“Come on, Alex,” she pleaded. “Let’s shut off his computer and go.”
Alex studied her and gave in with a sigh. “All right.”
“Cheer up,” she said. “We’ve got another mystery to finish up.”
“What’s that?”
“The story of the White Star.”
HARRY NICKELSON whistled as he walked through the glass door of the employees’ entrance to the museum. ’Nother day, another dollar. There were worse jobs than sitting in the guard room all night.
“Afternoon, Dolores,” he said to the buxom Latina at the security station. “Always a pleasure.”
“What’s gotten into you?”
He set his lunch bucket on the counter and waved his badge before the bar-code reader. “Nice day, the cold weather’s goin’ away. Can I help it if I’m in a good mood? You know, it’s maybe something in the air.”
“Yeah, exhaust fumes making you dippy,” she muttered, watching the exiting employees stream out.
But he could see her trying not to smile at him. Dolores looked good even when she was rolling her eyes at him. Nice brown eyes, nice mouth, a fanny with a little meat on it. Harry wasn’t one of those guys who wanted a woman who looked like a stick. He liked to have a little something to hold on to.
He nudged his lunch bucket aside. “So when are we going to go get a drink?”
She finished checking through the backpack of a coat-check kid who was leaving and gave Harry a look as though he were an unripe melon she was going to hand back at the store. “What, you and me?”
“Who the hell else do you think I mean, we? Of course you and me. Come on, Dolores, I’ll show you a good time.”
“Ha. Like I need to see your version of a good time. What I need to see is a report in the morning showing what went on during your shift.”
“I left a report,” he said indignantly.
“Sure, the time you came on shift, the time you went off.”
“Yeah, so?” He adjusted his utility belt.
“So what else happened?”
“What, you kidding?” He looked at her as if she were losing her marbles. “Nothing else happened. Nothing ever happens this shift. We just babysit an empty building. Only exciting thing that would happen is maybe you’d say yes to goin’ out with me.”
A glint of humor flickered in her eyes. “I say yes, it better not show up in your report.”
“Then you better expect to time in and time out, only. I’m telling you, nothing happens on this shift, Dolores. Nothing at all.”
“I STILL THINK WE ought to be looking at the papyrus scrolls instead of these,” Alex said, shifting restlessly in his chair.
Julia glanced over from her copy of Cleisthenes. “Hmm, gee, let’s see, do you read hieroglyphs?”
“No. But I think it’s time I learned.”
“And you really think that out of all the scrolls and all the libraries in the world, some fragment that just happened to mention the White Star would wind up here?”
“I’m just saying…”
“Think about it. We’ve been told that Adeodatus wrote a poem about the White Star, so we know the legend somehow made it into the classical canon.”
“So?”
“So, how did it get there? Someone had to travel and hear the legend, don’t you think? I’m thinking our best bet is to look at some of the classical histories and travel accounts of Egypt, see if it pops up.”
She knew she was being borderline obsessive, but what else did she have to do with her time? She’d traced it to Constantinople and identified it with the crack. The amulet she’d seen was probably the White Star.
Assuming the trader wasn’t a lying shyster, which, of course, there was every possibility he would be.
The reality was, she wouldn’t really be able to relax until she’d gone back as far as her sources would let her go.
The time passed and she wished for Alex’s cell-phone jukebox, long since out of power. Water or a soda would be good, but there was no way she was bringing any liquid around these books. Even the modern translations still deserved care.
“This is great stuff, you know,” Alex said.
“What are you reading?”
“Herodotus. He was looking at some skulls of Persians and Egyptians and wanted to know why the Persian skulls would crumble under a pebble but the Egyptian skulls wouldn’t crush. Here’s what they told him. ‘The Egyptians from early childhood have the head shaved, and so by the action of the sun the skull becomes thick and hard. The Persians, on the other hand, have feeble skulls because they keep themselves shaded from the first, wearing turbans upon their heads.’”
“Who knew that shade was so dangerous?”
Alex eyed her. “I think when we get out of here we should head south, maybe to Aruba, and put you in a bikini to toughen up your bones. I’ve never seen you in a bikini, you know.”
“That’s because we got involved in December.”
“But we never took a beach holiday,” he pointed out. “I think we ought to remedy that. Think of it—sand, blue water, umbrella drinks, sun…. We could toughen up your skull, too, although you don’t really need your head to be any harder, now that I think about it,” he added, wincing when she punched him in the arm. “Hey, what was that for?”
“I’m not hardheaded,” she told him.
“Good, then that means you’ll go with me to Aruba?”
His eyes were green and amused on hers. “No,” was what she should have told him. But suddenly, for the life of her she couldn’t figure out why. “We’ll see,” was all she said.
Alex bobbed his head as though to a beat only he could hear. “I’ll take ‘We’ll see’ for now.”
Julia flushed and turned back to her book.
Chapter followed chapter. It took her a moment to realize she’d found it when she finally did, because she was so bleary-eyed from reading, but there it was in front of her. “Alex, I think I found something,” she said.
“Read it.”
“This is from Cleisthenes.”
“Did he have a strong skull?”
