Chapter 10 of 10Outlined in Red

Garrett Shaw unrolled the blueprints across her desk before he introduced himself. The top sheet showed the museum's land, and in the middle of it sat the building she was sitting in, outlined in red and lettered REMOVE. He weighted one corner with her coffee mug and the other with the stapler she kept for accession forms.

"You must be the new one," he said, and put out a hand she did not take. "Garrett Shaw. I'm told you run this place."

"I direct the Port Clement Maritime Museum." Evelyn Sterling gave her title, her name, and her employer in that order. "We're closed to visitors on Tuesdays."

"I'm not a visitor." He pulled the desk chair out and sat in it, which put him on the office side of things. "I'm the man buying the lot."

She stayed standing, and she did not offer him coffee.

"That offer has been discussed."

"Then you know the number. Two point four million, cash, and this building comes down."

He flattened the curl of the paper with his forearm.

"Look at it anyway. It's yours to keep."

"Whose drawings are these?"

"Shaw Development. Family outfit."

He said it without looking up from the sheet.

"You're Harrison's son."

"I'm Harrison's son." He said it easily, as if the sentence had been printed on him. "Dad's stepping back from all of it, and he wants the harbor squared away before he goes."

She let the silence sit, and he filled it.

"And the town? Does the town know?"

He glanced at the gallery doorway before he answered.

"The zoning's been commercial since the Coast Guard moved out. The mayor's office has a set of these. So does the harbor commission. You're the last appointment on my list."

She asked him then whether the board had authorized him to show her the drawings.

"Dad calls the vote when the paperwork's ready. That's how it works here."

He said that without heat, as if he were reading a bus schedule aloud.

"What happens to the collection?"

"Back room at the town hall, behind the assessor's office. Dry, lit, locked."

He tilted his head.

"The ship models go into cases, the cases go on the wall, and people can look at them on their way to pay their property taxes. Or, and this is my favorite, we put the best pieces in the lobby of the new building. Residents love that. It's a nice touch."

He smiled at that, the first time all morning.

"With placards, I suppose."

"Placards, sure."

Wind came off the lake and pushed at the gallery windows.

"You've heard about the diary," she said.

"I've heard there's old paper about the shipwreck and that you've been taking it seriously, which I respect." He shrugged. "Every project I've ever built, somebody finds a story — a barn, a trail, one particular maple tree — and the story turns out to be the thing people use to stop the thing that pays the taxes. I'm not against history. I'm against it costing me a year."

The chair creaked as he shifted his weight.

"And my position here?"

"Nothing happens to it, as long as you keep this quiet." He crossed one ankle over his knee.

A gull worked at something on the breakwater and gave up on it.

"Directors here don't last. The last one ran the place down to the studs and left you holding the shovel. You're on a contract, and contracts end quietly. Keep this one quiet and you'll leave with a reference."

She let him finish before she said anything.

"You're offering me a reference."

"I'm offering you a warning, and the reference is a courtesy I'd rather you never needed."

She asked whose idea it had been to bring the plans to her desk.

"Mine." He stood and smoothed the jacket he had never unbuttoned. "Dad's fond of this building. He'd have turned it into a conversation. I'd rather it be a fact."

He paused in the gallery doorway and looked past her at the glass cases, the anchor chain hauled up from the harbor bottom, and the bronze plaque the Shaw family had given the museum. On his way out he folded a bill into the honor box by the door.

"One more thing," he said. "Every sheet is stamped and dated. Copy them if you want. It changes nothing."

The door sighed shut and the museum went back to its Tuesday hush. Maya came out of the gallery with the mail against her chest and half a pasty from the co-op wrapped in foil in her other hand.

"Was that Garrett Shaw?"

"It was."

Maya set the mail on the corner of the desk and unwrapped the pasty.

"He didn't sign the register," she said. "He parked in the loading zone, too. Minnesota plates. I got a picture of them."

"Good."

Maya bit the end off the pasty.

"He put money in the honor box."

"That's a first."

"It might be the most generous thing that man has ever done."

She folded the foil down around the pasty, and the office smelled of coffee and onion.

"So the condos are real."

"They're real."

Maya took another bite and waited, and Evie moved the mail aside to make room.

"And what do we do about it?"

"First we make a record of every sheet, both sides, the stamp and the date. Then we find out what the town requires before a nonprofit gets moved off its own land."

Evie squared the plans against the edge of the desk.

"Do you want me to put it online?"

"Not yet. Not until we know the rules."

"The rules are the whole problem," Maya said.

Evie called Mateo from the gallery, because her office had begun to feel like somebody else's desk.

"Flores Boatworks."

"It's Evie. Do you have a minute?"

"I'm holding a bilge pump, so mostly yes."

She told him what had come through her door: the stamped sheets, the red outline, the word REMOVE where a reader would have to hunt for it.

"He left them with you?"

"He told me to copy them."

"Then he doesn't think you can do anything with them."

"Can I?"

The bilge pump went down on the bench, and water ran.

"Paper changes hands. Paper disappears. Yours shouldn't."

The pump knocked against the bench, and then he went on.

"Anything that changes what runs off that property into the lake has to clear the harbor commission, and those meetings are open, and the minutes go in a binder that nobody in this town has ever read."

"You've read it."

"I've sat through a few."

The water stopped running on his end.

"Did you find your paper yet?"

"Not the paper Leo wants. Somebody else's paper."

"Start there," Mateo said.

She put the phone down and carried the plans into the gallery, where she taped them to the wall beside the bronze plaque the Shaw family had given the museum. Then she dialed the library.

"Mrs. Poole, it's Evelyn Sterling at the museum, and Garrett Shaw came by this morning with a set of drawings he left on my desk."

"The son," Agnes said, and a chair creaked at the other end of the line.

"He told me to keep them, and he said copying them changes nothing."

"Then copying them changes something."

Evie looked at the sheets on the wall and told her the rest of it: the museum outlined in red, the small word REMOVE, the zoning, the drawings in the mayor's office, the board that votes when Harrison Shaw says so.

"I'll come to you," Agnes said. "Do you have tape?"

"I have tape."

Evie hung up, wrote the date in pencil in the corner of the top sheet, and stepped back to look at what she had put on the wall. The vote still belonged to Harrison Shaw. But the drawings were hers now too, outlined in red, hanging inside the building they had marked for removal.