Episode 73 · The Bait

The article appeared on Monday, on page two of the local paper, beneath a photograph of the broken bank taken from the street. Soles read it on his phone at the kitchen table, through the bruise on the screen, his coffee going cold beside the port key.

The headline spoke of blocks paid for three times. Below it were two of Krista’s photographs, the old one and the one from after the works, side by side, exactly as she had laid them out on the long table in the small room. Under them, in small print: the images came from the archive of the Botanical Garden and had been made available by Krista. Her full name.

She had not made them available. Soles knew it the way he knew water runs downhill. Krista had signed copies for the investigator, and the originals had stayed in Alden’s register. Between that table and page two, someone else had passed.

The rest was thinner than the headline promised. Invoices, blocks, the five drains on the old plans. Nothing about the crane. Nothing about Kale. The last paragraph belonged to the garden’s administration.

Its representative regretted the haste with which archival materials were removed without the committee’s approval, announced an independent survey and urged caution regarding interpretations offered by a person without technical training. He did not say who that person was. He did not need to. Her name stood three lines higher.

Soles recognized the phrasing. It was the same pleasant voice that had told them by the water, on Saturday morning, that the ground was unstable.

He called Krista. She answered on the third try.

— Good morning, she said. I assume you’ve read it.

She was so polite that Soles felt guilty of something.

— You didn’t give them to the paper.

— No. Thank you for not asking.

A pause.

— The committee has suspended the exhibition pending the conclusion of the inquiry. The small room is closed. Alden is allowed in. I’m not. They asked for my key by noon.

— Are you giving it to them?

— I already have. I made a list of everything that was in the room when I left, and Alden signed it. I photographed every shelf as well.

Soles almost smiled. Furious, Krista did not shout. She took inventory.

— There’s something else, she said, and her voice changed. Someone was in the room last night.

— How?

— I don’t know. Alden locked up at seven. This morning the door was still locked, the key in his pocket, the windows latched from the inside. Every drawer had been pulled out. The files were on the floor, open. Nothing was missing. Alden checked against the register twice.

Soles looked toward the kitchen door, then toward the hall.

— They were looking for something.

— And they didn’t find it, Krista said. Otherwise something would be missing.

After she hung up, he went out into the hall.

The box stood by the front door. The lid was up. He had closed it himself the night before. The clothes were inside, but the gloves lay on top, no longer paired, one of them turned inside out.

Soles did not touch them.

The front door was locked, the key on the inside where he had left it. The hall window was shut. Upstairs, Maxim was still asleep after a night of driving. And on the wall beside the box, at shoulder height, the plaster had a paler patch, like the place where a picture has hung for years and been taken down.

No picture had ever hung there.

Mina had stopped in the kitchen doorway and would not come through. Lucky stood with his legs braced and growled at the wall, low and steady. Soles had not heard him growl like that since he was a puppy.

His hand went under his arm on its own. The oiled leather was there against his ribs, warm from his body. He had slept with it the night before without knowing why. Now he knew.

They were not looking for photographs. They were looking for what he carried. In Krista’s room, in his father’s box, in the places he had touched. Not upstairs, where two men were sleeping and the dogs would have woken the street. Not yet.

He went up and woke Maxim.

Maxim came down barefoot and looked at the patch on the wall for a long time. He put his palm flat on it, the way he tested a tire, then took it away and wiped it on his shirt.

— Warm, he said.

— I know.

— Walls aren’t warm.

He went through the house after that, room by room, opening closets he had no reason to open, and came back down with the hammer from the shed in his hand. Soles did not ask what he meant to hit with it. Maxim did not seem to know either.

That evening all five of them gathered in the yard, for the first time since the footbridge.

Maxim switched on the light under the shed roof and dragged over two kitchen chairs, an upturned crate, the workbench. Tesa came with her arm in a cast to the elbow and sat on the crate with her back to the shed, where she could see the gate. Krista held a folder closed with an elastic band on her knees. Varren arrived last with a bag of warm pretzels, which he set on the bench without a word.

Lucky lay under the bench. He kept his head toward the house.

Soles told them about the box and the patch on the wall. Krista told them about the room. Neither took long.

— So they walk through walls, Maxim said when they had finished. Great. I put a new padlock on the shed last week.

— They didn’t take anything, Krista said.

— Because they didn’t find it.

Tesa had not looked at the wall, or the house, or Varren. She was looking at Soles’s jacket.

— You slept with it on you, she said.

— Yes.

— Then they know where it is. They’re checking where else it could be. That’s not a search. That’s a list being crossed off.

Maxim looked at Soles, then lower, at the place under his arm.