Bound For Eternity

by Sarah Wisseman

  James went into his tiny kitchen. While he opened beer and hunted for crackers, I looked around.

  The living room was sparsely furnished with a navy-blue futon couch, a dirty brown beanbag chair, and a couple of oversized red pillows suitable for couch or floor. Two large watercolors of seascapes hung on the wall. A stack of medical books and journals leaned like the tower of Pisa near the couch, with more books crowded onto a low oak coffee table. Off to the right, I could see a small study with a computer and heavily laden bookshelves.

  I was looking at the paintings when James re-appeared bearing two cold Sam Adamses and a plate with Triscuits and slices of cheddar cheese. "Hope you don't want a glass." He grinned at me as he plunked the goodies down on the table next to a dying spider plant (was he another indoor plant killer, like me?) and folded himself into a sitting position.

  "Straight out of the bottle is what I'm used to," I replied, taking a beer and a cracker. "And Triscuits are my favorite crackers. Who did those watercolors? They're great."

  "I did."

  "Wow! They look just like the beach near my Dad's house. I wish I could paint."

  "Cambridge Adult Education has classes-that's where I learned. I can give you the class announcement if you like."

  "I like," I said.

  "Any news on your break-in?"

  "No. I don't really expect anything."

  He sure looked good in jeans. I hoped I wasn't being too obvious about my interest.

  James took a long swig. "And no news on the murder, right?"

  "No. But the police have been over every other day, asking more questions. They're working really hard on Marion's background, trying to find out who had a grudge against her. It's not always McEwan, though, so I don't get to talk with him often. Usually it's Detective Clyde or Gotti."

  "Sounds like they haven't given up."

  "I think not. But one of them told me they have a string of murders in South Boston, so they're really stretched thin right now."

  James pulled a red pillow over to lean on. "So, tell me more about the mummy project. How does it all fit into your exhibit?"

  I told him how I was going to introduce mummification in the context of Egyptian burial customs, against a backdrop of the famous scene from the Book of the Dead, the "Weighing of the Heart." He seemed to appreciate the story about the heart being weighed against the Feather of Truth. If it was too heavy, the heart was tossed to a crocodile-headed monster and the poor soul was refused admission to heaven.

  "What about all the gory details about embalming, like removal of the viscera?" he asked.

  "Oh, yes, they're included. We want to be able to gross out the school kids."

  "Stuff like how they took out the brain with a hook," James said, his green eyes gleaming.

  "Yeah, and cut open the abdomen with an obsidian knife."

  We both laughed.

  "Ghouls, both of us," said James.

  We had made serious inroads in the Triscuits and the sharp Cheddar, so he dumped some more on the plate. He passed me the plate, and I greedily helped myself. I hoped he liked women who enjoyed their food; I'd hate to pretend I was dieting.

  "Will you have some descriptions of other mummy studies?"

  "Yes. The Manchester mummy project, the Philadelphia study, maybe a couple of others. I think the public will really like it; mummies are hot." I was relaxing.

  James rose to fill the kids' juice cups, and to replenish their popcorn. They ignored him and the food, focusing instead on little plastic figures.

  "What is that game they're playing?" I asked.

  "Oh, it's a board game my wife Carol got for Sam: Candyland. He loves it." He sighed.

  I took a deep breath and ventured into new territory. "Ellen said you'd lost your wife to breast cancer. How long ago was that?'

  "Two years and three days," he replied, his big hands going still.

  We looked at each other. People who were still grieving knew exactly how long ago their loss was.

  "I'm so sorry. I guess that's something we have in common."

  "Ellen told me about your husband," he said gently. "It must be very hard for you." He had the nicest voice, as deep and soothing as solo cello music.

  "Yes, it's been hell. I don't know which is harder, the grieving process-I still miss Tom every day-or being a single parent."

  "Amen to that. My Sam has had some bedwetting episodes-I put that down to missing his mother, but I don't know how to deal with it. Maybe talk to his pediatrician."

  "Emma has bad dreams. Her pediatrician recommended regular bedtime rituals to make her fell secure. I need the rituals as much as she does." I gulped and shut my eyes for a moment.

  James waited until I was able to look at him again. "Have things gotten better since you moved to Boston?"

  "Yes. It's nice to be back in my home city. The work is crazy, but I love it, or at least I do when my colleagues aren't being too neurotic."

  "You can't have stranger people in museum work than we do in medicine," said James.

  "I'm not so sure about that," I replied. "Museums attract people from dysfunctional families who like to bury themselves in esoteric research and forgotten things. Sometimes I think we're like spiders lurking in dark corners, weaving our webs and waiting for something to happen."

  "Whoa! Do you include yourself in that description?"

  I was almost as startled as he was. Where had that nasty worldview come from? "I love research and forgotten things, but my family was normal. Well, fairly normal." I told James about my mother's sudden death and my father living alone on Cape Cod.

  "At least you're close enough to visit," James said.

