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The first time Maggie meets Dr. Carsen, it’s at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2004.
She’s heading back to her temporary office after eating her lunch in the Tenshin-en when someone she doesn’t know crashes directly into her. The only reason they don’t both fall is because she steadies herself on the gallery wall. He’s not as lucky, briefly slipping to the floor in the puddle of her spilled coffee before jumping back up and trying to shake it off.
“Sorry,” he says. She doesn’t recognize him, but it’s the lack of a nametag that clues her in to him being a total stranger. She’s only been contracted by the museum for about a week, and there are plenty of employees she’s only met in passing. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” she says. He’s about six inches taller than her and entirely spindly, with glasses sticking out of his front pocket. He’s probably only a few years younger than her, in his early thirties instead of late. His hands twitch and flutter the way Nate’s do, the way he says means his brain is buffering. Clearly anxious and flustered. Maggie smiles to show there’s no hard feelings. “Are you? You’re the one who fell.”
He nods, smiling sheepishly. “Happens all the time.” His eyes fall to her lanyard. “Oh, you work here! Do you think you could direct me to the Ancient World exhibit?”
Being a tour guide isn’t anywhere near in Maggie’s job description, but they’re on the same floor even if they’re catty-corner from that gallery, and more importantly she did just knock him over. She nods and gestures, leading the way through the Art of Europe. He looks around at everything they pass, pausing and opening his mouth several times like he wants to talk to her about it before remembering she’s taking time out of her day to take him where he’s trying to go.
“Sorry,” he says as he rushes to catch up with her. “I’ve never been here before. It’s a great museum. I wish I had more time to look around.”
Maggie nods. “I’m under contract to help them set up their exhibition of William Koch’s collection at the end of the month,” she says. “Come back on opening day, and someone can walk you through the whole museum.”
“I’m only in town for about twelve more hours,” he says. “I, uh, flew in last night just to see the Ancient World exhibit.”
Maggie looks at him with surprise. It’s certainly a well-presented exhibit. The Egyptian gallery in particular is a major tourism draw, according to the employees she’s spoken to. But taking a plane just to see it seems… excessive. Then again, she was temporarily relocated from Los Angeles to Boston just for the Koch exhibit on behalf of IYS and had to leave her husband and son almost as far across the country as one can get, so she’s in no position to judge.
“Thanks,” he says when they get there. He takes what looks like a jewelers loupe out of the same pocket his glasses were in. It’s rimmed with something that sparkles like imitation gold, which is unusual. “Sorry I spilled your coffee, Dr. Collins.”
“I should be the one apologizing for making you slip in it,” she says, ignoring the jolt that comes from someone knowing her name without her telling them. It’s been too long since she was contracted—she nearly forgot about the basic concept of nametags. Nobody at IYS needs to wear them, although Nate still sometimes does out of pedantry.
“Like I said, happens all the time.” He leans over a canopic jar and squints at it through the loupe, muttering something to himself. Maggie turns to go back to her office.
By tomorrow, she won’t even remember this.
The second time Maggie meets Dr. Carsen, it’s at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005.
Sam is sick by then. She doesn’t take any jobs that require her to fly out of state or even drive more than an hour from home anymore, just in case something happens. It’s not something she and Nate ever discussed, just a mutual nonverbal agreement they came to. James covers what Nate can’t leave to do, a benefit to them both since it makes him look better. There’s no one to fill Maggie’s role, no authenticator quite as good as she is, but that doesn’t matter. Sam needs her home.
“Dr. Collins!” The man she’s been working with, Professor Owens, flags her down, smiling, and she’s pulled out of her own thoughts long enough to recognize the person he’s talking to. He’s dressed almost the same as he was the last time she saw him about nine months ago. When he said he flew into Boston just for the exhibit, did he mean from Los Angeles, just like she did? That’s… dedication. “The public library sent someone here to put a story about the Garaicoa exhibit in their newsletter. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“I remember you,” Maggie says, shaking his hand. Truth be told, she’d almost entirely forgotten about it, but that innocuous day in Boston comes flooding back when she sees him. “You know, I never did get your name.”
“Flynn,” he says, and his voice is cheerful enough for the both of them. “Or Dr. Carsen. Are you opening another exhibit here?”
“Something like that,” Maggie says. “You work for the public library?”
“...Yes,” he says, and Maggie’s eyes narrow. She’s an investigator. She’s damn good at picking out when people are lying, and that was a lie. “Anyway, I was hoping Owens could tell me about the sculpture at the back of the Garaicoa exhibit.”
“There isn’t a sculpture there,” Maggie says. She’s not overly familiar with the exhibit, she’s been contracted to help with the presentation of one made up of pieces from the museum’s permanent collection, but she knows there aren’t sculptures in it.
