Read Four Hearts, One Light free: the opening chapter

Book One, Chapter 1: The New Hire

The ledger had survived ninety-some years, two floods and one very enthusiastic harbormaster's nephew with a stapler, and Margot Ellison was not about to let it die on a Monday.

It lay open on the suction table under the big north window of the conservation lab, its pages the color of weak tea, its spine split like a dropped loaf. Outside, the first Monday of January was doing what January did in Calloway Bay: a fine grey drizzle that never quite committed to being rain, the ferry slips below Pier 9 gone soft at the edges, the islands erased. The radiator ticked. The hygrometer on the wall read forty-eight percent, which was two percent higher than Margot liked and two percent lower than the building usually managed, so she was choosing to take it as a gift.

She lifted the corner of page sixty-one with a bone folder and a breath. SS Corinne, 14 crates tinned salmon, rec'd by M. Doyle. The ink had gone the brown of old blood. Somebody's whole working day lived in that line. Somebody's sore hands.

"You're doing the face," said Lucy Tran from the doorway.

"I don't have a face."

"You have a face. It's the 'I'm in love with a dead clerk' face." Lucy came in with two coffees and the bright, unrepentant energy of a twenty-six year old registrar who had not yet learned to fear donors. She set one cup on the far bench, well away from the table, because she had been trained properly. "Pike wants everyone in the boardroom at ten. He's wearing the plaid bow tie."

Margot lowered the page. "The plaid one."

"The plaid one."

The plaid bow tie meant an announcement. The polka dot one meant budget cuts. The solid navy meant somebody important had died, and once, memorably, that the gift shop had been robbed.

"Did he say what about?"

"He said, and I quote, 'exciting things.'" Lucy sipped her coffee. "He also said 'centennial' twice and 'synergy' once, so brace."

Margot pushed her glasses up, checked the clip in her hair, pulled off her nitrile gloves and tucked the cotton pair back into her cardigan pocket, where they lived. She straightened the bone folder so it lay parallel to the edge of the table. It did not need straightening. She did it anyway.

"Strictly speaking," she said, "I have fourteen pages to humidify before lunch."

"Strictly speaking," said Lucy, "the plaid bow tie."

---

The boardroom smelled of radiator dust and the orange cleaner the night crew used on the long table. Harold Pike stood at the head of it, sixty-two and anxious and kind in the way of men who had spent thirty years asking rich people for money and apologizing for the request. The bow tie was, indeed, plaid. Green and red, as though Christmas had not quite let go of him.

"Friends," he said, which was how he began everything, including layoffs. "As you know, this autumn marks one hundred years since the Calloway Maritime Museum opened its doors on this pier."

Margot knew. She had written the anniversary timeline for the brochure and had corrected, three times, the marketing department's belief that the building had been a cannery. It had been a net loft. Precision mattered. Nobody else in the room seemed to feel this as keenly as she did.

"To open our centennial year," Pike went on, "the board has approved a major exhibition for the Harbor Gallery. Working title, which the board quite likes, so let's call it the title." He clicked a remote. The screen behind him lit up with grey letters on a grey photograph of a grey dock. "Harbor Women: A Century of Work on the Water. Opening March twentieth."

There was a small murmur. Margot sat very still.

She had been asking for this exhibit for four years. She had a binder. She had a folder on the shared drive called HARBOR WOMEN (PROPOSAL) (REVISED) (REVISED AGAIN) that she had not told anyone about because it felt like admitting to a diary. Cannery line workers in hairnets. Telephone operators at the harbor exchange. Women who mended nets and kept ledgers and drove forklifts during the war and were sent home after. Three hundred and twelve objects she had already pulled, assessed and rated for condition, in a spreadsheet with color coding that Lucy called "aggressive."

March twentieth was eleven weeks away.

