There's No Place Like Home

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

CRASH!

“Oh no! Oh no no no no!”

I looked at the crushed remains of what was once the most important piece of the collection.

I felt sick.

*****

I’d been looking forward to today all week long. It was Restoration Day — the day that we examined a predetermined collection and decided whether or not the artifacts within that collection were aging well, or if they needed some TLC. And being the head curator and in charge of maintaining the historical “health” of the various collections, today was the day of the week I set aside to check the next set of artifacts in rotation. Today was especially exciting. I was examining collection #1939-1971.123.01, box one of ten. Collection #1939-1971.123.01 was better known as the Wizard of Oz Collection, Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers. My favourite!

Because my restoration skills were strongest in fabrics and hides — clothes, draperies, tapestries — as opposed to art or pottery, my prevue was the movie and television collections. And The Smithsonian Museum of American History has a lot of television and movie memorabilia. From the recreation of Archie Bunker’s living room, to the marbles used at the end of Men In Black. It was all here, stored in the gigantic warehouse that houses the archives.

I loved the Wizard of Oz. It was my all-time favourite movie. And the books. The books were excellent, but the movie brought it all to life. For me, this restoration would be an act of love.

I’d spent the first few minutes in the archives locating the box and setting up on the inventory table — the very important first step. Rules stated that a full and complete inventory of each box, crate, container must be made before the collection leaves the archives. That ensured that there was consistency in the inventory list and contents, so something couldn’t go “missing” between the archives and its destination. I placed #1939-1971.123.01, box one of tenon the table reserved for this process. A CCTV camera hung from above, capturing the inventory.  

I smiled at the closed box. Even though I was intimately familiar with the contents, it still felt like Christmas morning when I lifted the lid. I peered inside.

And there they were. The shoes. Dorothy's ruby slippers. They were stored in a protective lucite box, which was surrounded by rigid blocking material, preventing the lucite box from sliding around during transportation.

I donned my white cotton gloves and gently lifted the lucite cube with the slippers inside, out of the carton. I gave the cube a cursory glance. All seemed well.  Next, I slid back off the cube and gently slid out the display mount with the shoes still attached, placing them on top of the lucite box so that I could get good look. I hadn’t seen the shoes up close since the major restoration of 2018, when my team and I had spent over two hundred hours cleaning, repairing and restoring them. I bent over and looked at the first shoe.

What the—

Then I heard it — a groaning, wrenching sound. I froze and listened. The groaning got louder, turning into a screeching sound right behind me. I turned in time to see the huge shelving unit start to tumble forward — towards me and the table with the slippers on it. I had no time to react other than to drop to the ground, cover my head, and hope for the best.

The huge metal shelving unit crashed down, smashing onto the inventory table. At first I though the table would hold, then it started to wobble, then collapsed to the floor. The fifteen foot-high shelving unit hit the identical shelving unit directly in front of it, which jittered and swayed, but held. There would be no chain reaction of shelves crashing into one another, á la Indiana Jones.

I should have been crushed to death. But I wasn’t. I was bruised and battered. As the shelf was falling forward, I had been struck in the back and head by the storage boxes being flung forward — they may have been acid-free, but that didn’t mean that they hurt less when they hit on me.

“Oh no! Oh no no no no!”

I looked at the crushed remains of what was once the most important piece of the collection.

I felt sick.  

And I needed to get out quickly before the shelving unit slipped and crashed to the floor with me underneath it. I started to crawl out of the small space left by the shelf, pushing boxes and artifacts out of the way. I was stunned. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Shelves don’t just topple on their own.

*****

After the fire department and EMTs left, I surveyed the damage. The Wizard of Oz ruby slippers were crushed. I was crushed.

“What do you think caused the shelf to fall forward?”  

The person speaking was Conrad Chilton, head of security.

“I have no idea, Conrad. I just know that we need to get the shelves off of the collection, and start to sort this mess out.

Maintenance was able to work with our department — we removed all of the boxes laying on the ground, and maintenance righted the huge shelving unit — fifteen feet high, eight feet long, six feet wide. There is no way that it should have fallen over. In fact, someone would probably need a heavy-duty chain to topple it. But that was a problem for future me. What I needed to do right now was concentrate on the disaster in front of me. I assigned my entire department the task the inspecting and re-filing of all the artifacts that had fallen out of their boxes in the crash, then examining the actual boxes for damage, then replacing the boxes on the shelves in their proper designated spot. After everyone had their assigned tasks, my focus switched to Dorothy’s ruby slippers which had suffered catastrophic damage.