“There is now, actually,” Professor Owens says, which Maggie was not aware of. Granted, she’s been distracted with working from the collection, but still, she walks through the Garaicoa gallery nearly every day and hadn’t noticed anything new. Admittedly, she hasn’t looked at it today, but… “The director thinks it’s a guerilla art piece installed by one of the patrons.”
“It’s going to be the focus of my article,” Dr. Carsen says helpfully. He beams at her, awkward and gawky. “I was hoping Professor Owens would let me take a closer look at it.”
“And I said of course,” Owens says, before holding up the wrist that bears his watch. “Except that I have a meeting I should have been at five minutes ago. Dr. Collins, if you would be willing to show Mr. Carsen around, that would be absolutely fantastic.”
“That’s not my job,” Maggie says in a tone that’s maybe a touch more disgruntled than usual (but cut her some fucking slack, alright? She spent last night sitting up in Sam’s room watching him sleep, not convinced that he wouldn’t suddenly wake up puking his guts out again while Nate slept off some Jack Daniels in the other room). Owens doesn’t listen, just brushes past her with a pat on the shoulder and leaves her to play docent with a man she doesn’t know.
“Sorry,” Dr. Carsen says apologetically. He shoves his hands in his pockets and hunches his shoulders in, which does nothing to diminish his height. “I can find my way back there myself. You don’t have to babysit me.”
Maggie sighs and rubs her face, trying to chase the resentment away. “It’s… fine. I just haven’t been sleeping well. I might as well see this… ‘guerilla art project.’”
She can’t deny she’s a little curious, even if it’s not her kind of art. Her expertise lies in the classics and the masters; the only reason she’s in a contemporary art museum is because she needs the work now that she can’t go anywhere.
(She wonders if—
She can’t think about it as a possibility. She can’t. No matter how often the doctors try to gently tell her that there is no coming back from this, that this kind of sarcoma isn’t something that can be fixed once it’s moved into stage four, she can’t think of Sam as on the brink of death. She needs another year with her baby. Another five years, ten years, fifty years, his whole goddamn life.
But sometimes, late at night, when Nate thinks she can’t hear him sobbing, she wonders what will happen once he’s been buried. If she’ll leave Los Angeles and never look back or if she’ll be stuck by his grave for the rest of her life, unable to tear up her roots and abandon her baby here forever.)
The art project is… weird. It’s a small, twisted statue of a child, curled up around an empty space, left on a small pedestal in the corner with no label or credit. The first thing Maggie notices about it is that it’s old.
“Oh,” she says thoughtfully, leaning in. Something about it piques her interest. This isn’t just a hobbyist making something out of clay and paper-mâché to sneak into the nearest museum in the hopes of giving their floundering career a boost. This is old. And, by the looks of it, Greek. Instinct tells her not to touch it, so she just hovers her hands over it, peering at the marble.
Dr. Carsen leans over it, but unlike her, he immediately puts his hands in it, touching the hollow space in the middle. “Niobe’s Daughter,” he murmurs, so quiet Maggie doesn’t think he’s addressing her until he looks up. “There’s supposed to be an emerald here. The Niobe Stone.”
“I’ve never heard of that,” Maggie says, before she realizes—that is not the way someone would talk about an unknown sculpture abandoned in a museum while no one was looking. “You recognize this?”
A deer-in-headlights expression crosses his face. “Maybe?”
Maggie crosses her arms. “Why did you lie to the professor about being a librarian?”
“I didn’t,” Dr. Carsen says defensively. “I am totally a legitimate librarian.” He ducks his head down. “I just… don’t work for the Los Angeles public library system, that’s all.”
Maggie eyes him. He avoids looking at her. She taps her foot until she gets his attention again. “Did you put this sculpture here?”
“No,” he says. “But I think the person who did was just stashing it here until they could get back. See, there’s supposed to be an emerald in the middle, like I said. Legend says it’s magic. No matter where you go, it gives you a direct connection to the sacred water that comes from the weeping rock on Mount Sipylus. It’s not really supposed to be the last Niobid petrified and turned to marble, but the stone is an emerald because it represents Chloris.”
Maggie raises her eyebrows. “You say that like you believe any of it.”
“Wouldn’t that be crazy?” Dr. Carsen says, which is not a denial. He rubs the back of his neck. “You wouldn’t be willing to let me look at the security footage to see who left this here without the emerald, would you?”
“That sounds like a job for the museum’s insurance company, not a librarian,” Maggie says, which is another way of saying absolutely not.
“Worth a try,” Dr. Carsen says to himself. He points at something over Maggie’s shoulder. “Hey! What’s that over there?”