  "Yes, that makes a big difference." I suddenly noticed that my beer bottle was empty. I looked reluctantly at my watch. "This has been great, but Emma must be hungry," I said. "We should get going."

  "You don't have to. I could order pizza for all four of us. And you and I can have another beer while we're waiting." James looked at me with one eyebrow raised.

  I hesitated, but not for long.

  "That sounds wonderful."

  CHAPTER 14

  SCANNED

  Monday morning started bright and crisp, with a deep blue sky and maple leaves dancing in the wind. It should have been one of my favorite autumn days, but my mood was more appropriate for a dreary day in January.

  Emma's grizzly behavior as we were getting ready had aggravated my emotional slump. "But Mommy, I wanted to wear the pink sweater!"

  "Sweetie, you know you got ice cream all over it. It's in the wash."

  "I don't like this one!" whined Emma. "You know pink is my favorite!"

  "You can wear it tomorrow."

  "But mommy..."

  She kept it up all the way to daycare, and I suddenly understood why parents of small children turned violent. I dearly wanted to shake my darling child- hard.

  I dropped off my sulky offspring at Playtime, feeling only slightly guilty at the surge of relief that overtook me as I sped away to work.

  The traffic was backed up on Beacon St., so my thoughts drifted back to James while I waited to turn into the parking lot.

  Saturday night had been magical. We had eaten pizza, swilled beers, and for a short time had forgotten the outside world altogether. Emma and Sam were now best friends, and James and I...I was falling in love, and I was pretty sure he felt the same way.

  His laugh reminded me of my brother's; his puns were as awful as my dad's. His taste in music and books was even more eclectic than my own-mysteries rubbed shoulders with medical tomes and poetry, and he gave equal space to the Beatles and the complete piano works of Chopin. He loved Italian food, and professed to like cats.

  Or did he say that only because he knows I love them? A little voice of caution spoke in my head.

  The only cloud on our horizon was Ellen. James had urged me to talk with Ellen sooner rather than later, and I had said I would. But I was still dithering, waiting for the right moment.
r />   In the eight years I'd known Ellen she had hardly ever dated anyone more than three weeks. I knew that habit was a result of too much man bashing from her divorced mom. Like her mom, Ellen was cautious about commitment, about giving away too much of herself.

  Ellen was so attractive-she'd have a new guy in no time. If I waited until she was dating again, the news that James was dating me wouldn't matter as much.

  I was being a coward. I had always hated scenes, especially when they were my fault. Ellen despised cowardly, devious behavior. Now whenever I told her, Ellen would be madder at me for being wishy-washy and secretive than at James for dropping her.

  Disgusted with myself, I pulled into the parking lot, glancing towards the fence as I pulled my keys out of the ignition.

  An ambulance was parked in street behind the museum.

  Wondering who was hurt now and dreading the answer, I ran into the building and made a beeline for the front office. "Susie! What's going on? Is anyone hurt?"

  Susie greeted me with a Cheshire-cat grin. "No one's hurt. The mummy's getting some free publicity with an ambulance ride, and will probably make tonight's news. Cool, huh?"

  "Not another circus, like last time! Who set that up?" I was remembering my stressed-out feelings during the first media interview and had no desire to talk with another reporter.

  "Who do you think?" Susie retorted, her face flushing. "Actually, Victor told me that Dean Saltonstall suggested it."

  "Oh, I get it. Image repair. Make the museum look good-distract anyone who remembers we had a murder here a little while ago."

  "It won't hurt your image, either! I told Channel Two that you were the expert, the person to talk with. You'll find the whole crew in Registration."

  "Thanks. I guess." I turned to go.

  "Oh, Lisa!" called Susie.

  "Yes?"

  "Victor's giving you clearance to talk to the reporters since he can't be there. Just don't say anything he wouldn't say." She smiled and nodded at me.

  "Right," I replied, remembering what a control-freak Victor was about museum publicity. I sped away to the registration area on the third floor of Wigglesworth Hall where the mummy was being lowered into a long box (wooden, this time), supervised by Ginny and Betsy. Bubble wrap protruded over the edges, so it looked like a baby's cradle lined with a lacy blanket.

  The box was closed and loosely taped, placed on a cart, and wheeled carefully over to the elevator. Betsy ran back upstairs to get her black denim jacket.

  ? ? ? ?

  She joined me in my crowded car. "Hey, you sure have a lot of stuff!" Betsy moved aside a small pink sweater, a Berenstein Bears book, and a half-eaten purple lollipop so she could sit down.

  I picked up the Happy Meal box, another used coffee cup, and a campus newspaper off the floor and chucked them into the back seat. "Wait until you're a mom," I replied darkly. "Even if you start out a Nasty Neat, you turn into a hopeless slob."

  Betsy laughed. She turned her cheerful, round face towards me as she snapped her gum and blew a large, pink bubble. Today her hair was streaked with turquoise dye, and her T-shirt was adorned with "Why did God create Woman second? Because Man was just a Rough Draft." She asked, "Do you think we're gonna be on TV this time?"

