1960s superhero

Chapter 1

The marble floors of the Ashcroft Museum reflected the chandeliers so perfectly that Evelyn Carter found herself watching her own shoes instead of the exhibits.

She sidestepped another ladder as two electricians wrestled with a spotlight above the grand rotunda.

"You know," she said, glancing at the man balancing on the top rung, "if that thing falls during the gala, you'll have a much better story than I do."

The museum's director laughed without slowing his stride.

"We’ve done this many times, Miss, umm..."

Her response took half a heartbeat longer to arrive than it should have.

"Carter," she reminded him.

Evelyn Carter. Metropolitan Chronicle. Society desk, officially. Features when someone more important was sick. Crime when no one expected the article to matter.

She shook her head as though to clear it of cobwebs.

The director smiled politely, but his attention had already returned to the workers hanging banners between the columns.

THE STAR OF ALEXANDRIA
A One-Night Exhibition

The letters stretched twenty feet across the entrance hall.

Beyond them, photographers assembled tripods while city officials rehearsed speeches that no one intended to remember. A television crew argued over cables near the main staircase. Two police officers stood beside the central display case, trying to look bored in the way men looked bored when they wanted everyone to notice how alert they were.

Despite the director’s assurance, the museum had never hosted anything so valuable.

The Star of Alexandria wasn't merely a diamond. It was a legend—one of those jewels that accumulated impossible stories simply because it survived long enough. Emperors had owned it. Revolutionaries had stolen it. Insurance companies quietly wished someone else would insure it.

Now it sat beneath three inches of bulletproof glass in the center of the rotunda, surrounded by velvet ropes and enough police officers to invade a small country.

It would make a fine article.

A safe article.

A perfectly respectable article about wealth, history, public access, and the mayor’s sincere belief that culture belonged to everyone, especially when donors were watching.

Evelyn could already hear her editor trimming the interesting parts.

She thumbed through her notebook until she found the folded page she'd been saving. Clipped to it was a wire-service photograph of Sentinel soaring over downtown, cape billowing behind him. She'd carried it for nearly three months, waiting for the day she’d finally get to interview him in person.

The page beneath the clipping contained only three questions.

Where did you come from?

Why this city?

Are there others like you?

She had written a dozen safer versions and crossed them all out. The Chronicle did not need another article about how many cats Sentinel had rescued from trees or whether his cape was flameproof. Everyone wanted the myth polished. Evelyn wanted the seam.

Someone like Sentinel did not simply appear over New York one spring morning and make sense because people cheered when he caught falling buses.

Nothing that impossible was that simple.

The director excused himself to greet a donor, leaving Evelyn to wander the galleries while the museum still belonged to staff instead of dignitaries. Harold, the Chronicle photographer, was busy taking photos of the main gallery. There wasn’t much to write about the museum’s preparations yet, which meant she had little to do for a bit except walk.

The Renaissance gallery stood nearly empty.

Portraits of forgotten governors and industrialists lined crimson walls beneath soft pools of yellow light. Their painted faces watched her with the patient disapproval of dead men who had paid to be remembered.

A lone figure stood in the room, staring at a painting nearly taller than herself. The man wore a long brown trenchcoat with its collar up, and a matching hat cast most of his face in shadow.

Evelyn paused before the painting.

Two gentlemen and one woman stood outside a stone building, the men dressed in dark formal coats trimmed with gold braid while the woman stood between them, bejeweled like a queen.

Evelyn sucked in a breath.

The resemblance was not perfect.

That made it worse.

The woman in the painting had Evelyn’s mouth, or near enough. The same narrow chin. The same slight tilt of the head, as though listening to someone just outside the frame. Her hair was piled high in a fashion nearly two centuries dead, and her expression had the fixed solemnity of a person who had been told to stand still for history.

Still, for one unsettled moment, Evelyn felt less as though she were looking at a portrait than as though the portrait had noticed her first.

No title caught her eye.

Only a small brass plaque.

The Founders' Commission
c. 1783

She frowned. Then laughed at herself.

Too many late nights, too much bad coffee, and now she was finding herself in paintings.

"Remarkable, isn't it?"

Evelyn jumped slightly, having forgotten the man in the trenchcoat. He hadn’t moved. He still stood in the shadow of his hat.

He wasn't looking at her.

Only at the painting.

"I suppose," Evelyn said.

"You don't sound convinced."

"I've never understood portraits."

"No?"

"They always seem to be pretending."

Even in the shadow, she saw his lips lift in a smile.

"A fair criticism."

She glanced back at the painting.

"So who were they?"

"I'm afraid I can’t say."

"Can’t?"

The smile did not leave his mouth, but something behind it seemed to close.

"A poor choice of words."

"Then why are you looking at it?"

A pause.

"Professional curiosity."

That answer should have invited another question.

The kind Evelyn liked best.

Instead, someone shouted from the rotunda.

"The mayor's here!"

Evelyn sighed. "Duty calls."

She closed her notebook and headed back out of the gallery, but glanced over her shoulder before she reached the archway.

The man was still standing exactly where she'd left him.

Studying the painting.

It made her wonder what he was doing in the museum at all. It should have been only staff, press, police, and invited guests with names printed on cream-colored cards. The way he was dressed suggested a police detective, perhaps, though no detective Evelyn had ever met looked quite so much like he belonged in an old photograph someone had forgotten to label.

She walked away.

By the time she reached the rotunda, the museum had transformed.

Photographers surged toward the entrance.

Television lights flooded the marble floor.

Police shifted closer around the diamond's display.

The mayor climbed the temporary stage.

The museum director adjusted his tie for what had to be the tenth time.

Everything was finally ready.

Evelyn found Harold near the press line and opened her notebook.

"Get anything useful?" he asked without looking up from his camera.

"A diamond, a mayor, and a man pretending not to know a painting."

"So no."

"Not yet."

Harold grunted. "Save some ink for Sentinel. If he shows, that’s the front page."

Evelyn looked toward the skylight above the rotunda, where the afternoon sun spilled over marble and velvet rope.

If he shows.

Her fingers found the folded photograph inside her notebook.

For three months, Sentinel had been the question she could not reach. Tonight, finally, the impossible might land close enough to ask.

Somewhere outside...

A car backfired.

No one paid attention.

Then another.

Closer.

The museum's front doors burst inward.

Smoke rolled across the marble floor.

Someone screamed. Every police officer turned toward the front entrance.

Masked men carrying rifles, one with a literal machine gun, flooded into the rotunda.

One fired into the ceiling.

The chandeliers rang like cathedral bells.

"Nobody move!"

Evelyn instinctively reached for her notebook before realizing how ridiculous that was.

The man she'd met in the portrait gallery appeared by her side.

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