Maggie, who has a seven-year-old son at home, does not turn around, and instead watches with narrowed eyes as Dr. Carsen scampers away. He leaves the statuette behind.
The third time Maggie meets Dr. Carsen, it’s at the Musée Rodin in 2007.
(She knows the answer to the question she wondered about before. She won’t be tied to Los Angeles after Sam dies. She’ll live there, certainly. But she’ll run far, far away from that gravestone and the house the three of them used to share before they were divided down to one.)
It’s on behalf of IYS that she’s there. Blackpoole is lowering her back into the river of work, which she’s grateful for, but what she really needs is something to inspect and get her mind off of… everything. Hence the Musée Rodin, with their recently recovered sculptures by Camille Claudel that they hope to display by the end of next year and want IYS to insure. She hasn’t had a chance to even see the pieces yet, merely be taken on a tour of the entire museum by a very enthusiastic staff member who clearly wants her to say that the museum’s latest prizes are the genuine artifact. Which they very well might be, but that is Maggie’s place to judge, not his.
And then she turns the corner and sees a very familiar face.
Dr. Carsen is arguing with one of the museum employees, hiding what looks like a laser pointer behind his back. Apparently he knows French.
The employee turns to the person guiding Maggie. For her benefit, she switches to English. “I’m sorry, Dr. Collins,” she says, clearly frustrated. “This man is from the—how do you say, the American bibliothèque? And he is very insistent that he be allowed to point his little device at the statues.”
“We’ve met, actually,” Maggie says. “Hello, Dr. Carsen.”
“Dr. Collins,” he says, waving as his laser pointer disappears down his sleeve in an act of sleight-of-hand. “Funny seeing you…” He trails off and tilts his head as he looks at her, brow furrowing. Maggie’s not sure what he could be looking at. She looks fine, as far as she knows. Presentable, at least. Not like a woman who just finalized her divorce three weeks ago and buried her child not too long before that. The silence drags before he coughs and finishes his sentence. “...Here.”
“Then will you tell him to stop?” The employee says, exasperated.
Maggie looks at Dr. Carsen, who shrugs. “It’s just a laser pointer!” He says in a way that makes Maggie immediately sure it is something else entirely. “I checked, there’s no light-sensitive objects in this room. It’s not like I’m shining it at one of the Carrières.”
“If they make an exception for you, they have to make an exception for everybody,” Maggie says, and the employee gestures to her with gratitude and exasperation. “What are you doing here?”
“Enjoying the art,” Dr. Carsen says. He really is a terrible liar. “What, is that a crime now?”
“Please exit the museum, monsieur,” Maggie’s guide says with a sigh.
“I’m going, I’m going,” Dr. Carsen says, side-stepping away. He hesitates for a second, looking at Maggie again, and…
Sometimes she envied the way Nate always seemed to bring out the truth in people. He used to walk into a room and pick out insecurities and nag at them until people found themselves spilling the details of crimes they’d committed and trysts that were never meant to be exposed. She knows James always envied him for it, in contrast to her mere occasionally. Of course, she hasn’t had much by way of jealousy lately. Not since the truth he could find at the bottom of a bottle became more important than the truth he could find in their relationship as two people who had lost the one they loved more than anything else.
This must be what it’s like to be Nate on the days when he’s sober, because she’s never been more certain of what someone is going to ask her than she is right now.
“Coffee?” He says hopefully, and for some reason she nods.
What Blackpoole doesn’t know won’t hurt him.
They end up sitting outside of a café around the corner and down the street. Maggie sips her coffee while Dr. Carsen shreds pieces of the mesclun that came with his croque monsieur and feeds them to the small army of sparrows hopping around their feet. He clearly wants to say something to her but needs time to work up the courage. The good thing is she doesn’t think she’ll have to disabuse him of the notion that this is a date, even though he offered to pay for her coffee—he seems more like he doesn’t want to tell her there’s something caught in her teeth more than flirt with her.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Carsen says finally. He fidgets with his sleeves, leg jiggling. The sparrows don’t startle, just keep foraging around his sneakers. “Whatever happened, I’m sorry.”
Christ, how obvious is she that a stranger made her in two seconds? “What makes you think something happened?”
He twitches, eyes flickering to the side. She looks, but the only thing there is a pigeon.
“Your ring,” he offers, hunching the way he did in Los Angeles like he thinks that’ll make him look small and doing everything he can to avoid eye contact. “You were wearing a wedding ring the past two times I met you. Now you aren’t, but you keep reaching to twist it without noticing. The way you pause before you talk, it means you’re having dry mouth, and your hands keep shaking. Those are common side effects of prescription sleeping pills. You’re tired and frustrated in a museum you should love, and it’s not just because you ran into me. Something happened, and—and I’m sorry.”
