It was the newest member of the trustee board of the Massachusetts Museums Coalition, Veronica Pillsbury, who caught them red-handed. Oddly, they admitted to their deed at once, and even apologized. But this was not the strangest news that day.

The Camperdene Daily Journal headline that day: "Woman's Body Discovered in Cement of The Museum of the Year 2012."

Carla Spagnoli's body.

"Staffers at the museum are disoriented and distraught," Alice Armour Armstrong reported. "Museum curator Neil Wright, hospitalized in the night after an apparent heart attack, on learning of the past trustee's body's being found embedded four feet deep in concrete by investigators three days ago, had no comment. 'What can you say about such a thing?' queried Wright rhetorically, apparently saddled with neither sadness nor remorse."

"I've been telling the investigators of the probability of this since nearly time immemorial," Captain Richard Cunningham told reporters. "My words fell on deaf ears. No, no -- they wouldn't listen to The Captain. Oh no, they wouldn't listen to me. I told them, loud and clear: the bad attitudes and bad acts at this too highly politicized institution through too many years would lead to something like this. I had no political agenda. My purpose was to get through the politics to determine if the law held something useful for resolving some or all of the institution's conflicts, through the legendary convolutions of entrenched local politics. I got booted out of the Association while Wallace went on to become Chairman of the new The Museum of the Year 2012 Board of Trustees. I knew what he was up to. He thought I was out of the loop, but I wasn't out of the loop. I knew what he was up to. He was the man, the big man," The Captain rambled on. "Chief Honcho and lead member of the one faction of the feuding two factions of the Board. But I feel no venom for the man," The Captain confessed. "No venom. It was a very bad situation. We should not have done what we did. It is not now venom that I feel."

A full confession was not soon forthcoming from Wallace Barrow. But it was only a matter of time. Eventually, Barrow cracked, too.

On the Fourth of July, Richard Cunningham and Wallace Barrow were read their rights and arrested, charged with the murder of Carla Spagnoli. The two were led away, looking like two of Rodin's pathetic, burdened, leaden, green Burghers of Calais -- sans dignity. In the next few days, witnesses from the construction crew would come forward, identifying both men as having been seen at the site of the new The Museum of the Year 2012 building "in suspicious circumstances" -- unloading an "undetermined cargo" into freshly poured concrete. One witness would claim Captain Cunningham had killed the woman, and Barrow had kept her body hidden -- in plain sight in the Barrow Funeral Home -- until he could keep the body there no more. When the concrete had been poured for the foundation of the new museum building, Barrow and Cunningham had driven to the site in the Barrow Family Hearse and had unloaded the body -- in plain daylight.

The two men were brought to trial in Worcester. The preliminary hearing was held July 24th, twenty days after the arrest. Grand Jury proceedings were held on September 11th. The Grand Jury decided there was enough evidence to bring the men to trial, issuing an indictment charging Barrow and Cunningham with premeditated, first-degree murder. Judge Theodore Daniel Wyckes presided over the case. Jury selection ended in mid-August. Cunningham and Barrow entered the courtroom, on the 20th, in chains. There were TV crews and journalists from all the world over, covering "The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Versus Wallace Barrow and Richard Cunningham." The "Wallace and Cunningham Defense Fund Committeee" was launched. Police protection was increased, in the course of the trial, about twenty-fold.

Eventually, it came out that Captain Cunningham, after studying at Yale University, had arrived in Camperdene and, at a certain point, had given Carla Spagnoli a wedding ring. The two had spoken of getting married! Cunningham had taken a job as gardener and groundskeeper at the Camperdene Congregational Church. Carla and Cunningham had stopped seeing one another. Cunningham had got engaged to a different Camperdene woman, a nurse.

At the time the Museum of theYear 1912 was ending and the Museum of the Year 2012 was getting underway, museum heiress Carla was threatening to adhere to a tiny small-print clause in the will of Simon and Louisa Spagnoli stipulating that, in the event of the dissolution of the Museum of 1912, its contents -- all of its treasures --would go to the eldest living Spagnoli heir -- which, of course, was Carla.

Barrow had had designs on the soon-to-be-empty museum; he wanted it to become an extension of his business -- his mausoleum, the funeral home. He'd wanted to see it empty. But he'd also wanted to see the treasures of the old museum go to the new museum. Intending to be on the board of the new museum, he did not want to see the treaures fall into Carla's hands, to be sold away. He felt sure he could manage, in the process of transfering treasures from the old museum to the new one, to make a fortune for himself through mysterious misplacement and outright theft. As for Cunningham, he felt similarly -- and he wanted Carla dead and in hell.

One night, Carla had gone to dinner with some "friends." The next thing she knew, she was on the floor of the restaurant, vomiting. She supposed she'd contracted food poisoning during the dinner, but her table companions, who'd shared the meal, were not in any pain. Carla was tied up in knots, convulsing. Barrow had offered to take her home. Carla had arrived home safely -- barely able to walk. It was difficult to use her hands or feet or hold her head steady. The poison affected her involuntary muscle system. Her body began twitching wildly. She had sustained a lethal dose of arsenic, enough to kill her a few times over. By morning, the heavy metal had worked its way out through her skin -- sores on the tops of her hands and on her neck and face. Her body was trying to purge itself of the poison -- to no avail.

