Dead Past dffi-4

by Beverly Connor

  Juliet’s eyes grew round in a look of sheer terror; her face drained of color, she backed up against the wall and screamed before she slid down and held her knees, sobbing.

  Chapter 40

  “What in the world did you say to her?” said Mrs. Torkel as she hurried over to her granddaughter.

  “I’m not sure,” said Diane. She knelt beside the stricken girl, who now seemed to have fallen into a trance or a seizure. “Juliet, can you hear me?” No response. Juliet was breathing very fast.

  “My husband, God rest his soul, did this sometimes. It was after the war and I’d find him out in a field hiding from the enemy, he said. He’d pull me down with him and we’d both hide there in the weeds,” said Mrs. Torkel. “She’s having a flashback. That’s what it looks like to me. God in heaven, we thought she’d just forget and it would be all right.”

  “Can we help?”

  Diane glanced up briefly and several of the tourists were gathered around. She didn’t know which one had spoken.

  “Thank you, but no. Please go ahead and enjoy your tour of the museum.”

  Juliet sat there for several minutes with no change. Diane and Mrs. Torkel said nothing. Juliet’s breathing slowed and Diane thought she was coming around from wherever it was she had gone. After another couple of minutes, she tried to stand. Diane and Mrs. Torkel got on each side of her and helped her up and into the lab, away from the tourists. Mrs. Torkel, Diane noticed, elbowed a few of them out of the way.

  The two of them guided Juliet to a chair where she sat and put her head down. Diane got her some water from the fountain in the corner. As she handed it to Juliet she caught sight of Whitney Lester in the doorway of her office with a satisfied smirk on her face.

  “Don’t just stand there; call the nurse,” said Diane. Lester’s smile faded, and she disappeared into her office.

  “What’s the matter, child?” said her grandmother. “Where were you?”

  “I don’t know. I was just suddenly running through the brush and a man was chasing me to your house, Gramma. It was so real.”

  Mrs. Pierce, one of the museum’s nurses, arrived quickly, and Diane explained what had happened. Mrs. Pierce had a motherly bedside manner with a knack for comforting hurt and sick children. She took Juliet’s pulse and felt her skin.

  “Your pulse is a little rapid, but your skin isn’t clammy.” She shined a light in her eyes. “You’re OK. It looks like an anxiety attack. Have you had these before?” she asked.

  Juliet nodded.

  “Are you seeing someone about them?” she asked.

  Again Juliet nodded.

  “Good,” said Mrs. Pierce. “I recommend you take a rest for the remainder of the day. You’ll be fine. Be sure and call the person you’re seeing and tell him or her.”

  “I will, thanks.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Pierce,” said Diane.

  “That’s what you pay me for.” She smiled and left the aquatics lab.

  “This is just so stupid of me,” said Juliet.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Diane. “Can you answer some questions?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you see what the man chasing you looked like?” asked Diane.

  “He was mean. He had a black goatee of a beard and straight black hair.”

  “Do you know why he was chasing you?” asked Diane.

  “No. That thing you said, why did you say it to me?” She looked up at Diane in anguish, as if Diane had done it on purpose.

  “You mean the sentence with the word you feared?” Diane was careful not to say the words again. “I heard it while I was looking for a friend in the library. Students were studying and it was just a phrase I heard. It stuck with me, I suppose because it was a kind of tongue twister. That word is so unusual, it was odd to hear it twice in so short a time. Why did that throw you into a flashback?”

  “Flashback… like Grampa? I don’t know.” She looked confused. “The man said it,” said Juliet.

  “To you?” Diane thought that would be an odd thing to say to a seven-year-old.

  “No, but… I don’t know who he said it to. I just heard him say it. It was scary when he said it. I don’t remember anymore. I’m sorry,” said Juliet.

  “Did he just say the word, or the whole phrase?” Diane thought that highly unlikely, but why did she freak out so when Diane repeated the sentence.

  “The phrase. He said the whole thing the way you said it, and he was looking at me,” said Juliet.

