Stolen Souls

by Sackett, Jeffrey

  "Something like that. Jeeze, are my paranoias that obvious to everybody? Suzanne just called to tell me that they arrived okay, now you call to calm me down—everybody seems to know that I'm wide awake at three in the morning!"

  "We just know you, babe, that's all. If your roommate from college and your husband-to-be didn't understand how your mind works, then nobody would."

  "I guess that's true," she replied, smiling. "I can't help but be a bit nervous."

  "Of course. There'd be something wrong with you if you weren't. This is a major step for you. It will look great on a resume."

  "That's not why I'm doing it, Tommy, and you know it."

  "I know. But it doesn't hurt to be able to say that you managed to create a legitimate museum out of a dumpy college warehouse."

  "Tommy, it already was a legitimate museum when they hired me as curator. It just had a severely limited collection."

  "Well, you've made it grow."

  She accepted the compliment. "Want to come over for breakfast? I have some coffee going."

  "Are you kidding? I'm going back to sleep."

  "How can you sleep on a day like this?"

  "Hey, they aren't my mummies! I just called to tell you not to worry, that the exhibits will get here all right, and that I'll see you at the museum at seven."

  "You can be a little late. Suzie says that they're going to stop for breakfast when they reach New Paltz."

  Thomas Sawhill's rather groggy voice became suddenly serious. "I hope they know enough not to just leave the truck in some parking lot while they eat. I mean, those pieces are valuable, and—"

  She laughed. "Now who's being paranoid? I don't think anyone's going to break into the truck and steal dead bodies!" She knew that he pretended not to have any interest in the exhibits, but she also knew that, for her sake, he was as excited about the acquisition as she was. This was one of the things which endeared him to her, the fact that he took her career seriously. All too many men in the past had regarded it as a hobby. "Suzie assured me that they'll keep the shipment secure."

  "Well, that's good. Ever since you told me what she was like when you went to college together—"

  "That was fifteen years ago, Tom. She's changed. And besides, I was the exact same way back then. If you can't be irresponsible and self-indulgent in college, when can you be?"

  "Well, I never was."

  "Your loss."

  "Don't be nasty." He chuckled as he spoke. "I'm going back to bed. I'll see you about seven. Bye."

  "Bye."

  Harriet went back out to the kitchen to find her toast burned beyond redemption, but the coffee smelled good. Just as well, she thought. I couldn't eat anything right now anyway. She poured herself a cup of coffee and walked back into the bedroom.

  As she sat down in front of the mirror which was the upper part of the rear panel of her vanity she gazed at her reflection and thought contentedly about her current situation. She had everything she had ever really wanted out of life. All the work she had put in at the University of Chicago, where she earned her doctorate in Egyptology at one of the world's best departments dedicated to that arcane discipline, had been worthwhile. Oh, WinthropCollege was not Yale or Harvard, that was obvious. But it was a good school, small, serious, high standards, exclusive in the purest academic sense. Her dual role as professor of cultural anthropology and curator of the small but, under her guidance, growing WinthropMuseum afforded her all the professional satisfaction she could possibly want. She had scored quite a personal triumph in beating whatever competition there may have been in the purchase of the seven mummies, and she contemplated the expanded, increasingly well-known little museum with no small degree of delight.

  And there was Tommy. It is difficult enough to find an intelligent, sensitive man under any circumstances, but to find one who understood and encouraged her fascination with the long dead civilization which had been her field of study—that was an incredible stroke of luck. She reflected briefly on the numerous ignoramuses she had dated, and their stupid, childish jokes about Egyptology ("So! You're studying to be a Mummy!"), and felt pleased that Thomas Sawhill contrasted with them so well.

  As she looked at her face in the mirror, she smiled. She had always assumed, with the absurd ignorance of childhood, that the body started to decay at thirty Well, she was nearly half a decade beyond that, and she felt that she had never looked better. Her light blue eyes were unencumbered by crow's-feet, her smooth white skin was still smooth and white. Her long light-brown hair was softly layered around her heart-shaped face and highlighted with subtle streaks of blond. And if she had taken recourse to the color bottle of late to hide those few inevitable hints of gray, what of it?

