CHAPTER TEN: THE OPEN CURTAIN
The gallery director faced a difficult choice.
The public had been invited to see a rare traveling theater, but the authenticity claim was already collapsing in front of its organizers.
He suggested closing the display for the evening.
Nadia shook her head.
“You can close the sale,” she said.
“But the people who came to watch deserve a show.”
Sabine agreed that a public demonstration could be held if it was described accurately.
Quentin offered to cover the cost of opening the side room and hiring additional staff.
Everett complained that they were turning a professional exhibition into a spectacle.
“People came here for a spectacle,” Megan pointed out.
“They came to watch a miniature town move.”
The director made a decision.
He asked a staff member to remove the sales placard from the glass cabinet.
A new card would identify the harbor as a reconstruction with disputed components.
The event would feature a conversation with the surviving makers instead of a buyers’ preview.
“We’ll be honest about what we know and what we don’t,” he said.
Everett argued for several more minutes before leaving through the loading door.
Nobody chased him.
They had a harbor to prepare.
Nadia arranged the tiny figures on the portable stage.
Helen adjusted the curved track and inspected the lantern housing.
Megan helped set two small lamps at the correct angle.
Sabine carried out the original publicity photograph and placed it beside the rebuilt stage.
“People will ask why the two theaters look different,” Megan said.
“Then we’ll tell them,” Nadia replied.
“That’s more interesting than pretending they don’t.”
At six forty,
the director invited the visitors into the demonstration room.
A retired teacher came forward with a little girl who wore a bright yellow scarf.
Two teenage students squeezed between chairs.
A young couple stood near the wall with a toddler asleep against one shoulder.
Quentin took a seat at the back.
Helen stepped toward the audience and seemed to forget every word she had planned.
Nadia waited beside the control wheel.
Megan stood near the curtain and gave Helen a small encouraging nod.
“My name is Helen Brooks,” she began.
“I helped build a traveling theater many years ago.”
She described the women who made the painted streets, the tiny figures, and the moving harbor.
She spoke about the hospital show without assigning all responsibility to a single villain.
Solomon had pushed the machine too fast.
Nadia had made an unauthorized change to stop it.
Helen had stayed silent when her friend needed support.
The older woman kept her eyes on the audience as she said it.
“For a long time I told myself I was protecting my future,” Helen said.
“What I really protected was my comfort for a few hours.”
She paused.
“It cost me thirty years with people I admired.”
Nadia turned the first wheel.
The miniature harbor began to wake.
The audience grew quiet as individual windows lit up.
A boat moved across the small painted water.
The lighthouse turned.
The bakery advanced toward the square and paused as a figure appeared at the door.
A child near the front whispered, “It’s alive.”
Helen heard her and smiled despite herself.
The performance ended with a gentle change in the lighthouse beam, leaving only the little kitchen window illuminated.
The applause began hesitantly and grew louder.
Nadia bowed her head.
Helen looked stunned.
Afterward, the audience crowded around the table to ask questions.
The retired teacher wanted to know how the painted windows reflected the light.
The teenagers asked how the figures stayed upright.
The girl in the yellow scarf pointed to the kitchen panel’s empty frame.
“What goes there?” she asked.
Helen knelt beside her.
“A painting of people eating supper together.”
“Where is it?”
“We haven’t found it.”
“Can you make another one?”
Helen looked at Nadia.
Nadia considered the empty frame.
“Perhaps,” she said.
“But first we’d ask the artist who painted the original.”
Megan remembered the unanswered question about Iris Finch.
“Is she still alive?” she asked quietly.
Nadia nodded.
“She lives near the coast.”
Helen stared at her.
“You know where she is?”
“I do.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
Nadia gave her a long look.
“You never asked.”
The words were not cruel.
They were simply true.
A staff member approached carrying two cups of tea.
“Someone is calling for Mrs. Brooks,” she said.
“He says there’s been a problem at her house.”
Helen stiffened.
Megan took the phone.
The voice on the line belonged to her neighbor Kevin, who lived opposite the maple.
He had seen a man lingering by the tree again.
This time the man had been pushing a narrow cart with a folded canvas cover.
“He left when I walked over,” Kevin said.
“But I think you should come back.”
Megan looked through the windows at the darkening street.
The exhibition had been stopped from becoming a dishonest sale, but someone still wanted the tin.
“We’re leaving now,” she told him.
