Still As Death (8 page)

“It’s the middle of the night,” Sweeney whispered to him. “It’s not time for breakfast yet.” She sat down at the kitchen table and felt the cool breeze coming through the open window. It was three
A.M.
,
and Sweeney reflected that it was probably the only time of day or night she’d feel the cool air until the heat wave was over.

She stood and reached for the unfinished bottle of wine, then poured herself a half glass, listening to make sure Ian was still asleep. Sipping it, she wandered around the apartment and finally climbed through the open window in the kitchen to sit on the fire escape.

It was the stairs that made her remember her dream. She had been standing at the top of a long stone staircase, disappearing into the earth. The stairs had terrified her, but still she had decided to descend, to find out what was at the bottom. She remembered the loose soil beneath her feet, the way she had kicked up little stones that had plunk-plunked to the bottom of the staircase. What had been at the bottom? She must have awakened before she reached it because she couldn’t remember anything other than her slow, terrified descent.

She finished her wine, thinking that the staircase had seemed vaguely familiar to her, but where was it? She told herself that it was just a dream and that it probably didn’t exist.

“What’s wrong?” Ian asked as she crawled back into bed.

“Nothing,” Sweeney whispered. “Just a bad dream.” And she let him pull her into the circle of his arms, her head resting on his chest, his heart beating away as she fell asleep again.

Sweeney had been hoping that she’d arrive at the museum the next morning to the news that the collar had been located and was being transferred up to the gallery, but when she found Tad in his office, he looked up at her apprehensively from behind his glasses. He knew why she was there.

“Sweeney, we haven’t found the collar. Willem’s furious, can’t understand how this happened. We know it’s in there somewhere, but they changed the cataloging twenty years ago and he thinks maybe it’s just stored under the wrong number. I don’t have time to really investigate right now, though, so I think you may have to do without
it.” It struck her that though he was trying to seem nonchalant, he was in fact pretty worried about it.

“Can I help? I’m in pretty good shape workwise, for today, anyway. I’d be happy to look around.”

He gave her an exasperated glance. “Fine. Okay. Sign a key out with Harriet and see what you can find. My theory is that it’s in with the African jewelry. It all got recategorized as Willem acquired more Egyptian items. But if you can’t find it, don’t come back and ask me to look for it again. I’m not going to have time until the end of the week. And Willem’s already all up in arms about us misplacing something, so please don’t go to him and complain when you can’t find it.” He gave her what was meant to be a serious look. “Okay?” He looked more harried than she’d ever seen him, and she almost felt bad about pressing the issue.

“Okay. Thanks, Tad.” She tried not to grin as she went back out into the main office and stopped by Harriet’s desk to sign out a storeroom key.

Harriet handed it over and entered Sweeney’s name in the log of everyone who went in and out of the storage areas. She pushed it forward for Sweeney to sign. “You have to sign now,” she explained. “New policy. Willem read some article about a student impersonating a professor or something.”

“Seems like a good idea,” Sweeney said, signing her name. “Thanks.”

As always when she entered the storage rooms, Sweeney felt like she’d entered the ultimate junk shop. The mobile storage units that lined the three walls of the first room could be spun open to reveal shelves full of treasures, row upon row of small carved items from various corners of the world: jewelry, musical instruments, pipes, and other artifacts. Storage cabinets and bureaus held textiles and more valuable pieces, and open shelving against the fourth wall held statuary and ceramics. There were a few racks—ceiling-high metal grates where paintings could be hung—but most of the paintings in the museum’s collection were housed in other storage rooms.

Sweeney went to the area where the museum’s collection of Egyptian antiquities was held. Most of the really good pieces were displayed, so those back here were either less important, redundancies, or in poor condition. There were a few plain canopic jars and some broken statuary. And then there was the jewelry, kept in the drawers of a closed storage unit. Sweeney put on a pair of gloves and opened the first drawer.

Willem had about twenty gold amulets displayed out in the Egyptian galleries, but there had to be another fifty or so in here and Sweeney looked through them carefully. The next drawer held the larger pieces of jewelry, and this was where the collar should have been, according to the reference numbers on the file. But while there were some nice beaded necklaces and tons of amulets, the falcon collar wasn’t there. Tad was right.

Next she decided to check among the African jewelry, but when she finished searching the shelves and drawers, she realized that it wasn’t there either. She tried the rest of the drawers in the jewelry cabinet and finally decided to search through all of the jewelry collections in storage. This took a while, and although she had fun looking through pieces from Europe and China and Iran, she was frustrated when she’d gotten all the way through without any success. And the problem was that she really had no idea when it had been misplaced. When had it been acquired? She checked the file. Maloof had given it in 1979, along with some other jewelry. There was a note, signed by Willem, about how it rounded out the museum’s collection of eighteenth-dynasty funerary equipment and provided a nice counterpoint to another piece the museum already owned. Sweeney knew that curators at museums like the Hapner had to be able to make an argument for why a certain piece should be acquired. Even if a donor was giving a gift outright, the museum would be responsible for the upkeep of the item for all eternity. In any case, Willem’s argument must have been successful. But Sweeney still didn’t have a clue as to when the piece might have gone missing.

