Murder Never Forgets (30 page)

“I didn’t know they had you here.” That’s my father, breathing sweet nothings to the cartonnage. “That is good. Almost as good as my coffin lid.”

Rob is watching the room to the right. It’s smaller than this one but also has plenty of glass cases and statues. “People,” he asides to me. “Dodging around.”

I agree with him. The scene is getting too active.

“At least get that thing out,” he means the token.

Yes, get the token and then go down to the coffin lid, just Rob and me to start, and try hard to understand. Neither of us is very sure about our hieroglyphs. We need Edward Day. Who may not be that sure, either. But will probably join us after he sees us there. And if he’s full of blue pills, maybe he has his memory of hieroglyphs back.

I try to rehearse again what I think happened between my father and Aunt Crystal.

She was on her way down to the beach.

She met my father.

She wanted to tell him where she had hidden the incriminating whatsit. Text, probably. Aunt Crystal liked pieces of paper.

So she wrote him a note in a form that she thought he’d maybe understand. Or, maybe show to me.

“Is it sometimes cold in here?” my father is asking the cartonnage lady. Solicitously worried about her welfare in the afterlife. “Is the Eye of Horus triumphant?”

I tell Rob I’ll be back in a minute and snake my way out to the dark corridor and through to the ladies’ room, which of course has been Egyptianed up with murals of pharaohs and pyramids and with liquid soap containers that look like canopic jars. I sit down on the marble floor and take off my sneaker and then, after I’ve extracted the Walgreen’s receipt, have to decide where to put the damn thing. Down my bra? No. I’m not that well stacked; it’s likely to drop out the bottom. My backpack is the only logical place; I put the token in the outside pocket.

And emerge from the restroom into a hectic scene.

A busload of kids, fifth grade ones maybe, children about four feet high, has just been unloaded in front of the door.

A teacher has them lined up. Brighter lights have been turned on in the hall. Egon Rothskellar is jeeping around at the head of the line. The teacher is issuing ultimatums: No touching. No running. No getting under things. No chewing gum. Yes, there is a mummy in a glass case, but anybody who runs or touches has to go sit in the bus and doesn’t get to see the mummy. Now I know you’re going to make me proud of you. Mr. Rothskellar has done a wonderful, wonderful thing, having a real Egyptian museum here.

The teacher assesses her line, which looks ready to explode, and signals to Egon to open the inner doors. There are about twenty kids, but it seems like more.

I remember that I am a grown-up and dodge around the head of the line and out into the main room where Daddy is still whispering remarks to the cartonnage lady and Rob is backed against the wall. Behind me the line of kids gallops in like the wolf on the fold, but trying hard to muffle their normal instincts. “Hey, wheresa mummy? In there, I betcha. Or there, or there?” they ask, pointing in various directions.

“Jeez, Rob,” I take his hand, and lead him ahead of the mob down to the Edward Day Exhibit.

 
 
My phone rings. I consider just letting it ring, but after it does that once, twice, three times, and I see the teacher looking at me censoriously and a female guard plodding forward on her prison-issue shoes, after all that I answer and am greeted by the chirpy voice of Mrs. Cohen. “Carla, my dear, good morning, good morning. How are you? Where are you? Such terrible things are happening here . . . we are so interested, so worried. What about Ed? Is he there? Is he better?” The fifth grade kids, who like cell phones, have collected to watch, the guard is saying things like, “Just let me keep the instrument for you until you have seen the exhibits, please,” so I tell Mrs. Cohen that yes, Daddy is okay. We’re at Egypt Regained where we’re going to Daddy’s special room to see his exhibit. Thank you for calling; love to everybody, I have to stop now. And I hand the phone over to the guard, who goes away to check it and put a label on it.

I was glad to tell Mrs. Cohen where we were. It seems a good idea to spread the word around.

The kids are in a circle of about six, staring at me transfixed. Perhaps the charm is that the guard made me surrender the phone. Or maybe they see me acting nervous and find this interesting. Many little, round staring eyes are appraising me.

Back in the main room my father is still flirting with his gesso girlfriend.

“Father,” I call, and, “Edward,” and, finally, “Dr. Day.”

“Dr. Day” gets a little action. He turns in our direction.

“They have made a mistake here,” I say.

“What, darling?”

“Your translation is missing.” And it is. There used to be a word-for-word rendering of the text pasted onto the front of the case.

A section of the fifth grade thinks this may be important and tries to crowd into the Edward Day Exhibit.

Rob bends over, to become closer to their height. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he says. “The rest of your class doesn’t know this yet. The mummies are upstairs. The first kids upstairs will get to stand right next to the case and see the mummy close up, see how many teeth it has left and whether its eyeholes are open or shut and whether it still has eyeballs in there; you’ll see really clearly.”

Rob has said the magic words. The kids near the enclosure entrance start out on the run, and then remember about running and its penalties, so they key down and are off, stiff-legged, but as fast as they can manage.

And the commotion has another result; it also lures my father down here. He says good-bye to his gesso-wrapped friend and actually hurries toward us.

Rob is an old meanie. There are no mummies upstairs, only small, mostly mud-colored ceramics. But I guess it will take the kids a while to find that out.

Meanwhile, I have ascertained that there is an actual door to the Edward Day Exhibit. It’s folded back against the wall. I scoop Edward Day and Rob inside and close the door, which is tall and made of some sort of reddish wood and has a bronze clasp on it.

“Now, Daddy,” I say. I unfold the token.

There it is, all our token iconology, the little figure with its arms in the air, some straight lines.

Aunt Crystal wasn’t an Egyptologist at all; she was mildly critical of archaeology in general because she didn’t like my mother. But she was proud of Edward Day and had learned a few things about his work. I’m almost certain her drawings will be translatable.

