Then Fall, Caesar

by Sarah Wisseman

“So that’s it!” I liked Susie in the same way I liked cats; cats always put Number One first. Food and soft, sunny places to sleep and bathe—you never had any question about their priorities. Was Susie ruthless enough to try to murder Victor because he had strayed? As far as we knew, she had marriage in mind. She’d been trying to hook Victor into a commitment for two years or more. No, it was much more likely that she’d try to punish him somehow.

  “What about Nick?” I asked Ellen. “Isn’t he bogged down with his thesis?”

  “Oh, yeah. I don’t envy the guy, having his advisor also be his boss. Nick told me Victor hasn’t approved a single chapter without demanding extensive revisions. If he has his way, Nick will still be a grad student when he’s thirty-five.”

  Hmm. Virtual imprisonment by a picky advisor. Life as a perpetual grad student would certainly be motive enough for me to kill someone. Was Nick at that point yet? Or maybe he hated Victor because Victor had Susie, and Nick had a crush on Susie.

  Ellen looked done in, ready to crawl away and hibernate. I tried to distract her by picking up my fortune cookie. We found the usual Chinese fortunes too bland and impersonal, so we liked to make up our own. Now I pretended to read, “You are strong of mind, except around chocolate.”

  Ellen responded, “Happiness is a fat cat (to eat).”

  “You will meet a tall, bushy lawyer,” I shot back.

  “You are admired for your ability to sleep through meetings.”

  I laughed and looked at my watch.

  “Yikes! McEwan wants to interview me at two. ” I started groping for money in my cavernous shoulder bag.

  Ellen flagged down the waiter and we gathered up our coats.

  ***

  Days passed with little progress on the part of the police. They found no fingerprints and no clear evidence to tie any one person to the Augustus calamity. Also, McEwan agreed with me: there was no indication that Victor was the intended victim.

  Life at the museum wasn’t exactly normal, but the moving schedule was too tight for us not to push ahead. The elevator was out of commission until McEwan removed the police tape two days later, but we kept busy lining up the next victims—plaster casts, that is—in the hallway.

  Ellen and I were supposed to help Susie and Colin move a statue out of storage. One of the signs that Ellen was feeling better was her ability to laugh about men again. We were giggling over the story of one of Ellen’s disastrous dates.

  “So did you ever see him again?” I asked, sitting on a bench just inside the Egyptian storeroom to change my loafers for sneakers.

  “Are you kidding? After the way that jerk behaved?” replied Ellen, dumping her purse on a nearby table. She didn’t need to change her shoes since she was already wearing Rockports with rubber soles that gripped well.

  Susie was next on the scene, carrying a pair of immaculate white tennis shoes that looked like they had never been worn. She sat down and slipped off her delicate and expensive Italian heels. Lucky Susie, she had an inheritance; her clothing budget wasn’t limited by her pathetic museum salary.

  “Where’s Colin?” I asked.

  “He’s not back from lunch.”

  “It figures.” said Ellen. “What are we moving this time?” she asked, bracing herself for action.

  “That,” said Susie, pointing to an enormous replica of the Pharaoh Khafre sitting on a flatbed cart. Khafre was the divine ruler who supervised the building of the first pyramids in Egypt. His statue was so big that almost one-third of it stuck out over the edges of the cart.

  “Ye gods,” I groaned, shoving my hair behind my ears. “Couldn’t Victor afford the maintenance guys for this one?”

  “Not if you want your full exhibit budget,” said Susie, knowing how I would respond. My exhibit on Greek vase technology was supposed to be ready in time for the grand opening of the new building in just five months time.

  “Right.” I gave in quickly, and walked around the cart to survey just how tricky it was going to be. “Okay, ladies, let’s see if we can get it out of storage.”

  We took up positions around the cart, which was an elderly model with squeaky wheels. With some tricky shifting and a lot of panting, we managed to get it out the door. The elevator was down the hall, around two corners.

  We approached the first corner. I was walking backwards, facing Ellen and Susie who were pushing forwards.

  “Watch out for the…” Susie said, just as there was a sickening crash.

  “…restored foot,” Susie finished, gazing in horror at Khafre’s right foot that was now lying on the floor.

  We stood there in stunned silence. I looked at Ellen expecting a wry grimace or comically raised eyebrows. Instead, her face was once again as pale as a plaster cast.

  “Well,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Victor can’t fire all three of us. He’d have no one left to move the museum.”

  Ellen moaned, “Victor will have a fit. Can you just imagine what he’ll say? I should have been on that corner!”

  Susie usually told Victor way more than the rest of us wanted him to know. This time, she surprised us. “Take it easy. Victor doesn’t need to know a thing about it. You can fix it can’t you, Ellen?” She fixed a beady eye on Ellen.

  Ellen stared at her. “I think so.”

  “How?”

  “Well, spackling compound and a little black paint, with some white specks to look like granite.”

  “Maybe you should go into business,” I said, trying to cheer Ellen up and remove that awful whiteness from her face. “Ellen’s Pseudo-Stone Restoration.”

  “Sounds like faux-marbling,” said Susie. “So that’s what they teach at NYU.” Ellen was still too upset to respond to this slur on her old school.

  “Let’s get this baby back to Ellen’s lab,” I said, hoping to head off any more comments from Susie.

  After dragging the cart to Conservation, Susie and I left Ellen contemplating her faux-granite project and headed for the Starbuck’s across the street.

  ***

  We settled ourselves at a corner table overlooking Commonwealth Avenue. Susie slid her bulging drawstring purse under her feet.

