by Mary Malloy
Lizzie moved all the marble figures and fragments away from the fragile glass items, though as she gently placed the ancient Etruscan blue-glass bracelet on the table she had to acknowledge that it was sturdier than it looked. The objective of the day had been to make everything visible and be sure that everything on the object list had arrived in good condition. Tomorrow they would start to put like things together for a last conservation inspection, and then organize them by their arrangement in the exhibit.
At the end of one table the sarcophagus was still strapped to a wheeled cart. Within the next few days she would need to invite Prof. Haworth to examine it with her and to make a final translation of the hieroglyphs so that she could write the label. He had already made some comments from her photos, but he was anxious to see the real thing. Colleagues from local museums had also asked to have a close look at some of the items before they went into exhibit cases and she would have Roscoe set up a schedule for that as well. Tomorrow, Father O’Toole, the Italian consul, members of the Kelliher family and major donors would make an official visit to acknowledge the arrival of the collection. Usually this was a tiresome but necessary part of the process, but Lizzie looked forward to sharing what she had learned with Father O’Toole.
There was still one crate in the back of the loading dock, but it wasn’t on her list and Lizzie couldn’t find a bar code or shipping label on it. She didn’t think it could have come in with her shipment, but she also didn’t remember seeing it there when she had inspected the space to make sure it was set up to receive the collections. The tools that the workers had used to unpack the boxes were still lying on the floor and she took a crowbar and carefully pried off the lid. Inside, a large object was carefully fitted into a Styrofoam mold. Moving the covering Lizzie found herself looking at the mummy.
“Shit!” she said angrily. “Shit, shit, shit!” If she had not been alone she would have insisted that someone instantly get Justin Carrere so that she could shake him. “Calm yourself,” she said quietly. “You cannot attack a student, especially one whose family is paying for this exhibit, but Shit! What an idiot!” She called Jackie to complain. “That idiot Carrera! I gave him a very short list of assignments related to this project, and the first thing on the list was don’t send anything that isn’t on the final list.”
“Can I come see the mummy?” Jackie answered predictably.
“I guess so,” Lizzie said. “There isn’t anyone here but me.”
“And your mummy!” Jackie added.
“Yes, just me and my mummy. Come visit.”
Lizzie continued to sort through the collection, moving some things from one table to another so that she could see how they looked together. When Jackie called to tell her that she was at the outside door, Lizzie went to open it and found that John Haworth was with her.
“I called John,” Jackie said. “He’d like to meet your mummy too.”
Lizzie gestured for them to come in and led the way. They stopped first at the sarcophagus, which John was very excited to see.
“It’s in superb condition, just like you said. I’ve already written some things about it for your catalog from the pictures you sent me.”
“Where’s the mummy?” Jackie said insistently.
Lizzie pointed to the crate lying open on the floor across the room. “You warned me, John, that I would need a special permit to bring it here and I don’t have anything like it. I did no paperwork for it; it wasn’t supposed to be shipped and it doesn’t even have a proper shipping label.”
He rubbed his hands together gleefully. “Then we’ll have an even better story to tell!” He stopped short when he looked into the box. “What is it?” he asked unexpectedly.
“It’s a mummy of course,” Jackie answered.
“From where?”
“Isn’t it an Egyptian mummy of the eighteenth dynasty?” Lizzie asked. “Isn’t it the mummy that was in that case?”
John dropped to his knees and touched the head of the mummy. “I’m not sure what it is, but it isn’t the mummy that came in that case.” He turned and looked up at Lizzie. “I told you that the original mummy was probably brought to Europe to be ground into medical potions. This is …” He stopped for a moment and ran his hands along the length of the corpse. “I’m not sure what this is. Can we take it out of the box?”
Lizzie cleared a table that had only a few artifacts on it and the three of them moved the mummy onto it.
“Come on, John,” Jackie said insistently. “It’s obviously a mummy!”
John rolled his head as if trying to nod in assent but ending up shaking it in a gesture of disagreement. “There’s something wrong here. It is a human corpse that has been desiccated somehow and wrapped in linen soaked in a resin. But the materials don’t seem right, and the wrapping mostly follows the right pattern but there is just something weird about it.”
“What should we do?” Lizzie asked.
“Let’s get it x-rayed,” John answered. “Let’s just take it over to the campus clinic and run it through the fluoroscope.” He touched the mummy’s head again, pressing along the ridge of the nose. “I’m sorry we don’t have a CT scan or an MRI, we could get better detail.”
Lizzie paused. “I don’t have permission to do anything like that. This thing isn’t even supposed to be here.”
“Oh come on, Lizzie,” Jackie urged. “You have a mystery here and can find out more about it.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “How will we even transport it? Do we need to call an ambulance? Or a hearse?”
John laughed. “Of course not. I’m an archaeologist; I have a truck. I’ll just go get it and bring it up to the loading dock door.” He was already halfway across the room as he finished. “I’ll call Ross Wiley to meet us; he’s a radiologist and is on call at the clinic.”