Maggie slowly puts her coffee cup down on its little saucer. “You—”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Collins,” he repeats. “I really am.”
For a minute she can’t do anything other than stare at him. He briefly looks up at her before his eyes dart away again. Through the metal grate of the table, she sees a sparrow hop up onto his knee to snag a small piece of endive from between his fingers.
“All that, and you don’t know what happened?” She asks after a moment.
“I didn’t say that,” he says. Quiet. “I think... I think it was a kid. I mean, I—I don’t—” He makes that twitchy movement with the hand not feeding the birds. Finally, he settles on just saying, “I think.”
Maggie stirs her coffee. Some cars drive by. A few tourists pass them on their way to the Musée Rodin—or maybe the Musée de l'Armée, it’s hard to say. “What were you really doing in the museum, Dr. Carsen?”
“You can call me Flynn,” he offers. She taps her spoon against her cup and waits for him to give up on potentially distracting her and answer the damn question. He winces at the expression on her face. “You know. Just… regular librarian things.”
“You’re a very bad liar,” Maggie observes.
“No I’m not,” he argues, cheeks reddening. “Not that I am lying! But if I was, I’d be really good at it.”
She doesn’t dignify that with a response, just raises an eyebrow. He’s in his thirties, which is old enough to know his own weaknesses. There is no possible way she is the only person to ever tell him he lies worse than Sam—
Maggie stands, abrupt. “I need to go back to the musée,” she says. Dr. Carsen—Flynn opens his mouth, and she silences him with a look. “I’ll get my cannelloni to go.”
He doesn’t go back to the Musée Rodin, at least not that she sees. But Maggie does find something that looks suspiciously like the object he said was a laser pointer on the floor the next day after the museum has closed. When she picks it up and rolls it between her fingers, the imitation gold filigree reminds her a bit of the jeweler’s loupe Flynn had the first time she (literally) ran into him.
The object gives off a weak light when she presses the button. She hands it over to the permanent staff in case they have some kind of lost and found container.
It turns out that Claudel sculptures she was sent to investigate are fully legitimate, and she flies back to her empty house with enough time to comfortably complete the sale to its new owners.
The fourth time Maggie meets Dr. Carsen, it’s at the Kyiv Museum of Art in 2010.
It’s initially quite similar to their original meeting. She’s walking back inside after spending her lunch break with Alexander. She has some time before her next meeting, since Sam isn’t expecting her for another fifteen minutes, and her first thought is to spend it making her way through the galleries, hence what puts them in the same hallway.
Instead of physically running into Flynn, however, she hears him call her name from behind her. “Dr. Collins!”
Maggie turns around and blinks as Flynn skids to a halt in front of her. He grins at her, but that’s not the first thing she notices. She would like to think she’s sharp, and while art is her forte… Her eyes skim back over the cut of Flynn’s shirt and sport coat and the side the buttons are lined up on, plus the fact that while Flynn’s hair is just as rumpled as it was the first three times, now there’s a bit more of it to be so. Someone, whether Flynn or a friend, has also taken the time to apply a hint of makeup, most notably a smudged bit of dusty pink on the lower lip.
“Hello, Dr. Carsen,” she says, a touch cautious.
The smile slides off Dr. Carsen’s face. “...Hi.”
Maggie glances around. They’re pretty much the only people in this wing aside from a young couple mostly preoccupied with themselves. She has to imagine that’s a good thing. “I’m sorry,” she says, keeping her voice low and pleasant, “what did you say your first name was?”
The smile returns, so wide Dr. Carsen’s entire face scrunches up with it. “Alexandria,” she says. “Like—the ‘library of,’ you know?”
“Of course,” Maggie says, smiling back. “And what exactly brings you here?”
“To Ukraine, or to the museum?” She cocks her head, rocking on her heels.
“Either,” Maggie says. She nudges Dr. Carsen’s—Alexandria’s, maybe, she said that Maggie could call her “Flynn” and that probably applies to her new name, too—arm. She reacts like Maggie just hugged her, bashfully ducking away. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were following me.”
Dr. Carsen—yes, Maggie will stick with that for now until she hears otherwise—shakes her head fast. “No. It’s, uh—”
“‘Regular librarian things?’” Maggie quotes back to her the words from three years ago, amused despite herself.
“Exactly.” Dr. Carsen makes a “what can you do?” gesture.
“And what library is that, again?” Maggie crosses her arms.
“Did I never tell you?” Dr. Carsen says cheerfully. “It’s the Metropolitan Public Library in New York. You should come by and visit if you’ve never been. It’s a really nice library.”
“I’ll think about it,” she says drily. “It’s a little out of the way.”
