Chapter Eleven #2
Taddeo came down the steps beside her but did not take her arm. “Ready?”
“No.”
He waited.
Isolde looked toward the gate, then toward the sedan. “Let's go anyway.”
He opened the rear door.
The lock engaged after both of them were inside.
She looked down at it.
Taddeo followed her gaze. “Yes.”
“I didn't ask.”
“You were going to.”
“It's good to know kidnapping has made us efficient.”
His mouth moved faintly, but he said nothing more.
Crownport began reappearing gradually beyond the windows as the wooded coastal roads gave way to shops, traffic lights, apartment buildings, and people moving through their evenings with no idea how extraordinary their freedom would look to someone who had recently lost hers.
A delivery driver carried boxes into a convenience store.
A woman waited impatiently while a child dragged his shoes along the sidewalk.
Someone crossed against a light because a gap in traffic seemed more persuasive than the signal.
None of them needed permission to change direction.
The thought settled beneath Isolde's ribs and stayed there.
Taddeo must have noticed something in her face because he shifted slightly beside her, but he did not ask whether she was all right and did not insult her by pretending this counted as freedom. She appreciated that enough to resent him for making appreciation necessary.
Familiar streets appeared as they approached the harbor.
The coffee shop she used when the one near her apartment opened late.
The stationery store with terrible hours.
The narrow restaurant where Linnea insisted the cocktails justified the prices.
Isolde leaned closer to the window without meaning to.
“Slow down,” she said.
Luca's eyes moved toward the mirror.
Taddeo did not ask for an explanation. “Take it down.”
The sedan slowed.
The museum appeared two blocks later, old customs-house brick rising beyond the renovated waterfront. Exhibition banners moved lightly in the wind, the windows reflecting streetlights and harbor cranes. Isolde's gaze went immediately toward the staff entrance and then across the road.
The curb beneath the sycamore tree was empty.
“That was where your car sat,” she said.
Taddeo looked toward it. “Yes.”
“How long?”
“About forty minutes before you came out.”
Isolde turned. “Forty minutes.”
“We knew you were finishing.”
“You were nearby?”
“Several blocks away.”
The memory of that night changed around the new information. She had been beneath her task lamp arguing with old adhesive and worrying about Corwin while men outside tracked when she would leave.
“You planned it while I was working.”
“Yes.”
There were times when his refusal to evade an ugly truth was almost unbearable.
“Do you understand how insane that sounds from my side?”
Taddeo met her eyes. “Yes.”
The answer left nowhere for her anger to go.
Their car followed Marco's into the museum's service access and descended beneath the building. Fluorescent light passed over the windows as concrete replaced the evening city, and then the sedan stopped near the same corridors Isolde had walked almost every day for six years.
Marco got out first.
Isolde reached automatically for her door.
Locked.
She looked at Taddeo.
The lock released without comment.
She opened it herself.
Her boots touched museum concrete.
The smell reached her immediately: cool filtered air, old brick, archival board, dust, metal from the loading equipment, and the faint industrial cleaner facilities used after closing. None of it was pleasant enough to be nostalgic. It was simply familiar in a way Northglass could never be.
For the first time since Mercer Street, she was back somewhere that belonged to the life she'd chosen.
The loading gate remained partly open behind them while Marco spoke quietly into his radio. Through the gap, Isolde could see headlights moving along the street less than fifty yards away.
She could run.
The thought came without drama.
She might reach the gate. She might even reach the sidewalk before one of Taddeo's men stopped her. The odds were terrible, but freedom had become physically visible again, and some part of her still reacted to the sight of it like hunger.
Then she looked toward the service corridor.
Corwin's book was upstairs.
Isolde adjusted the conservation bag on her shoulder and turned away from the open gate.
Taddeo had been watching her.
“Don't mistake that for obedience,” she said.
“I didn't.”
There was no satisfaction in his expression.
That mattered too.
Marco signaled that the corridor was clear, and Isolde started forward with Taddeo beside her.
The museum felt stranger the deeper they went.
She knew every annoying defect of the old building: the floor tile near textiles that clicked beneath weight, the cold draft at one corridor junction, the service door that needed to be pulled toward you slightly while entering the code because the frame had shifted.
Tonight each imperfection struck her with absurd intimacy.
A staff bulletin board still carried a flyer for the holiday party she'd agreed to attend before Corwin disappeared.
