by Nick Thacker
THERE WAS A CERTAIN TENSION in the air as Julie and the others stood in the hallway, watching the woman approach. Julie knew the other men would be ogling the young-looking curator, enjoying her petite, well-dressed yet slightly disheveled appearance.
The woman, even as she gripped Ben’s hand and shook it, seemed to be constantly trying to catch her balance. Not in a way that made it look as though she had been drinking, but in a way that seemed delicate and klutzy.
And yet Julie could see right through her. There was nothing ‘delicate’ or ‘klutzy’ about this woman. Their brief had explained the woman’s background, and though it had only included a few sentences about her education, it was enough to immediately make Julie feel defensive about her own schooling.
The woman, Daris Johansson, had earned her undergraduate degree in American history at the University of Texas, but then she’d gone on to receive two masters degrees — one in anthropology and another in Native American history — and finally a doctorate in something related to history that Julie couldn’t even pronounce.
Julie herself had been a great student, graduating magna cum laude from the University of Ohio, but then deciding against a graduate degree in computer science because of a job offer right out of college — with the Centers for Disease Control.
She had taken the job, moved around the country, and generally had a successful career.
But the woman in front of her now, squeezing her fiancés hand, wasn’t just a great student. Daris Johansson had cashed in her phenomenal track record as a student into a lucrative position at the American Philosophical Society. The APS paid well, but Mrs. Johansson, according to the brief Julie and the others had been supplied with, was not just on the APS’ payroll.
And she wasn’t just a museum curator and glorified tour guide.
Julie cleared her throat, and Daris released Ben’s hand. She looked over, surprised.
“Hi,” Julie said. “I know we talked on the phone, but I’m Julie.”
“Juliette Richardson, yes,” Daris said. “How are you?”
“I — I’m okay,” Julie said. “You know, I could use a glass of water, though.”
Ben’s face was flush with embarrassment, as apparently he had just realized how long the handshake with the cute museum worker had lasted, but Reggie had a humongous grin plastered across his face.
Joshua, for his part, was completely oblivious to the tension in the hallway and just stared, stone faced, at Daris.
“Yes, right. Well, let’s get back to my office — right this way — and I’ll get us a pitcher of water. You’ve all had quite the trip, I presume.”
Julie nodded, too fast and too awkward. She stopped her head abruptly, likely also too fast and too awkwardly. Dammit . She was acting like an idiot, and for what? Ben’s the most loyal man I’ve ever met, she told herself.
Still, she watched Ben’s eyes as they walked down the hall. To his credit, they were dead-center on the back wall they were walking toward.
She sidled up next to Ben and casually slipped her elbow around his. She pulled him closer, feeling his strong arm and shoulder bump against hers. Julie suddenly felt goofy; she felt like she was in middle school all over again, minus the pimples.
“You okay?” she asked.
He frowned, looking down at her. “Uh, yeah. What do you mean? Just a little hungry.”
She smiled, turning back to the walk and watching as the tiny Daris turned — danced — on a heel and her small, perfect little body maneuvered into the corner office at the end of the hall.
She sighed, following Ben inside.
Chapter Twenty-One
THE OFFICE WAS SPARSE, A surprising revelation for Julie. She had expected shelves of books, artifacts from dig sites from expeditions the woman had been on, and scores of research papers and journals stacked in piles on her desk.
Instead, the office seemed to have been taken directly from a furniture catalog and turned into real life. A matching desk and chairs set filled most of the small room, while a long, low bookshelf cut of the same wood as the desk and chairs spanned the wall on Julie’s left. The bookshelf wasn’t filled, either. A few sections held collections of textbooks and other books, while the majority of the piece was empty or housed a kitschy object from the same furniture magazine.
The office was nice, well-decorated even in its plainness. Julie could tell the woman cared little for fancy adornments, and probably had only purchased those she had out of respect for any visitors she had. As much as she tried to deny it, Julie felt herself intrigued by this woman.
“Welcome,” the woman said. “Come in, have a seat.”
Julie and Reggie sat in the two leather chairs in front of Daris’ desk, while Ben and Joshua sat in a small couch against one wall. Joshua leaned in, his elbows on his knees, expectantly.
“Thank you for meeting us,” Joshua said. “Are you okay?”
She frowned, then smiled and nodded. “Yes — yes, I am, thank you. Really, it was nothing. I didn’t even notice the pieces were missing until I came in for my shift. So it didn’t happen on my watch.”
Julie examined Daris’ expression as she recounted her story. She’d probably said it to confirm that she was, in fact, okay — she wasn’t even there when the break-in had happened — but Julie it came across as overconfidence, as if the woman was trying to prove to them all that the theft hadn’t been her fault.
“Of course,” Joshua said. “But you noticed the journal missing first?”
She nodded again. “Yes. I opened up and then began walking the floor. It’s a habit I have — I am a geek about this stuff, after all — and I saw that the case it was in had completely disappeared.”
“You didn’t have the journal on display?”