She glowered at him. “Do you want to hear this, or not?”
“No, please, read away, my Egyptian beauty.”
“All right.” She cleared her throat. “‘In Cairo, I met a man who taught me much of the land, and I spent many afternoons in congress with him. For though he was now bent and gnarled with age, he had once been a high servant of the pharaoh Horemhotep and had traveled widely in the desert lands beyond. We spoke for long hours as he related to me accounts of empires and feats of arms, of kingly men and strange tusked animals large as a house.
“‘And yet it is not, after all, such stirring stories that remain in my thoughts, but a lesser one. The pharaoh Horemhotep was possessed of an amulet of great fascination and power, an amulet once plundered long ago as a spoil of war from a great kingdom now numbered among the vanquished foes of Egypt, and lost among the shifting sands. It was an object of great age, a star of ivory, white and smooth, handsomely carved and all unsullied save for a small fissure on its back.’” She stared up at Alex.
“That’s it,” she whispered.
“I know. Keep reading.”
“‘This amulet held great sway over the pharaoh’s thoughts, and he sought to know more of it. So he sent his servant into the wide desert, to hunt up the cities of the lost kingdom and find what he may, for surely such a powerful talisman was greatly valued by their rulers. The servant traveled for many days and spoke to the desert nomads who inhabited such places. And he sifted through rumor and legend until finally he reached a half-buried city.
“‘And there, among the ruins, he found the words that told the tale of a great love that was not to be and an amulet that held a love so pure it could pass through the ages like a hand through the water of a river.
“‘He made to leave, but a great sandstorm arose in the desert, and his camel would not suffer itself to be led but ran away. The searcher stru
ggled mightily and returned to the ruined city, and sheltered there for five days and nights. And on the sixth day, the storm had passed. Of his camel, there was no sign. He walked out into the desert and a band of nomads found him wandering all empty-handed, tormented with thirst, and they conveyed him back to the cities of the living.’”
Julia closed the book, a faint buzzing in her ears. “It’s done,” she said. “We did it.”
20
Sunday, 9:00 p.m.
THEY WERE BOTH SILENT as they walked out of the book repository. They’d tracked the amulet across the millennia, across countries and continents. And now, finally, the story had ended.
“The birth of the legend,” Julia murmured as Alex handed her the last can of Coke.
“And as close as we’re likely to get to the origin of the White Star.” He hopped up on one of the tables and she sat next to him.
“Maybe it’s as close as we were meant to get. There are some secrets in the world that should be kept.” She took a drink and handed the can to him. “It took a sandstorm to hide them all those centuries ago. Maybe that was a sign.”
“More hocus-pocus?”
“It’s not hocus-pocus,” she flared. “It’s real. For good or for evil, the White Star changed people’s lives. There are some powers that are that strong.” Blinking, she looked down.
“Hey.” Alex took a closer look. “Are you okay? What’s up?”
She swiped at her eyes in embarrassment. “I’m tired and loopy from all the research. It just gets me, that’s all. Imagine loving someone so much that the legend of it travels through the ages, and the token of it still carries all that feeling. And it did. That’s not hocus-pocus,” she said angrily. “That amulet was more than just inanimate ivory, and you know it. You felt it.”
He nodded slowly.
“That’s the way love is supposed to be. It’s not supposed to be about going hunting for a Dutch model when you have a midlife crisis or about control. It’s supposed to be about the feeling that lives in that amulet.”
Alex set down the can of soda. Maybe the Dutch model was part of the reason she guarded her emotions so jealously, part of the reason she relied so much on her intellect—she’d seen, after all, where living by the heart alone could lead a person. “So how did your father explain the Dutch model to you?” he asked softly.
There was no real surprise there, which told him a lot. “Gerald? He didn’t bother. But then, he was never very present in our lives. I haven’t heard from him since I got my Ph.D. He sent me a card with a hundred-dollar check,” she elaborated, and picked up the can of soda to take another drink.
“Nice.”
“He actually showed up when I got my B.A., Helga in tow.”
“Helga?”
“Helga, Heika, Sonia Henie,” she said carelessly. “It’s hard to remember.”
Alex studied her. “You’re still ticked at him.”
“Me? Ticked?” Her laugh was genuine. “I was a child of the eighties—I got therapized within an inch of my life to be sure I coped with it. Which didn’t, of course, stop me from marching right out and marrying a father figure, with predictable results.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Who? Gerald?”
“Your husband.”
“Ex-husband,” she corrected.
“Ex-husband.”
“I’ll take state capitals for a hundred, please, Alex.”
“Nope. I’m not letting you off the hook on this one. What happened?”
She sighed. “I was young, he wasn’t. End of story. Want to split that last protein bar?”
Alex handed it to her. “Come on, keep going.”
Julia ripped open the package with a scowl. “I met him when I was finishing my undergraduate degree. He was a visiting scholar. He was so smart. He knew about…everything, it seemed. He’d have these dinner parties with all kinds of intellectuals and they’d talk about real things. They weren’t like the people I’d known.”
“Like?”
