The Mask of Atreus Page 2

  Deborah checked the museum doors and did a quick walkthrough of the lobby under the T. rex skeleton and that ugly galleon prow Richard had unveiled last month like he was announcing Christmas had come early. It was a half-naked woman fused with the neck of a dragon, and looked like it would be more at home airbrushed on the side of a Harley than adorning the front of a Renaissance Spanish treasure ship, but Richard had thought it a wonderfully hilarious blend of history and kitsch. Deborah glowered at the woman’s vacant face and excessive curves, then down to where she became scaly and reptilian, the sexy allure turning—not surprisingly—into the serpent of Eden.

  She considered the great serpentine thing, its breasts like sixteenth-century headlamps, and grinned a wry, self-deprecating grin.

  “Richard,” she said aloud, “I love you, but you have a lousy sense of humor.”

  She shrugged, blew out a sigh, and paused to take in the carnage visited on the museum foyer by the caterers. They had left four trash cans filled with the paper plates they were supposed to have taken with them. In the semicircular alcove where she had done her presentation three hours earlier she found plastic martini glasses and napkins with the remains of the canapés, and a series of sticky spills on the polished floor. She’d be getting on to Richard about Taste of Elegance, and not just because their foie gras tasted suspiciously like Spam.

  Richard Dixon was the museum’s founder, its principal collector, its main source of funding, and its guiding light. He was her employer, her mentor, her friend. On the rare moments she was frank enough with herself to admit it, he was the nearest thing she’d had to a father since her own had died of heart failure when she was thirteen.

  Twenty years ago, almost to the day.

  Sometimes as she tried to drag the little museum into the twenty-first century, dealing with the likes of Harvey Webster in the process, Richard Dixon was the only thing that kept her going. Suddenly, standing alone in the museum foyer, dwarfed by the T. rex and lit only by the soft lights from the new Creek Indian cases, she wondered how much longer Richard himself would keep going.

  And what would you do if he was gone? she thought. It’s been twenty years, and you aren’t over the death of your real father yet. Past it perhaps, but not over it. Not really.

  She shook herself.

  “You shouldn’t drink at these things,” she said aloud. “It makes you melodramatic.”

  She looked around, trying to decide if there was anything else that had to be done tonight. Her passport was still in the office safe where it had been since she had faxed its details to the organizers of the Celtic exhibit (in case, she supposed, she had been planning to leave the country with a few significant pieces stuffed down her blouse), but that could wait till tomorrow. It wasn’t like she was going anywhere.

  She picked up the mail and leafed through it, separating the bills from the junk, the envelopes for her from those for

  Richard. A third of it went straight into the trash. The pieces bearing her name could wait, and those addressed to Richard seemed no more urgent. One had a little triangular mask in the corner: some begging letter from a local theater company, no doubt. Richard got dozens per week. He responded to all but the most generic or crass, often including significant donations. Smiling with a tired and familiar indulgence, Deborah put the letters in her purse and began locking up. She would deal with them in the morning.

  She set the alarm, peered quickly out into the parking lot with its surround of heavy Southern magnolias, and braced herself for the heat outside. It was June, far enough into the Atlanta summer that the nights could be sweltering. She caught herself at the door. A homeless man had been hanging around the museum over the last couple of days. He was old, but he had bright, intense eyes and muttered in a language she didn’t understand. Yesterday he had been skulking in the parking lot when she locked up, skittering crablike between the cars, draped in a heavy overcoat in spite of the heat. Those eyes of his had followed her with unnerving focus.

  But there was no sign of him or of Webster’s carefully waxed Jag, so she stepped out into the muggy night, yawning wide, her long, rangy stride bringing her up against her little Toyota in a dozen steps. All tiredness and irritation aside, it had been a good night.

  But that sense of Richard’s aging stayed with her as she drove south on the interstate through the core of the city, its postmodern towers of office glass still lit up, vibrant, and (like everything in Atlanta that wasn’t in her museum) new.

