Tess Gerritsen - The Keepsake

“Is there any news?” he asked, anxiously searching her face.

“I’m sorry, but there isn’t. May I come in, Dr. Robinson?”

He gave a weary nod. “Of course.”

In her parents’ Revere home, the TV was the centerpiece of the living room, and the coffee table was littered with various remotes that had cloned themselves over the years. But in Robinson’s living room she saw no television at all, no entertainment center, and not a remote device in sight. Instead there were shelves filled with books and figurines and bits of pottery, and on the wall hung framed maps of the ancient world. It was every inch an impoverished academic’s house, but there was an orderliness to the clutter, as though every knickknack was precisely where it should be.

He glanced around the room as though uncertain what to do next, then helplessly waved his hands. “I’m sorry. I should offer you something to drink, shouldn’t I? I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”

“I’m fine, thank you. Why don’t we just sit down and talk?”

They sank onto comfortable but well-worn chairs. Outside a motorcycle roared past, but inside the house, with its shell-shocked owner, there was silence. He said softly: “I don’t know what I should do.”

“I’ve heard the museum may be closed permanently.”

“I wasn’t talking about the museum. I meant Josephine. I’d do anything to help you find her, but what can I do?” He gestured to his books, his maps. “ Thisis what I’m good at. Collecting and cataloging! Interpreting useless details from the past. What purpose does it serve her, I ask you? It doesn’t help Josephine.” He looked down in defeat. “It didn’t save Simon.”

“Maybe you can help us.”

He looked at her with exhaustion-hollowed eyes. “Ask me. Tell me what you need.”

“I’ll start with this question. What was your relationship with Josephine?”

He frowned. “Relationship?”

“She was more than a colleague, I think.” A lot more, judging by what she saw in his face.

He shook his head. “Look at me, Detective. I’m fourteen years older than she is. I’m hopelessly myopic, I barely make a living, and I’m starting to go bald. Why would someone like her want someone like me?”

“So she wasn’t interested in a romantic relationship.”

“I can’t imagine she would be.”

“You mean you don’t actually know? You never asked?”

He gave an embarrassed laugh. “I didn’t have the nerve to actually get the words out. And I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. It might have ruined what we did have.”

“What was that?”

He smiled. “She’s like me-she’s so much like me. Hand us an old bone fragment or a rusted blade, and we can both feel the heat of history in it. That’s what we had in common, a passion for what came before us. That would have been enough, just being able to share that much.” His head drooped and he admitted: “I was afraid to ask for more than that.”

“Why?”

“Because of how beautiful she is,” he said, his words soft as a prayer.

“Was that one of the reasons you hired her?”

She could see that her question instantly offended him. His face tightened and he straightened. “I would never hire on the basis of physical appearance. My only standards are competence and experience.”

“Yet Josephine had almost no experience on her résumé. She was fresh from a doctoral program. You took her on as consultant, yet she was far less qualified than you are.”

“But I’m not an Egyptologist. That’s why Simon told me he was bringing in a consultant. I suppose I should have felt a bit insulted, but to be honest, I knew I wasn’t qualified to evaluate Madam X. I do acknowledge my own limits.”

“There must have been Egyptologists more qualified than Josephine to choose from.”

“I’m sure there were.”

“You don’t know?”

“Simon made the decision. After I advertised the job opening, we received dozens of résumés. I was in the process of narrowing down the choices when Simon told me he’d already made the decision. Josephine wouldn’t have made even my first cut, but he insisted she had to be the one. And somehow, he found the extra funds to hire her full-time.”

“What do you mean, he found the extra funds?”

“A substantial donation came in. Mummies have that effect, you know. They get donors excited, make them more willing to open their wallets. When you’ve worked in archaeological circles as long as Simon did, you learn who has the deep pockets. You know whom to ask for money.”

“But why did he choose Josephine? That’s the question I keep coming back to. Of all the Egyptologists he could have hired, all the freshly minted PhDs who must have applied, why was she hired?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t enthusiastic about the choice, but I saw no point in arguing because I had the impression that he’d already made up his mind, and there was nothing I could do to change it.” Robinson sighed and looked out the window. “And then I met her,” he said softly. “And I realized there was no one else I’d rather work with. No one else I’d rather…” He fell silent.

On that street of modest homes, the sound of traffic was constant, yet this living room seemed to be a trapped in a different and more genteel era, a time when a rumpled eccentric like Nicholas Robinson might contentedly grow old while surrounded by his books and maps. But he had fallen in love, and there was no contentment in his face, only anguish.

“She’s alive,” he said. “I need to believe that.” He looked at Jane. “ Youbelieve it, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do,” she said. She looked away before he could read the rest of the answer in her eyes. But I don’t know if we can save her.

That evening, Maura dined alone.

She had planned a romantic dinner for two, and a day earlier she had cruised the grocery store aisles gathering Meyer lemons and parsley, veal shanks and garlic, all the ingredients she needed to make Daniel’s favorite, osso buco. But the best-laid plans of illicit lovers can crumble in an instant with a single phone call. Only hours ago, Daniel had apologetically delivered the news that he was expected to dine that night with visiting bishops from New York. The call had ended as it so often did. I’m sorry, Maura. I love you, Maura. I wish I could get out of this.

But he never could.

Now those veal shanks were stored in her freezer, and instead of osso buco, she was resigned to dining alone on a grilled cheese sandwich and a stiff gin and tonic.

She imagined where Daniel was at that moment. She pictured a table with men dressed in somber black, the preliminary bowing of heads, the murmured blessing over the food. The subdued clink of silverware and china as they discussed matters of importance to the church: declining seminary enrollments, the graying of the priesthood. Every profession conducted its own business dinners, yet when theirs was finished, these men would not go home to wives and families, but to their lonely beds. She wondered: As you sip your wine, as you look around the table at your colleagues, are you troubled at all by the absence of women’s faces, women’s voices?

Are you thinking at all of me?

She pressed the cheese sandwich onto the hot skillet and watched as butter sizzled, as the bread crisped. Like scrambled eggs, a grilled cheese sandwich was one of her meals of last resort, and the scent of browning butter brought back all the exhausted nights she’d known as a medical student. It was also the scent of those wounded evenings after her divorce, when planning a meal took more effort than she could muster. The smell of a grilled cheese sandwich was the scent of defeat.