Grim Shadows (Roaring Twenties)

by Jenn Bennett

  “Mind the engine,” he said, helping to steady her while she stood on wobbly legs. “Burns like hell if you touch it. Believe me, I know from experience.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You sure?”

  If he said even a single word about her clinging to him, she would wither from humiliation. But when he didn’t, she eventually answered, “It wasn’t so bad.”

  “Better than ‘awful,’ I suppose. I’ll take it.”

  Mildly self-conscious, she glanced around the back parking lot. Empty but for three cars belonging to security guards. “If the guards question us, let me do the talking this time,” she said. “No more crazy stories of domestic abuse and pregnancy.”

  “If you insist. Now, what’s the plan? Where do you think the map’s hidden?”

  She retrieved a set of keys from her coat pocket. “Right under my father’s nose. Come on. Let’s see if I’m right.”

  Shadows greeted them inside the office entrance. The guards concentrated their patrol on the museum proper, only occasionally making a pass through the administrative offices. Hadley would rather avoid them completely, so best to work quickly. She led Lowe directly to her father’s office and closed the door behind them.

  “You didn’t recognize anything my mother said in regards to the location of the map?” she asked, switching on her father’s desk lamp.

  “Sounded like bad poetry.”

  “I suppose that depends on your tastes. Father used to give my mother books for every occasion—birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas. Expensive books. First editions. And they’re right over here.” She headed to one of the bookshelves on the far side of his office, near the door that connected to hers. “He said they were an investment, that he was giving her the pleasure of the words as well as something that would increase in value over time. But I remember hearing her tell my nanny that though Father may have given them to her, they were really more for him. Not that he’s a lover of poetry, mind you. He’s just a collector.”

  “These here?” Lowe’s gaze darted over the shelves. “Must be a hundred or more. They survived the Great Fire?”

  “My family home was just west of the fire line. We were lucky.”

  “We were in the Fillmore District at the time, so us, too.” Lowe frowned. “You’re certain your mother was referring to lines of published poetry?”

  “My parents might’ve only been collectors of books, but I’ve probably read every volume in this room at least once.”

  “I read a lot in Egypt,” he said. “Mostly The Argosy and Weird Tales.”

  “Pulp magazines don’t count as reading.”

  “What a little snob you are,” he said, slanting narrowed eyes her way. His smile told her he was teasing, but maybe he had a point.

  “Regardless,” she said. “If you’d read something with an actual spine, you might’ve figured this out. Because my mother said we could find the map in ‘Seine’s cold quays, in the fields of gazing grain, on night’s Plutonian Shore, and on a painted ship.’ I recognize at least two of those lines. ‘Plutonian Shore’ is from ‘The Raven.’”

  “Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Very good. I suppose Berkeley didn’t completely fail you,” she murmured, scanning the shelves in front of them.

  “There,” Lowe said, pointing to the highest shelf. “Help me move this out of the way.”

  Together they dragged the wingback chair in which her father smoked cigars across the floor. Once it was out of the way, Lowe’s impressive height gave him access to the top shelf. The tips of his fingers tugged out a volume. It was Poe, all right. He thumbed through it, once, twice. Tipped it sideways and fluttered it around to see if anything fell out of its pages. Nothing.

  “Give it to me,” she said. “Maybe there’s a clue on the page with that line.” She surveyed the index and found the poem. “I don’t see anything.”

  He leaned over her shoulder to scan the pages with her, and she caught the scent of his leather coat—the scent she’d breathed in on the motorcycle when her cheek was against his back. Her pulse increased. “No marking,” he noted. “No corner turned down.” She felt his gaze shift to her face a moment before his fingers followed. “You’re wilted.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Your lily.” Heat spread over her neck as he slid the flower out from its pin. “Bedraggled by the ride, I’m afraid. Shame. Still smells nice.”

  “Yes, well, nothing lasts forever.” Her hand patted the space where the flower had been. “Unless it’s been properly preserved, of course.”