  She stood up and examined her figure in the mirror with the same objective precision she applied to archeological artifacts. I'm no artifact yet, she thought. Her waist was slim, her stomach flat, her breasts high. She had always felt that she was a bit too busty, but it didn't seem to bother Thomas Sawhill. She grinned. Not at all!

  She sat down again and sipped from her coffee. It's amazing to think that just three years ago she had been so depressed that she had even, in a moment of alcoholic depression, considered ending it all. She had been unattached and unemployed (there being very little demand for Egyptologists in today's high-tech economy); she had been overweight and deeply in debt.

  And then came the job offer at WinthropCollege. She had applied for it as a matter of course, but at the time, living in Manhattan and hoping for a position on the faculty of some at least halfway decent college, the idea of moving to a small town like Greenfield up in New York's hinterland to teach at a hole in the wall school like Winthrop seemed like a sentence of professional death. Her first impression of the town had done nothing to alter her opinion. Greenfield was small, pretty, and friendly, but there was nothing in the town other than the college, one short business street, a movie theater, and two bars, one for the college kids and one for the townies.

  She almost prayed that the college would not offer her the position, and when they did, it was only the dire economic situation in which she found herself that made her accept it. Her old friend, Suzanne Melendez, with whom she had roomed for four years at the state college at New Paltz, had counseled her to decline the appointment. Of course, Suzanne was a devoted urbanite and regarded any population center of under a million people as a bastion of barbarism.

  Well, Suzanne was wrong, and Harriet had made the best decision of her life by accepting the position. She found, much to her surprise, that the school was very selective in its admissions policies, so that the quality of students whom she taught was far above average. The school was generously funded by a private foundation bequest, thus being able to avoid the kind of financial pressures which so often led small colleges to accept anyone who could pay the tuition. She was given the additional appointment of museum curator after her first year at Winthrop, and she met Thomas Sawhill, the town physician, at a barbecue at the college president's house that summer. It wasn't quite love at first sight, but it came close.

  And the town of Greenfield itself had proven to be an extremely pleasant place to live and work. There was an air of calm, of ease of friendliness, of safety here which she had never known, not in New York City, not in Chicago. It was the normal small-town atmosphere, but it was all new to her. She loved it.

  Everything was going great. Everything.

  And when she saw the notice in the LondonTimes, which Suzanne had thoughtfully sent her, she began to think that she had been born under some sort of lucky star. She dared to hope that the modest offer would be considered. She was flabbergasted when it was accepted. Seven mummies from a private collection! Unexamined, uncatalogued, unphotographed, untouched. According to Mr. Pearson, the lawyer she spoke with over the phone, the mummies had been acquired by a previous Earl of Selwyn sometime in the past, no one knew when, and had lain untouched and unopened in the attic of the family mansion. It was almost as if she had di
scovered them herself. She smiled at the foolishness of the thought. She glanced at the clock.

  Harriet shook her head as if to clear it. Stop wasting time, she thought. You have a big day ahead of you. Five o'clock already!

  She took a quick shower, put on her makeup a bit more quickly than usual, and dressed. She put on a black ruffled blouse and black slacks. She chose black because she anticipated having to do some crawling around on her hands and knees to examine the cases the mummies would doubtless be stored in.

  Harriet left her apartment, climbed into her vintage Volkswagen Beetle, and drove the short distance to WinthropCollege. She waved as she passed the statue of Montgomery Winthrop, the nineteenth-century tycoon whose largess had created and posthumously sustained the college named for him. Good old Monty, she thought. She pulled into her parking space in the faculty lot and walked the few hundred yards to the museum.

