The Room Behind the Stage

By nine the next morning, the museum had acquired the stale, expectant quiet of a house awaiting an estate sale. Thomas had gone to the county offices to argue about the boiler, though everyone knew the boiler was not the reason the museum was closing. June was in the archive room, feeding old newspapers through the scanner and swearing at a machine that believed 1974 was a language.

Mara carried the dance shoes into the workroom and set them beneath the examination lamp. They were satin, once pale blue, now the grayish color of rainwater. The soles had been repaired with narrow strips of leather. Inside one heel, someone had written an I in black ink.

She had already known the shoes belonged to Iris Bell. What she had not known was that Iris had danced in them the summer Elena disappeared.

“Don’t make that face,” June said from the doorway. “You look like you’ve found a corpse in the accession ledger.”

Mara glanced up. “I found a date.”

“Worse.”

June came in holding a folder. Her hair was pinned up with a pencil, and a streak of dust crossed one cheek. “The shoes were donated last month, but the donor form was backdated. Iris signed it in March. The volunteer who entered the collection used the date of the appraisal instead.”

“Why does that matter?”

“It matters because the appraisal was done by Walter Mercer.” June placed the folder beside the shoes. “And because Iris’s name appears in a newspaper clipping from July twenty-third, 1989. So does Elena’s.”

Mara did not touch the clipping. She could see the headline upside down: COUNTY DANCE RECITAL DRAWS CROWD. Beneath it, a photograph showed a row of girls in white dresses, their arms raised like branches. One face had been circled in blue ink.

Elena’s face.

At the edge of the photograph stood a dark-haired girl half turned away from the camera. Iris, Mara assumed. Or someone who had become Iris by remembering herself that way.

“Call her,” June said.

“I can’t call someone in assisted living and ask whether she helped my sister disappear.”

“You can ask whether she remembers the dance recital.”

“That would be a lie.”

June leaned against the table. “Mara, every question is a lie until you admit what you really want to know.”

The assisted-living facility stood beside a golf course where the grass had gone yellow in the heat. Iris Bell received Mara in a room filled with white roses made of silk. Her hair was silver and swept into a severe knot. The sharpness in her face had survived everything else.