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.

“I wondered when you’d come,” Iris said.

Mara stopped just inside the door. “You knew I would?”

“Your sister used to say you always arrived after the interesting part.”

The words were offered lightly, but they entered Mara with the weight of stones.

Iris noticed the envelope in Mara’s hand. “You brought the shoes.”

“They were donated to the museum.”

“Nothing is donated. Things are surrendered.”

Mara sat opposite her. Through the window, a man in a red shirt drove a golf cart in slow circles, unable to find the exit from the fairway.

“Did Elena wear them?” Mara asked.

“No. Elena had terrible feet. Flat arches, weak ankles. She hated dancing because it required obedience.” Iris smiled briefly. “She came to watch me rehearse. She took photographs. Not good ones. She cut off people’s heads and included empty chairs.”

“Why was she in the newspaper photograph?”

“Because she was standing where she shouldn’t have been.”

Iris reached toward the shoes but did not touch them. “The night before she left, she came here. We met behind the civic hall. She was frightened.”

“Of what?”

“Of being believed.”

Mara felt the room contract around that sentence. “What did she say?”

“That she had found something in the old pump house. Something that belonged to a child.”

The golf cart disappeared behind a stand of cottonwoods.

“Was it the coat?” Mara asked.

Iris looked at her then, and Mara saw not surprise but fatigue. “You know about the coat.”

“Walter Mercer donated it.”

“Walter was there.”

“Where?”

“Behind the civic hall. The night Elena left.”

Iris folded her hands in her lap. Her nails were polished the same blue as the shoes, though the color had chipped away at the edges. “She said she was going to meet him. She said he had the key.”

Mara thought of the brass key in the museum drawer, its paper warning in Elena’s unmistakable handwriting: DON’T OPEN IT UNTIL YOU KNOW WHO WAS THERE.

“Did Elena ever come back?” Mara asked.

Iris looked toward the window. “Not to me.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“No,” Iris said. “It isn’t.”

When Mara returned to the museum, June was waiting in the corridor with the developed photographs. Samuel had brought them himself. The images lay in a neat stack on the light table, still smelling faintly of chemicals.

The first showed the civic hall. The second showed the pump house. The third showed a child’s red coat hanging from a nail.

In the fourth, Elena stood beside Walter Mercer.

Between them, half hidden in shadow, was a third figure whose face had been scratched away from the negative.