“I don’t know,” I told her. And it was the truth. The letter. The amulet. They introduced more questions than I had had the night Peter thrust the box into my hand. “But I know where to find them.”
“Where did you get this?” I tossed the velvet box onto his desk. The box skidded across hitting a stack of papers before stopping. He looked up, exhausted.
“We cannot talk about that,” he said grabbing the box, quickly standing, moving to my side and shoving it into my purse. “Put it away.”
“Peter,” I glared at him as she returned to his chair. The man shook beneath his collared shirt, the top two buttons undone, the tie loosened and hanging gingerly around his neck. His hair was tasseled and unwashed. Bags collected under his eyes, the thick glasses not hiding them. And peppered stubble adorned his chin. The remnants of his last meal lay scatted on the desk.
“You need to sleep.” He shuddered under my touch as my hand rested on his shoulder.
“I have too much to do still,” he said.
“Why?” I asked. “It can wait till tomorrow. I want answers.”
“No,” he replied. Glassiness crept into his eyes as he looked past me. “No.” He shook his head and returned to the computer. His fingers busied themselves at the keyboard.
“What are you doing?” I asked. When he did not answer, I moved behind the desk to watch. He was moving files to the recycling bin. When he noticed me behind him, he opened a document and typed “they know,” then quickly deleted the words and then the file.
Peter retired the next day and took his wife on a cruise around the world. The same party that sent me the letter and the box sent him a generous sum of money for his troubles. A registered letter arrived to each Board of Directors, mine including a personal note, insisting this decision had been in the making for ages. I knew better, though. The Vatican knew the amulet was never lost and they were seeking it. Peter knew this, and so he fled. They would be hunting for the sender and for Peter. And so would I.
But Peter’s sudden absence didn’t go unnoticed after a string of fictitious and anonymous emails found themselves in a reporters inbox. The Chicago Tribune, not one to shy from a scandal, ran with the story of the curator’s mysteriously abrupt resignation and missing artifacts until all avenues of investigation were exhausted. We did what we could to silence the rumors, but it had to run its course. By mid-January 2006, when not even the paper’s best-hired private eyes could track Peter down, the story fizzled.
The Field’s newly hired curator, Melanie Davies-Whitaker, a staunch defender of antiquities conservation from The British Museum, eased into her role and took up the efforts to eradicate any staff-bred rumors. She brought in her own staff from the British Museum to oversee the transition of the Queen’s Royal Jewels exhibit. They then left for the British Museum’s Tell el-Balamun dig site – with two Field anthropologists assisting. Davies-Whitaker had asked Aleksandra to go but she refused. When she called the second time, though, Aleksandra was mute, leaving Wesley to reject the Field’s offers. Science, Aleksandra said, did not dwell in the past.
Unlike Aleksandra and Wesley, I distanced myself from the museum during the investigation. Whatever secret the amulet held – whatever power it contained – I did not want Peter’s leaving to be in vain.
Once, in my weakness, I ventured to the broad granite steps. But I dared not ascend.
Not until I was invited back into those granite halls and rooms filled with ancient treasure.
“Call me Melanie,” she said, “please. I insist. After all, the staff leaves the impression that my predecessor thought highly of you.” She waved her hand toward the chair. “Have a seat,” she urged. “Please, you must.”
“How can I help you, Melanie?” I asked. It was gravely disconcerting being in his office – Peter’s office – with her seated behind his mahogany desk.
“It’s this,” she said as she handed over a small rectangular box. It resembled a shoebox with Peter’s name scrawled on the top in black permanent marker. “I held on to his effects in case he returned for them. But since his instructions clearly state to do so, I’m releasing them to you.”
I lifted the lid and began thumbing through the contents. Nothing important: a Harvard felt tip pen, moleskin journal, and miscellaneous office goods. “You could have couriered this to me,” I noted.
“Yes, but the other board members thought a face-to-face would be best,” she replied. “You were absent from the welcome breakfast. And you never come in!”