“Oy!” Lizzie turned to Jackie with a look of helplessness. “What have you gotten me into?”
Jackie smiled broadly in return. “Something interesting, I hope.”
“Is Ross Wiley any relation to Roscoe, my intern?”
“His father, I think.”
“Well, at least we can try to keep this in the family while I figure out what I need to do to make it all legal and proper.”
When John came back he carried a backboard, the sort of thing used to carry an injured person out of the wilderness. “I always keep it in my van in case someone gets hurt in the field.” With the help of Lizzie and Jackie, he lifted the mummy onto it, and with him on one side and Lizzie and Jackie on the other they carried it to his waiting vehicle.
“Good thing he wasn’t very big or heavy,” Jackie said.
“He was bigger and heavier when he was alive,” John explained. “But he was pretty short, as were most Egyptians. Ramses the Great was six feet tall, but most of the other pharaohs were in the five-foot range.” He continued to talk about matters of this sort as they made the short drive across campus to Health Services.
It was a slow evening and there was no doctor on duty, but the nurse recognized the three when they came in with their strange request. John Haworth was a not-infrequent visitor with various items that needed a closer look for identification.
“Ross Wiley is meeting us,” he explained to the nurse. Then he turned to Lizzie and Jackie and whispered, “Probably best to leave the body in the van until Ross is ready for it.”
The three sat side-by-side in the molded plastic chairs of the waiting room. Jackie was ecstatic, John was interested, and Lizzie was worried—worried that there might be repercussions to this that would at the very least take her away from the work that had to be done to get the exhibit completed, and at the very worst damage her reputation and the College’s.
When Ross Wiley arrived, his son Roscoe and Jimmy Moe were with him. Jimmy was even more excited than Jackie at the prospect of seeing the mummy.
“I
thought the mummy wasn’t coming,” he said, adding that he was glad Lizzie had changed her mind and brought it.
“I didn’t,” she said, pulling her interns aside. “The mummy got shipped by mistake. I’m not sure yet how to handle this, but I need you two to promise me that you won’t say anything about this to anyone else.”
As they nodded, Roscoe’s father came up and put a hand on his son’s shoulder. He asked for an introduction, which was quickly given.
“I hope you don’t mind that I brought the boys along. They were working on your project at our house when John called me.”
Lizzie gave a forced smile and lied. “No problem,” she said, “but I’ve asked them not to talk about it outside this circle.”
Dr. Wiley winked at her and smiled. “Of course. So where is this mummy?”
As they spoke, John Haworth led Roscoe and Jimmy out to his van and soon after they came through the automatic doors of the clinic with the mummy on the backboard. Dr. Wiley led them to the x-ray suite where they laid it on a bed that had a machine mounted above it that could be moved over any part of the body.
“We’ll have to do this in several stages to get the whole corpse,” he said. “Where do you want to start, head or feet?”
He directed the question at Lizzie, but John Haworth answered it.
“Feet,” he said. “It has been charred there and I’m curious to see if there is any damage inside the wrapping.” He turned to Lizzie and said, “It’s probably a fake and the wrappings were burned on purpose to make it look old.”
“If we are just having a look for our own interest, we’ll use the fluoroscope and not bother with a permanent image,” Ross Wiley explained as he aimed the machine at the mummy’s feet. “Then we won’t have to worry about who will pay for it. You will all have to step outside for a minute.”
When they returned, there was an image on the screen showing the bones of two feet and the calf bones attached to them. “Nothing out of the ordinary here,” the doctor said. “A healthy person of maybe thirty or so, no damage from the charring you saw on the wrapping.”
The process was repeated at the knees, thighs, and pelvis.
“I was already suspecting this was a female from the alignment of the femur to the knees, but now I can confirm it,” he said as he pointed at the pelvic arch on the screen.
“Had it been a man, the penis would have been wrapped separately and be very obvious,” John Haworth added.
“You give us so much to think about, John,” Jackie said as they once again left the room and the x-ray machine was moved up to the abdominal and then chest areas, which had been emptied of the major organs.
“The heart was left,” John pointed out. “It was thought to be the source of both love and intellect. The other organs were usually mummified separately and placed in a series of four canopic jars.”
“What about the brain?” Jimmy asked.
“That was usually removed piece by piece through the nose.”
Various looks of surprise, disgust and awe were exchanged among the party.
“Well I’m ready to do the head now,” Dr. Wiley announced, sending them once again from the room. “When you come back we’ll see if that was done to this corpse.”
There was animated chatter among the five people waiting in the anteroom regarding mummies, the removal of brains, upcoming tasks that needed to be done for the exhibit, and how John Haworth’s essay would fit into Lizzie’s catalog. When the door opened they all stood up to see the x-rayed head of the mummy, but Dr. Wiley said he only wanted to see John. “And perhaps you better come too, Lizzie,” he added after a few seconds.
