Chapter 37

At the San Diego Art Museum, Cora Abramovic headed to the rear of the building on the first floor. In front of her, she was pushing an old flatbed trolley that clattered as it rolled over the floor.

She used her access pass to open a secure door that led to a section of the museum which visitors were not allowed in. It was here that a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff critical to the day-to-day operations of the institute occurred, and it was also in this section where—after Cora and her trolley made a couple of turns—the museum's shipping and receiving department was.

Being Monday, the museum was closed to visitors, as usual, but that didn't mean Cora and other support staff got the day off.

Cora was the manager of the museum's gift shop, a job she'd held for the past eight years, and Mondays were the perfect opportunity for her and whichever one of the other gift shop employees she had scheduled to come in to clean the shop, put out new stock, and receive deliveries of any orders she had placed.

She enjoyed taking the walk from the shop to the receiving dock whenever it was called for. It allowed her to get out of the confines of the store and stretch her legs. She also usually found time to chat with other members of the staff she passed along the way.

Today, however, she hadn't stopped for any chats on the way to Shipping Receiving. The atmosphere at the museum had changed considerably ever since that robbery a couple of weeks ago. Things were…more tense, and Cora and some of her friends felt as though they were under a constant cloud of suspicion nowadays. This wasn't helped by the new-and-improved heightened security in place. Not only had new access cards been issued, but they'd all had to have new photographs taken of themselves for them. Cora's old access card had borne a picture of her from when she first started at the museum thirteen years ago. Back then, she had only been 28-years-old, as well as blonde. But her face hadn't changed that much over the years—though her hair color had—and so that ID photo had been perfectly fine. Now the access card showed 41-year-old Cora on it. What's more, they had all been told that their ID photos would now be updated every six months!

They also needed their access cards to open even more doors now. As Cora's friend Genie ruefully put it one day last week, "Now Security knows every time I go pee!"

In the Shipping Receiving area, Cora had to show her access card to a guard stationed at a desk, even though he knew perfectly well who she was. But nowadays, he had to record her employee number in a logbook so she could go pick up the packages that had been dropped off by UPS.

It was one of the young men who worked for SR who loaded the two boxes onto her flatbed. The boxes had already been opened and inspected by Security. Apparently, the fear now was that someone might try to smuggle something into the museum. She supposed that made sense. After all, Security had been pretty embarrassed that they had been the ones who let those robbers in.

Before returning to the gift shop, Cora took a look inside the boxes herself…

One contained a shipment of t-shirts with a picture of The Young Shepherdess. The other contained poster prints of The Young Shepherdess, each one rolled and packaged in a green cardboard tube, green being the official color of the museum.

Ever since the theft of that painting, the museum's gift shop had been selling anything related to it like crazy! It was all Cora could do to keep the shop stocked with an assortment of Shepherdess products. The theft had made the girl in the painting something of an unofficial mascot of the museum, and many people in the San Diego area had let it be known that they were heartbroken that she was gone. Naturally, the museum—being an entity that constantly needed to make money—had quickly decided to exploit that. Thus, Cora's shop was the place to go for Shepherdess items. Posters, t-shirts, kiss-cut magnets and decals, coffee mugs and tumblers, a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and even socks were all available now.

But the posters were the top seller for museum patrons saddened by the disappearance of one of the most popular paintings the institute held. Cora supposed that buying a poster of the artwork was how those patrons felt they could still see the shepherdess whenever they wanted to.

Having looked in the boxes, she started wheeling them back to the gift shop. Chances were this new shipment of Shepherdess prints would sell out tomorrow or the next day. She made a mental note to order yet another batch as soon as she got in front of her computer in the stockroom…