“Just to let you know, California Tower is closed for repairs—” She broke off, her stray glance doubling back. “Emmett? Is that you?”
His head spun, checking to see who’d heard.
“You can’t be here,” Ry said. “You know you’ve been fired, right? And—”
“Shhh, please.”
“Aaron didn’t show up to work today,” she whispered. “No one’s been able to reach him.”
“Look, I’m not here to make trouble—”
“What happened to you?” Her gaze roved over his face, down to his hands. “You’re so fucking thin.”
“Forget about that.”
“Is it the Obexi-whatever?”
“Ry! I’m begging you. Just let me pay and I’ll be out of here in five minutes.”
A family joined the line for tickets. Making a split-second decision, Ry cleared her throat and announced, “That’ll be $19.95.”
Relieved, Emmett paid by card. She handed him his ticket, her eyes warning him not to do anything stupid. “Enjoy your visit,” she said through gritted teeth.
The dome-ceilinged main hall admitted him with a church-like solemnity, his footsteps echoing a muttered devotion. After the busy season of the winter holidays, the museum was all but empty. Still he kept his head down as he took the stairs to the second floor, passing a cluster of chattering volunteers. One of them, a woman he’d talked to a couple of times, caught his eye, her expression opaque.
Emmett hurried on, following the path he and Lizette had trod months earlier and never since. By the time he began working at the museum, he’d had enough misgivings about his condition to put him off the exhibition for good, as if he might enter to find his own photo displayed there, between the Aztec heart-eaters and the “savages” of Erromango.
He hurried down the hall of popular cannibals and moved swiftly through the mazelike exhibition hall, his gaze shifting from one display to the next.
He rounded a corner, and there it was: the portrait he’d been thinking about since he realized that Cecil H. Smith and C. Hank Stauder were one and the same man. Emmett took in the blood-spattered depiction of Sir Percival Blount, the seventeenth-century baronet who boasted that a medicinal tonic had restored his health and left him ravenous for human meat.
Emmett’s gaze paused on the glass vial lying unstoppered on the table. He’d always thought it was empty, but now he noticed an almost imperceptible dab of sky blue, the last drop of whatever Blount had just drained from it.
That wasn’t the only thing he’d overlooked last time he was here.
He made sure to include it in the photo he took of the painting, then immediately posted to Instagram.
Appendix Y—Instagram Post
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