It seems like Dr. Carsen is going in the same direction she is, and they walk together briefly. Despite the difference in apparel, she seems to be wearing the same beat-up sneakers as before. Maybe it was just the depressing topic of conversation last time, but she seems… freer. Happier. Maggie’s a little surprised to realize that she feels the same.
The pain of losing Sam isn’t gone. The pain of losing Nate isn’t, either, even though he’s still alive. She doesn’t think it ever will. She’s just lucky it hasn’t turned into bitterness.
(Admittedly, watching Blackpoole get just a little bit of what was coming to him was certainly a balm for the soul.)
“Are you here because of the Fabergé egg exhibition?” Maggie asks.
“There’s a Fabergé egg?” Dr. Carsen does a little skip. “Wow, that’s really cool.”
Maggie glances at her out of the corner of her eye. “Last time we met, you figured out I had just gotten divorced after losing my son because I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring and my hands were shaking. And you didn’t notice the giant sign outside the museum advertising the Fabergé centerpiece?”
“I was thinking about other things,” she defends, flushing pink. “I heard Russian art was donated from a private collection? I’m here to see that. A, uh, a cup, specifically. Gold and silver, carving of a stag on the sides, representative of the zagorkinje? If you know where it is, I’d really like to take a look at it. Preferably before midnight tonight. It’s kind of important.”
“Important,” Maggie repeats.
“Kind of. Extremely.” Dr. Carsen looks at her hopefully.
Now. By all rights, Maggie should fully believe that Dr. Carsen is a thief.
She keeps appearing in museums and giving wildly flimsy excuses as to why she’s there. She acts extremely suspicious, examining artifacts like the canopic jar and the mystery statue at the Museum of Contemporary Art and now requesting access to an object that—while announced for display several weeks ago along with the other donated pieces Maggie is here to help present—is not actually available for public viewing and won’t be for several more days. Despite allegedly working in New York, Maggie has now seen her across both the United States and Europe. She is, in Maggie’s experience, a highly dubious individual.
But Maggie has met thieves. Many different brands of them. People who commit insurance fraud and don’t believe she’ll catch them doing it. People who attempt to sell legitimate items to museums that they’ve acquired through less than legal means. People who steal lives. And that was before she got an up-close view at Nate’s thieves, saw them tick, watched them operate and execute plans. Even if she wasn’t an obviously terrible liar, Dr. Carsen simply does not read as a thief.
Of course, she could just be a totally incompetent one; nothing was stolen from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, or the Musée Rodin while Maggie was there. Maybe she tried and failed. But even that would have aroused enough suspicion for every member of staff to be alerted of it. Someone who is good enough to sneak in and out without being noticed should also be able to steal what they’re after, either then or in the very near future. And that just… didn’t happen.
“I’m not giving you behind-the-scenes access to anything in this museum,” Maggie says.
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Dr. Carsen says earnestly. She bites the inside of her cheek. “Is it not on display? Judson—uh, someone who works at the—at my library said…”
“Not for another three days,” Maggie says. “We also have a sign about that outside.”
“Three days,” Dr. Carsen repeats to herself. She runs her fingers through her hair, tugging at it. “I—okay. Kyiv will be leveled in, oh, eight hours, but sure, three days. Maybe the Hunt will wait. Hasn’t waited in five thousand years but who knows, they might now!”
“The what?” Maggie tries to ask, but Dr. Carsen has completely dissolved into hushed whispers to herself.
“Get on a red eye to Kyiv, Librarian!” She rants under her breath. “Talk to the master of the Hunt, Librarian! Promise the vile you’ll definitely get their stolen cup back if they would just wait three days, Librarian! Don’t risk war with the Legions, Librarian!”
“...Are you okay?” Maggie manages to push through to ask, genuinely concerned.
“Never better,” Dr. Carsen says through gritted teeth. “Thank you so much, Dr. Collins. Really nice to see you again. I’ve gotta go.”
She takes off running in the opposite direction from Maggie.
Well. It seems that certain other changes to her lifestyle haven’t made her any less strange.
The cup Dr. Carsen was asking about is still in the museum’s collection the next time Maggie goes through the catalogue, but there is a sticky note plastered to the inside of it reading “Sorry Dr. Collins, it’s a fake,” which is awfully bold because the security cameras don’t show anyone entering or exiting the room who isn’t supposed to be there... and because when she re-examines it, it's completely identical to the "old" one with a level of detail that would be impossible to fake on short notice. It's exactly the same cup.
Maybe she isn't a thief, but she might be a criminal after all.
(Of course, when the museum’s prized Fabergé egg is stolen with her set up to take the fall, Maggie never once considers Dr. Carsen to be anywhere on the list of actual suspects.)
The fifth time Maggie meets Dr. Carsen, it’s at the Egyptian Museum Cairo in 2012.
