The Keepsake

“They’re more like pottery and statues, I guess.”

“In a way.” She smiled. “The dustier the better.”

“And that appeals to you?”

“You sound like you can’t understand it.”

“I’m just wondering what kind of person chooses to spend a lifetime studying old bones and pottery.”

“ What’s a girl like you doing in a job like this?Is that the question?”

He laughed. “You’re the youngest thing in this whole building.”

Now she, too, smiled, because it was true. “It’s the co

Don’t talk about Mom.

To her relief, Detective Frost did not pick up on her sudden wariness. His next question wasn’t about her at all. “I know you haven’t been here too long,” he said, “but did you ever get the feeling things weren’t quite right here?”

“How do you mean?”

“You said that you feel as if you’ve been working in a house of horrors.”

“That was a figure of speech. You can understand it, can’t you, after what you just found behind the basement wall? After what Madam X turned out to be?” The temperature in her air-conditioned office seemed to keep dropping. Josephine reached back to pull on the sweater she’d hung on her chair. “At least my job isn’t nearly as horrifying as yours must be. You wonder why I choose to work with pottery and old bones. And I wonder why someone like you would choose to work with-well, fresh horrors.” She looked up and saw a glimmer of discomfort in his eyes because this time, the question was directed at him. For a man accustomed to interrogating others, he did not seem eager to reciprocate with personal details of his own.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m not allowed to ask questions. Only answer them.”

“No, I’m just wondering what you meant.”

“Meant?”

“When you said someone like you. ”

“Oh.” She gave a sheepish laugh. “It’s just that you strike me as such a nice person. A kind person.”

“And most policemen aren’t?”

She flushed. “I keep digging the hole deeper, don’t I? Really, I meant it as a compliment. Because I’ll admit, most policemen scare me a little.” She looked down at her desk. “I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that way.”

He sighed. “I’m afraid you may be right. Even though I think I’m the least scary person in the world.”

But I’m afraid of you anyway, she thought. Because I know what you could do to me if you learned my secret.

“Detective Frost?” Nicholas Robinson had appeared in her doorway. “Your colleague needs you back downstairs.”

“Oh. Right.” Frost shot a smile at Josephine. “We’ll talk more later, Dr. Pulcillo. And get something to eat, why don’t you?”

Nicholas waited until Frost had left the room, then he said to her: “What was that all about?”

“We were just chatting, Nick.”

“He’s a detective. I don’t think they just chat. ”

“It’s not as if he was interrogating me or anything.”

“Is something bothering you, Josie? Something that I should know about?”

Though his question put her on guard, she managed to say calmly: “Why would you think that?”

“You’re not yourself. And it’s not just because of what happened today. Yesterday, when I came up behind you in the hallway, you almost jumped out of your skin.”

She sat with her hands on her lap, grateful that he could not see them tighten into two knots. In the short time they’d worked together, he had become eerily astute at reading her moods, at knowing when she needed a good laugh and when she needed to be left alone. Surely he could see that this was one of the times she wanted to be alone, yet he did not retreat. It was unlike the Nicholas she knew, a man who was unfailingly respectful of her privacy.

“Josie?” he said. “Do you want to talk about anything?”

She gave a rueful laugh. “I guess I’m mortified that I blew it so badly with Madam X. That I didn’t realize we were dealing with a fake.”

“That carbon fourteen analysis threw us both off. I was just as wrong as you were.”

“But your background isn’t Egyptology. That’s why you hired me, and I screwed up.” She leaned forward, massaging her temples. “If you’d hired someone more experienced, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“You didn’t screw up. You’re the one who insisted on the CT scan, remember? Because you didn’t feel completely confident about her. You were the one who led us to the truth. So stop beating yourself up about this.”

“I made the museum look bad. I made you look bad, for hiring me.”

He didn’t respond for a moment. Instead he pulled off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. Always carrying linen handkerchiefs was one of those anachronistic little habits of his that she found so endearing. Sometimes Nicholas reminded her of a gentleman bachelor from an earlier, more i

“Maybe we should look at the bright side of all this,” he said.

“Think of the publicity we’ve gotten. Now the whole world knows the Crispin Museum exists.”

“But for all the wrong reasons. They know us as the museum with murder victims in our basement.” She felt a fresh pulse of cold air blow in through the vent, and shivered in her sweater. “I keep wondering what else we’re going to find in this building. Whether there’s another shrunken head stuck in that ceiling up there, or another Madam X bricked in behind this wall. How could this happen without the curator knowing about it?” She looked at Robinson. “It had to be him, didn’t it? Dr. Scott-Kerr. He was in charge here all those years, so he must have been the one.”

“I knew the man. I find it very hard to believe.”

“But did you really know him?”

He considered this. “Now I have to wonder how well any of us knew William. How well we ever know anyone. He came off as a quiet and utterly ordinary man. Not someone you’d particularly notice.”

“Isn’t that how they usually describe the psychopath with two dozen bodies buried in his basement? He was so quiet and ordinary. ”

“That does seem to be the universal description. But then, it could apply to almost anyone, couldn’t it?” Nicholas gave a wry shake of the head. “Including me.”

Josephine stared out the window as she rode the bus home. Didn’t they say that life was full of coincidences? Hadn’t she heard startling tales of vacationers abroad spotting their next-door neighbors on the streets of Paris? Strange convergences happened all the time, and this could simply be one of them.

But it wasn’t the first coincidence. That had been the name on the cartouche. Medea. Now there’s theIndio Daily News.

At her stop, she stepped out of the bus into a syrupy heat thick with humidity. Black clouds threatened, and as she walked toward her building she heard thunder rumble, felt the hairs feather on her arms, as though stirred by the static of lightning-charged air. Rain pelted her head, and by the time she reached her apartment building it had become a tropical downpour. She dashed up the steps and into the foyer, where she stood dripping water as she opened her mailbox.

She’d just pulled out a bundle of envelopes when the door to Apartment 1A swung open and Mr. Goodwin said, “I thought I saw you ru

“It’s a mess.” She shut the mailbox. “I’m glad I’m in for the evening.”

“He delivered another one today. Thought you’d want to take care of it.”