Chapter 4 of 7Local Fiction

Harrison Shaw held the keys to the archive, the board, and, for as long as her contract ran, Evelyn Sterling's job. The museum's lakefront ground was worth more to a developer than a century of shipwrecks, and everyone in Port Clement knew it except the woman hired to keep the place open.

"You've done something with the light," Harrison said. He stood at the west windows with his hands behind his back. "Doreen kept the blinds shut. She said it faded the fabric."

"It does fade the fabric." Evelyn stepped between him and the ship's wheel mounted on the north wall, oak and brass, salvaged off a Great Lakes tug in 1911. "So does darkness. I chose the slower damage."

"Mm." He moved down the gallery at a pace that had nothing to do with looking at anything. "This building was a Coast Guard station."

"I read the file."

"The Shaw family petitioned for it in 1938. My father chaired the committee that found the money." He stopped at the big display case and rested one hand on the corner of the frame. "That's my grandfather's compass. Alistair Shaw. He carried it on every crossing until the night he went down with the Whitefish Rose."

Evelyn looked at the compass, then at the plaque beneath it — GIVEN BY THE SHAW FAMILY, IN HONOR OF COURAGE AND SACRIFICE — and said nothing.

"We built this town," Harrison said. "Not the museum only. The ore docks, the breakwater, half the houses on Main Street. When the summer people buy their tickets in July, they're buying a Shaw story. That's the product."

"I'd call it a record."

"Call it what you like. It's what pays the electric bill." He glanced at the thermostat by the door, which she had set at sixty-two to stretch the month. "Can we afford that?"

"Barely."

"Then we agree on one thing."

He walked on, and she kept half a step behind, and he gave her the gallery another time as though she had never seen it: the Fresnel lens, the dory, a case of glass floats he called a fine example of our international reach. Evie waited until they had passed the last case and reached the open floor outside the office, where the ceiling did not carry his voice.

"Mr. Shaw, while I was clearing the storage room, I found something."

"We have a great deal of something back there."

"A diary. Kept by a woman at the lighthouse. First entry is April 1924."

His hand, swinging at his side, stopped swinging. "Whose diary?"

"Elara Peterson. The keeper."

"Peterson." He let the name sit there. "And what does a lighthouse keeper write about, Ms. Sterling?"

"Weather, coal, and how much wood the stove ate," she said. She kept to facts. "And the night of November twenty-eighth, 1924."

Harrison faced her fully then, seventy-two years old, hands in his pockets, jaw set.

"You'll forgive me," he said. "We get people through here with a find. A letter, a map, a piece of a ship's bell. It's always 1924." He smiled, and the smile had no weather in it. "Every town on this shore keeps its local fiction. A wrecker who truly murdered his crew. A captain who was truly a drunk. Somebody writes it down, and a hundred years later somebody else finds the paper and mistakes it for the record."

"I've handled enough forgeries to know paper from a hundred years ago. It's a bound notebook in pencil, and she signed the end of every entry."

"That's the trouble with paper." He said it slowly, and he took his time. "Paper holds whatever mood the writer was in. Be careful with it, and careful how you carry it around town."

"Gossip."

"Unsubstantiated." He gave the word its full weight. "The Shaw family put the roof over your storage room and paid for the case your diary sits in, because we believe in this town's history. We would hate to think our money was underwriting a version of it my own family couldn't stand behind."

The front doors opened, and Maya came through with the mail cart.

"Maya." Harrison's face rearranged itself into something grandfatherly. "How's your mother?"

"On call and cranky," Maya said. "There's a box from the state historical society, and a letter from a bank, which is never good news."

"The bank letter goes to Ms. Sterling. She's the director." He checked his watch. "I'll want the office in twenty minutes."

He went out into the parking lot, where the noon fog had burned off the lake, and the glass door swung shut behind him on its bad hinge.

"What did you do?" Maya asked.

"Why does something have to have happened?"

"Because he gave you the full tour. He only does that when he's deciding something about a person."

Evelyn slit the bank envelope and read the balance. Four thousand one hundred eighty dollars and twenty-three cents, and a note that the roofing check would clear on Friday.

"Ow," Maya said. She dug in her backpack, moved a Kwik Trip cup out of the way, and set a foil packet on the corner of the desk. "I brought you a pasty from the shop next to the hardware store. Six fifty. You owe me."

"I'll pay you Friday."

"That's what my dad says about everything." Maya nodded at the office door. "Want me to sit in on the meeting?"

"No."

"Good call." She wheeled the cart toward the front desk. "Yell if you need bail money."

Harrison came back while Evelyn was still picking pasty crust off her keyboard. He closed the office door and sat across from her desk, with the lake behind him and the light coming over his shoulder.

"I'll be direct. A development company has made an offer on this property."

She set the pasty down. "On the museum."

"On the building and the ground under it. Two point four million dollars, cash." He said the number and then waited. "Four floors of condominiums, a lake view from every unit, a boat slip for every door."

"And the collection?"

"Split up. Loaned out, sold, put in storage. That isn't my department."

Evelyn set her pen beside the bank statement, and the pen rolled against the edge of the blotter.

"Whose is it?"

"Mine, when I decide it is." He looked at her over the desk. "The board votes on the offer. I bring it to them when I'm ready to bring it."

"And what decides when you're ready?"

"You do, in part." He said it without any change in his face. "A museum that runs itself is one thing. A museum with a scandal in it is another. The board's decision will depend heavily on what this place looks like in a few months' time."

Evelyn folded her hands on the desk. "You're asking me to raise money and keep quiet."

"I'm asking you to do your job." He stood and buttoned a sweater that didn't need buttoning. "And one more thing. Whatever is in that diary, true or not, is not a museum's business until a historian can prove it and a board agrees to say it out loud. That is the whole policy. You can write it down."

Then he was gone, and the outer door swung on its hinge, and the gallery lights hummed over his grandfather's compass.

Evelyn opened the bottom drawer, where she kept the pending accessions, and set the diary inside. Then she took it back out. Harrison Shaw's keys opened every door in the building, and a man who owned the roof could reach any drawer beneath it.

She zipped the diary into her tote and folded the offer letter in behind it. At the safe she spun the dial, opened it, and stood looking at the empty shelf — not to put anything in it, only to measure how much room there was.

The board would vote when Harrison Shaw was ready for it to vote, and she had until then to learn whether a woman with a lead pencil had told the truth about the Whitefish Rose.