Tess Gerritsen - The Keepsake

“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 innocent time. A time when men would stand up if a woman walked into the room.

“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 running in. It’s pretty wet out there, isn’t it?”

“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.”

“Another what?”

“Another letter addressed to Josephine Sommer. The mailman asked me what you said about the last one, and I told him you took it.”

She glanced through the mail she’d just collected and spotted the envelope. It was the same handwriting. This one, too, bore a Boston postmark.

“It’s kind of confusing for the post office, you know?” said Mr. Goodwin. “You might want to tell the sender to update your name.”

“Right. Thanks.” She started up the stairs.

“Did you find your old key ring yet?” he yelled.

Without answering, she scurried into her apartment and shut the door. Dropping the rest of the mail on the couch, she quickly ripped open the envelope addressed to Josephine Sommer and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. She stared at the wordsBLUE HILLS RESERVATION and wondered why anyone would send her a photocopied map of nearby hiking trails. Then she turned the sheet over and saw what had been handwritten in ink on the other side:

FIND ME.

Beneath that were numbers:

42 13 06.39

71 04 06.48

She sank onto the couch, the two words staring up from her lap. Outside, the rain had intensified to a torrent. Thunder rumbled closer, and a slash of lightning lit the window.

FIND ME.

There was no threat implied in that message, nothing that made her think the sender meant any harm.

She thought of the earlier note she had received a few days ago: The police are not your friends. Again not a threat, but a sensible whisper of advice. The police were not her friends; this was something she already knew, something she’d known since she was fourteen years old.

She focused on the two numbers. It took her only seconds to recognize what they must represent.

With the lightning storm moving closer, it was not a good time to turn on her computer, but she booted it up anyway. She navigated to the site for Google Earth and used the two numbers as latitude and longitude. Magically the screen panned across a map of Massachusetts and zoomed in on an area of forested land near Boston.

It was the Blue Hills Reservation.

She had guessed correctly; the two numbers were coordinates, and they pointed to a precise location within the park. Clearly this was the location she was meant to visit, but for what reason? She saw no time or date given for any rendezvous. Certainly no one would patiently wait in a park for the hours or days it might take until she showed up. No, there was something specific she was supposed to find there. Not a person, but a thing.

She made a quick Internet search for Blue Hills Reservation and learned that it was a seven-thousand-acre park south of Milton. It had 125 miles of trails that traversed forest, swamp, meadows, and bogs, and was home to a diversity of wildlife, including the timber rattlesnake. Now, there was an attraction to recommend it. A chance to encounter rattlesnakes. She retrieved a Boston-area map from her bookshelf and spread it open on the coffee table. Gazing at the large area of green that represented the park, she wondered if she’d have to bushwhack her way through trees and swamp in search of…what? Something bigger or smaller than a bread box?

And how will I know when I’ve reached it?

It was time to pay a call on the gadget man.

She went downstairs and knocked on the door to 1A. Mr. Goodwin appeared, his magnifying goggles perched on top of his head like a second pair of eyes.

“I wonder if I could ask you a favor?” she said.

“I’m right in the middle of something. Will it be quick?”

She glanced past him, into the room cluttered with small appliances and electronics waiting to be repaired. “I’m thinking of buying a GPS for my car. You have one, don’t you? Is it easy to figure out?”

Instantly his face lit up. Ask him about a gadget, any gadget, and you could make him a happy man. “Oh my, yes! I don’t know what I’d do without mine. I have three of them. I took one to Frankfurt last year, when I visited my daughter, and just like that I knew the streets like a native. Didn’t have to ask for directions, just plugged in the address and off I went. You should’ve seen the looks of envy I got. There were guys stopping me on the street just so they could get a closer look at it.”