  "Looks that way. Mummies are hot, and news stations always need something for their human-interest slots. If we're lucky, we'll get about fifteen seconds at the end of the newscast." I wove through traffic a bit more aggressively than usual, hoping to beat the ambulance to Mass. General.

  "What will the CT scan show that the X-ray didn't?"

  "Well, we'll be seeing vertical slices instead of horizontal and side views. That means we might locate more internal organs-or sexual organs-or even amulets inside the packing. But amulets aren't that common in the Roman period."

  "Amulets? They're protective plaques, right? Sort of talismans against evil?

  "Yup. And each one is associated with a particular god or part of the body, like the heart scarab."

  Betsy spotted the ambulance a block ahead of us. I tore into the parking garage and was lucky enough to nab a spot near the entrance. I locked the car, and the two of us trotted towards Radiology as the mummy headed down the hall on a gurney. Chaos greeted us.

  "Lisa Donahue? Step right this way." A cameraman grabbed me and gave me a mini-mike to fasten onto my lapel. I shook my hair back, and hoped fervently that the little pimple on my chin wouldn't show up on TV. Behind me, the mummy was carefully lifted out of its box by Betsy and a hospital technician and positioned on the curved tray that fed into the CT scanner.

  The petite, blond technician grinned at me. "Great patient! We don't have to worry about claustrophobia with this one!"

  I laughed, suddenly more relaxed. This was going to be fun.

  It was fun. The taping went smoothly, and the mummy glided into the scanner before an attentive and almost silent audience. The red lights blinked and the machine whirred. The mummy was obediently motionless.

  I seated myself at the computer, next to Chip Burton, the CT technician in charge. I reminded him that we wanted one-millimeter intervals, so the 3-D imaging would work. Chip punched some buttons and we waited. The first images flashed on screen.

  "Will you look at that? Is that a board under its skull?"

  I stared in amazement. It was a board, complete with visible wood grain, and partial growth rings that we could count. "I haven't seen this before! I wonder if the board goes down the whole length of the body."

  The scanner moved down the body, slice by slice, and suddenly we could see the back of the skull for the first time.

  "Clear occipital fracture! Did your kid fall off a pyramid, or something?" Chip turned to me with a smile. The cameraman grinned, and someone chuckled.

  "Maybe. Or he got hit on the head. Or maybe the embalmers dropped the body when it was being transported," I replied.

  "Careless of them. Was it customary to mishandle bodies in ancient Egypt?" A deep, familiar voice chimed in behind me.

  I laughed. "We don't have a great deal of information about that aspect of embalming." My spine tingled in recognition, and I turned to greet James. "I thought you couldn't make it!"

  James grinned at me, and winked. "I got lucky." He focused on the screen and his eyebrows shot up in a comical way. "So there is a skull fracture here! And brain tissue."

  "That's interesting because it confirms that embalmers in the Roman period didn't always take the brain out," I said. "Can you tell if the fracture was the cause of death?" I was thinking about Marion.

  "Well, if the kid died from a blow on the head, we'd expect to see pooled blood at the site. But if the child suffered post-mortem damage, you wouldn't see any blood there. What I think we're seeing is two kinds of brain tissue, cerebrum and cerebellum." James peered at the screen and frowned. "Wait a minute, there's a dense patch there that could be pooled blood."

  "So the child died from a blow to the head?" I said with a shiver.

  "It's certainly possible. I wish I could open up the skull right there and check," James raised his eyebrows.

  "Not allowed. I wish we could," I said.

  Just then there was a commotion in the next room. A young girl came in, supported by a technician who helped her lie down on the other CT scanner. The scanner bed started to move towards the open circle of the instrument. "What's going on?" someone asked.

  Chip came back and told us. "That girl fell off her bicycle and hit her head. We want her to have a CT scan to make sure her skull is intact."

  James and I watched as the modern child's skull came up on the screen next to the ancient one we had been studying. In a few minutes, we could see both skulls, one with living brain tissue filling the cranium, the other with desiccated tissue collected near the base. Silently, James pointed to the modern head. A hairline fracture had appeared in the same place as the one on the mummy child.

  "How old is the little girl?" I asked in a hushed voice, feeling a chill on the back of my neck.r />
  "Eleven."

  One child fell off a bicycle, the other fell off a pyramid (or a wall, or a tomb entrance)...or was hit by something. I shook myself and tried to focus again.

  The mummy scan proceeded down to the neck, where I noticed the board's width shrank by about six inches. Then we were in the thoracic cavity, and a big discussion took place about which organs were there. Lungs? Heart? Both? No one was completely sure. Once again, everything was shriveled up and moved around. But two doctors were pretty certain they saw lung tissue, and I saw nothing solid enough to be an amulet. And the board had widened again underneath the lower body; it extended all the way past the ankles. Why on earth was there a board inside the mummy? As far as I knew, this wasn't a common practice in any period.