My Patron Ordered Me To Polish A Museum's Missing Girl

I made the fox while the glue dried on a dead man's shield.

The shield was rubber. The man was an actor, still alive and due back on a Burbank set at six. My job as a movie-prop conservator was to make old things last and new things look old.

I was a white man of forty-three, with pale freckled skin, gray at my temples, and clay packed into the lines of my broad hands.

I pressed down the fox's left ear. I did that to all my little clay animals. One bent ear made them look as if they were listening.

Outside, a plane climbed from the airport. The windows shook. I held the shield still until the sound passed.

Magnus Kells came through the shop without knocking.

Magnus Kells was a white man of fifty-eight, with swept-back silver hair, a soft pink face, and neat brown gloves he wore even indoors.

He set a crate sheet beside my fox.

"A quick clean, Owen. No need for your usual fuss."

The sheet read RESIN ORCHARD GIRL. VALUE: $84.

"What's the deadline?"

"Tomorrow. Our friends in Lisbon need their scenery."

He supported our warehouse, three small film crews, and a school arts fund. His name was on the brass plate by the gate. Mine was on a strip of masking tape above the sink.

Six years earlier, a public sculpture job had fallen through. I had spent the deposit on stone before the buyer went broke. I owed $19,600 and owned half a horse carved from marble.

Magnus gave me work at $38 an hour. He liked to mention the horse when visitors came.

"A gifted man," he would say. "Business defeated him."

I lifted the girl from her foam bed with both hands.

Resin warmed under a palm. This stayed cold.

"Odd casting mix," I said.

Magnus looked at me, then at the shield.

"Everything is a copy here. Try to remember that."

After he left, I put the girl on my turntable. She held a small round fruit against her chest. The tip of one ear was gone.

I used a soft brush first. No water, no solvent. Under gray dust, I found a pale stone surface and a line of old wax near the base.

My screen held the intake form. Beside it sat my scan folder.

I scanned every object before I touched it. The light rig mapped the surface. A borrowed X-ray panel helped when I needed to see pins or old repairs. I kept the raw files in my own paid archive, as my work agreement allowed.

Magnus had once called it a failed sculptor's scrap heap.

I had asked him to initial that part of the agreement anyway.

On the girl's shoulder, three thin cracks met at a shallow crescent. I knew that crescent.

Five summers before, I had earned $1,200 making condition scans for the Cedar Basin Museum outside Ventura. One piece had shifted on a bad shelf years earlier. Its shoulder had struck a metal bracket.

I opened that old job.

There was the girl. There was her broken ear.

I laid the two surface maps over each other. The old shelf damage lined up. So did a tiny pit under the fruit, where no mold seam would run.

A copy could repeat a broad crack. It could also repeat small marks. I knew enough to keep looking.

The base had a fresh scrape through old wax. Beneath it, part of the museum's painted number remained.

I took photographs with a ruler in frame.

Then I searched the museum's public notices. The girl had vanished during a closed gallery move eleven months earlier. The notice called her a limestone votive figure. Her listed insurance value was $280,000.

Our export sheet called her an $84 lawn ornament.

Magnus returned before I shut the folder.

"You haven't cleaned it."

"The label may be wrong."

He read the open museum page. His gloves rested flat on my bench.

"Labels come from the client."

"This could belong to somebody else."

"Most things do. We are paid to make them useful."

He picked up my fox and turned it between two fingers.

"Your animals have more promise than that horse. Keep your attention there."

He put it down with the good ear facing away.

"And polish the base. All the way around."

I waited until his car passed the open loading door. Then I marked the job HOLD FOR MATERIAL REVIEW, an option already on our intake form.

I called the number on the theft notice.

"My name is Owen Vale," I said. "I have a condition file you may need."

The woman who answered asked me to leave the object alone.

At four, a plain sedan stopped beyond the gate. A woman stepped out, checked the warehouse sign, and called my phone.

"Mr. Vale? Leila Haddad. Before I come inside, tell me who else knows you called."