I had the collapsed table transported to my restoration room, in situ. We carried the it up to the workshop, and laid the table on top of my workbench. I activated the overhead camera to record my examination of what was left of the shoes.  

The slippers were smashed to bits, to smithereens, to pieces. The edge of one of the shelves had landed squarely on the slippers, essentially cutting them in half, followed by a large wooden crate falling on them which crushed not only the slippers but the Lucite box they had been sitting on. Sequins, shoe parts, and sharp shards of lucite were all mashed together. It was a total disaster. The shoes would be impossible to restore in this condition. I would have been more upset if these were actually Dorothy’s ruby slippers. But they weren’t.

My boss, Killian Harris, entered the room. He’d been down in the archives overseeing the cleanup.

“How are you feeling?” He looked at me. My clothes were dirty, the knee ripped out of my pants, my hair as a disaster. I had looked better. “I think you should go home. You’ve been hurt, and need time to heal.”

I shook my head. We’d been over this downstairs.

“Killian, I’m fine. More upset than hurt.” I looked at the remains of one of the most recognized movie icons, pieces of which littered my workbench. “This is a disaster.”

“Shay, it’s not your fault. We’re going to look into how this happened. But the fact that you’re okay is the important thing.”

“I know it’s not my fault.” I waved my hand towards the mangled shoes. “The real disaster is that these ruby slippers are forgeries. And not very good ones. More importantly, where are the real slippers?”

“What!?” He looked from me to the remnants of the shoes and box. “How can you tell?”

I walked over to the carnage.

“Well, after spending all that restoration time with them, I’m pretty-well acquainted with the the slippers. I noticed something not right immediately, just before the shelf tried to kill me.” I picked up a pencil, and pointed.

“See the sequins?”

“Yes.”

“Well, these are made of vinyl. They’re pretty high-end, but the originals are made out of gelatin, with a silver base for increased reflectivity.”

I pointed to the insoles of the shoes, both of which were visible.

“See how the heel lining inside both shoes is the same?”

“Yes. So …”

‘The pair of shoes that we have — or had — in the collection were a mismatched pair.  In our pair, each heel back had a different shape sewn into the lining. These two are the same.”

I walked around the table to the other side, and pointed to the heel of the left shoe.  

“On our pair the left heel was repaired during filming. This heel is intact. Plus there’s no wear spot at the toe portion of the sole.” I pointed towards the toe.

“So, you’re saying that these destroyed shoes are not our shoes? They’re fake?”

“Yes.”

“How sure are you?”

“I’d say almost a hundred percent, but I’ll do some tests on the materials, and get back to you. Give me a couple of hours.”

*****

I made my way to Killian’s office.

“The thread used to attach the sequins to the organza is polyester, not cotton. The large stones are not glass but a high-end poly-resin, and the leather of the shoe top itself is new, not eighty-five years old. And, the shoes were definitely not manufactured by Innes Shoes, the company that made all the shoes used to make the ruby slippers, unless they had a factory in China in 1939.”

“So, it’s conclusive, then?”

“Yes.”

Killian sighed.  

“I’ll have to call the authorities.  And inform the board. They are not going to be happy.”

I went back to my lab, and studied the shoes. The forgeries were not even particularly well done. The use of modern materials, while “good enough” if you’re just looking at them in a lucite display box in the museum, would not pass the smell test at Restoration. No one from the public would notice the difference. But I would. Whoever was behind the theft had to know that the fakes would be found out. And these shoes were scheduled to be returned to public display at the beginning of the month. The gig would be up by then.  

So, who could have done the switcheroo? These particular shoes — or the shoes that were supposed to be in the archives — hadn’t been on display for almost a year. There were four authenticated pairs of Dorothy’s ruby slippers that we knew of — one pair the Smithsonian owned, one pair the FBI had recovered in 2018, one pair the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences owned, and the last pair — the ones currently on display — that were loaned to the Museum for the period of one year., which was up at the beginning of the month.

Now the slippers on display were going to be returned to their generous owner, and our shoes would have been put on permanent display. Obviously not now. Or ever. Not unless the real ruby slippers were found.

