Chapter 1
Delphine
There were eleven people on the two o'clock tour and four of them were asleep.
I want to be precise about this, because precision is my job and also because it's the only revenge available to a woman in my position.
Four asleep. One of them standing up. That's a skill.
I've been doing this eight years and I have never once seen a man fall asleep vertically with his hand on a display case, and now I have, and I don't feel like I've gained anything.
A woman in the front laughed. God bless her forever. Her name was Ruth, she was seventy-something, she was from Dayton, and she was the only reason I got through Tuesdays.
"What was he lying about?" Ruth said.
"Volume, mostly. He'd report a hundred barrels and move four hundred. The port took its cut on the hundred."
"So he was a smuggler."
"He was a merchant," I said. "A smuggler is a merchant who got caught. Beauregard died in a very nice bed."
Ruth cackled. The vertical sleeper adjusted his hand on the case and slept on.
We went through the parlor, the cabinet of curiosities, the room where we keep the maritime instruments that nobody looks at and I love more than most people I've met.
I gave them the octant. I gave them the two-hour version of the octant compressed into ninety seconds, which is a thing I can now do without engaging any part of my brain, so I spent the ninety seconds thinking about the museum's operating budget, which is a bad thing to think about while smiling.
Here's the arithmetic of a small private museum in New Orleans in the year of our Lord right now.
We have an endowment that was generous in 1974.
We have a board of six, two of whom are dead but whose families still like the letterhead.
We have a boiler that costs nine hundred dollars every time it clears its throat.
And we have eleven people on a two o'clock tour, four asleep, at eighteen dollars a head, minus the two who used the AAA discount, which brings us to a gross of one hundred and seventy-four dollars.
The boiler cleared its throat that morning.
"Miss Broussard?" One of the awake ones, a teenager, sixteen maybe, with the specific hostility of a person dragged somewhere by a parent. "Is it true this place is closing?"
The room went quiet in that way.
"Where'd you hear that?" I said.
"It's on the internet."
"The internet also says there's an alligator in the sewer under Canal Street."
"Is there?"
"Almost certainly, but not because the internet said so."
She didn't smile. Tough crowd, sixteen. "So it's not closing."
"It's not closing today," I said. "Which is what everybody in this city can honestly say about everything, so I'm in good company."
Ruth stayed after. They always stay after, the Ruths, and I always let them.
"Can I ask you something rude?" she said.
"Please."
"How does somebody get your job?"
"Badly," I said. "Very slowly and badly. Six years of school for a field with eleven jobs in it, four unpaid internships, two of which were in cities I could not afford to sleep in, and then a woman retires and you get a call."
"Was it worth it?"
I looked around the parlor. The water stain on the ceiling shaped like Belgium. The octant nobody looks at. The chair rope I retie every morning because visitors treat it as a suggestion.
"There's a letter upstairs," I said, "from a woman in 1851 to her sister, and it's about a lamp. Two pages about a lamp she wants and can't have. That's it. That's the whole letter. And she's been dead a hundred and seventy years and I know exactly what she wanted for her front room."
Ruth from Dayton looked at me for a second.
"That's a yes," she said.
"That's a yes."
Ruth from Dayton bought two books in the gift shop on her way out. Forty-one dollars. I thanked her about four percent too intensely and she patted my arm like she knew.
At four I had a board call, which is a phrase that should be prescribed as a sedative.
There are six of us on paper. Two are dead. Of the remaining four, one is a retired judge named Hollis who attends every call and says one sentence at the end, one is a woman in Charleston who has never attended, and two are cousins who spend the entire hour disagreeing about a garden.
"The bequest question," I said. "Item four. We have a donor family in Metairie who wants to give us nine boxes of shipping records and a portrait."
"Is the portrait good?" said cousin one.
"The portrait is a man."
"That's not an answer."
"It is a complete answer. It's a man, in oil, in a chair. He has the face of somebody who's just been told the price of something."
"Do we want it?"
"We want the boxes. The boxes are 1840s port paperwork and I would trade my car for them. The portrait is the tax."
"How big's the portrait?"
"Enormous."
"Delphine."
