The Keepsake (10 page)

“No,” Gemma agreed. “There are worse things to be afraid of.” She paused, then looked across the table at Josephine. “So why are you still alive?”

The question startled Josephine. “You think I should be dead.”

“Why would some weirdo waste time scaring you with creepy little notes? With grotesque gifts in your car? Why not just kill you?”

“Maybe because the police are involved? Ever since the scan of Madam X, they’ve been hovering around the museum.”

“Another thing puzzles me. Putting a body in your car seems designed to draw attention to you. The police are watching you now. It’s a strange move if someone really wants you dead.”

The statement was typical for Gemma: factual and brutally blunt.
Someone wants you dead.
But I am dead, she thought. Twelve years ago, the girl I used to be dropped off the face of the earth. And Josephine Pulcillo was born.

“She wouldn’t want you dealing with this all alone, Josie. Let’s make that phone call.”

“No. It’s safer for everyone if we don’t. If they’re watching me, that’s just what they’re waiting for.” She took a breath. “I’ve managed on my own since college and I can deal with this, too. I just need some time to catch my breath. Throw a dart at the map and decide where to go next.” She paused. “And I think I’ll need some cash.”

“There’s still about twenty-five thousand dollars left in the account. It’s been sitting there for you. Waiting for a rainy day.”

“I think this qualifies.” Josephine stood to leave the room. In the kitchen doorway she stopped and looked back. “Thank you for everything you’ve done. For me. And for my mother.”

“I owe it to her, Josie.” Gemma looked down at her burn-scarred arms. “It’s only because of Medea that I’m still alive.”

FOURTEEN

On Saturday night, Daniel finally came to her.

At the last minute, before he arrived, Maura rushed out to the local market where she bought kalamata olives and French cheeses and a far-too-extravagant bottle of wine. This is the way I’ll woo a lover, she thought as she handed over her credit card. With smiles and kisses and glasses of Pinot Noir. I will win him over with perfect evenings that he’ll never forget, never stop craving. And someday, maybe, he’ll make his choice. He’ll choose me.

When she got home, he was already waiting for her in her house.

As the garage door rolled open, she saw his car parked inside where the neighbors wouldn’t see it, where it would cause no raised eyebrows, no lascivious gossip. She pulled in beside it and quickly closed the garage door again, shutting off any view of the blatant evidence that she was not alone tonight. Keeping secrets so easily becomes second nature, and it was automatic for her now to close the garage door, to draw the curtains and smoothly fend off the innocent queries from colleagues and neighbors.
Are you seeing someone? Would you like to come to dinner? Would you like to meet this nice man I know?
Over the months, she’d declined so many such invitations that few were now offered. Had everyone simply given up on her, or had they guessed the reason for her disinterest, for her unsociability?

That reason was standing in the doorway, waiting for her.

She stepped into the house, into Daniel Brophy’s arms. It had been ten days since they’d last been together, ten days of ever-deepening longing that was now so gnawing she could not wait to satisfy it. The groceries were still in the car, and she had dinner to cook, but food was the last thing on her mind as their lips met. Daniel was all she wanted to devour, and she feasted on him as they kissed their way into her bedroom, guilty kisses made all the more delicious because they were illicit. How many new sins will we commit this evening, she wondered as she watched him unbutton his shirt. Tonight he did not wear his clerical collar; tonight he came to her as a lover, not a man of God.

Months ago he had broken the vows that bound him to his church. She was the one responsible; she had caused his fall from grace, a fall that once again brought him into her bed, into her arms. It was a destination so familiar to him now that he knew exactly what she wanted, what would make her clutch him and cry out.

When at last she fell back with a satisfied shudder, they lay together as they always did, with arms and legs wrapped around each other, two lovers who knew each other’s bodies well.

“It feels like it’s been forever since you were here,” she whispered.

“I would have come Thursday, but that workshop went on forever.”

“Which workshop?”

“Couples counseling.” He gave a sad, ironic laugh. “As if I’m the person who can tell them how to heal their marriages. There’s so much anger and pain, Maura. It was an ordeal just sitting in the same room with those people. I wanted to tell them,
It will never work, you’ll never be happy with each other. You married the wrong person!
”

“That might be the best advice you could have given them.”

“It would have been an act of mercy.” Gently he brushed the hair from her face, and his hand lingered on her cheek. “It would have been so much kinder to give them permission to leave. To find someone who
would
make them happy. The way you make me happy.”

She smiled. “And
you
make me hungry.” She sat up, and the scent of their lovemaking wafted up from the rumpled sheets. The animal smells of warm bodies and desire. “I promised you dinner.”