  He was, what? Seventy-five, seventy-six? Something like that. And he was slowing. That was why she had been brought in in the first place, to shoulder the burden of putting the museum on the map while he slowly retired to the adjoining residence, staying on only as a generous benefactor. Three years ago, that had seemed a very long way away, but there was no avoiding the speed with which that day was approaching now. They never spoke of it directly, but it hung between them like a shadow. Or maybe it was just that he was fading. Yes, that was it. And then…?

  Your museum.

  It would be soon. In a sense, it was already. The idea depressed her.

  Deborah was startled out of her unwelcome reverie by an irritating salvo of electronic notes. Her cell phone. Richard had thought it amusing to secretly program her phone to ring to the tune of “La Cucaracha.” She had yet to reprogram it or to get him back. The idea muted her annoyance and reminded her that he liked to check in on nights like this when he thought the coast would be clear. He had retired a good hour and a half earlier, remarking vaguely to the crowd about an old man’s tiredness, followed by a furtive wink to Deborah as he abandoned her to Webster and his cronies. She’d need to get him back for that too.

  “Yes?” she said, brisk, poised to unleash her bitterest sarcasm on the old man.

  “Deborah?”

  Not Richard. Not by a long chalk.

  “Hi, Ma,” said Deborah, her heart sinking a little. She loved her mother, but there were times…

  “We were out with the Lowensteins,” her mother was saying, as if Deborah had just asked. They hadn’t spoken in over two weeks.

  “You remember the Lowensteins?” she said, snapping out the words as if Deborah was slightly deaf. “From Cambridge? Anyway they live on Long Island now, but they were in town visiting. We went out to dinner, and I nearly had a heart attack when I got home and there was a message from my eldest girl. The first in—what?—a month?”

  “Not that long.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Yeah, sorry, Ma,” said Deborah, feeling the headache start, powerless to stop it as she was powerless to stop so many things where her mother was concerned. She should never have called. It had been a wild impulse to share the night’s triumph with someone—anyone—but now, only an hour later, it seemed like a terrible idea.

  Deborah’s mom had been a part-time nurse whose great accomplishment in life, she was fond of saying, had been marrying Deborah’s dad, a doctor of internal medicine. She had left her job the moment she had become pregnant with Deborah, only returning to it after her husband’s death left her with bills to pay. In Deborah’s adolescent eyes, her mother had spent almost two years moving to and from the hospital in a kind of affronted daze, like a beauty queen stripped of her crown on a technicality. Deborah, who had idolized her father in spite of—perhaps in part because of—his frequent absence, resented her mother’s subsequent attempts to prettify her bookish daughter and her palpable horror when Deborah, always lanky, graceless, and boyish, woke up at the tender age of fifteen to find herself six feet tall and still growing.

  “So what’s your big news, Debbie? I called as soon as I heard your message. You sounded like you had news.”

  No one else in the world called her Debbie. It was one of the persistent ways in which she willfully misread her daughter’s personality.

  “Oh, you know,” said Deborah, closing her eyes, backpedaling. “Just work stuff. I had a good day.”

  “That’s wonderful, dear,” said h
er mother, barely pausing for breath. “And what else is going on with you? I talked to Rachel this morning, but she hasn’t heard from you either.”

  Rachel, the good daughter, who has the body of a gymnast, and who—as a perpetual gift to her mother—lives with her husband and offspring less than three blocks from the Brookline house in which she was born…

  “No, I haven’t spoken to Rachel lately. Work is going well.”

  “Work? You work too hard. Just like your father. But him I used to see.”

  “You’re always welcome,” said Deborah.

  “There?”

  “It’s not Calcutta,” said Deborah. “It’s two hours on a plane.”

  “How do you remember?” she said, arch as ever.

  “Funny, Ma.”

  “So what’s new, apart from work? Did you secretly get married or anything?”