Jackie and Jimmy were clearly disappointed that they were being left out of learning something that must be interesting if it had to be secret, and both said so, but Lizzie ignored them as she went back into the room where the mummy lay stretched out under the x-ray machine.
“What do you know about this mummy?” the doctor asked as he closed the door.
“Only that it comes from the collection of a family in Bologna,” Lizzie said. “I don’t know when or how they acquired it.”
“It’s no ancient Egyptian.”
“I knew that,” John Haworth said. “So what or who is it?”
Ross Wiley used a pencil to point at the image on the screen, but before had a chance to speak John gave a gasp of surprise, and even Lizzie had seen enough of her own dental x-rays to recognize that this mummy had fillings.
“I didn’t realize they had dentistry in Egypt,” she said hesitantly.
“They didn’t, not like this,” John said with authority.
“There’s more,” Ross said. “Look at this.” He pointed to a small white mass at the back of the skull. “There was some attempt to pull the brains out, and there has been a resin of some type poured back in, but the murderer failed to get the bullet.”
John nodded as if he had recognized it, but Lizzie was totally shocked by the news. “Bullet?” she said, and then “murderer?” She felt her legs weaken and reached out to hold onto the table. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that this is the corpse of a young woman who was murdered. She was shot below her right ear with a small caliber gun.”
“When?” Lizzie asked, her voice shaking from the news.
“I don’t know,” Ross answered. “I can send the film of the head to a forensic dentist I know who might be able to date the material and the method of the fillings, but you realize that I have to call the police.”
“Of course,” Lizzie said. She moved to the only chair in the room and sat down. Her first thoughts were of the meeting tomorrow with Father O’Toole, Jim Kelliher and the cardinal. They were all coming to see the collection. “What should we do with it, or rather her?” she asked.
“I suspect that even though the victim clearly wasn’t killed here and the crime probably isn’t in the jurisdiction of the Boston Police Department, the coroner’s office will still want to take the corpse and do an autopsy,” Ross Wiley answered.
“So they’ll have to unwrap the mummy,” John Haworth said. “I think I’ll offer my services for that.”
“‘Unwrap’ is probably a nicety they won’t bother with. They’ll probably just cut the cloth off.”
“If that’s so, then I’m going to take a few samples of the cloth and the resin back to my lab and see what they’re made of.”
Neither Lizzie nor the doctor objected, and John found a pair of scissors in one of the drawers, as well as forceps and a small plastic cup for the samples.
“What should we tell the boys?” Ross asked.
“As little as possible,” Lizzie answered. “I know this will sound uncharitable in light of discovering the nature of this poor woman’s violent death, but it couldn’t come at a worse time as far as my exhibit is concerned. It is bound to hit the news in a fairly sensational way.”
“Who do you think she is?” John asked.
“I have no idea,” Lizzie answered, then asked him questions of her own. “How long ago do you think she was mummified? Can you tell by the bandages?”
He shook his head. “Probably decades ago, but how many I just can’t say. Ross’s dentist friend is probably our best bet in establishing a timeline.”
While they spoke, Ross called the police and when he hung up he said they would be there within a half hour. “Someone needs to take the boys home,” he said. “Would your friend Jackie do that?”
“Only if she can come back. Jackie will not like being sent away when she learns about this.”
Lizzie went into the waiting area and pulled Jackie aside to explain the situation, then told Roscoe and Wiley only that there was something strange about the mummy and they would need to do more work on it.
“I’m coming back!” Jackie whispered to Lizzie as she left.
Lizzie cal
led Martin to tell him she would be late coming home. It was almost six o’clock and as she turned off her cell phone she heard the police arriving.
The campus policeman on duty arrived at the same time as the Boston Police cruiser with two uniformed patrolmen. They said that a couple of homicide detectives were also on their way, as they understood a murder had taken place.
“Where is the victim?” one of the officers asked.
Ross led them to the bed where the mummy lay.
“Is this a joke?”
“Of course not,” Ross answered angrily. “It’s not a recent murder, but it is a murder.”
“From a thousand years ago?”
“No. It’s not an ancient Egyptian.”
John could not help interjecting that the mummies of ancient Egyptians were a lot more than a thousand years old. “From about 2600 B.C. to about 360 A.D.,” he said.
Ross rolled his eyes and interrupted to explain that the victim was a modern woman. As he pointed to the image of the bullet on the fluoroscope the detectives arrived.
“So this was recent?” one asked, approaching the mummy and putting on a pair of latex gloves.
“She was shot in the head,” John said bluntly.
“When?”
“We don’t know.”
“Today?”
“No.”
“This week?”
“No.”
“Do you know where the murder took place?”
“I believe it was in or near Bologna, Italy,” Lizzie said. “That’s where the mummy came from.”
One of the detectives turned to her and handed her his card. “Who are you?” he asked.