“No, I didn’t. It’s not… known to the outside world that we even have it. Or that it even exists. So it’s always been in a case, locked up, and kept inside the vault.”
“The vault ?” Reggie asked.
“Well, it’s just a room, really. We don’t have very high security here, as it’s not at the same level museum as something like the Smithsonian or the Louvre. Usually the patrons of our library are fascinated specifically with early American history. You sort of need to be a history buff to truly enjoy this place, and you certainly need to have a strong desire to dig around and do some research to understand all of the things we have here.”
Reggie grinned, holding it long enough to ensure that Daris saw it. “I’m a history buff,” he said. Julie even thought he saw the man wink.
“Anyway,” Joshua said, shooting Reggie a glance. “The vault — or the room you call the ‘vault.’ Where is it?”
“It’s right off the main meeting hall,” she said, as if they were all already intimately familiar with the building’s layout. “Just a closet, really. But it’s where we keep all of the items that aren’t currently on display, if they’re not lent out to another museum.”
“And this room was locked?”
“Yes. It’s always locked.”
“How did you notice the room had been entered then, if the room was locked when you came in for your shift?”
She nodded, seeming to have anticipated this question. “It’s part of my walk through. I check everything — the hallways, the main floor, and the vault. Just a habit, but I go through each room and just…”
Her cheeks turned a slight shade of red as her voice trailed off. Her eyes sank, her gaze falling to the desk.
Reggie leaned forward. “What’s up? You just… what?”
“Sorry,” she said quickly.” I apologize. “It’s just that… it’s a weird routine, I admit. But I just like to be around those items. It’s an amazing collection, actually. So much history that has gone unnoticed for so many years…”
Julie suddenly felt sad for this woman. Obviously educated, obviously very beautiful, she wondered how Daris had come to be the curator at a place so… underwhelming . It was true what Daris was saying about the place —
there was a lot of history in this building, but the general public didn’t know, or even care, about it. It wasn’t the architecturally alluring building of Independence Hall, and it wasn’t the storied internationally popular attraction of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
But Daris was here, and she seemed utterly fascinated by her job and caught up in the importance of it all, even if she was the only one who felt that importance.
Julie smiled. She understood, to a small degree. Julie herself was passionate about certain things that made no sense to anyone — the elegance and beauty of perfect syntax and simplicity in server code, for example, or the logical chain of adoption in a new disease her old employer, the CDC, was studying.
Things the general public cared little about, but impacted their daily lives more than they knew.
Could that be what’s happening here? she wondered. Is there something hidden under the surface of this organization that makes all of this more important?
“Daris,” Julie said.
Daris’ head snapped up and her attention burned a hole through her head.
“Y — yes?”
“What’s going on here?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Richardson,” Daris said. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“A journal that no one — in your words — knew about was stolen, as well as what sounds like the most insignificant artifact in human history. An artifact that wasn’t even important enough to live in the vault with the other out-of-rotation things. This one was in the basement.”
“Correct —”
“But someone knew they were there. Someone knew exactly where to look, and how to get into both the vault and the basement.”
Julie sat back, suddenly realizing her questioning had escalated from confusion to interrogation. She considered apologizing, but thought better of it.
“Again, correct.”
They sat there a moment, Daris on one side of her power desk, and the four of them on the other.
Julie broke the ice. “Your story doesn’t add up.”
Daris’ cheeks burned even redder. “My story is not at all fiction. I’m telling you exactly —”
“Perhaps,” Julie said. “But you’re leaving something out. Something crucial .”
The tension in the room ratcheted up a few notches, and Julie felt like she was swimming in it. It was thick, bold, and obvious.
No one spoke. Reggie looked around, his eyes wide.
Julie couldn’t tell if the others were on her side or upset that she’d even opened her mouth. But she was right.
She knew it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
DAMMIT, JULIE, REGGIE THOUGHT. YOU had to go and clam her up.
Reggie was sitting in the leather chair in front of Daris’ desk, still surprised at how comfortable it felt. He was also surprised at how forward Julie had just gotten with her, and he was afraid it would end the conversation.
He knew something was fishy as soon as they’d entered the office. Decorated with furniture that looked like it had all been purchased at the same time, from the same store, and placed around the office in exactly the same way as the picture on the outside of the box it all came in, Reggie got the immediate feeling of strangeness.
He would have been able to ignore the feeling, however, and write it off as a personality quirk. Some people, especially reclusive types who like to work in museums, aren’t as savvy when it comes to interpersonal skills. It would have made sense, and he would have simply thought of it all as a characteristic that made him like her more.
But her clothes contradicted that feeling. They screamed trendiness, from her hair down to her shoes, and they were certainly out of place in downtown Philadelphia.
The woman in front of them now wasn’t who she said she was, and Reggie had already planned his attack — how he’d get her to confess and tell them what was really going on.