The two masons, Cunnigham and Barrow, helped each other out. Cunningham had poisoned Carla; Barrow had kept the body in his funeral parlor a few days; then the two had together put her in the freshly poured concrete of the new museum. An autopsy had revealed the poison. Tests showed arsenic had caused severe trauma and the breakdown of blood vessels. On September 6th, the defendants -- and the world -- learned the verdict of the jury: guilty, as charged.

Though the principles the trustees had claimed their institution embodied looked good on the surface, the trustees themselves, over time, had hardened into sordid, sinister, degraded criminals. Here were truly prisonworthy injurers, misrepresenters, falsifiers, scoundrels, conscienceless thieves. Still, for all that, they would not have been sentenced, punished, and imprisoned had they not also been murderers.

Ah well, at least -- at last -- they were in prison now.

Captain Powderkeg's family would go on pretty much as it had before. The Barrow family, on the other hand, would be thrown into utter turmoil. Candy Barrow would sell the contents of the house at auction, and return to Scanadinavia. Her husband's brother, Broderick Barrow, would appear from out of nowhere to grapple with the chaotic Barrow family affairs, and would put the house up for sale -- up for grabs.

Before things could get any worse on that front, Town Counsel Carson went before Town Meeting members with a proposal to purchase the defunct and empty funeral home at an offering that could hardly be refused, proposing also that the street between the mansion and the Museum be ripped up, and that the two buildings be rennovated and joined, thus creating a new Camperdene Police Department headquarters. (This was put to a vote that same evening. It passed unanimously.)

Town Attorney Carson informed Neil, who had recovered fully from what had not been a heart attack, but rather something like apoplexy, a panic attack, was now his own man. He was free to fill the vacant post, Secretary to the Board of Trustees and Administrative Assistant to the Director, as he saw fit. Neil needed only to interview at least three of the more than twenty applicants seeking the job. Carson assured Neil it truly was his call on this; Carson said he would "quash any other resolve."

On the Fourth of July, the day that Barrow and Cunnningham were arrested, Neil wrote to the Captain's wiley daughter, Lizzie, "Thank you for for applying for the position, Secretary to the Board of The Museum of the Year 2012 and Administrative Assistant to the museum curator, and for advising me that your resume can be found in the museum's personnel files. Your letter of intent came two days after the 'seven (7) calendar days' in which current members of the Camperdene Association of Paraprofessional Employees could apply to be considered for promotion to such a vacancy. While you submitted it in time to qualify for the general deadline for applying, you were not among those considered for interviewing."

Even as witnesses had been giving testimony regarding Captain Cunningham and Wallace Barrow's disposing of Carla Spagnoli's body, Neil had selected Judith Parker Brown from West Virginia to fill the vacancy. Recently graduated with a Master's degree from Georgetown University, bringing half a dozen irresistibly formidable letters of reference, Ms Brown had showed up at the interview wearing a violet crushed-velvet blouse with matching slacks and purple sneakers -- both shoelaces untied. She had said said she'd heard "irresistibly intriguing things" about The Museum of the Year 2012. "This," she had assured Neil, "is where I want to be."

One week before Christmas, Neil took the vacation time allotted him, and left the employ of the the museum. He'd start a new job as an editor for a Boston-based travel magazine in the first week of the new year. On December 22nd, Lucille Jameson, Chairwoman of the American Museums Coalition, sent Neil a handsome certificate of appreciation for his "vivid demonstration" of "how museums change lives." On Christmas Eve, Neil pressed through sixteen inches of fresh fallen snow to the museum to pack his stuff. He set his keys down lightly on the massive, bare curator's desk, strolled down the hall, set the alarm, and walked out. He never looked back.

On stepping out of the building, he saw Minna, Mark, and Jillian. "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!" his kids cried out. Over the snow they flew. Neil's arms were open. On both knees, he gathered them up. Then, standing akimbo, a child in each arm, he kissed his wife. In Neil's later memories of this, he could see dazzling sunlight -- but that was impossible. This was at night. Neil told Minna, "We are soulmates. Don't ask me how I know this. I just know this."

On Christmas morning, they got a blazing fire going in the fireplace. Rotund, silver-bearded Nicholas Wentworth showed up in his gold-trimmed purple velvet St. Nick oufit, carrying a dozen donuts and four beautiful books he'd bound himself for each of them. "Let us ripen like fruits in a shining sky," he said, distributing the gifts. "To evil rogues and foulest hypocrites!" Nick toasted, raising a freshly poured glass of golden egg nog. "We shall neither curse nor hate our enemies."

Wentworth took a seat in the coziest available chair and motioned for the kids to sit with him. He gave a bouyant, cheerful reading of Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales. Further books, drawings, and photographs were then given and received.

Neil's parents had sent him an old, familiar brown leather briefcase filled with magazines profusely loaded with photos -- pictures of Jews and Gypsies saved in the Holocaust, Chinese immigrants building America's railroads, nomads in the Sahara desert, Aztecs bowing before Quetzalcoatl; pictures of Spinoza, Ibn Battuta, Voltaire, and Houdini.

"They put Houdini in a straightjacket and shackles upside-down in a chained and locked box," Neil whispered to no one in particular. "They dropped him in a river in the middle of winter. He got loose."