Dark Museum

Blair | July 6, 2004

What she did next depleted Blair like a slow bleed.

Replacing the torn magazine page in the box was the opposite of unpacking, but Blair couldn't stomach the memories anymore. At best the relics were a pain in the ass to move, at worst they triggered feelings she'd buried with the museum.

She wasn't supposed to be unpacking anyway, but rather helping unload the moving truck out front.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of artwork, a lifetime's toil, and she kept the aftermath: magazine pages and missing person flyers: shit everyone got.

"Don't stay down there too long," David called down the basement stairs. "I don't want dad trying to carry your bed out of the truck."

"In a minute."

Enough people were upstairs to help haul her stuff out of the moving van: her brother and parents and several people from the law firm who only came because David owned them. Blair didn't admit around the office that they were related, but now everyone knew. It was bad enough David had gotten his job through nepotism; she couldn't be seen the same way, especially since she hated the place.

She hated her co-workers free-floating in her home, especially in a disassembled state. But Blair took the boxes to the basement herself for the very reason she was keeping them down there: to keep the potion vials hidden. Though they should have been with the news clippings and other museum memorabilia, they weren't.

Footsteps upstairs thundered in a hoard.

In 1990, before or after the interview she'd just revisited, Blair couldn't remember, she let her dingy shared studio apartment go and occupied the museum's basement as a last-ditch attempt to save money and keep the place afloat. Blair and Cy both had faith the magazine interview would buoy ticket sales until they unveiled the Bollywood spectacular — except said spectacular led the police to the museum. Once they questioned the validity of one statue, all four were suspect: the police dredged up missing person reports from the late eighties and matched one to Kieron.

"I told you before," she'd explained calmly as the officer stood over her desk in the museum office, the one place she counted on for peace. "Kieron was my boyfriend and he disappeared, so I channeled my distraught creativity into the statue. That's all that happened."

"And Joshua Rossi. That statue also based on sadness?"

"I attended his last concert," she'd said. No use lying since witnesses put her at the theater that night. "His performance moved me. Come on — playing the violin while singing isn't something you see all the time. It stayed with me. I worked on that piece before I heard he was missing."

It was true: she'd spent a week locked in her studio getting the costuming and pose right with Cy. Returning to the city after installing the statue, Joshua's missing person flyer caught her at the first subway entrance. The situation's gravity didn't strike her at first since she'd spent the better part of a week studying his face. Though she snatched the poster and crumpled it in her purse, the city was littered with them.

"What about the other two?" the officer continued. "If I peruse my database, am I gonna find reports for them as well?" He paused. "You're not running a House of Wax situation, are you?" The officer laughed, but Blair hadn't understood his reference. "House of Wax?" he continued. "Movie from the fifties? Vincent Price? Wax poured over human corpses?"

The insult awoken in Blair at the statement almost made her spill the secret.

"Poured wax—? Have you never coated your finger in candle wax? It's thick and bulbous — I'd never get any detail — Have you seen my statues?"