"Dr. Ellison will lead collections and content," Pike said, and nodded at her, and there was a small, warm patter of applause that made Margot's ears go hot. "And for design, we've brought in a contract exhibit designer from Chicago, who comes very highly recommended. She's done work for, ah, several very interesting institutions. She starts today." He looked at his watch, then at the door. "She starts, I believe, now."

The door did not open.

Pike cleared his throat. "Shortly."

---

He caught Margot in the hallway afterward, by the case of ship's bells, and lowered his voice in the conspiratorial way he lowered it when he was about to say something he had been told not to say.

"Margot. A word."

"Of course."

"Delphine is retiring in May." Delphine had been Head of Collections since before Margot was born, more or less, and was retiring the way glaciers retired. "The position will be posted in spring. Internal and external search. The committee will, naturally, look very carefully at the centennial." He touched the bow tie. "I don't want to put pressure on you."

"You've just put pressure on me."

"A small amount of pressure. Productive pressure." He smiled, all creases. "Think of this exhibit as your audition. Not officially. I would never say that officially."

"You've just said it officially, Harold. We're standing next to the bells."

"The bells don't talk." He patted her arm. "You've earned a shot. Make it sing. Make the board happy. And, ah, work well with the designer. The board likes collaboration. It's a word they use."

He went off down the hall humming. Margot stood beside the case of ship's bells and looked at her own reflection in the glass: tall, pale, freckled, auburn hair escaping the clip in three places, tortoiseshell glasses, a grey cardigan with the sleeves shoved to the elbow because she always forgot she'd pushed them up. She looked like someone who belonged behind a case. She looked like someone who catalogued things.

Head of Collections. She let herself want it for exactly the length of one breath, and then she folded the wanting up and put it away, because wanting things at work made you careless, and careless people put coffee on ledgers.

---

She was back at the suction table, page sixty-four, when the lab door banged open so hard the hinge complained.

"Hi! Sorry! Hi. Is this conservation? The guy at the front desk said second floor, left, then left again, then 'you'll know it when you smell the glue,' and honestly he was right, it smells like a really specific kindergarten."

Margot looked up.

A woman stood in the doorway, soaking wet. Not damp. Not drizzled on. Wet, as though she had walked from wherever she had come from by way of the harbor itself. She was maybe thirty, compact, brown-skinned, with short dark hair shaved close on one side and falling into her eyes on the other. A silver hoop in one ear. A flannel shirt, red and black, open over a band T-shirt so faded Margot couldn't read it. Work boots that were leaving two distinct puddles on the lab's very clean floor. A carpenter's pencil behind her ear, which was somehow the most offensive part.

In one hand she held a large black umbrella, closed, streaming.

"I'm Dani," she said. "Dani Reyes. Exhibit design? I'm supposed to be in a meeting. I think I missed the meeting. My bus went the wrong direction, which, it turns out, is a thing buses here just do, and then I got off and walked, and then it started really raining, and then I found out my umbrella has a hole in it, which explains a lot about my last apartment." She grinned, and the grin took up most of her face. "Anyway. Hi. You must be Dr. Ellison."

She came forward with her free hand out.

The umbrella came with her.

Margot watched, in the slow motion that only happens in car accidents and conservation labs, as a fat drop gathered at the umbrella's tip, swelled, and swung out over the open ledger.

"Stop," Margot said. "Stop. Stop. Do not move."

Dani stopped. The drop hung. Margot came around the table in two strides, took the umbrella by its shaft, turned it point down, and carried it at arm's length to the sink in the corner, where it dripped onto stainless steel the way God intended.

When she turned back, Dani was standing exactly where she'd been told, both hands raised a little, like someone in a heist film.

"That," Margot said, and heard her own voice go thin and precise, the voice she used on interns and on the HVAC contractor, "is a 1923 cargo ledger from the Port of Calloway Bay harbormaster's office. It is iron gall ink on rag paper. Water on iron gall ink does not blot. It bleeds. It halos. It migrates. It takes a line somebody wrote ninety years ago and turns it into a stain, permanently, because some person couldn't hold an umbrella."