“I’ll make more of an effort to be here for the next gala,” I said as I stood and extended my hand. I clutched the box to my side.
“Please do,” she replied as she escorted me out. “I speak for the Board of Directors; we don’t want you being a stranger.”
“Of course,” I replied, smiling as I left.
I would have stashed the box away had it not been for Aleksandra’s curiosity. Her hungry hands sifted through its contents. She removed each item, twirled it in her hand, and eventually plopped it next to her on the couch.
“There is nothing here but desk clutter,” she said. “Why didn’t they toss it?”
“He left it in my care,” I replied. I sat down at the desk and opened the laptop. The screen emitted a vivid neon glow as the machine woke from hibernation.
“Green this week?” I remarked, my fingers tapping at the keys.
“Mother, what does this key go to?” she asked. She held up a tiny brass key.
“Safety deposit box?” I speculated as she walked the key over and placed it in my hand. The metal was cool.
She pointed to the journal. “I would get reading,” she laughed. “Or hire an assistant to phone every bank in the city.”
There had been no need for assistants or phoning banks, however. Peter had revealed the location within
three sentences: I had a meeting today with a scholar at Union Station. We discussed Dante’s Inferno – the 8th Circle. Bree was a no-show.
There had been no meeting, but we had discussed Dante. We had discussed, in length, the eighth circle – fraud. In graduate school Peter had painted a scene from Dante’s Inferno, where Dante and Virgil descend into the eighth circle of hell, riding upon the back of Geryon – a winged, shape shifting monster. He had given me that painting. He knew I would understand the reference.
“I know what this key opens,” I told them. Wesley and Aleksandra were sitting together on the couch reading, as I entered the Study.
“How?” Aleksandra asked.
I held up the moleskin journal. “He left me clues!”
“Going on a treasure hunt, then?” Wesley asked, his eyes not veering from the newspaper.
“That I am.”
A dusty snow fell the night I left for Union Station to retrieve the contents of Peter’s locker.
D8: Dante’s 8th. It stood stacked on top of its partners, locked and abandoned. Heartbeats and mindless thoughts droned past as I slid the key into the lock. Three lockers down a slender man approached in a three-piece business suit, slightly wrinkled from a day’s train travel. His locker door swung open and he shoved in a laptop case before closing it. What should I do with a four-hour layover, he thought. He walked away, key in hand.
Waiting until the crowd around me dispersed, I opened the locker to find a new moleskin journal. There were scribbles here and there, passwords for Peter’s emails, and the override for his home security system. Did he need me to sell his house? I stopped thumbing through the book and tossed it into my messenger bag. The snow was beginning to fall more heavily now. The city’s homeless would take to shelters soon and I would lose my chance for an easy feed.
Outside the train station, I ascended and flew a few blocks before spotting a woman huddled under a filthy, flea ridden blanket. The stench of urine permeated the air while the soft whimpering came from the small child sleeping in her lap. As the duo slept, I fed from her and left behind one-thousand dollars tucked into the woman’s shirt. And another tu
cked into the child’s pajama top.
The snow was a white blur by the time I got home. The scorching fire raged inside warming the study. I tossed the book onto the desk and rubbed my hands over the amber flames. The flakes outside stuck to the windows before melting and running down the glass.
“What is in the journal?” Wesley asked. He had been reading the Tribune from his chair.
“Passwords.”
“To?” He put the newspaper down.
“Random e-mails and the security system for Peter’s house on the North Shore,” I noted. The flames licked the granite fireplace, the wood crackling sending sparks into the darkness. “What does it mean?”
“Maybe he needs you to cancel his newspaper subscription,” Wesley laughed. He stood and walked to the desk picking up the journal. He looked to me and waited for me to nod until he opened the soft, brown cover. His fingers thumbed through it, venturing farther than I had. “They are watching,” he whispered.
“Excuse me?”