  “A mummy joke?”

  She smiled to herself. “Please focus on the task at hand. I’d prefer to avoid the guards.”

  “Well, the map’s not here. Maybe we’re looking in the wrong volume. Did your mother own two Poe books?”

  She shook her head, fighting the disappointment unfurling in her chest. “Just this one.”

  “Let’s try another verse, then. What was the other one you recognized?”

  “On ‘a painted ship upon a painted ocean.’”

  “Sounds very familiar,” Lowe mumbled.

  “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.”

  “Ah-ha! I saw Coleridge . . . there. Let me reshelve the Poe.” He reached to slip the book back into place, then halted. “Hold on.”

  “What?”

  “This feels odd.”

  ELEVEN

  LOWE FLIPPED THE POE book over to study the leather cover. “I can’t be sure. How attached to your mother’s books are you?”

  “Attached? If you mean sentimentally, not at all. Like I said—”

  He reached inside his jacket before she could finish. Metal glinted. He could tell by her murmur that she was surprised he’d been wearing his dagger beneath his tuxedo. With the flick of a wrist, he slashed across the leather book cover with abandon and stuck a finger inside the gouge he’d made. Definitely something inside. A yellowed paper slid out.

  “What is it?” Hadley pushed closer and grasped one edge while he held the other.

  Textured artist’s paper, about the size of his hand. And on it was a delicate watercolor painting of something he immediately recognized. Hadley, too.

  “Canopic jar,” they murmured in unison.

  Pottery jars with lids shaped like heads of gods, used by ancient Egyptians to preserve their internal organs for the afterlife. Each tomb would contain four jars, holding four different organs. This painting’s jar lid was rendered with Duamutef, the jackal-headed son of Horus and guardian of the stomach.

  “Four poetry references,” he said. “Four canopic jars. There’s a date in the corner. February 5, 1906. And what’s this?”

  Running down the middle of the jar, carefully drawn over the watercolor with brown ink, were two columns of strange pictorial symbols. Hadley squinted. “This is where the hieroglyphic inscription would normally be—or the name of the god protecting the organs. But these aren’t hieroglyphs.”

  “Not Egyptian ones,” he corrected. “Appears to be an alphabet of pictograms. Look here—there’s a flower and a knife.”

  “No, I think that’s a blade of grass.”

  He darted a glance at her face, charmed by her scholarly seriousness. “Your father said your mother loved puzzles. Do you think she made up her own alphabet to mimic hieroglyphs?”

  “Maybe,” Hadley said. “But this isn’t a map. What does it all mean?”

  “Don’t know, but ten dollars says paintings of the other three jars are inside other books.” He relinquished the paper to her grasp and reached for Coleridge, gutting the book like he had the first. “Mother lode! This one’s Hapy.”

  A baboon head was lovingly rendered on the lid of this jar. “Lungs. January 21, 1906. And there’re the pictograms again.”

  “None match the first.”

>   “Let me see.” Her eyes flicked over both papers. “You’re right—no matches. What a beautiful little alphabet, though, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll reserve my judgment until we figure it out. What’s next? The ‘gazing grain’ makes me think of Nebraska. Any Nebraskan poets who go crazy for wheat stalks?”

  “I think Nebraska is better known for corn. Gazing grain, gazing grain . . .” She ran a finger along the spines lining the nearest shelf. “They’re poems about death—the Poe and the Coleridge. ‘Gazing grain’ must be another death poem. Oh!”

  “What?”

  “‘Because I could not stop for Death.’”

  “‘He kindly stopped for me,’” he finished. “Yes, I do know that one, Emily Dickinson. Though, I never managed to memorize anything past the first stanza in school. Nice memory you’ve got there, Bacall.”