She’s actually trying to find her way to the restroom. For once, she’s not contracted with the museum, but invited by an old friend to see some of the relics she’d uncovered at a dig finally go on display. It’s a long way to travel just to see an exhibit, but Maggie’s owed a vacation, and there was a bit of an implication that a good word might be put in for her at the museum if she showed up and showed out. Hence mingling in the cafeteria with people she hardly knew.
She follows the signs until she rounds a corner and sees Dr. Carsen with her back pressed up against a janitorial closet door.
“What are you doing?” She asks, because there’s not much else she can say.
“Nothing,” she says, looking quickly from side to side before her head snaps back up. Her eyes widen when she sees Maggie. “Dr. Collins? You’re here? Wait, should that be ‘you’re here?’ Or ‘you’re here?’”
“I… Yes. What are you doing?” Maggie repeats. She’s abandoned the lipstick but not the blazers or the haircut. Or the sneakers.
“Just. Uh. Resting my back.” Dr. Carsen’s voice gets several octaves higher, although whether it’s on purpose or with anxiety is hard to say. “Taking a little break. Nothing to see here!”
The doorknob behind her rattles. Maggie takes a small step back. “Is there someone in there?!”
“No,” Dr. Carsen says quickly. She looks at Maggie very seriously. “I swear, Dr. Collins, there’s no one alive in there.”
Dr. Carsen is truly a terrible liar, which is how Maggie knows she’s telling the truth.
“Alright,” she says. “Is the bathroom down this way?”
Dr. Carsen helpfully points the other direction. “That way, I think.” She hesitates for a second. “You… should probably call the police. An internationally wanted criminal just left with the Crown Jewels of Amenhotep.”
Maggie jolts. She hasn’t actually seen those yet; she was supposed to get a tour after the socializing was done. They weren’t from Emily’s recent excavation, but they were a relatively new addition to the EMC’s collection, and supposedly pretty spectacular. Not a single alarm had gone off the entire time she’s been here. “Are you sure?”
“Very sure,” Dr. Carsen says, voice strained. “He sort of left a problem behind for me to deal with. So. Definitely, definitely sure. Use the bathroom, call the police. Good itinerary.”
It very well might be, but Maggie reverses the order. Her bladder can wait.
Dr. Carsen is gone by the time the police show up, and Maggie takes the opportunity to look into the closet she was leaning against. Every inch of it is coated in a heavy layer of dust that smells like wet sand, but there’s not a fingerprint or footprint to be seen. True to Dr. Carsen’s word, there doesn’t seem to have been anyone in there despite the rattling.
The sixth time Maggie meets Dr. Carsen, it’s at the New York Museum of History in 2015.
She’s been invited as a guest by someone she met through IYS—someone who thankfully quit long before Nate uncovered anything rotten about Blackpoole, but kept enough contacts in the art world that he and Maggie have brushed past each other on a regular basis. She doesn’t have much interest in most of the Isola Perduta exhibit, but the uncovered and restored art that was hauled up with it is a different story.
There are certainly worse places to be stuck in during a historic storm.
She really shouldn’t be surprised when she hears a small cry of excitement and turns around to see Dr. Carsen squeezing her way through the crowd to get to her.
“Dr. Collins!” She shouts over the heads of some bystanders, waving at her. “Hi! Did you put on this exhibit?”
Maggie shakes her head. “I’m not working,” she says, gesturing to the once-waterlogged painting set up in a sealed display case. “Just here to see the art.”
Dr. Carsen nods. “Me too. Sort of. Not really. Close enough. I’m, uh, on the way to the archive room, but I saw you and I wanted to… I don’t know. I wanted to say hello.” Her fingers twitch and she rocks in place. Even dressed up for a party—or at least, wearing a nice coat with a pocket square and an orange ascot—her shoes look like they’re falling apart. Maggie feels a great deal of fondness for that. “Say, do you know anything about the chess set from Milan that’s in the other room?”
“I can’t say I do,” Maggie says. She sips her champagne. By now, she’s realized that sometimes it’s better to just brace herself for the whirlwind. “Is that your favorite thing in the museum?”
“Oh, no,” Dr. Carsen says, shaking her head quickly. “I love—I loved their Egyptian wing, I did my graduate work there. Well, one of the times I graduated, anyway. The last time. Something happened and it kind of lost the shine for me. But, I mean, even though they don’t even try to compete with the American Museum of Natural History’s taxidermy section, they still have a passenger pigeon display I really like. Of course, the American Museum of Natural History has a Labrador duck diorama, so—” She falters. “Sorry.”
Maggie fights a smile. “Don’t be. We’re stuck in here and I’ve already taken a tour of the room three times.”