  “Looking at you? Directly at you?” asked Diane.

  “No, I’m not sure…” Juliet looked like she might panic again.

  “That’s all right. Why don’t you take your grandmother to the restaurant? Sit in a quiet booth, have something cool to drink, get some nourishment,” said Diane. “I’ll walk with the two of you.”

  “I think we both could use some food,” said her grandmother. “I’ll bet you’ve been skipping meals, haven’t you, dear?”

  Diane walked them to the elevators and they all went down to the restaurant. Diane told the hostess to seat them in her place, which was her code for the bill to be put on her tab as well.

  “Have a good meal. When you finish I’ll have someone drive you home,” said Diane.

  “I can drive. I’m fine, really,” said Juliet. “It’s just that darn word.” She tried to smile.

  Ruby Torkel turned to Diane. “You keep the doll. Don’t let anybody take it away from you.”

  “I won’t.”

  Diane didn’t even try to explain to her that the security guard was just making sure that nothing dangerous was being brought into the museum.

  “Is that the doll you said I stole?” asked Juliet. She touched the package with her fingertips. “I don’t even remember what it looks like.”

  “Do you want to see it?” asked her grandmother.

  Juliet grabbed her hand back as if the package had turned into a snake. “No… I think I’ve freaked everyone out enough for one day. Maybe when the museum is having a slow day.” She smiled again.

  “Do you remember anything Juliet said when she showed you the doll?” Diane asked Mrs. Torkel.

  “Oh, she didn’t show it to me. I found her playing with it. She said it had something… a secret, that’s what it was. You know how kids are, making stuff up. I asked her where she got it and she wouldn’t tell me; she just said it was a secret. I told her she had to give it back, but she said her friend gave it to her. That’s when I took it away and told her she couldn’t play with something that wasn’t hers and people just didn’t give away toys that nice.”

  Juliet stood listening to her grandmother with a frown. “I don’t remember any of that.”

  “Well, honey, you were seven,” said Mrs. Torkel.

  “I’m going to leave the two of you to eat and catch up on news. Juliet, you can have the rest of the day off,” said Diane. “Oh, would you mind if I open the package in my office?”

  “Go ahead,” said Juliet. “I don’t care.”

  Diane left them and, carrying the package, went to her office.

  “Hey, Andie. Anything going on?” asked Diane as she walked through Andie’s office.

  “Usual stuff. Someone said there was a commotion in Fish?” she said.

  “News travels fast. It was nothing. I’m going to be in my office for a while.”

  “MOF?” asked Andie.

  MOF was Andie’s abbreviation for Museum On Fire, which meant she would only disturb Diane in a dire emergency.

  “Not that drastic, but field everything you can,” said Diane.

  She sat down at her desk and looked at the package a moment before she unwrapped it. The doll was in almost-new condition. It was a pretty doll with a porcelain head, feet, and hands, and a soft body. It had a head full of black finger curls and an ornate green satin bonnet and satin green dress trimmed in white fur. Her feet were covered in high-top patent leather shoes and white stockings. She carried a white fur muff in one hand, attached by a
piece of elastic sewn into the muff and looped over the wrist. It was a nice doll, but not an expensive one. Diane’s sister collected dolls, so Diane had a passing familiarity with them.

  Diane leaned back in her chair and focused her eyes on the table fountain and the water running over the rocks. The making of palimpsests was possible even with papyri. That was such an odd phrase. What exactly did it mean-other than the obvious literal meaning? Diane knew what a palimpsest was, but she grabbed her Webster’s dictionary anyway and looked it up: Palimpsest: writing material as a parchment or tablet used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased.

  Diane knew that it was a practice in ancient times to erase the work of an earlier author and reuse the parchment to pen another piece of work. Sometimes the earlier work can still be deciphered. Korey Jordan, her head conservator, had revealed the earlier writing on a medieval parchment that was a palimpsest.

  Why would a kidnapper or killer use a sentence like that? What was the meaning in that context?

