The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason

then to another—“and here.” Abruptly he looks up. “Bill didn’t just stumble onto this tonight. Not the night before your work is due.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “What about the drawing?” Curry demands. “Bill gave you that too?”
    “What drawing?”
    “The piece of leather.” Curry forms dimensions from his thumbs and index fingers, about one foot square. “Tucked into the centerfold of the diary. There was a drawing on it. A blueprint.”
    “It wasn’t there,” Paul says.
    Curry turns the book in his hands again. His eyes have become cold and distant.
    “Richard, I have to return the diary to Bill tomorrow,” Paul says. “I’ll read through it tonight. Maybe it can get me through the final section of the
Hypnerotomachia
.”
    Curry shakes himself back to the present. “You haven’t finished your work?”
    Paul’s voice fills with anxiety. “The last section isn’t like the others.”
    “But what about the deadline tomorrow?”
    When Paul says nothing, Curry runs his hand over the diary’s cover, then relinquishes it. “Finish. Don’t compromise what you’ve earned. There’s too much at stake.”
    “I won’t. I think I’ve almost found it. I’m very close.”
    “If you need anything, just say so. An excavation permit. Surveyors. If it’s there, we’ll find it.”
    I glance at Paul, wondering what Curry means.
    Paul smiles nervously. “I don’t need anything more. I’ll find it on my own, now that I have the diary.”
    “Just don’t let it out of your sight. No one has done something like this before. Remember Browning. ‘
What many dream of, all their lives.’
”
    “Sir,”
comes a voice from behind us.
    We turn to find a curator stepping in our direction.
    “Mr. Curry, the trustees’ meeting is beginning soon. Could we ask you to move to the upstairs deck?”
    “We’ll talk about this more later,” Curry says, reorienting himself. “I don’t know how long this meeting will be.”
    He pats Paul on the arm, shakes my hand, and then walks toward the stairs. When he ascends, we find ourselves alone with the guards.
    “I shouldn’t have let him see it,” Paul says, almost to himself, as we turn toward the door.
    He pauses to take in the series of images one more time, forming a memory he can return to when the museum is closed. Then we find our way back outside.
    “Why would Bill lie about where he got the diary?” I ask once we’re in the snow again.
    “I don’t think he would,” Paul says.
    “Then what was Curry talking about?”
    “If he knew more, he would’ve told us.”
    “Maybe he didn’t want to tell you while I was there.”
    Paul ignores me. There’s a pretense he likes to keep up, that we are equals in Curry’s eyes.
    “What did he mean when he said he’d help you get excavation permits?” I ask.
    Paul looks over his shoulder nervously at a student who has fallen in behind us. “Not here, Tom.”
    I know better than to push him. After a long silence I say, “Can you tell me why all the paintings had to do with Joseph?”
    Paul’s expression lightens. “Genesis thirty-seven.” He pauses to call it up.
“Now Jacob loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age. And he made him a coat of many colors.”
    It takes me a second to understand. The gift of colors. The love of an aging father for his favorite son.
    “He’s proud of you,” I say.
    Paul nods. “But I’m not done. The work isn’t finished.”
    “It’s not about that,” I tell him.
    Paul smiles thinly. “Of course it is.”
     
    We make our way back to the dorm, and I notice an unpleasant quality to the sky: it’s dark, but not perfectly black. The whole roof of it is shot with snow clouds from horizon to horizon, and they are a heavy, luminous gray. There isn’t a star to be seen.
    At the rear door to Dod, I realize we have no way in. Paul flags down a senior from upstairs, who gives us an odd look before lending us his ID card. A