The Curator's Mistake

The wing was dead quiet after closing, which is exactly when I do my best muttering. Fifty-four years old, curator of this museum for nearly twenty years, and there I was at eight at night, sitting on the floor of the children's wing with a laptop on a milk crate and a spreadsheet that refused to make sense.

"Donation drive, I said," I told the empty room. "Easy event, I said. Toys in, toys sorted, families happy." The spreadsheet disagreed. Fatima's team had logged half these boxes under codes that meant nothing, and Damon had alphabetized things in a way that only Damon could understand, and somewhere in this pile of plastic castles and stuffed bears there was supposed to be a box from a private collector that I did not remember ever seeing.

The donation drive had been running all month. Toys for the family outreach program, gently used or new, dropped off at the front desk. We'd collected maybe two hundred items and the sorting was behind schedule, so I'd stayed late on a Thursday to chip away at it. My knees were killing me on that hard floor and I was forty-three lines deep into a list that said "misc plush" eleven times in a row.

That's when I heard the side door go.

"Luz? You still down here?"

I knew the voice. Garret. Board member, art history professor, the man who'd been coming to our meetings for three years and who I mostly knew as the guy with strong opinions about the lighting in the Egyptian gallery. I stood up too fast and one knee cracked like a walnut.

"In here! By the storage closet!"

He came around the corner of the puppet theater display carrying a box, and I'll be honest, my first thought was that the man looked good. He was fifty-seven, silver at the temples, and he was wearing that tweed coat he always wore even in summer. My last serious relationship had ended eight years ago and I'd been dating around since my early thirties without much luck, so I noticed things like that. I noticed them and then I told myself to knock it off. He was a colleague. Sort of. He was a board member who I'd never once been alone with.

"You're here late," he said, setting the box down on a crate next to me. "Good. I have a confession to make and it's easier with witnesses. Sort of."

"What kind of confession?"

"The box kind." He knocked on the top of it with one knuckle. "This was dropped at the department office by a private collector, a donor, and I was supposed to take it to the warehouse loading dock on Monday. I forgot. Then today I remembered, grabbed it, got halfway across campus, realized the warehouse closes at four, and thought, well, the museum is right there, Luz is probably still there with her drive, I'll just leave it with her and tell her."

"Garret." I looked at the box. No label. No packing slip. Just a strip of tape and a coffee ring on the top. "Why would you leave it with the donation drive? This is all children's toys. All of it."

"Because I panicked, that's why. I put a sticky note on it saying do not open until catalogued and I figured you'd see it and call someone. I have been carrying this thing around all day like a guilty man." He ran a hand through his hair. "There's coffee involved in this story too, if that helps. The collector delivered it while I had coffee with a colleague and I said yes to receiving it before I even knew what was in it."

I stared at him. "You accepted a donation and you don't know what's in it?"

"It's fine, it's from Bertram Hale, he donates every year, it's probably ceramics. Well. I hope it's ceramics." He paused. "It might be textiles. I said yes before he finished his sentence."

This is what passes for professional in my life, I swear. Two adults with decades of experience between them, standing over an unlabeled box at eight at night, neither one willing to be the one who opened it.

"I have to know what's in it," I said finally. "If it's sitting in my children's drive all weekend, I need to know it's not, I don't know, a taxidermy thing. Bertram Hale is eighty-one and his idea of appropriate is not everyone's idea of appropriate."

"That's fair," Garret said. "Open it. I'll stay. Moral support."

So I got the box knife out of my apron pocket and slit the tape. Inside, on top, was a cream envelope with Bertram's spidery handwriting on it. I pulled the note out and read it aloud, because at that point reading it silently seemed worse somehow.

"To the museum. Contents as catalogued: eleven pre-Columbian figurines, erotic, Tairona culture, approx. 1400 AD. One personal item of my late wife's, modern, to be disposed of discreetly. Please handle the figurines with cotton gloves, they are priceless. Regards, B. Hale."

Garret made a sound that resembled a kettle starting to boil. "Erotic."

"Erotic," I agreed.

"Pre-Columbian erotic figurines. In a box. That I carried across a college campus."

"And left in a children's wing."

"Which nobody will know if we fix it right now." He was already rolling up his sleeves, which I noticed more than I should have. "We repack it, I take it to the warehouse tomorrow morning before my nine o'clock, and this never happened."

"I need to at least verify the contents, Garret. If one of those figurines is cracked, that's on me, because I signed for it by opening it. That's how chain of custody works. I've been doing this twenty years."

He groaned. "Fine. Verify. Carefully."

I lifted out the first layer of packing straw and there they were, eleven little fired-clay figures, rounded and grinning, most of them in poses that made me glad no children were present. They were actually beautiful. I'd seen Hale's collection photographed in a journal once and here it was in a coffee-stained box. I was counting them and muttering numbers when I got to the bottom layer and found one item wrapped in a dish towel, not straw.

I unwrapped it, and it was not 1400 AD anything. It was a