  But the more important mystery in her mind was why had she heard it in the library-apparently the exact sentence. Was it actually more common than she thought? She got on her computer and flipped over to the Internet and Googled the sentence with quotations. No hits whatsoever. She removed the quotations and tried again. She got a lot of hits, but none that contained the words in any combination even close to the sentence she heard. She clicked on her bookmark of the Gutenberg project and searched the offerings. Nothing.

  So, it didn’t seem to be a common quotation. Then who in the library said it? She closed her eyes and tried to remember the voice. Female? That’s what she thought she remembered.

  It seemed to stretch the imagination that it could be the same person who had said it in Florida twenty years ago, here now-in the university library. But it was quite a coincidence. Her thoughts were interrupted by her intercom.

  “Sorry, Dr. Fallon. It’s David. I thought you might want to talk with him.”

  “Thank you, Andie. Put him through.”

  “Diane, I did the search in Arizona and Florida and found no such murders. I increased the dates and increased the area of search-still nothing that fit your criteria. Sorry.”

  “Thanks, David. If I get any more variables, I may ask you to search again.”

  “Sure.”

  She hung up the phone.

  “Well, damn,” she said out loud. “I was so sure.”

  She picked up the doll again and looked into its dark eyes. So this doll has a secret? To Diane, that meant one thing. She lifted the dress and examined the stitching.

  Chapter 41

  When they were children, Diane’s sister had collected Madame Alexander dolls, pushed baby dolls around in strollers, and dressed and undressed her extensive assemblage of Barbie dolls. Diane, on the other hand, had played with hers in a wholly different manner. Her dolls were couriers, adventurers, and spies. She often used them to carry secret messages. A message might be hidden in their clothes, inside the hole of a dislocated arm or leg, or sewn up in their torso.

  Diane examined the stitching of Juliet’s doll with a magnifying glass. No sign of the legs being detached and reattached, nor were there any repaired tears in the torso. She carefully undressed the doll and checked the arm attachments. Nothing at the right arm, but the left arm had been restitched by hand. Diane smiled with delight as she took fingernail scissors and snipped the thread.

  She pulled the stuffing from the arm. The result was a pile of fluffy white fill on her desk, but nothing else. She stuffed the fill back into the arm with a pencil eraser and turned her attention to the torso. She began pulling the fill out of the armhole. This produced quite a large pile. The doll was now flattened in the middle. She saw nothing but stuffing. She pulled it apart to see if there was something in it she missed when she was taking it out. She hadn’t.

  She really hoped that Juliet and her grandmother did not come to her office right now.

  With a penlight from her desk drawer she looked inside the empty sack that was the torso of the doll. Still nothing. She stuck the tip of her little finger up in the doll’s head.

  There it was.

  It felt like a slip of paper. Diane grinned broadly. There is nothing like the thrill of discovering a hidden message. She managed to tease the edge of the paper through the opening in the doll’s head far enough that she could grasp it with her fingertips and pull it out.

  It was a piece of newsprint, yellowed with age, rolled up when it was put inside the doll, and now lying in a loose coil. She unrolled the strip of paper on her desktop. After all the trouble she had gone to, she expected it to say something like Inspected by #12. But it did not.

  Printed on the paper was a series of capital letters in groups, like words in an enigmatic foreign language.

  KVQ PEZJMTR WOYIYP QQMRKSDY BW XMMRJ JMNA CZQWRCZKN VE HTE PZHK OS XZQNQRZQMNIGT FYFFUDN KVDER WSQT HERQR GYS TENUGFOAV CR LRRBPEE CZQWRCZKN

  It looked like a code if Diane had ever seen one. She was so gleeful she laughed out loud. OK, it was a code. Was it child’s play, as hers were? Someone could take apart a few of her old dolls today and find notes still inside them containing lines of scribbled letters and numbers that stood for nothing more or less than a child’s adventurous imagination at work. This could be like that… or it could mean something important. No way to tell at the moment.