“Yeah, stuck,” Dr. Carsen says ruefully. “I’ve, uh… A friend of mine is upstairs looking at the weather station.” She keeps rocking, then gestures over to the refreshments table. “My G—my Eve—my partner is over there. Tall, blonde, radiant, talking to Mr. Worth. Will you tell her where I went if you see her looking for me?”
Maggie easily picks out the woman she’s talking about. She’s a little intrigued. She recalls Dr. Carsen mentioning someone she works with in Kyiv, but the idea that she isn’t the only person the Metropolitan Library pays to wander around museums and squint at things is new. “Another librarian?”
“No,” she says. “Better. More important.” She smiles at Maggie, nervous. “Don’t worry. We’re going to figure all of this out.”
“Is there going to be another robbery?” Maggie asks, cautious, because that really sounds like there’s going to be another robbery. She can’t help but imagine Dr. Carsen as some sort of hapless bagman (bagwoman?), led along to scout for crimes. Of course, there’s only ever been one crime linked to her, the one at the EMC, but…
“No,” Dr. Carsen says fast. She winces. “Maybe. If there is, I’ll get him to return it. Whatever it is.”
For some reason, Maggie is reminded of Nate. Dr. Carsen is not like him, not at all, except for the autism she doesn’t know if Nate to this day has ever realized he has, but the exasperated tone reminds her of when he’d lied and told her that he was on the straight and narrow and his band of merry men wasn’t there for anything except helping her evade the Ukrainian authorities. Maybe bagman is accurate. She half wonders if she should call Parker—she has Nate’s phone number, and Sophie’s, but a number for Parker appeared on the new phone she got a year and a half ago—and tell her she’s got a new client.
God, when did she let this happen to her? She used to be normal. She can’t even think that normal died with Sam, because she had a normal long after that. Maybe normal died when Nate looked at her with red-rimmed eyes and told her that if she looked at him the way he looked at himself he would’ve killed himself, and she joined up with a crew of criminals to make it right.
And now here she is. Planning to look the other way if there’s a report of a theft tonight without even being asked.
“Stay safe, Dr. Carsen,” she says gently.
“I told you eight years and five months ago that you could call me—uh, you know,” Dr. Carsen says quietly. “If you wanted, you could call Alexandria. Or Alex. I have friends now, kind of, and they call me Alex.”
She sounds utterly amazed at the idea of friends. Maggie can’t help but sympathize. “Then it’s only fair that you call me Maggie.”
Alexandria beams at her and skips away.
There’s no robbery that Maggie’s aware of, but the museum does nearly flood. It’s so extreme she actually gets a call from Sophie checking in on her because Maggie mentioned that she was going to the party a month ago when she had a connecting flight in Boston that gave her a day to catch up with her and Nate. Luckily no one is killed or seriously injured.
She checks for a report of Alexandria’s friend on the roof potentially being hurt, but there’s nothing to suggest someone was in the weather monitoring station at all when the storm started trying to crack it open.
The seventh time Maggie meets Dr. Carsen, it’s at the Portland Art Museum in 2017.
She’s willing to play along and pretend it’s a coincidence that the director reached out to her for help with the etchings exhibit that will be opening in June. Just like so many years ago in Los Angeles, it’s not really her specialty, but there must be a reason the team indirectly called her into town. She watches every employee she meets for signs that they might be the kind of person to have what was once Nate’s crusade turned against them. It’s a fun pastime. Sophie would be proud. Nate would be disappointed. Neither of them have to know.
This time, she hears Dr. Carsen—she hears Alexandria before she sees her.
“Secret passage, secret passage,” her now familiar voice says. “Could’ve sworn it was around here somewhere.”
“Seems like a small museum to have a secret door,” someone Maggie doesn’t know observes.
“You’d think,” Alexandria says, frustrated.
When Maggie spots her, she’s kneeling on the ground, hands pressed flat against the wall. The woman she called her partner in New York is standing behind her, hands on her hips while she frowns at the same wall. She registers that Maggie’s eyes are on them far faster than Maggie herself does, and half-spins to lock eyes with her, hand dropping to her side. Maggie’s sure she’s reaching for a firearm she wasn’t allowed to bring into the museum.
Alexandria glances over her shoulder at whatever her friend (if that’s the kind of partner she meant, anyway) is looking at and her eyes light up. “Dr. Coll—Maggie!” She jumps to her feet. “This isn’t what it looks like?”
“You two know each other?” Her partner says, clearly suspicious. Maggie steps around a display case to come closer to them.
“Sort of,” Alexandria says, shrugging. She leans against her partner, resting her chin on her shoulder. Her partner’s face softens almost imperceptibly. “Eve, this is Dr. Collins. Maggie, this is Eve, my… Eve.”