  There it was, the amiable jibe that killed whole flocks of birds with one highly polished stone. It was her mother’s great talent. She could skewer half a dozen sore points with one remark like she was threading hunks of lamb onto a kebab. In this case the remark, so light and quick that it seemed almost casual, said:

  1. You work too hard, and your work, let’s face it, isn’t worth the effort.

  2. You have no man in your life. As usual.

  3. Keeping things from your family is what you do best.

  4. Marrying away from your family would be par for the course. After all, you turned your back on them, your hometown, your cultural heritage, and all we hold dear when you first went down to that gentile Sodom…

  Before that, actually, Ma, she thought a little wistfully. Dad’s been dead twenty years.

  “No, Ma,” she said, managing a thin smile in spite of herself, “nothing new in my life right now.”

  She was still considering a few half-joking skewers of her own that she should have said when the phone trilled its maniacal song again.

  “Ma,” she began, “I’m on my way home. Can I call you back when—”

  “Is it all still there?”

  She had opened her mouth to respond before she realized that the voice was unfamiliar.

  “What?” she said. “Who is this?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I said, who is this?” she repeated.

  “Did they get it? Where are you?”

  He was shouting. And the voice… There was something about the intonation. An accent? British? Australian? Something like that.

  “I’m sorry,” said Deborah, with chill politeness. “I think you have the wrong number. Try dialing again, and then begin the conversation by asking for the person you wish to scream at.”

  “Listen to me, you stupid bloody woman! You have to go back—”

  She hung up and switched the phone off.

  CHAPTER 2

  The interstate was quiet. In less than ten minutes she was off, pulling through the lights on Tenth Street and down toward Piedmont, her mind already getting ready for bed as she drove, shutting down zone by zone like she was tripping circuit breakers. By the time she had parked on the gravel strip of road reserved for residents of the Bay Court condos, she was on autopilot. Out of the car. Lock the car. House keys. Mailbox. Apartment door, and inside.

  The light on her answering machine jarred her out of her groove. It blinked red, forcing her awake. She had checked her messages by phone from the fund-raiser, so anything on there had been called in within the last hour. Richard? She frowned, pushed the button, and moved toward the bedroom to get her toothbrush.

  “Are you there?” said the machine.

  Deborah stopped in the sudden silence, the hair on the back of her neck prickling into life. That voice again. The Brit. Another wrong number.

  But that isn’t very likely, is it? Last time he called your cell.

  True.

  “If you are there, pick up.”

  She stood quite still, hearing the urgency in the voice. There was another long silence, a heavy clunk, and the familiar hum of the dial tone. The machine beeped, whirred, and fell silent. Deborah stayed where she was, looking at it. Something about that voice bothered her, though whether it was the accent, its sense of purpose, or the fact that it didn’t announce who it belonged to, she couldn’t say.

  But Deborah Miller was not easily spooked, or at least that was what she told herself. She shrugged it off as she had shrugged off Harvey Webster’s clumsy advances, and got ready for bed. Tomorrow would be a big day, and the one remaining conscious part of her brain turned over her responsibilities as she shut off the bedside lamp and hunkered down under the duvet. Thank God she’d left the AC on.

  Richard would want to follow up the new pledges they’d acquired in person. In the meantime she’d talk to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and then start lining up her design plans for the Celtic exhibit. She would call the caterers and angle for a discount since she’d done most of their cleanup herself and would have to deal with the wrath of Tonya, the museum’s new janitor, first thing in the morning. Dealing with the incompetent caterers would be peanuts compared to dealing with the overly competent Tonya.

  Tonya was unlike any janitor Deborah had ever encountered. She was watchful, even aloof, feisty but not so much defensive as… sardonic. An odd quality in a middle-aged janitor. Deborah suspected that Tonya’s manner, or her own uneasy reaction to it, was tied to the fact that Tonya was also smart, educated, and black, but in what ways she wasn’t sure. Anyway, explaining why all these local hotshots (white folks) had made such a mess of her nice clean lobby floor would be a bit like defusing a piece of curiously ironic explosive.

  Still, there was the Celtic exhibit to work on, and that made her smile: four centuries of Scots-Irish crosses, illuminated manuscripts, and jewelry. Two years ago they would never have landed it. She was still smiling as she settled gently into sleep.