"Six feet by four and a half, and I want everyone to understand that we do not have six feet by four and a half. We have a hallway with a boiler intake in it."
"Hang it in the hallway."
"It won't fit past the stairs."
"Take it off the stretcher," said cousin two, and cousin one said, "You cannot take a nineteenth-century canvas off its stretcher in a hallway," and cousin two said, "Then take the stairs off," and the two of them went at it for eleven minutes while I muted myself and put my forehead on the desk.
At the end, Judge Hollis said his sentence.
"Take the boxes, Miss Broussard," he said. "Somebody will die and we'll have wall space."
That's the governance of a New Orleans institution. I have never heard it summarized better.
I stayed late. I always stayed late, but that night I stayed later, because the accession backlog had gotten to the point where it had stopped being a task and started being a personality trait, and because my apartment had a broken window unit and the museum had central air paid for by an endowment from 1974.
At nine I called my sister.
"You're at work," Camille said.
"How do you know that."
"Because you called me. If you were home you'd have texted me a picture of your dinner to prove you made one. What are you eating?"
"I'm not eating."
"Delphine."
"There's a granola bar situation."
"A situation."
"It's from the gift shop. It's been in the gift shop since I started here. It has achieved a kind of shelf stability that I find genuinely impressive."
"Come to my house."
"It's an hour there and back."
"It's twenty minutes."
"It's an hour with feelings."
Camille laughed. My sister has a laugh like a door slamming in a good way. "Fine. Starve at the museum. Very Victorian of you. Very consumption in the archive."
"That's the plan. I want to be found draped over a card catalog."
"We don't have a card catalog."
"I know, that's the tragedy. I'll have to be draped over a laptop and it just doesn't scan."
I got home at eleven forty and I was asleep by midnight, which is relevant, because at 3:12 in the morning the smoke alarm in my hallway went off and I was so deeply under that for about four full seconds I thought it was my alarm clock and I was annoyed about a meeting.
Then I opened my eyes and the hallway was orange.
I'm not going to be poetic about this part.
People are poetic about fires when they've read about them.
Here's what it actually is: it's loud, and it's stupid, and everything you own becomes a stranger.
The doorway I'd walked through nine thousand times was suddenly a decision.
The hallway had weather in it. That's the thing nobody tells you. A house fire has weather.
I got out the back through the kitchen because the front hall was gone.
I got out barefoot in a T-shirt and a pair of running shorts I don't run in.
And I got out with my work bag, and I want to be very clear that I did not grab it heroically, I did not think the archive must survive.
It was hanging on the chair by the back door where it always hung and my hand took it on the way past because my hand has taken it on the way past every morning for eight years.
That's the whole reason the ledger survived. Muscle memory and a chair.
I stood across the street in my neighbor Mr. Ancelet's yard and watched my house burn from the inside out while Mr. Ancelet, who is eighty-four and has never once in a decade said more than nine words to me, held my elbow the entire time and did not say one of them.
The fire marshal's name was Dupuy. He found me around dawn, sitting on a curb wearing a stranger's cardigan over my T-shirt.
"Miss Broussard." He crouched, which I appreciated, because people who stand over you at dawn are informing you and people who crouch are talking to you. "You got somewhere to go?"
"My sister's."
"Good. That's good." He had a folder. Nobody good has ever crouched next to me with a folder. "I have to ask you some questions and some of them are going to sound like accusations. They're not. They're just the questions."
"Okay."
"You have renter's insurance?"
"Yes."
"Recently taken out?"
"Four years ago. Renewed automatically. I don't even know what it covers, I have never once read it, which I understand is not the answer of a woman committing insurance fraud but is unfortunately also not the answer of a competent adult."
He almost smiled. "Anybody angry at you?"
"Professionally?"
"Sure, start there."
"There's a man who writes us letters about the octant."
"About the—"
"Maritime instrument. He believes it's a forgery. It's not. He's been writing since 2019. He signs them A Friend of the Truth, which I think we can agree is the least friendly way to sign anything."
Dupuy wrote that down, which I found upsetting for reasons I couldn't articulate at six in the morning.
"Miss Broussard," he said. "Anything taken from the house?"
"How would I know? It's a house full of ash."