“I feel guilty that you’re always feeding me.” He, too, sat up and reached for his clothes. “Tell me what I can do.”

“I left the wine in the car. Why don’t you get the bottle and open it? I’ll put the chicken in the oven.”

In her kitchen they sipped wine as the chicken roasted, as she sliced the potatoes and he made the salad. Like any married couple, they cooked and they touched and they kissed. But we’re not married, she thought, glancing sideways at his striking profile, his graying temples. Every moment together was a stolen one, a furtive one, and although they laughed together, sometimes she heard a desperate note in that laughter, as though they were trying to convince themselves that they were happy, damn it, yes they were, despite the guilt and the deceptions and the many nights apart. But she was beginning to see the emotional toll in his face. In just the past few months, his hair had gone noticeably grayer. When it’s completely white, she thought, will we still be meeting with the curtains closed?

And what changes does he see in my face?

It was after midnight when he left her house. She had fallen asleep in his arms and did not hear him rise from the bed. When she awakened he was gone, and the sheet beside her was already cold.

That morning she drank her coffee alone, cooked pancakes alone. Her best memories of her otherwise disastrous and brief marriage to Victor were of Sunday mornings together, rising late from bed to lounge on the couch, where they’d spend half the day reading the newspaper. She would never enjoy such a Sunday with Daniel. While she dozed in her bathrobe with the pages of
The Boston Globe
spread out all around her, Father Daniel Brophy would be ministering to his flock in the church of Our Lady of Divine Light, a flock whose shepherd had himself gone terribly astray.

The sound of her doorbell startled her awake. Groggy from her nap, she sat up on the couch and saw that it was already two in the afternoon.
That could be Daniel at the door.

Scattered newspapers crackled beneath her bare feet as she hurried across the living room. When she opened the door and saw the man who stood on her porch, she suddenly regretted not combing her hair or changing out of the bathrobe.

“I’m sorry I’m a little late,” said Anthony Sansone. “I hope it’s not inconvenient.”

“Late? I’m sorry, but I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Didn’t you get my message? I left it on your answering machine yesterday afternoon. About coming by to see you today.”

“Oh. I guess I forget to check the machine last night.”
I was otherwise occupied.
She stepped back. “Come in.”

He walked into the living room and stopped, gazing at the scattered newspapers, the empty coffee cup. It had been months since she’d seen him, and she was struck yet again by his stillness, by the way he always seemed to be testing the air, searching for the one detail he’d missed. Unlike Daniel, who was quick to reach out even to strangers, Anthony Sansone was a man surrounded by walls, a man who could stand in a crowded room yet seem coolly apart and self-contained. She wondered what he was thinking as he looked at the clutter of her wasted Sunday. Not all of us have butlers, she thought. Not all of us live the way you do, in a Beacon Hill mansion.

“I’m sorry for bothering you at home,” he said. “But I didn’t want this to be an official visit to the ME.” He turned to look at her. “And I did want to find out how you’ve been, Maura. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“I’m fine. It’s been busy.”

“The Mephisto Society’s resumed our weekly dinners in my house. We could certainly use your perspective, and we’d love to have you join us again some evening.”

“To talk about crime? I deal with that subject quite enough at my own job, thank you.”

“Not in the way we approach it. You only look at its final effect; we’re concerned with the reason for its existence.”

She began picking up newspapers and stacking them into a pile. “I don’t really fit in with your group. I don’t accept your theories.”

“Even after what we both experienced? Those murders must have made you wonder. They must have raised the possibility in your mind.”

“That there’s a unified theory of evil to be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls?” She shook her head. “I’m a scientist. I read religious texts for historical insights, not for literal truths. Not to explain the unexplainable.”

“You were trapped with us on the mountain that night. You
saw
the evidence.”

On the night he spoke of, a night in January, they had almost lost their lives. That much they could agree on, because the evidence was as real as the blood left in the aftermath. But there was so much about that night that they would never agree on, and their most fundamental disagreement was about the nature of the monster who had trapped them on that mountain.

“What I saw was a serial murderer, like too many others in this world,” she said. “I don’t need any biblical theories to explain him. Talk to me about
science,
not fables about ancient demonic bloodlines.” She set the stack of newspapers on the coffee table. “Evil just
is.
People can be brutal and some of them kill. We’d all like an explanation for it.”

“Does science explain why a killer would mummify a woman’s body? Why he’d shrink a woman’s head and deposit another woman in the trunk of a car?”

Startled, she turned to look at him. “You already know about those cases?”