Wesley turned the book, his index fingers separating the pages, and showed me a page with the words they are watching scrawled near the top, with my name and a date and time written on the bottom.
“July 10th, 8:30?” Wesley asked. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Not that I recall.” The main door opened and Aleksandra yelled into us; Wesley let her know we were in the study.
Entering, she tossed her Gucci lab bag near the door, kicked off her black, last season Prada pumps and plopped onto the settee, tossing her auburn hair over the back and stretched out her legs. Wesley closed the book around his index finger, leaned down to place a genteel kiss on Aleksandra’s forehead, and then resumed his search for more clues.
“If that lab’s alarm goes off one more time, I’m hiring a new security company,” Aleksandra remarked. “This is the third time this month I’ve been called to reset it because they’ve set it off!”
“July 10th,” I tossed into the atmosphere along with a throw pillow aimed at her face. She caught it and sat up.
“July 10th at 8:30 – where would I have been? Do you remember?”
“July?” she asked. She moved to the desk and pressed the button on her laptop. A few seconds later, the screen lit up with her multi-colored DNA sequence wallpaper. Aleksandra opened a calendar document and flipped back to July. Her studious eyes roamed the spreadsheet, combing through the various engagements. “I am not finding anything noted for that date,” she said.
“Perhaps it was an appointment he planned on making,” I wondered aloud.
“Wait,” she said. She was now looking at an Excel spreadsheet. Her fingers were gracing the arrow keys, moving frantically between the up and down keys. “On July 10th I have a check written from your account to The Field Endowment.”
“The night of the Cranston Expedition Fundraiser,” Wesley realized. “They were watching that night.”
“Who was watching?” Aleksandra asked. Her voice raised an octave as she turned from the computer.
“The Vatican.”
“The Vatican!” Wesley nearly dropped the book. Aleksandra sat down at the desk, her pale complexion somehow a shade paler. “Why is the Vatican watching someone?”
“They were watching Peter. They wanted the amulet back and they did not believe his cover story – that it had gone missing en route.”
“They must have been watching that night,” Aleksandra said. “That is why he left after he gave it to you. Now they’ll be watching you; they’ll be watching us!”
“You must go to him now, Bree,” Wesley said calmly.
“I have been trying to locate him, this whole time, but I do not know where to start!” I snatched the book from his hand and thumbed through the pages. “It is all in code!”
“Let me see it, then,” she said. Aleksandra took the book from me and began turning pages, her fingers tracing the letters. Three days later, she came to me with a page marked. “How does this sound? ‘Booked a cruise to Norway. Will depart at 9 am – sharp – no luggage required. Passport – check?’”
“You’re grasping, Aleksandra,” I said.
“Grasping?” she said. “Perhaps, but what do you have to lose?”
TWENTY-FIVE
The Norwegian winds are icier in January. They whip off the water that laps and licks near the rocks of my abandoned cavern home. The overgrowth and mossy covering still shrouding the door, which had only been slightly disturbed not too long ago when I awoke. Now, nature once again concealed that which human hands had once built into the mountain.
This had been my fortress in the fjord, my Norwegian paradise. This had led to two new beginnings and an end. Now ghosts from my past had reappeared to haunt me in trinkets and religion. Those ghosts lured me to the cobwebbed sanctuary where I had slumbered, bleeding into time until the future became the present.
My hands held Peter’s journal, the page open to the entry Aleksandra found the night before. Scribbled in the corner in tiny, faded penciled letters, was a cryptic “Booked a cruise to Norway. Will depart at 9 am – sharp – no luggage required. Passport – check.?” Alone, rather in insignificant scribble, perhaps just a thought on a possible excursion, but then my eyes caught a faded word written across the page – “ekki” – and I knew the code was for me.
Ekki. The first time he called me that I was in the Egyptian exhibit at the Field. There was a gala that evening, raising money for a children’s charity. This was shortly after I awoke and the world was new. As I walked amongst the artifacts, I felt part of them. Out of place and out of time, and strangely on display.
