Cordelia “the museum curator”'s Arc

Chapter 1 of 8

Cordelia found the claw tracks at seven in the morning, three thin scratches running across the bottom corner of a medieval tapestry she had paid eleven years of grant money to acquire. The unicorn beside the fountain was untouched. The border was not. She crouched in front of it and pressed her thumb to the snagged thread. One more pull and the whole lower edge would unravel. She had opened the Curio Museum alone. She found the building herself, a strange old place with rooms that did not match the original floor plans. She bought it cheap because no one else wanted the carousel pieces left behind in the basement. She wrote every grant. She hung every label. Last week someone had left an oil painting at her door overnight, a woman on a carousel horse, older than it looked, and she still meant to find out who knew enough to leave it. But first she had to find the cat. She knew it was a cat now. She had seen it twice, a skinny black stray with yellow eyes, slipping past her ankles in the dim hall and vanishing before she could shut a door. It was getting into the tapestry wing. She had moved the whole collection there after she peeled back a carousel-horse tapestry while dusting and found a hidden door behind it, a black panel with gold handles that did not appear on any blueprint. She had thought the wing was sealed. The cat disagreed. She walked the wing on her hands and knees with a flashlight. She checked the baseboards, the vent grates, the seam where the new wall met the old. She found nothing. The gap was somewhere she could not see, and the Las Unicornes tapestry was four feet from the floor. One jump. One claw. Six hundred years gone. That night she set the trap she could manage. She carried a pair of black ceramic bowls into the office at the far end of the building, filled one with water and one with dry food, and left the office door propped open. Then she sat in the dark hallway with her back against the wall and waited. Near midnight she heard the small dry sound of kibble being chewed. She stood up slowly, crossed the hall, and closed the office door behind her. The cat froze over the bowl. Cordelia knelt. She did not reach for it. After a long minute it came to her on its own and pushed its head against her knuckles, and she scratched behind one torn ear and then the other. "I guess I have a friend now," she said. "Though I'm not the most social type." She would call the vet in the morning and ask about the gap in the wing in the afternoon. The tapestries were safe tonight. The painting at the door was still waiting for an answer.