  Hadley whooped a little laugh as a pretty pink color flushed her cheeks. He felt it, too, the thrill of discovery. What an unexpected pleasure to share it with her. Together they located the book and, sure enough, the third paper had been hidden inside the leather. A third canopic jar with a third set of pictograms, and a date of March 25, 1906.

  “What about the last poem?” she asked.

  “Well, the Seine’s in France, so I’m betting on a French poet. Someone obsessed with death like Miss Dickinson, maybe?”

  “Rimbaud, Hugo, Baudelaire . . .”

  Lowe snagged all three volumes and ran his fingers along the back covers, stopping when he felt the telltale raised edge on the Baudelaire. And there it was: a fourth canopic jar painting, a fourth set of pictograms, and something new. Several things, actually.

  “Dimensions,” he said. “Fifteen inches tall, six inches wide at the base.”

  That wasn’t all. Next to the watercolor of the jar, a cross section was drawn in ink. The jar was built with double walls and an empty section at the bottom, labeled with the description “sub compartment.”

  Lowe tapped the corner of the paper. “Notes for clay and glazes . . . prices. Looks like these are all commissioned sketches from a business called Cypress Pottery. ‘Approved by client, VM. January 7, 1906.’ It’s the earliest of the four dates.”

  “VM,” Hadley murmured. “Vera Murray. My mother’s maiden name. She must’ve had these made. Look at the sub compartment. It’s big enough to accommodate one of the amulet’s crossbars, if they’re in the same scale as the base you found.”

  He studied it. “By God, you’re right. It’s a hiding place. The jars are designed to be sealed after the pieces are inserted. Four jars to conceal four crossbars.” He slid his finger across a smudged word near the cross section. “Arched? Ashes?” His gaze connected with hers. “Hadley, these are meant to be urns.”

  “Why, yes, they’d be about the right size.”

  “Look at the dates.” He took the paintings from her and fanned them out on her father’s conference table. “January, February, March—all four dates are in the months before the Great Earthquake.”

  “In the séance, my mother mentioned she gave the amulet crossbars away. She hid them in urns, and then hid the urns around the city. These are made for real ashes. Real people.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment, both grinning.

  She blew out a breath and surveyed the paintings. “That means these four pieces of paper really are a map. Because I’ll bet you ten dollars, Mr. Magnusson, that the pictograms are the names of the deceased whose ashes are in these urns. If we want to find the pieces, we have to track down the families in possession of these urns.”

  She was right, of course. But finding them might prove difficult.

  “A couple of ways we could approach this,” he said. “Could try looking for this Cypress Pottery shop, but the chances that it’s still around twenty-one years later, what with the earthquake and half the city burning to the ground . . . Better bet would be checking death records. How many people could’ve died in the city over those three months? A couple hundred?”

  “So many records were destroyed in the Great Fire,” she pointed out. “We could try the Columbarium north of Golden Gate Park.”

  “The what?”

  “The domed building near the cemeteries. It houses funerary urns. A place for families to visit their loved one’s ashes. An indoor graveyard, if you will.”

  “I wasn’t aware any of that was still operational these days.”

  “The crematorium on premises hasn’t been used since cremation was outlawed within city limits, but the Columbarium is still open for viewing. Survived the earthquake, so maybe there’s a chance one or more of the canopic jars could be there.”

  Leave it to her to know something like that. Sort of endearing, in a macabre way.

  She began gathering the paintings. “Tomorrow’s Saturday, so I don’t have to work. We can meet there in the morning and have a look around. In the meantime, I’ll take these home and—”

  He put a firm hand over hers. “Whoa. Who says you get to keep them?”

  “They were my mother’s.”

  “And it’s my job. You’re helping, not running the show.”

  A flash of anger bolted through her eyes. “She said I’d be able to solve her puzzle. This is what she meant. I’ll look at them, then you can have them afterward.”

  Devious little thing, wasn’t she? Had to admire her for trying, but no way in hell was he leaving without the paintings. And the heat of her knuckles under his made him greedy for something more. “I’ve found there are two ways to end an argument with a stubborn woman.”

