Chapter 17 of 20Take It All Down

Harrison Shaw could end the museum with one phone call, and the offer that would do it was still on the table. Shaw Development had put $2.4 million in front of the board, and on Saturday morning he stood in the west gallery of the Port Clement Maritime Museum, reading every panel of Evelyn Sterling's lighthouse exhibit with one hand clasped behind his back. One meeting, properly noticed, and the building, the collection and her job would go with it.

He had climbed the front steps that morning in a camel coat with his hat in one hand, though his voicemail had promised Friday and he had let it sit.

"Friday," Evie said from the window ledge, where her coffee had gone cold. "You left a message about Friday."

"I did."

"And you came on Saturday instead."

"Saturday there are people in the building." He kept his eyes on the wall. "Friday there is only you."

He turned his hat over in his hands.

"Nicely hung."

"Thank you."

"The lighting especially."

"Thank you."

He had walked on a few steps by then.

"Your intern did the labels."

"Maya wrote them from my notes."

"She has a good hand."

He stopped again.

"I had a call this morning from a woman up in Sault Ste. Marie."

"What did she want?"

"To know whether the museum had turned into a courtroom."

"And what did you tell her?"

"That I would look into it."

Evie set her mug on the window ledge.

"It's a display about a lighthouse keeper."

"It's a display with a hole in it." He tapped the frame with one knuckle. "You have given a woman her whole life back and left one man out of the story entirely. People notice a hole."

"They notice the record, too."

Two visitors came up from the harbor side, a retired couple in Packers sweatshirts, and Harrison spent five minutes with them at the Fresnel lens, explaining the clockwork and the mercury bath.

"She cried in the car," the woman said.

"On the way home," the man said. "All the way back to Superior."

"Then it's doing its job," Harrison said.

The man rocked on his heels.

"My grandmother's people summered up past Grand Marais."

"Same water," Harrison said. "Different shore."

The woman looked back at the wall.

"You're on the board."

"I am."

"Then don't let anybody take it apart."

"We will see," he said, and walked them to the front door, holding it against the wind.

When he turned back, his face had closed over again. He read the panel about the lamp oil and the trimming of the wick. At the panel carrying Elara Peterson's line about a cold that gets into a person's bones and stays, he stood a while with his hands clasped behind his back. Out on the shore road the county plow went past with its blade down, throwing a white arc across the empty parking lot.

"First mate," he said, at the panel that named Eino Koskinen.

"Yes."

He waited, and she understood he was waiting for something she had no intention of handing him.

"No captain."

"No."

"Would you have printed it if you had found one?"

"I print what the record says."

He nodded once, as though he had settled the question by himself some other evening. Maya came through with the mail in her fist and stopped.

"Morning, Mr. Shaw."

"Morning, Maya. Is that coffee from the Kwik Trip out on the highway?"

"It is."

She set the mail on the corner of the desk.

"I never could drink it."

"Nobody's making you."

"No," he said. "Nobody is."

He smiled at her, and she smiled back, because she was twenty-three and he was Harrison Shaw, and then she looked to Evie for a cue, got nothing, and went back into the office, where a high school playoff game played low on the radio and half a loaf of nisu sat on the filing cabinet in wax paper.

Harrison turned from the Koskinen panel. "My office, or yours?"

"Mine is closer."

"Yours, then."

He let her walk ahead and closed the door.

She had barely set her mug down when he spoke, and the voice belonged to somebody she had never met.

"Take it down."

"Which part?"

He set his hat on the corner of the desk.

"All of it. The panels. The photographs. The little cards with her handwriting printed on them. By Monday morning."

"Mr. Shaw—"

"We have been patient. We brought you here. We gave you a building, a budget line, and the benefit of every doubt, and you have spent your time digging in a grave."

"I have spent my time in the archive."

Evie put a hand on the chair back and stayed standing.

"You know what you have done."

"Take it down, and put your attention on the Heritage Fund application. It is due."

"It is the only thing standing between this building and a wrecking ball. That is not a threat. That is arithmetic."

"And if I don't?"

"Then I call a special meeting of the board."

He said it quietly, which was worse than any volume.

"I have the votes. The property sells, the building comes down in the spring, and the diary goes into a box in a basement in Minneapolis, where nobody will ever ask you a question about it again."

"It isn't a diary. It's a public record."

"It's paper, Ms. Sterling. And we own the building it sits in."

She kept her hands folded on the desk so that he would not see them move.

"Which part of the wall is the problem? The mate's name, or the fact that he lived long enough to have one?"

"Don't be clever with me."

Evie did not look away.

"I'm asking a question."

"The whole of it is the problem." He straightened the brim of his hat. "Every visitor who reads that wall goes home and wonders, and wondering is how a thing like this starts."

"Wondering is how it ends, too."

"No," he said. "We end it Monday."

She looked at the hat on the desk, at the window where the harbor had gone gray and the first flakes of the afternoon were coming in sideways.

"You have never read it. Not one page."

"I don't need to."

"That's the part I cannot get past."

"You will get past it. By Monday, with the display down." He set the hat on his head. "And, Ms. Sterling. You are still on probation."

He was out of her office before she could answer, and then the wind had the building to itself.

She did not move for a moment. Maya appeared in the doorway holding her coat, two questions on her face.

"Go home," Evie said. "I'll lock up."

"You sure?"

"I'm sure."

"What did he want?"

"The panels down by Monday."

Maya stared.

"He can't."

"He can call a meeting of the board."

"What do we do?"

"I don't know yet."

Maya stood with her coat over her arm.

"Evie."

"Go home, Maya."

Maya took her coat and her bread and left, and the office went quiet.

Alone, Evelyn Sterling walked back into the west gallery. She went past the lamp oil, past the wick, past the cold that gets into a person's bones, and stopped at the last panel, where Eino Koskinen's name was cut into vinyl and set behind glass under a small lamp. Take the panels down by Monday and there would be nothing left in Port Clement for anyone to be angry about. Leave them up and the board would meet without her, on paper, in a room she would not be invited into.

She went to her desk, opened the bottom drawer, and put the diary into her tote bag, where it had lived since the afternoon Harrison Shaw first called it local fiction. The panels stayed where they hung. She pulled Agnes Poole's folder across the blotter, took a clean sheet of museum letterhead from the box, and began the list she should have started sooner: what she had, what she was missing, and every name she would have to say it out loud to before Monday.

The exhibit was still standing. Whatever it cost her now, it would cost her on purpose.