But the car was going too fast for her to follow. She stopped running and stood in the middle of the road, tears of fear and frustration streaming down her face, the cold wind whipping her bright red coat around her shivering body.

***

When Reginald Thorn made up his mind to erect a monument to himself, he decided that a museum would be suitable, and he went to an old friend, who had been an associate of the great Chicago architect, Louis Sullivan, to discuss it.

Thorn explained that he wanted a neoclassical building, something that would not look dated in a few years. He also did not want an older architect to design the building. He wanted someone young, brash, full of himself and full of new ideas. He trusted his friend to come up with the right young man.

His friend did not fail him. He introduced Thorn to an assistant in his office, a former protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the plans for the Thorn Museum got underway immediately.

Now, almost forty years later, The Thorn Museum looked as new and handsome as if it had been designed and built the week before. It stood on the shore of Lake Michigan, just off the most expensive and prestigious stretch of Michigan Avenue, and it suffered not at all from comparison with the Mies van der Rohe buildings that were its neighbors.

As Joan Hart's cab pulled up in front of the museum, posters everywhere proclaimed the current exhibition of Edvard Munch paintings. The posters featured Munch's most famous and horrifying work, 'The Scream.' Joan Hart stood and stared for a long time at the masterpiece before she walked up the ramp leading into the museum. It seemed to her that the painting was not merely apt but was actually another sign that she was on the right track, and she drew encouragement from it.

Inside, dwarfed by the high ceiling, she suddenly felt small and vulnerable once again. But she knew why she had come and what she was looking for. A guide directed her to the gallery on the second floor where Charles Warren was preparing his exhibition of artifacts from the ill-fated Bugenhagen dig at Belvoir.

Warren stood amid a welter of floor plans and photographs; he was showing Ann Thorn how he planned to install the exhibition. Although Ann often interested herself in the affairs of the museum, having selected that as her special province from among her husband's many concerns, Warren had never seen her as consumed with curiosity as she was about the artifacts arriving from Acre.

'We're going to reconstruct the catacomb at the end, there,' he said, pointing to a floor plan. 'That way, as the visitors move from one gallery to the next, they will constantly glimpse it in the distance. Each time it'll be closer, until finally they'll have to go through it just as they leave the exhibiton.'