Ron looked up at the statue. He had worked in the building for nineteen years. James wondered if he had ever looked at it either.
"Okay," Ron said, finally. "Okay. East wall."
He carried the suitcase himself. He set it down at the end of the bench directly beneath Night and her owl, and Iris sat down beside it with a little sigh and put one gloved hand on its lid, and looked up at the stone woman high in her niche, and then across the room at the top of the Canal Street stairs, where she had come in, where a man coming off a train would come up into the hall and look around for a red coat.
"There," she said. "Now he'll find me."
Officer Akers came over with his hat in his hands and said quietly, "Ma'am, I'm very sorry I upset you," and Iris looked at him with gracious incomprehension and said, "That's quite all right, young man, we all have our days," and he went away looking absolved of something he would carry anyway. James thought the kid would make a good cop eventually, and that this afternoon was part of how.
Iris fell asleep within ten minutes.
She went the way old people and small children do, all at once, mid-sentence, her chin dropping onto the plaid scarf, and then she tipped slowly sideways until her head came to rest against James's shoulder, and stayed there. He didn't move. Petra, on Iris's other side, reached over and straightened the little hat with its pin so it wouldn't fall off, and then sat back, and closed her eyes, and let out a breath that seemed to go on for a very long time.
Ruby was on the floor at their feet, cross-legged, drawing.
"What are you drawing now, Rube?"
"Us," said Ruby, not looking up.
The Great Hall went on around them. The Christmas tree glittered. The light from the skylight had changed, the gray going faintly gold at one edge as the short December afternoon began to lean toward evening. A Metra train came in from somewhere and a hundred people came up the stairs and crossed the hall and went out into the city, and none of them knew anything had happened at all.