If there are hieroglyphs on the lid that look like these, we’ve got a starting point even without the text that used to be part of the exhibit. Maybe I, or Rob, can free-associate some. And if Daddy is feeling anything like his old self, he’ll be translating clearly, right away.

I turn up the lights on the enclosure and twist a handle on the bronze door. I don’t want to be interrupted while we’re doing this. I’ve locked us in.

Chapter 23

We’ve been in a huddle inside the Edward Day exhibit for twenty minutes now, and it’s beginning to feel like being barricaded in a besieged castle. Outside our door, the fifth grade has returned, and the conversation and scuffling has gotten oceanic; inside the temperature is rising.

My father seems, at last, to be delighted at his reunion with his lid. He stands, hands in pockets, beaming down into the case, murmuring little snatches of phrases. “Victorious. . . . In the underworld.” I’ve asked him to look at the token, which I’m clutching in my hand, but he waves me away.

Rob and I are bent double near the south end of the case, trying to match Aunt Crystal’s kneeling figure and the straight lines with the incisions on the lid.

This is harder than you might expect.

Incisions don’t stand out sharply on old, very battered, very scuffed wood.

I’ve tried from every angle. The north end of the case. The south end. With the lights turned higher, which they aren’t supposed to be, because that damages ancient artifacts. “Daddy, help me,” I say. “You know what’s on there. You know it from way back.” I circle the case again.

My father says something about opening the storehouses. He’s quietly cheerful.

I’m wasting energy being angry about the lack of a printed translation. Certainly there used to be one; the big importance of the coffin lid was that it changed hieroglyphic readings. But Egyptologists are always fighting about what something means, maybe in one of those disputes the text got rewritten. And yes, I see it now; there’s a notice on the wall. WE ARE UPDATING THE COMMENTARY ON THIS EXHIBIT.

Hell and hell.

I’m glad Daddy hasn’t noticed that sign, evidence of people interfering in his history. I move around the case again, trying to get a better angle on those scratchy markings.

I kick off one shoe, the one that had the token in it. It’s come untied, and I’ve been tripping on the lace.

Suddenly, either light or association or the slant of the sun from outside—something works, and I can see a whole set of indentations. I can see them; I can follow them, and I know what they mean. “Hey,” I say. “Rob. I
get
it.”

Rob says, “My God, my God,” and pushes up beside me.

“See there,” I say. “And there? And then the straight lines. That’s our text. Don’t you think so? Yes, sure.”

“Okay,” Rob says. “Yep, you’re right. Two lines, one heavy, one light and serrated. Yes. So. What does the rest of it say?”

“I can’t read that part, but I can read the stuff before. I recognize it. Sort of a preamble. It’s a formulaic statement, something they ask over and over, always the same way. A ritual question. It looks like bird, pen, kneeling figure, bird, plus some other stuff. It means ‘What then is it?’ ”

I’m so pleased at recognizing this that I don’t stop to evaluate what my find adds up to for us. How does it help us right now? For the moment I don’t care.

But Rob cares, big-time.

“What then
is
it?” He bleats. He says this twice, once as a simple question and a second time, loud and cross, as an angry exclamation. He follows that up with, “Jesus triumphant, you mean to say we’ve come so far and done so many stupid things to be asked ‘What then is it?’ ”

My bird-pen speech has also awakened my father. “Bird, pen?” he asks. “Oh, daughter. I cannot believe it. Not
bird, pen
. A hieroglyph has a name. There is a proper noun for each hieroglyph. When I was younger I knew. I cannot believe that you would call it ‘bird, pen.’ ”

My failure upsets him a lot. “Simplifying. Bad, very bad . . . your shorthand . . . for the hieroglyphs, my dear.”

Well, at least I have his attention. I start out, “Listen, Father . . .”

Outside, the fifth grade has gotten into a fight. Feet slide, voices screech, someone calls someone an asshole, a grown-up voice says, “All right, you kids, cut it out, cut it out and get away from here. Get away from that door. Come on now . . . Nobody, nobody at all is going to see even one mummy if you don’t . . . Now come on, get in line.”

The outside gradually dies down into silence, and my father is still looking at me as if he’s interested. I seize the day. I grab one of his hands. “Listen, Daddy, after ‘What then is it,’ what comes next?”

He looks puzzled. “Many things, I think.”

I point down at the coffin lid. “It’s too scarred, I can’t read it. But you did. You read it when you wrote your book. What was the next thing it said?”

“Why, my dear.” He puts his other hand to his forehead in a protective, shielding gesture. “Various things. Good things.”

“No,” I announce fiercely. “You
know
. Just there, on your coffin lid. It is
yours
, you know.”

“Why, of course, my dear. Certainly it is.”

“What came after ‘What then is it?’ ”

“Why . . .” He waits for a minute, tilts his head. “Why, darling, a song of some kind? Maybe ‘Wake up, wake up, darling Corey’?”

“
No
,” I tell him, “absolutely not. Daddy,
think
.”

My father surveys me and begins to get a pleased crinkle at the corner of his eyes, “Why, darling, I know, yes, of course I know. It was about the millions of years. The Dark Lake.” Chin up, he shows me his sunny smile. He moves a hand rhythmically. “ ‘Dark Lake is the name of the other,’” he intones, the singsong voice telling me it’s a quote.

“Dark Lake?” I say. “What’s Dark Lake?”

“Dark Lake. A deep lake. Sacred. There are two of them. Heracleopolis. I think that’s right.”

I look at Rob. “Oh, my God, there it is.”

“What?” ask Rob. “How? Where what is?”

I’m remembering Belle’s statement about Daddy being interested in the well. The one in the hills behind the Manor. The one Rob and I walked up to. “And he calls it Dark Lake,” Belle had told me. “Of course it isn’t a lake, but that’s what he calls it.”