Cordelia “the museum curator”'s Arc

Chapter 7 of 8

Cordelia did not go home. She stayed in her office with the two paintings on the wall and the list flat on her desk. By dawn she was pulling files from the cabinet behind her, looking for any record that might match a title further down the column. She found nothing. She paced between the desk and the door. She read the list again. She read it a fourth time. The titles meant nothing to her, and she had no painter to attach to them. She stopped pacing. The room felt colder than the hallway. She turned her head slowly. The cold sat behind her left shoulder, steady, like someone standing close. She did not move. She had felt it before in the attic, and she had felt it last night near the wall. Whatever stood there was watching her read. "I know you're here," Cordelia said. She kept her hands on the desk. "I have your list. I have two of the paintings. I don't know the rest." The air thickened near the bookcase. Small pale shapes formed there, one then another, until a loose cluster of gray orbs hung at shoulder height. They drifted toward the office door and stopped. Cordelia took her lantern from the shelf. She followed. The orbs led her down the main stairs, past the tapestry wing, and through the back corridor she rarely used. They stopped at the end of it, in front of a door she had walked past for years without opening. Dark wood. A carousel horse carved into the panel. A brass handle gone green at the edges. The basement door. She had always assumed it led to storage she had inherited and never sorted. The orbs sank into the floor and vanished. Cordelia tried the handle. It turned. The door swung inward on a stairway that smelled of damp paper and old wood. She went down with the lantern raised. At the bottom, the carousel horses she kept stored stood in their usual row against the far wall. But behind them, stacked along the side she had never cleared, sat a dozen wooden shipping crates with curling tags, and beside the crates a leaning stack of empty black frames. She lifted the top frame. A small brass plaque sat at the bottom edge. Frederick Vale. She set the frame down and stood very still. The painter had a name. The crates had his name. The frames had his name. He had used her building. He had stored his work here, decades before she ever found the deed. She turned in a slow circle, lantern held high, and saw the pale figure of a girl standing between two crates, holding a black stuffed horse against her chest, watching her. The girl did not vanish this time. Cordelia did not look away.