  “So, how are things with Victor?” I asked, trying not to sound too eager.

  Susie smiled and said nothing, concentrating on stirring three generous spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee. She could afford the extra sweetener; she never put weight on her statuesque figure. Unlike me, who only had to look sideways at a piece of chocolate to gain an inch around my waist.

  I tried again. “He seems a little preoccupied these days—or maybe that’s just the pressure from the Dean to get everything done on time.

  Susie’s large, almond-shaped eyes fixed on mine suddenly and chillingly. “He isn’t the only one operating under pressure. I’ve been overloaded ever since he fired that creep George. And he’s been so busy with wining and dining donors, he’s had precious little time for me.”

  But he had had time for the decorative Ms. Hawthorne.

  Susie had an uncanny ability to read minds. “He isn’t dating that cow, Diana, anymore,” she announced with a satisfied smirk. “Not since the accident with the statue. Getting all shook up reminded him how much he needs me.”

  Uh-oh. Maybe Susie was less like the god Zeus who hurled thunderbolts and more like his jealous wife Hera, who transformed some of her rivals into animals.

  I was still curious how she was going to deal with Victor’s defection.

  “You’ve forgiven him?”

  “That’s what he thinks. I’m reserving judgment,” Susie said. “I know he needs to schmooze a little with his fellow directors, but he doesn’t have to do it with intimate, candlelit dinners at Angelo’s.”

  True. Angelo’s was Susie’s favorite restaurant. Victor should know better than to take another woman, even a colleague, to the same place he took Susie on her birthday.

  Susie thwarted me from learning further juicy tidbits by changing the subject. “Ellen’s still pretty upse
t by that near-miss in the elevator. I think she may need counseling.”

  We reviewed all the therapists we knew about (an easy task, since so many of the museum profession were in some kind of therapy). I told Susie I’d talk to Ellen, but privately I thought Ellen just needed some time and the distraction of engrossing work.

  I looked at my watch. “Time to get back,” I said, shoving back my chair with a screech.

  Susie rose quickly and kicked her white purse over, tumbling its contents onto the tiled floor.

  I knelt to help her pick up the pieces. A rabbit’s foot, two lipsticks (Clinique), a small solar calculator, cell phone in a pink leather cover, three used tissues, a cosmetic bag…quite a haul, I thought. A torn ticket to “Macbeth,” loose change, a metal nail file…

  And a roll of clear packing tape. I looked up at Susie, who was watching me with an inscrutable expression.

  “Packing tape, Susie?”

  “I swiped some to repair my cosmetic bag. See?” She turned over the little flowered bag, revealing one torn corner covered with tape. “The stuff’s all over the museum.”

  That’s right, anyone on the staff could acquire a piece of packing tape. Feeling a little faint, I sat down again.

  Susie smiled. “Meet you at the cash register,” she said, shrugging on her jacket and turning away from me.

  I remembered Susie’s proprietary hand on Victor’s elbow, just before Augustus fell. How her fluffy appearance hid her intensely practical nature, her essential single-mindedness.

  She could have pushed him into the path of a ton of falling plaster, or chosen to hang onto him. Either way, I couldn’t prove a thing.

  I watched her now as she moved gracefully towards the front of the coffee shop, padding softly in her Gucci shoes with her long skirt swishing.

  THE END

  Interview with author Sarah Underhill Wisseman

  How did you become a writer?

  My parents read to me when I was very little, and my father wrote two unpublished mysteries after he retired. My university job has always required writing, but I wrote mostly non-fiction until about 1998.

  What is your background?

  I grew up in Evanston, IL and Weston, MA. Since college, I have worked as a museum curator, database manager, conservation lab assistant, field archaeologist, archaeological scientist, cook on an archaeological dig, and dorm mother. I majored in Anthropology as an undergraduate, and that’s when I fell in love with archaeology and museum work.

  Your books are about archaeology and museums. Do you have experience in those areas?

  Yes. I’ve been on archaeological excavations in Israel, Italy, North Carolina, and Nevada. My museum experience began in college when I took a job as a museum guard at the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Mass. Since then I have worked in five other museums in four different cities in registration, conservation, research, curation, tour-guiding, fund-raising, and database management.

  Have you published other books?

  Yes. Five books of non-fiction on ancient Greek vases, Greek archaeology, scientific methods in archaeology, and Egyptian mummies. Four books of fiction (mystery and suspense). Visit www.sarahwisseman.com

  How did you become an archaeologist?

  During my freshman year in college, a friend handed me a brochure about a summer archaeology program in Israel. I signed up and it changed my life. I went back for a junior year abroad, living in Tel Aviv and digging in the dessert around Beersheva and the Dead Sea area. I completed my graduate work (M.A. and Ph.D) at Bryn Mawr College in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology.

  Is your first book, Bound for Eternity, based on real life?

  Yes. At the University of Illinois, my colleagues and I conducted an investigation of an Egyptian mummy using X-ray, CT scanning, and other non-destructive analyses. I wrote about our results in several technical articles and then in a book for the general public called “The Virtual Mummy” which was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2003. The murder mystery grew out of that experience (of writing the non-fiction book).

  Why choose Boston for your setting?

  I grew up in a Boston suburb and went to high school and college in that area. Although I have lived in Illinois for over twenty years, I wanted to return home to Boston in my books since it is one of my favorite cities. Also, Cape Cod was my parents’ home after they retired.

  What are you working on now?

  A historical mystery about archaeology and Prohibition set in central Illinois and the next Lisa Donahue mystery, set in Italy.