  Tom was joking when he referred to the museum as a dumpy college warehouse, but there was an element of truth to the description. What was now the museum had until only five years before been precisely that, a storage building. It had been her predecessor, now curator of a larger museum at a larger college, who had first sorted through the boxes and piles in the warehouse and discovered that the nucleus of a small museum collection already existed at Winthrop. True, much of it consisted of American Indian artifacts and paintings by some of the lesser luminaries of American brush and canvas, but it was a start. He, and Harriet after him, had been steadily accumulating exhibits, a piece here and a piece there, slowly creating a decent, though somewhat eclectic, collection.

  She surveyed her domain from without. The eager and unpaid labor provided by the students at Winthrop had turned the warehouse into an attractive little museum. Harriet knew that museums were generally constructed of brick and stone, but the pleasant wood with its fresh white paint and red trim not only preserved the old American atmosphere; it also seemed to radiate a pristine hominess which could be regarded as a welcome relief from the austere Gothicism which seemed to be the impression made by most museums.

  She unlocked the door and entered, switching on the light beside the doorway. She looked around, pleased at the arrangements she had made for her new exhibits. (Careful, girl, she thought. They're the museum's exhibits, the college's, not yours. Let's not get territorial.) After checking the fire alarm circuit, she shut the door.

  The WinthropMuseum was housed in one very large room. The students had made one significant structural change a few years back, under the watchful eye of a local carpenter who had donated his time and skills to the project. The building was two stories in height but had only one floor. The students had constructed a catwalk which ran along all four sides of the room, at a height one third of the way up the wall. This preserved the airiness which the tall, open center of the room provided, and also allowed the display of exhibits on a second level. Harriet had placed the Indian artifacts against the west wall of the ground floor. The south wall was reserved for the East Asian sculpture which a patron of the school had kindly provided. The north wall, which contained the entrance way, was still largely unused but for the table upon which lay guides and brochures about the college. The walls along the catwalk were filled with paintings, mostly early twentieth century, a few nineteenth, a few modern. A long display case along the west wall catwalk held a collection of vintage swords and other weapons which had been rusting in the museum when it was still a warehouse.

  The east wall of the lower section was completely empty. It was here that Harriet intended to place the mummy cases, resting against the wall. The center of the large, spacious room was at present occupied by seven glass cases, lined in red velvet. The cases were empty. She smiled at them. You won't be empty for much longer. It was her intention to display the mummies themselves in the glass cases, not in their own coffins. The coffins were themselves an exhibit, and she reasoned that she was in a sense making two acquisitions for the price of one.

  She felt a wave of nervousness fighting its way out of her subconscious, but she repressed it. True, she had no idea what condition the mummies were in, but that was unavoidable. It was the fact that they had never been examined or researched which made them such a fascinating find. She hoped that they were largely intact. She remembered how startled she had been at the lifelike visage of Rameses II in the CairoMuseum, and how sad she felt when she looked at the broken, rotted face of Tutankhamen. I hope the embalmers who worked on our mummies were the ones who worked on Rameses, not young King Tut!

  As for the coffins themselves, the mummy cases, she was reasonably certain that they would be of decent display quality. No mummy buried in a substandard-quality coffin would have received an embalming which would enable it to survive for so many thousands of years. Even in death the Egyptian class structure had an impact. The fact that the mummies existed at all indicated that they were not paupers, and that their coffins would thus be worth displaying.

  She turned her head when she heard a soft knock on the door. Sam Goldhaber, the president of WinthropCollege, was smiling at her and half leaning into the room. "Can I come in, boss?" he asked.

  Harriet laughed. "Good morning, Sam. You're up bright and early."

  The elderly man strode into the room. "I've had this date circled on my calendar for weeks. I wouldn't miss this delivery for anything." He brushed a stray lock of thinning white hair off his forehead. "Are you excited?"

  "Oh no," she laughed. "I take possession of ancient Egyptian exhibits every day of the week. Of course I'm excited! I haven't slept a wink all night!"

  Goldhaber chuckled kindly. "You've done a splendid job with this project, Harriet. We're all very, very proud of you."

  "Thanks, Sam. Thanks for giving me the chance to try."

