Beverly Connor - Dead Past

“I will, thanks.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Pierce,” said Diane.

“That’s what you pay me for.” She smiled and left the aquatics lab.

“This is just so stupid of me,” said Juliet.

“No, it isn’t,” said Diane. “Can you answer some questions?”

“Sure.”

“Did you see what the man chasing you looked like?” asked Diane.

“He was mean. He had a black goatee of a beard and straight black hair.”

“Do you know why he was chasing you?” asked Diane.

“No. That thing you said, why did you say it to me?” She looked up at Diane in anguish, as if Diane had done it on purpose.

“You mean the sentence with the word you feared?” Diane was careful not to say the words again. “I heard it while I was looking for a friend in the library. Students were studying and it was just a phrase I heard. It stuck with me, I suppose because it was a kind of tongue twister. That word is so unusual, it was odd to hear it twice in so short a time. Why did that throw you into a flashback?”

“Flashback… like Grampa? I don’t know.” She looked confused. “The man said it,” said Juliet.

“To you?” Diane thought that would be an odd thing to say to a seven-year-old.

“No, but… I don’t know who he said it to. I just heard him say it. It was scary when he said it. I don’t remember anymore. I’m sorry,” said Juliet.

“Did he just say the word, or the whole phrase?” Diane thought that highly unlikely, but why did she freak out so when Diane repeated the sentence.

“The phrase. He said the whole thing the way you said it, and he was looking at me,” said Juliet.

“Looking at you? Directly at you?” asked Diane.

“No, I’m not sure…” Juliet looked like she might panic again.

“That’s all right. Why don’t you take your grandmother to the restaurant? Sit in a quiet booth, have something cool to drink, get some nourishment,” said Diane. “I’ll walk with the two of you.”

“I think we both could use some food,” said her grandmother. “I’ll bet you’ve been skipping meals, haven’t you, dear?”

Diane walked them to the elevators and they all went down to the restaurant. Diane told the hostess to seat them in her place, which was her code for the bill to be put on her tab as well.

“Have a good meal. When you finish I’ll have someone drive you home,” said Diane.

“I can drive. I’m fine, really,” said Juliet. “It’s just that darn word.” She tried to smile.

Ruby Torkel turned to Diane. “You keep the doll. Don’t let anybody take it away from you.”

“I won’t.”

Diane didn’t even try to explain to her that the security guard was just making sure that nothing dangerous was being brought into the museum.

“Is that the doll you said I stole?” asked Juliet. She touched the package with her fingertips. “I don’t even remember what it looks like.”

“Do you want to see it?” asked her grandmother.

Juliet grabbed her hand back as if the package had turned into a snake. “No… I think I’ve freaked everyone out enough for one day. Maybe when the museum is having a slow day.” She smiled again.

“Do you remember anything Juliet said when she showed you the doll?” Diane asked Mrs. Torkel.

“Oh, she didn’t show it to me. I found her playing with it. She said it had something… a secret, that’s what it was. You know how kids are, making stuff up. I asked her where she got it and she wouldn’t tell me; she just said it was a secret. I told her she had to give it back, but she said her friend gave it to her. That’s when I took it away and told her she couldn’t play with something that wasn’t hers and people just didn’t give away toys that nice.”

Juliet stood listening to her grandmother with a frown. “I don’t remember any of that.”

“Well, honey, you were seven,” said Mrs. Torkel.

“I’m going to leave the two of you to eat and catch up on news. Juliet, you can have the rest of the day off,” said Diane. “Oh, would you mind if I open the package in my office?”

“Go ahead,” said Juliet. “I don’t care.”

Diane left them and, carrying the package, went to her office.

“Hey, Andie. Anything going on?” asked Diane as she walked through Andie’s office.

“Usual stuff. Someone said there was a commotion in Fish?” she said.

“News travels fast. It was nothing. I’m going to be in my office for a while.”

“MOF?” asked Andie.

MOF was Andie’s abbreviation for Museum On Fire, which meant she would only disturb Diane in a dire emergency.

“Not that drastic, but field everything you can,” said Diane.

She sat down at her desk and looked at the package a moment before she unwrapped it. The doll was in almost-new condition. It was a pretty doll with a porcelain head, feet, and hands, and a soft body. It had a head full of black finger curls and an ornate green satin bonnet and satin green dress trimmed in white fur. Her feet were covered in high-top patent leather shoes and white stockings. She carried a white fur muff in one hand, attached by a piece of elastic sewn into the muff and looped over the wrist. It was a nice doll, but not an expensive one. Diane’s sister collected dolls, so Diane had a passing familiarity with them.

Diane leaned back in her chair and focused her eyes on the table fountain and the water running over the rocks. The making of palimpsests was possible even with papyri. That was such an odd phrase. What exactly did it mean-other than the obvious literal meaning? Diane knew what a palimpsest was, but she grabbed her Webster’s dictionary anyway and looked it up: Palimpsest:writing material as a parchment or tablet used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased.

Diane knew that it was a practice in ancient times to erase the work of an earlier author and reuse the parchment to pen another piece of work. Sometimes the earlier work can still be deciphered. Korey Jordan, her head conservator, had revealed the earlier writing on a medieval parchment that was a palimpsest.

Why would a kidnapper or killer use a sentence like that? What was the meaning in that context?

But the more important mystery in her mind was why had she heard it in the library-apparently the exact sentence. Was it actually more common than she thought? She got on her computer and flipped over to the Internet and Googled the sentence with quotations. No hits whatsoever. She removed the quotations and tried again. She got a lot of hits, but none that contained the words in any combination even close to the sentence she heard. She clicked on her bookmark of the Gutenberg project and searched the offerings. Nothing.

So, it didn’t seem to be a common quotation. Then who in the library said it? She closed her eyes and tried to remember the voice. Female? That’s what she thought she remembered.

It seemed to stretch the imagination that it could be the same person who had said it in Florida twenty years ago, here now-in the university library. But it was quite a coincidence. Her thoughts were interrupted by her intercom.

“Sorry, Dr. Fallon. It’s David. I thought you might want to talk with him.”

“Thank you, Andie. Put him through.”

“Diane, I did the search in Arizona and Florida and found no such murders. I increased the dates and increased the area of search-still nothing that fit your criteria. Sorry.”

“Thanks, David. If I get any more variables, I may ask you to search again.”

“Sure.”

She hung up the phone.

“Well, damn,” she said out loud. “I was so sure.”

She picked up the doll again and looked into its dark eyes. So this doll has a secret? To Diane, that meant one thing. She lifted the dress and examined the stitching.