My Boss Ordered The Mold Destroyed Before The Loading Door Closed

Rafe Belloc put a pink disposal slip beside my lunch.

"Cut the mold into strips," he said. "Feed it through the waste shredder. Today."

I moved my sandwich away from the wet plaster on his sleeve.

"Which mold?"

"V-Seventeen. That worthless teaching copy."

I was thirty-seven, a Native Hawaiian woman with brown skin, broad shoulders, and thick black hair I wore in a braid down my back. My name was Leilani Kahoano, and I made fossil casts at the Basin Lantern Museum in Vernal, Utah.

I cleaned seams. I patched air bubbles. I painted resin until children could see where an animal had healed from an old break.

People called that copying bones.

They rarely asked what a copy kept.

Rafe was a white American man of fifty-two, with silver hair brushed straight back, pale blue eyes, and soft hands that never held a dirty tool.

He paid for our traveling shows through his company, Belloc Exhibition House. His name stood on a brass plaque beside our front door. Mine sat on a label inside the mold cabinet.

"Why are we scrapping it?" I asked.

"Because storage costs money."

"The silicone cost $1,842."

His smile went thin.

Outside the loading door, trucks hissed along Highway 40. Red dust had settled on the sill. Beyond town, the hills looked dry enough to crumble under a thumb.

Rafe picked up my detail brush.

"Such fine work," he said. "What makes that little ridge?"

"A healed fracture."

"Wonderful."

"Whose specimen was the master?"

His interest left his face at once.

"That question isn't part of your job."

I took my brush back.

V-Seventeen had arrived six weeks earlier in a plaster field jacket. The intake sheet called it a resin teaching master. It was a tail vertebra, with a forked crack across one side and a small hollow beneath it.

I had wondered about its weight. Resin could be filled with stone powder, though, and old teaching sets often mixed real fragments with repairs.

I had recorded my doubt in the intake log.

Rafe had never answered it.

When I molded the piece, a numbered aluminum seal lay flat against the jacket rim. My silicone had covered the bone and a small patch of that rim in one pour. We called that patch a witness tab. It kept the object and its intake marks together.

The seal read BH-73184.

On the negative, its letters ran backward.

"The cabinet has a retention notice," I said.

"I gave you an order."

"And the museum gave me custody of its production molds. Seven years. A disposal needs the collections director's signature."

"You're the girl who paints the copies, Leilani. Don't turn yourself into a committee."

I set my brush on a sheet of scrap paper.

Eight strokes had dried there. I counted them. One through eight. It was something I did when my chest got tight. Brushstrokes stayed where I put them.

"I'm the person who signs the mold register," I said.

He leaned close enough that I could smell his mint gum.

"I can stop funding this room."

My rent was $1,180. My truck needed $640 in brake work. I knew exactly how little room I had for a brave speech.

So I gave him no speech.

I wrote PENDING COLLECTIONS REVIEW across the pink slip and placed it in the outgoing tray.

Rafe watched me lock the cabinet.

"You have until tomorrow," he said.

After he left, I checked the cabinet register. The silicone negatives belonged to the museum. I held the key because I had signed for them. Rafe's company owned the shipping foam and display stands, which was a different line on a different form.

That line mattered.

I photographed the disposal order with the museum's work camera and attached the image to the intake record. Then I called our collections director, Ruth Penn.

"Don't cut anything," she said.

"He said he'd stop the funding."

"He hasn't bought the right to erase our records."

Her voice shook on the last word. That helped me more than a steady voice would have.

At five, I stayed to wash my brushes. I made eight slow passes across the cleaning screen. On the eighth, someone knocked on the staff door.

The man outside held his badge away from the glass so I could read it. He wore a plain brown coat. There was gray at his temples and mud along the edges of his boots.

"Leilani Kahoano? I'm Mateo Salceda. Federal antiquities investigation."

I kept the door locked.

"You can call the field office to check," he said. "Use a number you find yourself. I'll wait."

"What do you need?"

He lifted a printed shipping form.

Even through the glass, I could read the number he had circled.

BH-73184.