  "My pleasure." He glanced at his watch. "Seven o'clock. When are they scheduled to arrive?"

  "I would think sometime between now and eight. Suzanne called me about three—"

  "Who?"

  "Suzanne—oh, I'm sorry. Suzanne Melendez, my friend with the Surity Insurance Company, who handled the insurance for the shipment."

  "Oh, yes, yes, I remember. She called you?"

  "Yes, at about three this morning. They were just about to leave Kennedy Airport, and it's about a four-hour drive, and she said they were going to stop for some food—so I figure anywhere between now and eight o'clock."

  "I see," he said needlessly. "Well, what shall we do until then?"

  "I think I'll just putter around here," Harriet replied. "There're still a lot of things I have to do in here before we can display the exhibits properly, and—"

  "Listen, young lady," Sam said with mock avuncularity, "there isn't a damn thing you have to do in here, and if you don't take it easy, you're going to develop a nice little ulcer for yourself."

  "Oh, Sam, don't be ridiculous!" she laughed.

  "I'm not," he said, his tone serious now. "You're too much of a workaholic."

  "I'm not a workaholic at all," she said, a bit defensively. "I just take my job seriously, that's all."

  "So do I, but I remember to eat breakfast." He peered at her knowingly over the rims of his glasses. "Did you eat breakfast today?" Her slightly sheepish grin answered his question. "That's what I thought. Let's go to the cafeteria. I'll buy you breakfast."

  "Sam—"

  He shook his head firmly. "I don't want any undernourished faculty members fainting in the classroom. Now, those are your boss's orders!"

  "Doctor's orders too," Thomas Sawhill said from the doorway. "I like my women with some meat on their bones."

  "Tom!" she said cheerfully. "You're early."

  "Not by much," he said, walking into the room and joining them. "After we spoke on the phone I couldn't get back to sleep anyway."

  "I'll bet," she laughed. It was her opinion that Sawhill would be able to sleep through a nuclear war.

  "Well," he said, smiling, "I didn't sleep deeply, anyway, so I got up and came over." He extended his hand to
Sam Goldhaber, who shook it with friendly enthusiasm. "How are you, Sam?"

  "Fine, Tom, fine. And yourself?"

  Sawhill took Harriet's arm and smiled, saying, "Okay, unless I'm going to end up married to an anorexic."

  Harriet sighed and said, "Okay, okay, we'll go get some thing to eat. But let's not dawdle. I want to be here when the exhibits arrive."

  As they walked from the museum to the cafeteria, Harriet took a position between the two men. She glanced left at her boss, who often called her "boss" jokingly, and then right to her lover, and smiled to herself. After years of career frustration and personal loneliness, everything was finally going well.

  Emotional and physical reactions mingled in her as she looked at Thomas Sawhill. Tall, broad-shouldered, with intelligent, flashing brown eyes, he was the essence of adolescent female fantasies made flesh in the reality of adulthood. The bushy but carefully clipped moustache and the flecks of gray in the sideburns beneath his sandy hair lent him an air of dignity which offset the dimples which emerged with each smile. God, he's good-looking! she thought.

  She had to look up to gaze into Sawhill's face, but she was able to look Sam Goldhaber right in the eye—well, when she was wearing heels, at least. Sam was the gentlest, warmest person she had ever known, the kind of man who immediately put everyone at ease and made each person with whom he spoke feel as if he or she were someone special. This accounted both for his numerous friendships and his school popularity. A born teacher, Harriet thought. I wonder if he regrets taking the job of chief administrator? Maybe all those decades of teaching at various colleges and universities had grown wearisome to him. Maybe when I'm in my sixties, I'll want to forsake the classroom for the office too.

  Sam noticed her smiling at him and he smiled at her in return. His rather watery blue eyes and snowy white hair combined with his gentle smile and the twinkle which peered out over his bifocals to give him the appearance of a Jewish Kris Kringle. I couldn't ask for a better boss, Harriet thought. Or a better mentor and friend.