A yellow sticky note in her own handwriting remained attached to a rolling cart.
Return acid-free folders to Paper Storage.
Isolde stopped.
Taddeo slowed beside her. “What?”
“I wrote that.”
He looked at the note, then back at her.
“I know that sounds stupid.”
“No.”
“I don't remember leaving it there.”
“Why would you?”
She looked at him.
The answer was so simple that something tightened in her throat.
Because when she'd written the note, she had believed she'd return the next morning. She had assumed there would be another workday because ordinary life taught people to believe tomorrow belonged to them.
Isolde drew a slow breath. “I'm fine.”
Taddeo did not tell her she wasn't.
They continued.
The conservation lab stood exactly as she'd left it.
Broad worktables occupied the center of the former customs inspection room.
Steel shelving lined one wall beside sinks, humidification equipment, chemical storage, and the fume hood.
Her desk remained near the windows beneath unstable stacks of papers only she understood.
Her coffee mug sat beside the monitor.
A dried brown crescent remained inside it.
Beside the keyboard was a folded sheet of museum stationery.
Isolde crossed the room before she realized she was moving.
Linnea's handwriting covered the page.
I watered the plant. You're welcome. Also, your “family emergency” better not involve you secretly marrying a lighthouse keeper. Call me when you can. — L
The plant on the windowsill did, in fact, look healthier than it had under Isolde's care.
She read the note twice.
Taddeo stayed several feet away. “Linnea?”
“Yes.”
“Lighthouse keeper?”
“It's an ongoing insult.”
“What did you do to deserve it?”
“She thinks I have the romantic instincts of a Victorian widow.”
Something about the timing was so absurd that Isolde almost laughed.
Then she looked at Taddeo.
His expression shifted faintly.
“Don't,” she said.
“I didn't say anything.”
“You were going to.”
“No.”
“You're a terrible liar.”
“Get the book, Isolde.”
The restrained amusement in his voice loosened the pressure in her chest enough to let her move.
The Crownport Harbor Pilot and Tide Register, 1912 sat on the second shelf of her incoming-treatment queue exactly where she'd left it, beneath a rolled harbor survey and beside a nineteenth-century mariner's chest. It looked offensively ordinary considering what had brought them here: faded blue-gray cloth, softened corners, nearly vanished gold stamping, and a badly repaired spine she had dismissed ten days earlier as another example of somebody doing the wrong thing to an old book with good intentions.
Isolde carried it to the main worktable.
Taddeo approached.
“Don't touch it.”
“I wasn't going to.”
“You were thinking about it.”
His gaze met hers. “You've become very confident about that.”
“You look different around evidence.”
“How?”
“Impatient.”
“I've been standing still.”
“You're impatient internally.”
“That seems difficult to prove.”
She switched on the conservation lamp rather than answer.
White light flooded the binding.
Once she began examining it with intent rather than casual professional irritation, the repair looked different almost immediately. Isolde pulled on nitrile gloves and settled the volume into a cradle, examining the cloth along the hinge before angling the lamp.
“This section isn't original.”
Taddeo moved close enough to see without entering her working space. “Why?”
“The fading is wrong. Original cloth changes differently where it's protected from light. Whoever repaired this matched the exposed color instead of what should've been under the spine.”
“So somebody replaced it.”
“Yes, but that alone isn't suspicious.” Isolde tested one loosened edge with a microspatula and stopped. “The adhesive is modern too. Flexible. Whoever did this wasn't completely incompetent.”
“Corwin?”
“No. Corwin could barely wrap a Christmas present without somehow taping the paper to himself.”
The memory came with surprising force: Corwin on their mother's living-room floor, swearing beneath his breath while Isolde laughed at him.
Her hands stilled.
Taddeo noticed. “Do you need a minute?”
“No.” She drew a breath and returned to the book. “I need him to stop turning out to have been clever in ways that involved me without telling me.”
Taddeo didn't answer.
That was probably wise.
She examined the exposed sewing where the case had lifted. “This thread is newer too. Somebody removed the case and put it back.”
“How recently?”
“Recent enough that it doesn't belong to the original structure. I can't give you a year from looking at thread.”
His mouth shifted.
“Don't.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You were about to ask whether my conservator powers have limits.”
“I've learned better.”
“Good.”