I lost my grip on the box; it fell and broke, sending yellowing holograph pages in all directions.“Really, Mr. Booth!” Mr. Lucent said crossly.“Bones,” I said, still staring at that crack in the bricks. “There . . . in the wall.”“Bones? The dust has gone to your head.”“No, really.” I wedged my fingers into the crack, cringing from the possibility of touching the bones; all the mortar was cracking and weak, and the upper brick came away easily.“Oh!” said Mr. Lucent in a sort of gasp. “There’s a person back there!”There, clearly visible, were the bones of a hand, clawed into the absence of mortar as if whoever they had belonged to had died trying to dig through that brick wall with his bare hands.“There was,” I said.Mr. Lucent and I were in that storeroom only because of Dr. Starkweather’s inventory, which had been eating the time and energy of the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum staff for months now. Dr. Starkweather had come in February and instituted his comprehensive reforms amid a searing barrage of contempt and invective; it was now mid-June, and there was some faint hope that we could have a preliminary, albeit woefully inadequate, catalogue ready by his six-month anniversary.