He approached me from the shadows as I emerged from the Field’s replica pyramid, his scent betraying him as it always would. Aleksandra was behind him. She introduced the older man whose hair had silvered and whose suit had dust from the archives clinging to its lapel. He lived for his work and wore that fact proudly.
“Ekki,” he remarked as he fearlessly took my hand in his, kissing it. “And with golden hair, as well, Aleksandra, it is enough to make the god’s jealous. The Sumerian’s would quake at the site of her, of any of you walking ekkimu.” Then he laughed as Aleksandra took his champagne glass away, handing it to a passing waiter.
“I think you have had enough,” she whispered.
“An ekkimu?” I asked him. “You think I am a vampire?”
“I know you are a vampire,” he replied, his eyes darting about the deserted exhibit.
“Vampires do not exist,” I told him, smiling.
“Do not be silly,” the silver haired curator replied as he grabbed a lobster ball from a passing tray and stuffed it into his waiting mouth. He pointed to Aleksandra. “She told me,” he said between bites. He laughed again, this time a joyous laugh that drew eyes from the few others in the room. “And my antiquities professor said the Sumerian’s were full of it, that vampires did not exist. A plague, he said, wiped the buggers out! Guess who is a pompous blowhard now!”
Ekkimu. The word for vampire in ancient Sumerian, which when shortened to Ekki, became his pet name for me. In the little time I knew him, I grew fond of Peter. He and Barbara threw elegant parties in their North Shore home, opening their beachfront veranda to a select few of which Aleksandra, Wesley and myself were always included. It was not long before I became as generous as my brother and Aleksandra, bestowing thousands on collections and funding expeditions.
Peter had never asked me to turn him. Aleksandra admitted that he had asked her only once. She refused and he understood, and that was the last time he mentioned her peculiar state.
Neither Peter nor Aleksandra would tell me how the pair met. A dark secret hung between them, binding them in a bond tighter than blood. I would have never found out had it not been for him telling me, though. He thought I should know.
“She was dying, Bree,” he told me. It was at a private dinner, celebrating his grandson’s graduation from Vassar. “Judith had acute lymphoblastic leukemia. They tried treatment, but her blood ne
ver responded and the cancer spread.”
The pain dripped from his forehead with each droplet of sweat that beaded and rolled down, falling onto his linen suit. The May heat was unseasonably, warm that year. Wesley and Aleksandra were inside with Barbara. The three were talking with Colin, Peter’s only son and Judith’s father.
Colin was a younger copy of his father, hair a darker brown, though, and a few less lines creasing his brow. But the resemblance was uncanny. The near loss of his only daughter wore heavily on him, and it played in his hazel eyes. Her face, solemn and fixed forever in time, imprinted on his pupils from that last moment he saw her lying in the hospital bed. You could see it when you glanced into his eyes. It was there with the memories of his father rushing him from the room, of Judith’s shallow breathing, her sunken cheeks, of her fever that spiked near dawn. There were too many memories haunting Colin from that night. Too many hurtful memories leaving an acrid taste in his mouth that the red wine could not drown.
“Aleksandra’s a fixer, Peter.” The sky was clear; the stars were bright over the lake.
A few sailboats were still out near the shore, their lights bobbing with the waves. The coastline cracked to life with Peter’s family and friends. Groups gathered, huddled near fire pits outside. For those not risking the mosquito bites, the living and dining rooms, lit by chandelier and opulent candlelight, served as recluse spaces for conversation between friends.
“Fixed?” he asked. His gazed remained on the stars. “Can you really call it that?”
“It was her choice.” I took his shoulders and turned his face until his eyes met mine. “Aleksandra gave her a choice, Peter. Would you rather have let her die?”
He turned away, his eyes squinting back tears. He looked into the living room through the glass curtain wall and watched Colin engaged in conversation. “He knows,” Peter said, gesturing toward Colin.
“That she is a vampire?” I asked.
Descent Into Madness Page 21
