This time, instead of heat, she feels a coolness. As if she has just dipped her hand through the wall into the river. Mary starts to wash away the dirt and notices a smell. It is sweet, like damp hay in the sun. Around the edges of the riverbank, the lines are faded. There are places where the water is seeping out. The strokes are weak, as if Everett had difficulty holding the brush in his hand.

Mary slips into the hall, and tiptoes past Dr. Fisher’s office. Whenever a color is too faded, or a figure too small for her to identify, she has been given permission to consult Everett’s original notes and sketches, which are kept in the museum library. The room is used only by directors and benefactors. On the shelves are the travel journals of the Roach family, as well as a massive catalog of each exhibit and specimen.

The horses are from North Dakota. Killed over a hundred years ago. The Roach family kept one in their drawing room. Everett has a small sketch pasted in the catalog, the horse posed between a velvet sofa and a pianoforte. Mary checks the date, and understands why the brushstrokes are different. Michael Everett was dying when he made them.

In one of the travel journals, Mary finds his obituary, clipped from the local news. The print is stained, the paper yellow. He died from consumption soon after completing the dioramas. The Roaches were in Venice at the time. The handwriting in the journal describes the Piazza San Marco as much too hot. There is no mention of Everett. Mary imagines the Roaches’ youngest son receiving the news, folded into a letter. Grieving after his lover was already in the ground.

All week her father has been in discussions with the artist who will take his body when he dies. There is a spot open in The Burghers of Calais. Rodin is one of her father’s favorite sculptors.

“I want to be the man holding the key to the city,” he says. “I like the look on his face.” He tries it out, lifting his chin, slightly frowning, a crease between his eyebrows, resigned but proud.

Mary watches him practicing in the mirror. There is a photograph of her father, at a similar angle, included in one of his biographies. When the book was published, Mary used it as a reference to fill in her father’s secrets. She read about his first tries at painting, his failures. She read about the men in the studio. She read about her mother, an alcoholic he’d met at a party and married against his better judgment. She read about what it had been like for him to hold her as a baby, just after she was born. How large her nose had seemed. How soft the skin was on the bottom of her feet.