Chapter 1
Story: The Chairwoman Grabbed a Six-Year-Old on Stage — Then the Locket Swung Into the Light
The Chairwoman Grabbed a Six-Year-Old on Stage — Then the Locket Swung Into the Light
The chairwoman's hand came down hard on Margo's shoulder and spun her around.
Two hundred donors had been talking over the last of the dessert plates. They stopped. The room went the way rooms go when something breaks — first the small circle nearest the stage, then the next table, then all of them, a wave of turned chairs and lifted faces.
Margo was six years old. The borrowed velvet dress hung a size too big on her, a safety pin working at the hem. She had stepped exactly one foot past the silver tape at the edge of the stage, and she was holding the conductor's baton in her right fist like it had always belonged there.
"You," Celia Boyne-Ashford said. Her voice carried. She had a small silver microphone clipped to the neckline of the emerald gown, and it was on. "What do you think you're doing on my stage?"
Margo didn't answer. She didn't cry. She looked up into the chairwoman's face with an expression that was almost polite — the way a child looks at an adult who is very large and very close.
At table one, dead center, Hollis Brand slowly lowered his glass toward the tablecloth. He didn't set it down. He just held it there, halfway, the way a man's arm freezes when the rest of him has already stopped.
Nobody at table one noticed. Everyone was watching the stage.
"My baton, I believe," said the conductor from the orchestra pit on the right. He was halfway out of his chair, embarrassed, trying to make the whole thing small and funny. "My fault entirely — I dropped it when I stepped off the podium to say hello to Mrs. Vandermeer. She was just returning it. Actually."
The chairwoman did not turn to look at him.
"Do you know what that is?" she asked the child. She pointed at the baton in Margo's small fist. "Do you know what that costs?"
"It's his," Margo said. Her voice was small and clear. "He dropped it."
The chairwoman's mouth did something tight and satisfied. She had been handed a perfect moment. She turned to the room with her chin lifted, one hand still flat on the child's shoulder, and the microphone caught her breath.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is what I mean when I talk about stewardship. This is a two-hundred-dollar-a-plate evening. The stage is for our performers. It is not a playroom."
A few people laughed. It was the laugh people give when they aren't sure whether they're allowed not to.
Margo's other hand was closed around the strap of a canvas tote bag, faded, with a rosin tin poking out of the top and one folded sheet of paper wedged against the canvas. She had not let go of it once all night. She didn't let go of it now.
Then she did something nobody in the room expected.
She lifted her chin and looked up at the chairwoman, and the small gold locket on her short chain swung out from inside her collar into the stage light — and stayed there, hanging, catching every lamp in the rig.
At table one, Hollis Brand's arm finally finished its movement. He set the glass down. It made one flat, hard sound in a silent room.
Celia Boyne-Ashford saw the locket. Everyone on the first four tables saw the locket. It was the size of a thumbnail, engraved on both faces, and for one long second it was the brightest thing on that stage.
The chairwoman's fingers tightened on the child's shoulder.
"Whose child are you?" she said.
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