But of course he would know. Anthony Sansone’s ties to law enforcement reached the highest levels, into the office of the police commissioner himself. A case as unusual as that of Madam X would certainly catch his attention. And it would stir interest within the secretive Mephisto Society, which had its own bizarre theories about crime and how to combat it.

“There are details even you may not be aware of,” he said.

“Details I think you should be acquainted with.”

“Before we talk about this any further,” she said, “I’m going to get dressed. If you’ll excuse me.”

She retreated to her bedroom. There she pulled on jeans and a button-down shirt, casual attire that was perfectly appropriate for a Sunday afternoon, but she felt underdressed for her distinguished visitor. She didn’t bother with makeup, but simply washed her face and brushed the tangles from her hair. Staring at herself in the mirror, she saw puffy eyes and new strands of gray that she hadn’t noticed before. Well, this is who I am, she thought. A woman who’ll never see forty again. I can’t hide my age and I won’t even try to.

By the time she came out of the bedroom, the smell of brewing coffee was permeating the house. She followed the scent to the kitchen, where Sansone had already pulled two mugs from the cabinet.

“I hope you don’t mind that I took the liberty of making a fresh pot.”

She watched as he picked up the carafe and poured, his broad back turned to her. He looked perfectly at home in her kitchen, and it annoyed her how effortlessly he had invaded her house. He had the knack of walking into any room, in any house, and just by his presence laying claim to the territory.

He handed her a cup, and to her surprise he’d added just the right amount of sugar and cream, exactly as she liked it. It was a detail she hadn’t expected him to remember.

“It’s time to talk about Madam X,” he said. “And what you may really be dealing with.”

“How much do you know?”

“I know you have three linked deaths.”

“We don’t know they’re linked.”

“Three victims, all preserved in grotesque ways? That’s a rather unique signature.”

“I haven’t done the autopsy on the third victim, so I can’t tell you anything about her. Not even how she was preserved.”

“I’m told it wasn’t a classic mummification.”

“If by
classic
you mean salted, dried, and wrapped, no, it wasn’t.”

“Her features are relatively intact?”

“Yes. Remarkably so. But her tissues still retain moisture. I’ve never autopsied a body like this one. I’m not even sure how to keep her preserved in her current state.”

“What about the owner of the car? She’s an archaeologist, isn’t she? Does she have any idea how the body was preserved?”

“I didn’t speak to her. From what Jane told me, the woman was pretty shaken up.”

He set down his coffee cup and his gaze was so direct it almost felt like an assault. “What do you know about Dr. Pulcillo?”

“Why are you asking about her?”

“Because she works for them, Maura.”

“Them?”

“The Crispin Museum.”

“You make it sound like a malevolent institution.”

“You agreed to view the CT scan. You were part of that media circus they organized around Madam X. You must have known what you were getting into.”

“The curator invited me to observe. He didn’t tell me there
would
be a media circus. He just thought I’d be interested in watching the scan, and of course I was.”

“And you didn’t know anything about the museum when you agreed to participate?”

“I visited the Crispin a few years ago. It’s a quirky collection but it’s worth seeing. It’s not that different from a number of other private museums I’ve visited, founded by wealthy families who want to show off their collections.”

“The Crispins are something of a special family.”

“What makes them special?”

He sat down in the chair across from her so their gazes were level. “The fact that no one really knows where they came from.”

“Does it matter?”

“It’s a bit curious, don’t you think? The first Crispin on record was Cornelius, who surfaced in Boston in 1850. He claimed to be a titled Englishman.”

“You’re implying it wasn’t true.”

“There’s no record of him in England. Or anywhere else, for that matter. He simply materialized on the scene one day, and was said to be a handsome man of great charm. He married well and proceeded to build his wealth. He and his descendants were collectors and tireless travelers, and they brought home curiosities from every continent. There were the usual items—carvings and burial goods and animal specimens. But what Cornelius and his family seemed especially interested in were weapons. Every variety of weapon used by armies around the world. It was an appropriate interest of theirs, considering how their fortune was made.”

“How?”

“Wars, Maura. Ever since Cornelius, they’ve been profiteers. He became wealthy during the Civil War, running weapons to the South. His descendants continued the tradition, profiting from conflicts all over the world, from Africa to Asia to the Middle East. They made a secret pact with Hitler to provide weapons for his troops, and simultaneously armed the Allied forces. In China, they supplied both the Nationalist and the Communist armies. Their merchandise ended up in Algiers and Lebanon and the Belgian Congo. It didn’t matter who was fighting whom. They didn’t take sides; they just took the money. As long as blood was being shed somewhere, they stood to make a profit.”