  She snorted. “Please do enlighten me.”

  “The first way is to let her win.” He allowed her fingers to slip away from his.

  “Very wise. And what’s the second way?”

  His pulse pounded in his temples. “The second . . . is this.”

  Lifting her chin with one hand, he brought his mouth down on hers. Firmly. She stilled beneath him, not breathing. Probably just shocked. And maybe he was carried away with enthusiasm. He loosened up a bit, inhaled, and tried smaller kisses. Delicate and feather soft. Kisses even the purest of virgins wouldn’t find offensive.

  Nothing.

  She was still as marble and twice as cold. Had he miscalculated? She wasn’t pushing him away, but she wasn’t exactly overcome with passion, either. A dead body would have more zeal.

  This was definitely not what he’d conjured in his fantasies.

  Christ. He’d never kissed a woman who didn’t want to be kissed, but from the wooden indifference of her lips, he was fairly sure this was what it felt like. So different from the erotic pull he’d felt at the gazing pool back at the party. He could’ve sworn there was something between them. Had it all been in his mind?

  Nothing to do but end it and let the fire of humiliation warm the arctic air between them. How could he have been so wrong?

  He released her chin and pulled away. A look that was something close to horror harshened her features. Her hands were fisted at her sides.

  “Guess that doesn’t always work after all,” he joked, trying to salvage his stinging pride.

  A brisk knock sounded across the room. The office door creaked open to reveal a middle-aged man in a guard’s uniform. “Dr. Bacall?”

  “Ah, good evening, Mr. Hill.”

  “Miss Bacall. Sorry to bother you. I’d just punched out for the night and was headed home. Saw the light under the door and thought it was your father working late.”

  “No, it’s just me. Oh, and Lo—umm, that is. I mean, this is—”

  “Mr. Magnusson,” Lowe said.

  “Yes,” she said, laughing nervously. “He’s just back from Egypt. And we’ve both just come from the museum’s party.”

  The guard’s eyes narrowed. “I see . . .”

&nbs
p; What had she said? Let her take care of the talking? She was terrible at lying. If she said much more, she’d end up turning herself in for a crime she hadn’t committed. Worse—she might tell the guard they’d been ripping up books to hunt down a map.

  Oh, God.

  The gouged books sat on the conference table with the paintings. Lowe quickly stepped in front of them, hoping to block the guard’s view, and spoke over Hadley.

  “We were planning a surprise for Dr. Bacall’s retirement,” Lowe said smoothly. “Collecting some old photographs of him in his younger days—so we could have an artist sketch him for a program highlighting his achievements.”

  The guard’s posture relaxed. “I’m sure he’ll be so pleased.”

  It was really too easy.

  “You won’t breathe a word, I trust,” Lowe said. “We hoped to surprise the whole staff. That’s why we rushed straight over here from the party. Don’t want anyone spilling the secret until we could get the program to the printer.”

  “My lips are sealed,” the guard assured him. “Well, then, I’ll be on my way. You need a ride home or anything, Miss Bacall?”

  “Yes, please,” Hadley said. “That would be so kind, Mr. Hill. Will save me from catching a taxi.”

  A frustrated anger stole over Lowe. Had he not just invented an excuse to appease the guard? Was she so appalled by the kiss that she’d take any opening to remove herself from his presence?

  She smiled at Mr. Hill. “If you could just wait for me at the entrance, I won’t be a minute.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll wait.” The guard tipped his hat to Lowe. As soon as he’d headed far enough down the hallway, Hadley surveyed the room with nervous eyes.

  “I could’ve taken you home,” he said.

  She ignored that. “Put the books back exactly where you found them. Make sure your butchery job isn’t noticeable. And I’ll just—”

  Oh, no. Lowe lunged for the table and managed to get his hand on two of the paintings. She’d already grabbed the others.