Bound For Eternity Page 15

  I loved the look of this pottery, but I was even more fascinated with the technology. To achieve the polished surfaces, someone had spent hours and hours burnishing the leather-hard clay with a smooth pebble. The pots were fired only once, in a carefully controlled reduction firing, done the same way for generations. The method was so efficient that the pottery surface was consistently a glossy black. I had done some less than successful experimental firings when I was writing my dissertation, and my respect for so-called primitive potters had skyrocketed.

  I wandered around the exhibit, enjoying the chatter of the Friends of the Museum in full fig, and the clink of glasses from the reception area. The lovely committee ladies had transformed the gallery with little tables covered with tablecloths in a Southwestern design. Wait a minute, was that a band setting up in the far corner? I was sure that hadn't been in the staff memo. I waved urgently at Susie, who was nearby.

  "Remember the anniversary celebration? Well, I think Mrs. Powell has done it again."

  "Oh, my God..." Susie was horrified. She spied Mrs. Powell on the other side of the room and took off as fast as her clinging skirt and high heels would allow.

  Both Susie and I remembered vividly the previous spring, when Mrs. Reginald Powell had pulled a fast one for the Museum's fiftieth anniversary benefit. As president of the Friends, she and her ladies-who-lunch buddies had hired a band without telling the museum staff, and champagne-sodden couples had waltzed precariously close to fragile cases containing prized Greek vases. The same good ladies had decorated everything in silver and black, including the elevator (tin-foil and scotch tape). In the galleries, black balloons had been tied to various appendages on the nude Greek statues, and to complete the effect, a bagpiper in full regalia had greeted guests as they entered Wigglesworth Hall.

  Now I could hear the band (five white-haired gentlemen) tuning up. It looked very much like the Friends were going to do it again. Then I saw Susie cornering Mrs. Powell near the cash bar. Susie just might be a match for the Queen of Volunteers; I could hardly wait to see who won.

  Where was Carl? I spied him in his tuxedo and slicked-back hair, holding court over by the champagne. His swarthy face was animated and his hands described loops and invisible points in the air. Looked like he'd already had some champagne, but why not? This was Carl's big night.

  I said hello to a couple of ladies from the Friends and to some of the student staffers, who were clustered around the hors d'oeuvres. Steamed salmon, served with dill and caper sauce, little sandwiches with succulent ham and honey mustard, gorgeous veggies with high-fat dip...I got hungry all over again.

  Instead of returning to the buffet table like the little piglet I was, I looked at my watch. It was seven-thirty, late enough so that I could fade out. I had enough time to hit storage again (and to come back and see if Mrs. Powell or Susie had prevailed) before the reception was over, and I really wanted to see if I could locate some of the missing Egyptian items.

  I let myself into the storeroom, teetering on my own miserably uncomfortable high heels (torture instruments, invented by Men), and once again groped for the lights. I made a beeline for shelf 13A. Sure enough, an object about the right size was wrapped in acid-free paper. I uncovered it, and pulled it down so I could look at it closely without getting my gold silk blouse dirty.

  I was looking at a duplicate of the face portrait on my Roman-period mummy, the one slated for the exhibit. But this one was a little more worn, the colors a little more subdued. I turned it over, looking for the number. 1924.02.0014a. So which portrait was on my mummy?

  I sped over to Marion's work area, the exhibit prep tables where I had last seen mummy number 14 after Marion's murder. It was there, lying face-up on a long cart and awaiting transfer back to the gallery. I looked closely at the wrappings around the face. They looked pretty loose. I grabbed some white gloves, and put them on. Carefully, I inserted my fingers around the panel, and tugged gently. The portrait came out easily. I turned it over, looking for the number.

  It was 1924.02.0015. It didn't belong with this mummy. I reversed it and stared at the face. The colors were less faded, and the encaustic paint looked like it had been done...yesterday.

  I slipped the false panel back in the surrounding wrappings. It may as well stay there until I got some answers.

  CHAPTER 23

  THIRD INTERMEDIATE PERIOD

  "Mommy! Look at me!" Emma twirled around in her hot-pink princess costume. She looked adorable, her skinny little arms outstretched and her face radiant.

  "No, look at me!" cried Sam, posing theatrically in his Robin Hood outfit. He looked comically like his dad, minus the beard.

  I laughed, and James grinned. Both children were wired, and they hadn't even had any sugar yet. We picked up their plastic pumpkin trick-or-treat containers, and headed for my front door.

  "Mommy, can we go to Grandpa's?" Emma wheedled. She loved her grandpa-even more now that she could beat him in chess.

  "Sorry, sweetie, he lives too far away. We're going to do our neighborhood, and then we'll drive over to James' neighborhood and do trick-or-treat there."

  "Hooray!" shouted the children, tearing down the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. I winced, thinking about Emma tripping over her long princess dress.

  "Wait for us!" called James, as he zipped up his chocolate-brown leather jacket. He helped me wind a blue wool scarf around my neck-it was definitely brisk outside. We hadn't been able to persuade our kids to wear jackets on top of their costumes, but we had insisted on extra layers on underneath. ("Aw, mommy! Do I have to?").