  The sudden ringing of the phone woke her like a siren, and she surfaced, gasping and confused. For a second she thought it was the front doorbell and was half out of bed before she could focus. It was dark, and the clock radio by her bed said it was almost three. Had she been awake, she might have let the machine get it, sure it was a wrong number, but dazed from sleep, she picked it up without thinking.

  “Yes?”

  “Why aren’t you at the museum? You need to get back.”

  “What?” For a second she was lost, then it came back. The same voice. “Who is this?”

  “You need to get back!” he said again, the same frustration and urgency as before. “You must not let them take it!”

  “Take what?”

  “The body!”

  “If you call me again—on either number,” she said, “I’m calling the police. Got it?”

  She disconnected with a click of her finger and lay there in the dark, the receiver still clutched in her hand, staring up at the ceiling, waiting for her unease to slip away.

  Body?

  What body?

  She stayed like that for six minutes, watching the numbers click over in the clock’s illuminated screen, but she was not sliding back into sleep. In fact, it was like all her circuit breakers were being snapped back over, and there was power coursing through her again, flicking on lights, powering up appliances, so that her head was filled with the steady drone of electricity. She could smell it in the night air like lightning.

  Body?

  She got up, pulled on some clothes, and grabbed her car keys.

  CHAPTER 3

  The museum was dark, the parking lot deserted, both of which Deborah would expect at three thirty in the morning. She was being stupid. She should be home in bed. She unlocked the front doors and checked the alarm panel. It hadn’t gone off. There had been no break-in and everything in the main foyer looked exactly as she had left it.

  But the alarm hadn’t beeped at her as it did every morning when she arrived, which meant it hadn’t been armed. She stared at it. She had been tired after the benefit, but surely she had remembered to set the alarm?
She moved quickly to the light switches by the door and flicked them all up with one quick motion.

  Nothing. The foyer with its dinosaur skeleton and its information booths and temporary exhibits glowed in the low emergency lights, which never went out. She snapped the switches back and forth. Still nothing. The muffled whisperings of unease which had stopped her from going back to sleep after the phone call spiked suddenly, then settled again, but louder than they had been before. Something was wrong.

  Deborah pulled her cell phone from her pocket and switched it on. The foyer was the museum’s heart, the building being arranged like half a wagon wheel, each spoke originating here and taking the visitors down exhibit galleries to the perimeter walk, a broad corridor flanked by stuffed animals and birds, connecting the whole in one great semicircular arc. She crossed the lobby quickly, passed the Creek Indian cases, and plunged down one of those “spokes” to the perimeter.

  It was darker here, the emergency lights less frequent, the cases (local fossils, charts of the Jurassic and Cretaceous, a near-perfect velociraptor skeleton along with a series of lifesized models of the beast on its nest) all completely dark, great blank panels of glass like the walls of a vast aquarium. The idea (unseen shapes swimming behind the panes) bothered her, and she moved quickly. There was still no sign of damage or disturbance of any kind, but there was a dull, metallic tang in her mouth, as if some primordial gland in her brain stem had activated an ancient alarm. She walked faster, and as she did so, she dialed Richard’s home number.

  It started ringing. She braced herself for his bewildered voice and then, when it did not come, began to run, the ringing phone still pressed to her ear. At the end of the hallway, she paused.

  Ignore the darkness and keep going. Don’t look at the exhibits.

  The perimeter corridor with its stuffed birds and animals into which the prehistoric gallery eventually emptied itself was her least favorite section of the museum. It was so dead, so Victorian in its sense of what a museum was. It smelled different, like mothballs and formaldehyde, older than the velociraptor by far: musty and bookish, a version of learning constructed by people who blew animals out of the sky with rifles and then mulled issues of Latinate classification over their badly stuffed corpses. Butterfly Collector Logic, she called it. “Here’s something beautiful: let’s kill it so we can all see how beautiful it was.” One day, she had told Richard, she would replace it; when they had something to replace it with. He had just smiled and said what he always said: “Just so long as you don’t turn my museum into a theme park.” The board, of course, wanted to pack people in at all costs.