The briefing room hasn't changed since 1990, same long table, same bad coffee, though this time I'm sitting at it instead of standing in a doorway waiting to be questioned. Owen Rusk is here too, the investigator who's been the museum's contact with Bellweather Recovery Counsel Office since the reward first went up, older now, grayer at the temples, flipping through a draft of the exhibit text like he's looking for a fact he can't correct later.
"This line," he says, and reads it aloud. "'With the reward in place, recovery is expected soon.' Celia, I need that gone before this goes anywhere near a printer."
Celia looks up from her own copy. "It's meant to give people hope that information still matters."
"I'm not trying to invent a timeline," Celia says, and I can hear that she believes it even as Owen keeps his eyes on the draft instead of her face. "I'm trying to keep this building from feeling like it's given up. There's a difference between hope and a deadline."
"There is," Owen says, "and this sentence erases it. You've written hope as a prediction. The counsel office can't stand behind a prediction, and neither can I, not after four years of telling families and board members the same honest nothing." He sets the draft down. "I've watched hope curdle into anger before, when the date everybody quietly expected came and went. I'd rather you not build that date into a wall text I'll be answering questions about in January."
Celia is quiet long enough that the bad coffee machine clicks off behind her, the whole room waiting on her instead of on an answer.
"It gives people a timeline I can't back," Owen says. "We're still coordinating with the counsel office. That's true today and it was true in 1991. Nothing's confirmed. No recovery, no suspect, no deadline. If this goes on a wall and nothing happens by Christmas, you've taught every visitor that the museum doesn't know what it's promising."
I think of Edwin's letter, sitting now in gallery four exactly where I asked for it, a document that never claimed to answer a question it was only standing beside. I think this draft sentence is doing the opposite, dressing up a question as if it were already answered.
"What if it just says the door's open," I offer, surprising myself by speaking first. "No clock on it. Just that the reward exists, the office is still working, and anyone with information still has somewhere to bring it."
Owen considers that, turns it over like a part he's checking for the right fit. "'Information may be brought to the Bellweather Recovery Counsel Office at any time. The reward remains available for the safe return of any of the thirteen works.' No 'soon.' No 'expected.'"
Celia reads it back to herself once, quietly, the way she read Edwin's letter on Friday. "That's not as comforting a sentence."
"It's an honest one," I say, and I watch her weigh the two things against each other the way she's been weighing panels against empty frames all week.
"Fine," she says, and crosses out her own line, writes Owen's in its place. "Honest and open-ended. I can live inside that sentence even if I don't love it." She looks at me across the table, not quite a thank-you, but close enough to one that I let it stand as something earned instead of something owed.