  "James, I found something really odd," I said as we hustled down the stairs after our offspring. I told him about the extra mummy mask.

  James halted at the foot of the stairs and turned to me. "A forgery?"

  "Yes, I'm pretty sure of it," I said, pulling on my cozy blue fleece gloves.

  "Could that be a motive for attacking Marion? I mean, is someone on your staff dealing in forgeries?" He sounded definitely worried now. Unlike me, James didn't seem to feel the cold blast of night air that roared through the open doorway.

  "Not necessarily. Every museum has some forgeries, and most aren't detected for many years."

  We were out in the street now, following Emma and Sam who were already running up to the first house.

  "No budget for testing them, right?" James said.

  "Right. I didn't really study the portrait on my mummy the first time I looked at it. I have no idea whether it's always been like that-I mean, like that since we've had it in our collection-or whether it was recently switched."

  Sam and Emma were giggling together and comparing their loot from the first house as we approached the second home.

  James took my hand. He felt so good, even through mittens. It was difficult to concentrate on the mummy problem when my mind kept leaping ahead to our future together. Someday we'd have a house, with a fireplace...

  The children had rung the doorbell and were waiting with anticipation. The front door opened slowly and spooky music made them step back. Suddenly a witch's cackle sounded, and I recognized a famous speech: "Double, double, toil and trouble..." Emma and Sam had backed to the stairs by now. The unseen witch finished with "...finger of birth-strangled babe!" and an unearthly shriek.

  James and I laughed as the kids abandoned the haunted house and ran for us. I crouched down to give Emma a reassuring hug, but she passed me on the way to the next house. Candy was a powerful drug.

  "Didn't you tell me you had another suspicious artifact?" James said, as we followed our sugar-hunting children.

  "Yes, a cartonnage. But again, the presence of a couple of forgeries in a large collection doesn't prove a thing."

  We halted outside the last house on the street while Sam and Emma raced up to the door and rang the bell. James put his down-covered arm around me and I leaned into his warm bulk.

  "So even if you found ten or fifteen forgeries, that wouldn't help."

&
nbsp; "Unless they were all within the same collection, or acquired the same year- that might be significant," I said, wrapping my arm around James' waist. "What I need to find is a pattern, one that doesn't fit with the normal protocol."

  "Have you called McEwan yet about this new discovery?" James was beginning to sound over-protective.

  "I'll call him tomorrow. I meant to do it yesterday, but I got so distracted with work."

  "Don't wait. You might be withholding crucial information." Had James been such a nag with his first wife?

  We caught up with the children. Sam and Emma's containers were piled high with the candy they hadn't already sampled, and the sugar high was kicking in. A small rain of candy wrappers spread around them.

  "Look how much they have already! Maybe we should go to your neighborhood now." As we made the children pick up their wrappers and herded Sam and Emma towards my car, I tried to make him lighten up. "Don't worry, McEwan's at the top of my list."

  "I hope you're not still going in after hours? That place isn't safe." He was getting positively bossy.

  "James! If our roles were reversed, would I be telling you not to do your job?" I opened the rear door for the kids and they piled in. James and I remained standing in the cold, glaring at each other across the roof of the Rabbit.

  "Sure you would!"

  "No, I would not! I would recognize that sometimes the job comes first!"

  "Even if my life were in danger?"

  "Well, if your business were tree-trimming or lobster-fishing and there was a storm coming, I'd say stay home. But in my case, it's just museum work, and we do have a police guard."

  "You also have a murderer out there. And it's only one cop on duty-when he isn't on break."

  I took a deep breath.

  "He's a good cop, and I carry Mace in my purse. I have an exhibit coming up, grants to finish, a paper to write, and I can't afford to lose this job!"

  "I can't afford to lose you!"

  Our first fight. We stood gazing at each other's slightly blue faces, neither of us knowing what to say next, until the kids started beating on the window with impatience.

  Suddenly James grinned. "'Darling, be careful!'"

  He was quoting Ingrid Bergman in our favorite old movie, "Casablanca." My anger whooshed out like air from a balloon.

  "I will be careful-honestly."

  We agreed to do twenty minutes of trick-or-treating in James's neighborhood and then call it a night.

  CHAPTER 24

  THE FEATHER OF TRUTH

  We met in the underground complex of Radiology. James had arranged for endoscopy of the mummy, and I had convinced a reluctant Victor that we could get some important new information without damaging the mummy.

  "We have to pay attention to all this NAGPRA stuff," Victor had said, referring to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. "The mummy isn't Native American, but all governments are much more sensitive to how human remains are being treated these days. Remember what the Egyptian Office of Cultural Affairs said."

  "Don't worry. Dr. Barber, my radiologist friend, assured me that the pediatric endoscope is a very narrow tube, less than two centimeters in diameter. It can snake up next to the leg bone on one side, and it won't cause any additional damage. Remember, the foot bones are in a separate package almost, only attached by threads. There's a gaping hole-tons of room." I waited anxiously for his response.