  Jin liked to do puzzles and ciphers. He frequently contributed his logic puzzles and cryptograms to puzzle magazines. This would be a job for him.

  She keyed the lines of code into her word processing program, double-checked it, and saved it under a password-then immediately felt utterly silly. She was a kid again playing games with dolls. She cut a thin piece off the scrap of paper and put it in a vial, then locked the code-or whatever it was-in her safe.

  When the fill was back in the torso, she took a needle and thread from a small emergency sewing kit in her desk drawer and reattached the arm with fine stitches. That done, she redressed the doll. Thank goodness, it looked as good as new. She wrapped it in the paper Mrs. Torkel brought it in and put it in her drawer. Just as she closed the drawer, there was a knock on her door.

  “Come in,” she called, and Kendel entered her office.

  “Hi. Andie said you wanted to see me. Sorry I’m late, I was up talking to Korey about courses he wants to teach.”

  “That’s fine. I have something I need you to find.”

  “Oh, a new acquisition?” Kendel smiled, showing a bright white set of teeth.

  “No, this is something different and will surely test your abilities,” said Diane.

  “OK, I’m intrigued,” said Kendel.

  Diane turned to her computer, typed in the palimpsest phrase, printed it out, and gave it to Kendel.

  “The making of palimpsests was possible even with papyri,” she read, then looked up, her eyes wide and eyebrows raised.

  “I want to know where it’s from. I’ve looked on Google and Project Gutenberg. I heard it spoken in the university library recently, but it goes back at least twenty years.”

  Kendel smiled and tapped the piece of paper on her hand. “I’ll accept your challenge.”

  “Thanks, Kendel. Would you take this to Korey for me? I would like to know if he can give me a ballpark figure on how old the paper is.”

  Kendel took the vial and looked at the piece of paper inside it.

  “Looks too modern for C14,” she said.

  “He’ll probably just have to do a chemical analysis. Something quick.”

  Kendel gave her another smile. “And you thought I might want to work at other museums.”

  When Kendel left, Diane printed out the string of coded letters she had found in the doll and put them in her pocket. Before going back to the crime lab, she called Laura.

  “Diane. How is the Juliet investigation coming?”

  “Interesting,” said Diane.

  “It always scares me when people say ‘interesting.’ ”
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  “Funny you should talk about words scaring people,” said Diane.

  “I know. Juliet has a few that scare her,” said Laura.

  “I discovered, firsthand.” Diane explained about Juliet’s breakdown in the aquatic room. “I assume she’ll be calling you about it.”

  “Wow,” Laura said. “It’s obviously associated with her trauma. But how in the world? She said a scary man said it to her? When she was seven?”

  “She was unclear. At first she said he was talking to her; then she said she didn’t know.”

  “I know what papyri is. What is a palimpsest?” said Laura.

  Diane explained what it was and gave her a short history.

  “What could it mean in this case?” she asked.

  “I have no idea. I asked Kendel to track down its origin. She’s good at finding things.”

  “She’s the one who found the snake in her drawer, right? I heard about that.”

  “That was Kendel,” said Diane.

  “Have you had any luck finding a mass murder around the time of Juliet’s kidnapping?”

  “None whatsoever-not in Arizona or Florida.”

  “So that’s a dead end,” said Laura.

  “For now.”

  “You aren’t letting go of that notion, are you?”

  Diane could imagine Laura’s amused but stern face on the other end of the phone.

  “I’m putting it aside until I have more evidence. When you talk to Juliet, ask her where she was in her flashback. It didn’t sound like Arizona. I’ve been to Arizona, and there’s not a lot of vegetation.”

  “There’s plenty of vegetation,” said Laura. “Just not the kind you’re used to.”

  “At any rate, see what you make of her description,” said Diane.

  “You’re determined, aren’t you?” said Laura.

  “I’m thorough,” said Diane. “There’s something else I need to tell you. I called her grandmother. She told me Juliet had visited her the month before she was kidnapped.”

  “Really?” said Laura. “That is interesting. It’s just what you suspected.”