The Painted Hands Led Us Back To The People Who Owned Them

I would not let anyone call the panels a collection yet.

“That's a word people use when they want things to belong together,” I told Leah. “We need to find out who owns each piece.”

She nodded and changed the label on her folder to Stored Property.

For three days, I worked at a folding table outside the cold room. I wore gloves when the surface called for them and used clean hands when loose cloth might catch on a splinter. Every panel got a number, measurements, and photographs of its front, back, and edges.

The inventory clerk logged each movement.

I charged nothing for that first survey. Leah made me write those hours down anyway.

“Free work still has a value,” she said.

The first owner arrived on Thursday.

Deacon Ellis Ward had driven from a small church outside town. He brought an old photograph in a kitchen bag and a woman who had been the church secretary during the 2011 flood threat.

“We were told they went to a conservation warehouse,” he said.

“They did come here,” I said. “Grandma offered dry space on the raised floor.”

“Curtis told us the fund was treating them.”

I showed him the hand with the wheat.

He sat down hard.

“My wife dusted that frame every Saturday for twenty-two years.”

The secretary, Vera, brought out their church minutes. A vote had approved temporary storage. No sale. No gift.

On the back of the storage receipt, Grandma had written two words: Still Theirs.

Her handwriting made my throat close.

I remembered the panels coming in during the high water. Later, Curtis had said the fund had placed them with specialists. I had been traveling for work then. Grandma had stopped climbing those stairs as her knees worsened.

Neither of us had asked enough questions.

Under a shelf, we found her green bag. Inside was a binder of duplicate receipts, sorted by church, with a column for the date each piece should go home.

Most of that column was blank.

Tucked into it was a note to Curtis from eighteen months earlier.

Need Simone to look. Tell her where everything is. These are not ours to keep.

Below it, he had written: Handled.

I sat with that page for a long time.

“She did try,” Nadine said.

“She also trusted the wrong person.”

“Both can be true.”

By Friday, representatives of four churches had supplied photographs, minutes, and receipts. Two had closed, so Leah began tracing the groups that had legally received their property. We did not hand anyone a panel based only on a memory.

Curtis sent a demand for $26,400 in storage charges.

Leah answered with the agreement he had sent me himself. It said storage was without rent. She asked for any later contract signed by an owner of the panels.

He supplied none.

Meanwhile, the icehouse needed money I could not pretend to have.

A roofer quoted $3,850 for urgent flashing and patch work. Insurance would cost $2,160 a year. The tax office confirmed $1,284 remained due on the current bill. There was no hidden fortune beneath the floorboards.

I paid for a temporary roof cover and shut off a leaking sink. I did two evening church jobs and stopped buying lunch.

Then a woman named Lorna Kess arrived with a cardboard box.

She was River Lantern's volunteer treasurer. Curtis had told her to stop speaking to me.

“I can follow an instruction,” she said, setting down the box. “But I need it to make sense.”

She had asked the fund's other directors to meet after receiving Leah's notice. They had voted to preserve records and hire an outside accountant. Lorna brought copies the board had authorized her to share with the property owners.

The fund had received three restricted grants of $16,200 each. All three had promised treatment of these panels by qualified workers.

“That's $48,600,” I said.

“Yes.”

The lock service had been paid. So had the electric bill for the dehumidifier. Those costs had receipts.

The treatment reports were another matter.

I opened the top one. It listed a facing tissue, a weak adhesive wash, and a full color match on the wheat panel.

None of that work had been done.

I took a blue sample from my tin and set it beside the panel. The report claimed I had filled a long scrape near the wheat. The scrape was still bare wood. In an old intake photograph, the same knot showed through it. I labeled both images and wrote what I could see, without adding what I thought of Curtis.

At the bottom, above the words Lead Conservator, was my name.

Lorna pulled out a second page.

“This is the invoice attached to it,” she said. “Did you receive $9,800?”