But Julie had ruined all of that. She’d opened her big mouth and called out the ‘curator’ for lying to them, or at least withholding information. Now it was almost guaranteed Daris wouldn’t talk to them anymore, and they’d have to figure out another way to —
“You’re right,” Daris said. She sighed, a short, huffy thing that seemed genuine to Reggie. “You’re right. I’ve left some things out.”
Reggie’s eyebrow danced up. This is a twist, he thought. He looked at Julie and caught sight of the very end of a smug smile.
“First, I’m not the curator here.”
Reggie waited. Ben and Joshua, sitting behind him on the couch, also waited silently.
“My name is Daris, but I do not work at the APS. Or, rather, I do not work at the museum .”
“Where do you work?” Joshua said.
“Well, I work here,” she answered. “But there’s no museum here.”
“Wait, what?” Julie asked.
“It moved, a long time ago. The Society needed a place to have larger meetings, so we purchased a building nearby — the Benjamin Franklin Hall. We moved the library and meeting hall there. This building —” she held up an open hand and flourished it around the room — “is just smaller offices, a small conference room. Nothing else here.”
“Okay, so you were in the other building and noticed the stuff missing. So what?”
“Well, I didn’t notice it missing. Like I said, I’m not a curator. I just work here.”
“So you’ve got someone you’re covering for.”
She paused. “Yes, something like that.”
“Fine,” Joshua said. “We’ll let that slide for now, but go on. This other person noticed the journal and the rock missing, and told you about it?”
“Right. They called it in, and I told them to tell no one else about it until I could figure out the next move.”
“You told someone in the military. They passed it on to our benefactor.”
“Yes,” she continued, “but I specifically told them I was handling it.”
“Why tell them in the first place?”
Another pause, this one longer.
“Listen, Daris. It really is important that we’re on the same team here. And that means we need to know what you know.”
She swallowed. “I understand. It’s just… all of this is happening so fast. I never thought it would…”
“Never thought what ?” Julie asked.
“Never thought it would happen at all,” she replied. “At least not in my lifetime.”
Reggie looked at the faces of everyone else in the room. Aside from Julie, they were all masters of their poker faces. Ben, Joshua, and Daris all had a blank, expressionless silence written on their faces.
Reggie felt the tide turning in their argument, but he turned back to the woman seated across from him and drilled into her with his gaze.
This is it, he thought. The moment of truth .
“Daris,” he said, calmly. “What are you afraid is happening?”
She swallowed again, then a third time. She sat back in her chair, sinking into it a bit and getting even smaller. Then she turned her focus back to Reggie and laid her hands out on the desk, palms up.
“We call it… The Shift .”
Chapter Twenty-Three
OKAY, NOW I KNOW THIS woman’s crazy, Ben thought. For a lady who had played a role as a museum curator well, he had been surprised to hear she wasn’t exactly who she’d said she was. She was well-dressed, working in a decent office, and telling them a story that they’d all — as far as Ben could tell — believed.
Now she was admitting to Reggie that there was a bit more to the story than she’d initially let on. She wasn’t the simple, lowly museum curator of an all-but-forgotten monument of American history.
Ben stared her down. He didn’t like people who used lies and deceit to get what they wanted. Then again, what did she want?
“What the hell is The Shift? ” Reggie asked.
Julie and Joshua nodded, but Ben continued staring at her. He watched her face, studying it. He h
ad already decided that it was a nice face — nothing compared to her tiny, petite body — but it was a decent enough face. Pretty, slightly upturned nose, small features. All of it together made for a very beautiful human.
But she was holding back information from them, and that didn’t sit well with him. It made her less attractive to Ben. Her face showed no sign of regret, however, aside from the very slightest of tics: the left side of her mouth popped up and down just a bit every few seconds, as if she was deep in thought and trying to work through her response.
Or work through the response she was supposed to give them.
She’d already played her hand, at least the part of it about what she was worried about. Ben figured she might as well explain the rest of it, too.
“It’s…”
A loud crash sounded from outside the room. It echoed into the hallway, but Ben thought it might have even come from outside the building entirely. It was quiet in a distant sort of way, but also intense, as if glass and drywall and brick had suddenly — and violently — just been disrupted.
“Everyone get down,” Joshua said. His voice was calm, as always, and he sounded more annoyed than surprised.
Ben dropped to a knee, moving over slightly to make sure Julie knew he was next to her. She nodded at him, also coming to rest on her left knee. Both of them swiveled and looked out the door.
Ben saw out of the corner of his eye an odd movement — Daris flicked her eyes left, then right, and then back to the door. Only then did she crouch down as well. Her eyes stayed riveted on the open door that led to the hallway.
She’s waiting for something.
Making sure we’re waiting, too.
Ben’s mind immediately filled with possible scenarios. He knew Reggie and Joshua would have been better equipped to decipher the odd behavior Daris had just portrayed, but he wasn’t sure if they’d seen it.
Reggie and Joshua were already whispering to each other in the corner of the room, Reggie pointing at his eyes with two fingers of his left hand while pointing out the door with the other.