  "What do you expect to find? Convince me that it's worthwhile." He placed his fingertips together in a steeple and gave me a steely stare. I had a fleeting memory of my father doing my favorite hand game when I was little: "Here is the church and here is the steeple. Open the door (turning the laced fingers over), and see all the people!" Victor was nothing like my gentle father.

  "We will probably be able to determine sex, which wasn't possible with the X-rays or CT scans. And James-I mean Dr. Barber-says, if we can get the endoscope up inside the mummy, he may be able to determine whether blood is pooled there-that is, whether the blow to the back of the head caused the child's death, or the skull damage occurred later."

  "Hmm." Victor thought about it. Then he relented. "It would make a better story for the exhibit, wouldn't it?"

  "Thanks, Victor!" I was thrilled. "You won't regret it."

  "I'm regretting it already," he said. But I thought his mouth was twitching at the edges. Did he find me amusing? Or did he just think I was a not-so-dumb blond?

  ? ? ? ?

  Now James and I waited while the technician, a slender young woman named Dana, adjusted the mummy position and gently threaded the endoscope up inside the wrappings. "Okay, here we go," she said, adjusting the computer settings.

  A black and white image appeared on the screen. I could see solid white leg bone-that was obvious. But what was that bright, rectangular shape?

  "Stop it right there!" I cried.

  James reached over and adjusted the contrast. "Wait...wait. Now. Hey, that looks like an inscription!"

  I gasped. "I think it's a mummy tag! And it's not very far up." I turned to the technician. "Do you have a pair of long tweezers?"

  Dana pulled the scope out and rummaged in a drawer. "Here." She handed the tweezers to me and moved the light over so I could see well.

  Carefully, I inserted the tweezers until I felt something hard. I grasped it and tugged gently. Nothing happened. Abandoning artifact integrity in the pursuit of knowledge, I pulled harder. Triumphantly, I held up a small piece of battered wood decorated with spidery writing in faded ink.

  Silently, Dana handed me a magnifying glass.

  "FIL...ATEI. There's a gap after FIL. Filius? That would mean son of Ateius..."

  "What's that word?" asked James, squinting at the other word in the inscription.

  "I think it's VIN...vinarius for wine merchant!" I looked up into his green eyes. "Son of Ateius the wine merchant!" I could barely contain myself. Then I frowned. "But I thought mummy tags were written in Greek and used only during the Hellenistic period. No, wait a minute-there are Roman examples, too, but I'm not sure if Latin was used."

  "You mean toe tags, like we use in modern morgues?"

  I grinned. "Exactly. The embalming studios were often just tents on the outskirts of town. The embalmers had to carry the bodies back and forth, and they needed a way to keep track of who was who. Only the tags were usually on the outside. I wonder who shoved it up inside the wrappings? It could have happened in antiquity, or maybe more recently."

  Dana had reinserted the endoscope and eased it up to the pelvic region.

  James looked at the monitor. "Can you move it to the right, towards the genitals? We're hoping to find out if it's a girl or a boy."

  Four fingers, held in slightly curved positions came into view, then a thumb. We could even see the thumbnail. It was the child's right hand, resting on its thigh. Then the crucial region appeared.

  "Holy Toledo, it's a boy!" I breathed.

  "Yup." James was pleased. "I didn't think it would be that easy. Now let's see if we can get up to the head and look for pooled blood."

  But our luck had run out. At the level of the rib cage, the wrappings and the packing were so tight that the endoscope could move no farther. Dana pushed gently, but there was no movement at all.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I can't go any further if you want to avoid damage."

  I sighed, "Too bad." Then I brightened. "But the inscription is fantastic. Wait until I tell Victor! Thanks so much, Dana."

  We began packing up.

  CHAPTER 25

  REMOVAL OF THE ORGANS

  "Mommy! Mommy, it hurts!"

  I groaned as the little voice woke me again. The gods had cursed me. I was doomed to stay awake, like Sisyphus pushing his boulder uphill, forever. I grabbed my chenille robe and headed for Emma's room.

  A Little Mermaid nightlight gave the room a soft glow. I turned on the overhead light so I could see my daughter better. Emma's little face was pinched and pale and her forehead was
clammy to the touch. Icy fear trickled into my guts. Maybe this was not just a tummy bug. What should I do?

  "Where does it hurt now, sweetie?" I asked.

  This time, Emma clutched her right lower abdomen.

  Uh-oh.

  Could it be her appendix? I began palpating Emma's stomach, moving my hands gently as I had seen doctors do.

  "No, Mommy! Ow!" Emma shrieked suddenly as I hit a tender spot. I observed my daughter, trying to quell the metallic taste of panic that filled my mouth. If only Tom was here, he'd know what to do.

  Well, I was the lucky one who had to make a decision. "Honey, I'm going to call the hospital. I think I was wrong about you having a little bug. We need to have you checked out."