Maggie nods and offers her hand for Eve to shake. “Like she said. I’m Dr. Collins.”
“Pleasure.” Eve eyes her. Maggie is reminded of Eliot scrutinizing her—not when they had first met and she knew him as “Professor Sinclair,” because he hadn’t bothered with assessing her much then, but after she opened the back of a mysteriously nearby van and found her ex-husband and a group of criminals inside it. Categorizing a possible threat. This woman Maggie could easily believe was a criminal.
“We should probably find Stone,” Alexandria says. She rolls her head so she can look up at Eve. She looks shorter than she actually is next to her. “They’d really get along. Maggie goes to museums around the world, she’s probably helping with an exhibit here.”
“The James McNeill Whistler exhibit next month,” Maggie confirms. “Who’s—?”
“Did you see what they have in the Hoffman Wing?” A voice exclaims as a man comes running up to them. “Monet’s Waterlilies! It’s five feet by five feet!”
“Speak of the devil,” Maggie mutters, looking at Eliot’s quite frankly dreadful disguise. He couldn’t even be bothered to fake an employee lanyard like the one she has. Hardison must be busy. And clearly slacking on his side job to make sure Eliot doesn’t get terrible haircuts. She coughs to get his attention. “Excuse me. I’m Dr. Collins.”
He absently shakes her hand. “Jacob St—” He does a double take, which in Maggie’s opinion is a little much. “Not the Dr. Margaret Collins? The art expert?”
“The very same,” she says. She can safely assume this will be a job involving a forgery, then.
Eliot’s eyes widen. “Wow, I—I had no idea you were in Portland. That’s amazing.” He looks at Alexandria and Eve, fighting down excitement. “You’re talking to one of the foremost experts in Michelangelo’s work in the world. I mean, this is art history royalty, right here.”
Oh, that’s laying it on a little thick. “I wouldn’t say a foremost expert,” Maggie says. “Just a regular one.”
“It’s just such an honor to meet you,” Eliot says, somehow managing to sound genuinely starstruck. He hadn’t even looked at her like this when he was legitimately flirting with her. “We actually emailed a little bit in 2011 under a pseudonym when I asked your opinion on Beaux-Arts influence on American functional architecture, but this is even better.”
Maggie… remembers that. Vaguely, anyway. Not the name attached to it, just that it happened. Was that really Eliot the whole time? What, did Parker need to know where the sturdiest parts of a French bank’s exterior were for rappelling down it? She decides to go with a diplomatic approach in response to his overbearing fanboy attitude. She’s not exactly sure what con he’s running, but she doesn’t want to blow it up now unintentionally. “Well, it’s nice to meet you in person.”
“Likewise.” He laughs nervously, borderline giggling, which is a sound she’s never heard him make before.
Maggie looks at poor Alexandria, who seems utterly unconcerned by the criminal she apparently knows. Maggie narrows her eyes, but she just blinks back. Terrible liar and therefore a terrible actor, Maggie reminds herself. She fully believes this alias of Eliot’s. Maggie feels bad about that. Dr. Carsen may be eccentric, but she’s a nice woman. It’s not fair that she’s so gullible she keeps getting taken for a ride by criminals. At least Eliot won’t do anything to hurt her.
“Come on, Alex,” Eve tugs her arm. “We should check the other side of the building for… what we’re trying to find. Maybe you got mixed up about which hallway it’s in.”
“I never get mixed up,” Alexandria sulks.
“Of course not, honey.” Eve inclines her head to Maggie. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Collins.”
“You too,” Maggie says, curt but polite. She nods to Eliot, since there’s no doubt she’ll be seeing him as soon as he’s shaken his two potentially unwitting accomplices. Alexandria gets a genuine smile. “I assume I’ll see you in a few years.”
A strange expression crosses her face and she touches her fist to her chest just below her collarbone, knuckles flat against the slight bulge of fabric that means there’s a necklace hanging there. Maggie can see the thin gold chain disappearing under her shirt.
“Yeah. Yeah,” Alexandria says, voice slightly strangled. “A few years. See you then.”
She waves to Maggie as her partner leads her away. Eliot goes with them, chattering to Eve in a convincing display of anxiety that actually manages to fit on this character he’s playing. Maggie doesn’t expect a wink or a signal or anything. He’s too professional for that.
When it becomes her job to legitimize a supposedly lost Matisse they’re using to try to lure one of the curators into admitting he’s a fence, she makes sure to tell Parker to pass along to Eliot that he was overacting just a bit, and that he needs to fix his hair before someone fixes it for him.
Of course, she denies that any of them know what she’s talking about, but that’s to be expected.
Unlike Dr. Carsen, they’re all very good liars.