The Keepsake

“I’ll do the autopsy tomorrow,” said Dr. Singh. “If you’d like to observe, you’re certainly welcome.”

What she really wanted to do was drive home to Boston. Take a hot shower, kiss her daughter good night, and climb into bed with Gabriel. But her work here was not yet finished.

“The autopsy will be in Augusta?” she asked.

“Yes, around eight o’clock. Can I expect you?”

“I’ll be there.” She took a deep breath and straightened. “I guess I’d better find a place to stay for the night.”

“The Hawthorn Motel’s a few miles down the road. It serves a good breakfast. Not that awful continental stuff, but lovely omelets and pancakes.”

“Thanks for the tip,” she said. Only a pathologist could stand over a dripping corpse and talk so enthusiastically about pancakes.

She walked back up the trail by flashlight, the path now well marked by little flags of police tape. Emerging from the trees, she found that the parking lot was starting to empty out; only a few official vehicles remained. The state police had already searched the building, but all they’d found was trash and the putrefying remains of that raccoon she had spotted earlier. They had not found Josephine or Bradley Rose.

But he’s been here, she thought, gazing toward the woods. He parked near these trees. He walked the trail to the bog. There he tugged on a rope and hauled one of his keepsakes from the water, the way a fisherman hauls in his catch.

She climbed into her car and drove back along that crumbling road, her poor Subaru jouncing across potholes that seemed even more treacherous in the dark. Moments after she turned onto the main road, her cell phone rang.

“I’ve been trying to reach you for at least two hours,” said Frost.

“There was no reception at the bog. They finished searching and found only the one body. I’m wondering if he has another stash-”

“Where are you now?” Frost cut in.

“I’m staying here for the night. I want to watch the autopsy tomorrow.”

“I mean right now, where are you?”

“I’m going to check into a motel. Why?”

“What’s the name of the motel?”

“I think it’s called the Hawthorn. It’s around here somewhere.”

“Okay, I’ll see you there in a few hours.”

“You’re coming up to Maine?”

“I’m already on my way. And someone’s joining us.”

“Who?”

“We’ll talk about it when we get there.”

Jane stopped first at a local drugstore for new underwear and socks and then to pick up a take-out pepperoni pizza. While her hand-washed pants hung drying in the bathroom, she sat in her room at the Hawthorn Motel, eating pizza as she read Jimmy Otto’s file. There were three volumes, one for each year he had been a student at the Hilzbrich Institute. No, not a student-an inmate, she thought, remembering the ugly concrete building, the remote location. A place to securely segregate from society the sort of boys you didn’t want anywhere near your daughters.

Jimmy Otto, most of all.

She paused at the transcript of what Jimmy had said during a private therapy session. He’d been only sixteen years old.

When I was thirteen, I saw this picture in a history book. It was in a concentration camp where all these women were killed in the gas chambers. Their bodies were naked, lying in a row. I think about that picture a lot, about all those women. Dozens and dozens of them, just lying there like they’re waiting for me to do whatever I want with them. Fuck them in any hole. Poke sticks in their eyes. Slice off their nipples. I want there to be a bunch of women at one time, a whole row of them. Or it’s not a party, is it?

But how do you collect more than one at a time? Is there some way to keep a corpse from rotting, a way to keep it fresh? I’d like to find out, because it’s no fun if a woman just rots away and leaves me…

A knock on her motel room door made Jane snap straight. She dropped the half-eaten slice of pizza in the box and called out, in a none-too-steady voice: “Yes? Who is it?”

“It’s me,” Barry Frost answered.

“Just a second.” She went into the bathroom and pulled on her still-damp slacks. By the time she got to the door, her nerves were steady again, her heart no longer racing. She opened the door and found a surprise awaiting her.

Frost was not alone.

The woman standing beside him was in her forties, dark-haired and strikingly beautiful. She wore faded blue jeans and a black pullover, but on her lean, athletic frame even that casual garb looked elegant. She said not a word to Jane but slipped right past her into the room and ordered: “Lock the door.”

Even after Frost had turned the dead bolt, the woman did not relax. She crossed immediately to the window and yanked the drapes more tightly shut, as though the narrowest chink might admit the gaze of unfriendly eyes.

“Who are you?” Jane asked.

The woman turned to face her. And in that instant, even before Jane heard the answer, she saw it in the woman’s face, in the arched brows, the chiseled cheekbones. A face you’d see painted on a Greek urn, she thought. Or on the wall of an Egyptian tomb.

“My name is Medea Sommer,” the woman said. “I’m Josephine’s mother.”

THIRTY-FOUR

“But…you’re supposed to be dead,” Jane said, stu

The woman gave a tired laugh. “That’s the story, anyway.”

“Josephine thinks you are.”

“That’s what I told her to say. Unfortunately, not everyone believes her.” Medea crossed to the lamp and turned it off, plunging the room into darkness. Then she went to the window and peered out through the slit in the curtains.

Jane glanced at Frost, who was barely a silhouette standing beside her in the shadows. “How did you find her?” she whispered.

“I didn’t,” he said. “She found me. You were the one she really wanted to speak to. When she found out you’d left for Maine, she tracked down my phone number instead.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this on the phone?”

“I wouldn’t let him,” said Medea, her back still turned to them, her gaze still on the street. “What I’m going to tell you now has to stay in this room. It can’t be shared with your colleagues. It can’t be whispered anywhere. It’s the only way I can stay dead. The only way Tari-Josephine-has any chance of a normal life.” Even in the dark, Jane could see the taut outline of the curtain she was clutching. “My daughter is all that matters to me,” she said softly.

“Then why did you abandon her?” asked Jane.

Medea spun around to face her. “I never abandoned her! I would have been here weeks ago, if only I’d known what was happening.”

“ If only you’d known?From what I understand, she’s been fending for herself for years. And you were nowhere around.”

“I had to stay away from her.”

“Why?”

“Because being around me could mean her death.” Once again, Medea turned toward the street. “This has nothing to do with Josephine. She’s just a pawn for them. A way to draw me out into the open. The one he really wants is me. ”

“You care to explain that?”

With a sigh, Medea sank into a chair by the window. She was just a faceless shadow sitting there, a soft voice in the darkness.

“Let me tell you a story,” she said. “About a girl who got involved with the wrong boy. A girl so naïve that she couldn’t recognize the difference between sweet infatuation and…” She paused. “Fatal obsession.”

“You’re talking about yourself.”

“Yes.”

“And who was the boy?”

“Bradley Rose.” Medea released a shuddering breath, and her dark form seemed to shrink in the chair, as though folding in on itself for protection. “I was only twenty. What does any girl know at twenty? It was my first time out of the country, my first excavation. In the desert, everything looked different. The sky was bluer, the colors were brighter. And when a shy boy smiles at you, when he starts to leave you little gifts, you think you’re in love.”