“Like the society people.” She handed him his half of the bar. “I mean, if I never go to another one of Bunnie Bernaldo’s parties, it’ll be too soon. All the same brainless people having all the same conversations,” she said impatiently, “wearing five- or ten-thousand-dollar evening gowns they’ll put on exactly once and never again so that they can be one up on the rest of the fashionable crowd.
“Edward’s world wasn’t like that. It was meeting famous artists and authors and playwrights, talking around the table for hours. I felt like I was alive for the first time. And I felt special that he opened the door and let me in, that he thought I was worthy. I couldn’t believe it when he proposed.” She set the bar aside.
“How old were you?” Alex asked quietly.
“Twenty-two. It was my senior year in college. I was just…stunned. And a lot of it was hero worship, I know that now. He made me want to be more than I was, better. And I thought that I was in love because isn’t that what love is? Caring more for someone else than you do yourself, wanting to be the best possible version of yourself for them?”
Alex nodded. “‘Trying to always live up to the best within you,’ I believe you said.”
She let out a breath. “And so long as I was starry-eyed, everything was perfect. I was the adoring pupil at his knee, absorbing every bit of knowledge he dispensed, being his audience. And he taught me a tremendous amount. But I was learning things elsewhere, too.
“I was midway through my doctorate the first time I corrected him on something. We were having a dinner party and he’d said something about Egyptian art from the Early Dynastic period. But he was wrong. I’d just done some research on it. So I just spoke up and made my point, backing it up with data, the way he’d taught me.”
Alex could imagine her, so caught up in the thrill of knowing, of learning, of sharing.
“I was so proud of myself,” she continued. “And I thought he’d be proud of me. He didn’t say anything, though, just got really quiet. Dinner ended early. And after everyone went home, we had our first fight. About loading the dishwasher, of all things. Except it wasn’t about loading the dishwasher at all. It took me years to realize that.”
“He wanted an audience,” Alex said, wanting badly to hit something. “You weren’t supposed to outgrow him.”
“I thought he wanted a wife,” she said, old pain echoing in her voice. “I thought he wanted an equal.”
“Maybe he thought he did.”
She moved her shoulders. “Mostly he just wanted to control me, especially toward the end. The more I turned into my own person, the more he wanted to call the shots. I left for my postdoc in Cairo, and it was such a relief to be out from under his thumb. And that was the beginning of the end.”
“How long were you gone?”
“A year. I missed him, though. I took an early flight home and went over to the university to surprise him.” Her mouth twisted. “I still remember walking up to his open door and hearing his laughter. It reminded me of the good times. And I thought, we’d had them once, and maybe again…. But then I came around the corner and there he was, sitting on the edge of his desk and smiling at some little undergraduate.”
He wanted to crush the idiot she’d been married to for putting that look in her eyes. He wanted to pace, to burn off at least some of the anger for her. But he was afraid that if he moved, she’d stop talking, and he didn’t want to take that chance. “He didn’t deserve you,” he said instead.
“Nothing had happened, he told me later, in the middle of the biggest, ugliest fight we’d ever had.” She laughed humorlessly. “The hell of it was, I believed him—physically. Emotionally, she was giving him what he wanted, the same thing I had, once. Pure adoration. The sad thing was that I admired him as much intellectually as I had when we’d first met. I didn’t admire him as a person, though—the fights, the nastiness, the control games had burned it all out of me. We staggered on for another year, mostly because I was too stubborn t
o give up. But when I was done, oh boy, I was done.”
Alex let out a breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding. “What did your aunt Stella think of him?”
“She only met him once. By the time we started dating, she was already ill. Heart disease,” she said in answer to his unspoken question. “I could tell by the way she reacted that she didn’t think much of him. He went with me to her funeral. It was the first time he met my family. In a way, that was when I really started falling for him.”
“Trading one mentor for another?”
She gave him a startled look. “If you like. I missed her so much, and here was Edward, being strong, showing me there was a life outside of the one my family lived. Bad timing. My mother tried to control a lot of what I did and then Edward did. When I broke up with him, I went a little nuts for a while. That was when you and I got together.”
And when she was done with her period of madness, she wanted to be done with him. But he wasn’t going to let it happen.
Alex stirred. “Can I ask you something? The first night we got together, at the museum fund-raiser, you wore a red dress. This really deep, really wild red. I’d never seen you wear anything like it before.”
Julia smiled. “That was my Declaration-of-Independence dress. The divorce had been final for about two months. I’d gotten past the living-hell part, but I was still making my decisions like I had to worry about keeping Edward happy. And then I was in a changing room and the clerk brought in the dress. It was the sort of thing I’d never pick out, but I was in a hurry and I was desperate, so I put it on. And it looked…”
“Amazing,” Alex supplied. “It about stopped my heart when I saw you.”
Her eyes lit up. “My first thought was that it was way too outrageous, way too tight and low-cut. And all of a sudden I realized that that was Edward talking. And I just snapped. I thought, you know, I’m going to start living for me. I’m not going to live for Edward and I’m not going to follow my mother’s life, I’m going to do what I want. And somewhere, I could hear Stella cheering.”
“It showed, you know,” he said, voice husky with the memory. “The minute you walked through the door that night, you were practically vibrating with it.”
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