Isolde Vale's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Isolde drifted back to the office at dawn. Cordelia sat at her desk between the two paintings, the list flat under her hands. She kept turning it over, checking the back, the corners, the margins. She looked at the carousel painting, then at the portrait of young Isolde, then at the list again. She shook her head and pushed the list away. Isolde knew that look. She had worn it herself for years, standing beside her father's canvases, waiting for someone to say his name. Cordelia stood and walked to the cabinet by the wall, a dusty black thing with drawers stuffed past closing. She pulled one open and dug through folders. Acquisition records, donor cards, old receipts. She read a few, frowned, and shoved them back. No painter matched. No signature on the canvases. Without a name, the two paintings would stay labeled as curiosities by an unknown hand. Isolde turned away from the desk and noticed the glass case in the corner. Inside sat a single black carousel horse on a stand. She had passed it a hundred times. Now she remembered the shipping crates her father used to ship that horse and others like it. She remembered where they had gone after he died. The basement. She slipped through the wall and down. The dark wood door at the bottom of the stairs had two carousel horses carved into its face. She passed through it and stopped. The basement was full of her father's things. His old filing cabinet stood against the far wall, drawers swollen with paper. A stack of empty black frames leaned beside it, each one stamped with a small brass plaque: Frederick Vale. He had signed the frames when he refused to sign the canvases. Shipping crates lined the floor, his name burned into the wood. His painter's trunk sat open in the corner, blank stretched canvases still inside, waiting for work he never finished. Isolde stood in the middle of it and understood. Cordelia had been sitting on her father's name for years. She walked past it every week to check the boiler. The proof was here, under her feet, in her own building. The list upstairs named the paintings. The basement named the painter. She rose back through the floor into the office. Cordelia was closing the file drawer, ready to give up for the night. Isolde gathered herself into a single pale orb and drifted across the room. She hovered over the doorknob to the stairs, then sank slowly through it, then rose again. She did it three times. Cordelia stopped with her hand on the drawer. She watched the orb dip and rise. Then she picked up her flashlight, crossed the room, and opened the door to the basement stairs. Isolde slid down ahead of her, toward the frames with her father's name.