There was a pause. The radiator ticked.

"Okay," said Dani. "That's fair. That's completely fair." She lowered her hands. "I'm really sorry. I wasn't thinking. I was thinking about being late, which, also my fault." She looked past Margot at the ledger, and something in her face changed, the grin sliding off into plain attention. "Is that the actual one? From the harbormaster?"

"Yes."

"Can I look? From here. I'll stay here. I'll stay right here and drip on the floor, which I know is also bad."

Margot hesitated. Then, because it was the ledger, and because no one ever asked to look at it, she said, "From there."

Dani leaned. She did not come closer. She squinted at the open page with the absorbed stillness of someone reading a map.

"Fourteen crates of salmon," she said. "Received by M. Doyle. Do you know who M. Doyle was?"

"Not yet."

"You've got a 'not yet' face." Dani looked up at her. Her eyes were very dark and very amused. "That's a good face. Okay. I owe you. Seriously. I'm sorry, boss."

"I'm not your boss," Margot said. "We're co-leads."

"Co-boss, then." The grin came back, a little crooked. "I'll get a better umbrella. I'll get a dry suit. I'll stand outside and shake like a dog."

Margot did not laugh. She was nearly certain she did not laugh. Something happened at the corner of her mouth and she turned back to the table before it could become anything.

"There are paper towels by the sink," she said. "And a mop in the closet. I'd be grateful."

---

They had a meeting at two, because Pike had looked in on them at eleven-thirty with the expression of a man who has introduced two cats and is listening for screaming.

The design office was down the hall: a long room with drafting tables nobody used and a pinboard covered in the ghosts of old exhibits. Dani had dried off, mostly. She'd hung the flannel over a radiator, where it steamed gently and smelled of wet wool and, faintly, of sawdust. In the T-shirt she looked younger and stronger, and there was a long pale scar on her left forearm, ridged, the kind you got from machinery.

Table saw, Margot thought, and then thought: why do I know that, and why am I looking.

"So," Dani said. She'd taken a stool and turned it backward and was sitting astride it with her forearms folded on the back, which nobody over twenty-five should be allowed to do. "I read the brief. I read your object list. I read the whole spreadsheet, actually."

"All three hundred and twelve lines?"

"The colors are very aggressive."

"That's what Lucy says."

"Lucy's right. I liked it. You can tell somebody loves this stuff." Dani tipped her head. "Can I ask a dumb question?"

"You can ask any question you want. I'll decide if it's dumb."

That got a laugh, short and startled, as though Dani hadn't expected her to be funny. Margot was used to that. People heard the precision and missed the joke underneath it, and then they were surprised, and then they were either charmed or wary. She waited to see which.

"Who's it for?" Dani said.

"I'm sorry?"

"The exhibit. Who's it for? Like, who walks in. A twelve year old on a school trip who wants to be anywhere else. A guy waiting for the ferry with forty minutes to kill. Somebody's grandma who worked at the cannery in 1970 and wants to see if her line's in there." Dani held up three fingers. "Who are we trying to make feel something?"

"Everyone," said Margot, "who comes."

"Okay, but that's nobody. That's the answer you give the board." Dani didn't say it unkindly. "When you pulled all those objects. When you picked them. Who were you picturing?"

Margot opened her mouth to say the objects themselves, and then didn't, because it would have sounded insane, and because it would have been true. She had been picturing the ledger. The hairnets. The telephone headset with the cracked bakelite earpiece. She had been picturing them safe. At forty-eight percent humidity and fifty lux, behind museum glass, where nobody's dripping umbrella could reach them.

"The objects matter," she said. "Some of these will never be shown again. They're fragile. Light damages them. Air damages them. People damage them, mostly by breathing. My job is to make sure they're still here in another hundred years."

"Sure," Dani said. "And my job is to make sure somebody wants them to be."

