The silver locket was in the wall.
Eli discovered it on a Thursday, during his second week of working through the old stone alcove at the north end of Room 404 that previous archivists had filled with architectural salvage — corbels, door hardware, fragments of decorative tile — before simply sealing the alcove behind a rank of temporary shelving.
He had moved the shelves to reach a section of the archive's original stone wall, looking for the junction of two drainage pipes that the building's 1920s survey had recorded in conflicting positions. He found the pipes without difficulty. He also found a small iron recess, roughly fifteen centimetres square, set into the mortar at approximately eye level, containing a fabric pouch.
He extracted the pouch with a pair of cotton gloves and laid it on a sheet of archive tissue on the worktable.
Marrow was at his shoulder before he had finished putting on the gloves, sitting with his front paws together and his eyes fixed on the pouch with the focused attention he reserved for objects that interested him.
The pouch contained a silver locket on a fine chain, wrapped in a strip of silk. The locket was oval, approximately five centimetres long, with a pattern of engraved ivy leaves on the front face.
The clasp mechanism was seized with oxidation but yielded to careful pressure from a bone folder, opening to reveal two small oval spaces — one containing a sepia photograph of a young woman, perhaps twenty-five, in clothes consistent with the 1880s, and the other empty.
On the inside back of the locket's left panel, in very small handwriting, the words: Harbor Mist. 1888. If found, bring to the library. Ask for Vane.
Eli read the inscription twice. Then he looked up at the ceiling, as though through sixty feet of foundation stone and floor and reading rooms and shelves to the library's public desk above.
Vane.
His own name.
Marrow pressed his head against Eli's forearm with unexpected gentleness, then withdrew and positioned himself around the locket in his characteristic way, the low resonant purr beginning almost immediately.
Eli sat very still and let it happen.
The lamp did not flicker this time, but the quality of the air in Room 404 changed in a way that was difficult to describe — a brief density, a slight warmth, as though the temperature had risen by one or two degrees and then returned to normal within the space of a breath.
When Marrow stepped back, Eli wrote: Someone named Vane was expected here in 1888. Someone left their name on an object in a sealed wall. Someone named Vane did not come.
He looked at the photograph.
The young woman's eyes were clear and direct. She was not smiling. She wore a high-collared blouse with a cameo brooch at the throat, and her hair was pinned in the fashion of the 1880s. She had the expression of someone who took photographs seriously, which in that decade was not unusual — the process was still slow enough that a portrait required composure.
Eli placed the locket, still open, in an archival enclosure and labelled it in his notebook with the date of discovery, the alcove location, and the inscription.
Then he went back to the drainage pipe survey and did not look at the locket again for the rest of the night.
Marrow slept curled on the worktable beside the enclosure, as though keeping watch.
He stayed in the alcove longer than was strictly necessary, examining the quality of the stone around the recess — whether the mortar showed signs of recent disturbance, whether the iron lining of the space had been painted over or freshly exposed. The mortar was old and the iron was original.
No one had opened this recess since it had been sealed, which placed the deposit somewhere in the period before the wainscoting had been installed in front of it, which, based on the style of the paneling, would have been circa 1910. The locket had gone into the wall before 1910.
It had been put there by someone who expected it to remain undisturbed. The inscription said otherwise.
The inscription expected someone to find it. He began to understand that these two things were not in contradiction.
He recorded the dimensions of the recess in the logbook before returning the temporary shelves to their original alignment against the stone wall.
The silver locket rested in its protective tissue lining, its chain neatly coiled beside the small brass clasp.