Chapter 6
Story: The Chairwoman Grabbed a Six-Year-Old on Stage — Then the Locket Swung Into the Light
Trey in the booth had not changed it. Someone else had. The woman with the phone had texted a name and a number, and on the fifth try she had gotten the number of the audio engineer who actually ran the AV for the gala, and he had been standing in the back booth this whole time, and he had read the sheet the child was holding on his own monitor, and he had made a decision.
He had switched the main projection screen — not the inset panel, the whole screen — from the gala program to the manuscript page.
The page filled the back wall of the ballroom, four feet tall. Every stroke of the small neat hand was legible. The date along the bottom. The staves. And the signature in the bottom right corner, blue ink, a little smudged:
*Marguerite A. Bower.*
Nobody moved.
The chairwoman's arm was still in the air, the locket still in her fist. She turned her head slowly, the way people turn when they already know what they are going to see and need three extra heartbeats to survive it.
"That is not the program," she said.
"No," Hollis said, from the aisle. He was twelve rows in. He kept walking. "It's not."
"Take it down."
"I don't work the booth, Celia."
"I said take it down." Her voice was still loud, because the microphone was still clipped to her neckline and still on. Every donor at the back tables heard her say it. All two hundred of them heard the exact tone of a woman discovering that she is no longer the loudest person in her own room.
Hollis reached the front row. He stopped at the bottom step of the stage, and he did not go up.
Down in the pit, the conductor — a white-haired man named Erdos who had been playing benefits in this city for thirty years — reached over and put his hand on Margo's father's arm. "Don't," he said quietly. "Not yet."
"I know who wrote the featured piece," Hollis said. Not to the room. To the chairwoman.
"You do not."
"I executor her estate."
The room made a sound. It wasn't a gasp and it wasn't a laugh. It was the sound two hundred people make when something enormous, and careful, and previously locked in a small box, is opened in public.
Celia Boyne-Ashford's mouth was still open.
She had one line ready. She had spent four years rehearsing a version of this night in which she was beloved, and she had exactly one sentence prepared for the way the founder's private suite was arranged, and it was not going to help her.
Two hundred people watched her lift the locket and the manuscript page toward the light, side by side, on a four-foot screen, and read what was engraved on both.
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