They looked at each other across the drafting table.

"I take your point," Margot said carefully.

"I take yours." Dani smiled. "Mostly. I'll take more of it after lunch. I didn't eat. The bus."

"The bus," Margot agreed.

They went through the logistics. Install would start the last week of February. The Harbor Gallery was four thousand square feet with a mezzanine and a window wall facing the water that Margot had always hated, because of the light, and that Dani said, at the same time, she loved, because of the light.

"How long are you here?" Margot asked, writing window wall: UV film? in the margin of her notes.

"Contract runs through opening night. March twentieth." Dani shrugged. "Then I'm back to wherever's next. Chicago, maybe. Maybe not. I don't really plan past the end of a job."

"Ah," said Margot.

She wrote March 20 on her notepad and underlined it, and felt, as she did, something loosen in her chest. Eleven weeks. That was manageable. Anyone could be managed for eleven weeks. A ledger could survive eleven weeks of anything if you kept it in the right box.

It was a relief. She told herself so, firmly, in the voice she used on interns.

---

Lucy caught her by the elevator at four.

"So?"

"So what?"

"So the designer." Lucy's eyes were bright. "I saw her mopping. She mopped your whole floor. She mopped under the flat files. Nobody mops under the flat files. That's commitment."

"She nearly destroyed the harbormaster's ledger."

"Did she, though, or did she almost." Lucy leaned in and dropped her voice to a whisper that could have been heard in the gift shop. "She's cute."

Margot pressed the elevator button again, although it was already lit.

"She's a hazard," she said.

"A cute hazard."

"Lucy."

"Respectfully, I've worked here three years and you've never once said anyone was a hazard. You said Ron from facilities was 'not ideal.' You said the guy who spilled Coke on the whaling log was 'a learning opportunity for us all.'"

"Ron from facilities is not ideal."

"Hazard is a strong word." Lucy waggled her eyebrows. "Hazard is a spicy word."

The elevator arrived. Margot stepped in. Lucy did not, because she was going to the registrar's office, which was on this floor, which meant she had come all the way down the hall purely to say she's cute, which told Margot everything she needed to know about the state of morale in the building.

"I'm going to go humidify fourteen pages," Margot said, as the doors closed.

"That's not a euphemism," Lucy called after her, "but it should be."

---

She stayed until seven, because she always did, and because the ledger was finally behaving.

When she lifted her head the window had gone black, and the ferry slips below were strings of yellow light on black water, and the 6:50 to the islands was nosing out of its berth with its windows lit like a moving house. She stretched. Something cracked in her neck. The building had the hollow, settling quiet of after hours, and somewhere down on the ground floor, very faintly, Mr. Okonjo's radio was playing the jazz station, a saxophone climbing up and down the stairwell.

She covered the ledger, checked the hygrometer (forty-seven, good boy), and went down the hall to the design office to drop off the object list she'd promised.

Dani had gone. The flannel was gone from the radiator. The stool was turned the right way round, which was something.

On Margot's own desk, when she went back to get her bag, was a sheet of paper that had not been there at lunch.

It was a floor plan. The Harbor Gallery, drawn freehand with a carpenter's pencil in bold, sure strokes, the mezzanine sketched in perspective, little scribbled figures walking through it. The window wall was there, flooded with light. And in the middle of the gallery, where Margot had planned forty-two display cases in six neat rows, each one chosen and measured and argued for over the course of a year, there was nothing. There was open floor. There were walls that curved like a harbor's edge. There was a full-sized room, drawn in at the far end, labeled in block capitals: A ROOM YOU CAN STAND IN.

There was not one single case.

Margot stood and looked at it for a long time. Her hands were cold. She was aware that she was holding her breath.

Every case. Every one she'd chosen. Gone, with a pencil.

At the bottom of the sheet, in the same loose, sure hand, was a note:

Hear me out? D.

The sample ends here.