*****

I went down to the archive room. The others were still working on restoring order to the boxes, and ensuring that the contents were intact. About two-thirds of the boxes had been returned to their proper places on the shelves.  

I grabbed one of the rolling safety stairs — exactly like the ones you see in IKEA or Costco — and pushed it to the end of the shelf. I climbed to the top and started examining the top rail. This was the side that had crashed down and the top frame was bent and scratched. It was going to be impossible to tell if something had pulled the shelves over — there were too many dings and gouges. I got off the stairs, and walked to the back side of the shelf.  

That’s where I got lucky. On the bottom shelf edge that abutted the ground, were two scratch marks on the floor that almost exactly corresponded with two bends in the metal on the bottom shelf edge. They were a couple of feet across, and I would bet, made by a hydraulic handcart — the mini forklifts that were used to move smaller loads around the archives, and could lift well over a thousand pounds.

I took my phone out and photographed the marks.

Next, I went in search of the handcart. From the marks that I had seen, there had to be paint transfer to the forks.  

We have a myriad of handcarts, forklifts, and scissor lifts that are needed in the archives for moving and transporting collections. Now I just had to track down the one that with blue paint on the forks. Twenty minutes later, success. I called Conrad Chilton and asked him to join me. When he arrived I explained what I discovered. He looked dubious.

“It coulda happened any time. There’s no proof it happened today."

I showed him the photo of the shelf and scratched on the floor. “See the paint? It matches the shelving paint.”

He wasn’t convinced. I made him promise to send the police to my workshop when they arrived.

Back upstairs I sat at my desk and accessed the CCTV. There were a plethora of cameras throughout the archive building, and other than a couple of blind spots, it was almost fully covered. When I opened the stream from this morning, there was … nothing. Nothing at all — the entire system had been down. It was blank from 5:24 am until just before ten this morning — after the accident. All the cameras were now working, except the one over the inventory table — the crashing shelf had ripped it from the ceiling.

I sat and thought for a moment. Who had access to the CCTV cameras? Me, because the archives were my purview, Conrad, some of the department heads, and of course the boss’s boss, Dr. Milford, the Secretary of the Smithsonian. 

This wasn’t helpful. Too many people. I considered another angle. If the target was the shoes, then who had known that they were being restored today? My schedule was posted, but only to those in Archives and Restoration. Who could access my account? IT, of course. They could access anything. Just my team. But who else? I had no idea.  

I replayed this morning in my head. Conrad had been all over the accident. He’d been on the scene in no time. He was also reluctant to consider my evidence. But did he have the skills to create a fake pair of shoes?

Anyone on my team could have made the shoes, maybe, with enough time, but I didn’t think so. Where would they have done the work? Their workspaces were open-concept.  

There was Killian, of course. He had the access, and the skills to create the shoes. But, why? And I could have been killed! Unless that was the idea. I shivered. I would have been splattered all over the shoes if I hadn’t dropped to the ground. Killian was my friend. But, the shoes were worth over two million dollars at auction.  

My list of suspects had been whittled down to two — Conrad and Killian. I had to make a decision as to who I could trust.

I picked up my phone and dialled a number.

*****

I was in Killan’s office for the second time that day.

“I think Conrad is the thief.” 

I explained my thesis.  

Killian nodded his head slowly.

“We should call the police, and tell them,” I said.

“Good call!”

The police arrived and took Conrad into my workshop to interview him.

******

“Why, Killian?” I said.

The police and I had watched Killian move about the building. First, he went into his office, and came out carrying a bag. Then we followed him on CCTV to the security office, where there were cameras inside. We watched him place the bag into the bottom drawer of Conrad’s desk.  

That’s were the police intercepted him.  

He looked at me.  

“The money. It’s always about the money.”

“I could have died.”

“I know, Shay, but two million dollars is two million dollars.”

*****

I got home that night, and went straight to my basement workshop. It had been a long, horrible day. But we had recovered the shoes that Killian had stolen.  

Not that they were actually the originals that everyone thought they were. No, they were also fakes.  

But some of my very best work!

I slid the wall panel to the side and opened the climate controlled walk-in safe. And there they were. Dorothy’s ruby slippers.  

I had authenticated the slippers that Killan had stolen. Because I was the world’s expert on Dorothy’s ruby slippers, and in charge of authentication, everyone trusted me.

But why would I steal the originals?  

Because I could. And there's no place like home.