knuckle popping.
Under the board, the trunk kept going.
A second bottom, the length and width of the chest, dry and swept clean and not empty.
Evelyn Sterling sat back on her heels. Somewhere at the front of the building the old clock ticked toward five.
Whatever was down there had been put there on purpose, by somebody who never meant for it to be found. She closed the lid. She locked the storeroom behind her. In the morning she would come back with gloves, a camera, and every light in the building on.
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