All she really knew, Sweeney reflected, was that someone named Karen Philips had studied the piece at some point. She checked the date on the front of the folder. November 1979. Maybe she could ask Karen Philips.

Sweeney removed her gloves and went back out to Harriet’s desk. She handed in her key and signed out on the storage room log. “Hey, Harriet, does the name Karen Philips ring a bell? Apparently she studied this piece I’m looking for, and I’m wondering if I can get in touch with her somehow.”

Harriet took the log back and looked nervously up at Sweeney. “She was a student intern,” she said. “She was here a long time ago. I don’t remember exactly when. But I’ve been here almost thirty years and it was during the first five or so years I was at the museum.”

It was remarkable that Harriet could remember the name of a student from more than twenty-five years ago. “You don’t know where she went after college, do you?” Sweeney knew she could probably get some information from the alumni office. They tried to keep track of every graduate of the university.

“No.” Harriet glanced quickly down at her desk, where a framed photo showed her husband and two young sons playing on a beach, and then said very quietly, as though she were passing on a shameful secret, “She died. It was terrible. Everyone at the museum liked her.”

Something in the way she said it made Sweeney ask, “What happened?”

Harriet looked around as though she didn’t want anyone to hear, then leaned forward and whispered, “She committed suicide. They said she was depressed and she hanged herself in her residence house.”

Harriet didn’t know much else about the untimely death of Karen Philips, so Sweeney decided to do a little research at the library. The yearbooks were kept in an out-of-the-way bookcase on the second floor, and Sweeney took a stack of them—1979 to 1985, just for
good measure—and settled down on a couch she had often fallen asleep on as an undergrad.

She was going back through the yearbooks and looking at the sections separate from the class pictures just to make sure she hadn’t missed anything when she came across a page toward the end of the 1980 book with a picture of a young woman and the words, “In Memoriam. Karen Philips. 1960 to 1980.”

The picture was a candid snapshot of a young woman standing in front of a brick wall. She was pretty, with bowl-cut brown hair feathered back and away from her face. Her rather large, dark eyes were cast away from the camera. Harriet was right. Karen Philips was dead.

After a few phone calls to the alumni records office, Sweeney had some more information. Karen Philips had entered the university as a freshman in 1977. She was from Greenfield, had graduated from the local public high school and, during her sophomore year, had declared her major as the history of art. She had been a student intern at the Hapner Musuem and had gone to Egypt with a group from the museum the summer before her senior year. The next March, she had been found hanging from a belt in her single room. That was the bare bones of her career at the university. As an afterthought, the secretary at the alumni office added that Karen had been a Lorcan Fellow.

Sweeney had also been a Lorcan Fellow during her undergraduate career. The fellowship offered money for travel to students particularly interested in art history.

Beyond that, there wasn’t much information. Suicides were not unknown at competitive colleges and universities, after all, and the secretary who had read the file to Sweeney over the phone said that as far as she remembered, the police had been satisfied that Karen Philips had committed suicide. Sweeney, hearing impatience creep into her voice, knew she wasn’t going to get anything more there.

She decided to try to put her mind somewhere else for a little while and spent the rest of the day going over the exhibit. She was
happy with the way it was turning out, and the more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that she was telling the story she wanted to tell, the story of how throughout recorded history, human beings had responded to the recognition of mortality by creating art, art that helped them process the idea of death, art that gave them a kind of immortality, art that would serve the dead in the afterlife and serve the living in the here and now.

Funerary art fascinated Sweeney because it danced on the subtle line between form and function. Gravestones were needed to mark the site of a burial, but they had become canvases for the stone carver’s hopes and dreams for his own death. The ancient Egyptians had believed it necessary to entomb their kings with all of the things needed in the afterlife, but these common household items had been made glorious with gold leaf and carnelian, paint and beads.

Sweeney’s exhibit would start with a room of artifacts that spoke to the elaborate preparations the ancient Egyptians had made for death. Alongside a sampling of sarcophagi from the museum’s collection, she had included information about the elaborate process of mummifying bodies and a variety of canopic chests and jars used to hold the internal organs once they had been removed.

The exhibit then took a look at grave markers, including photographs of very early stone dolmens, and moving on to the American gravestones that were Sweeney’s specialty, including rubbings, photographs, and castings of cemetery art from the earliest days of the American colonies.

Then came the postmortem photography, as well as other mourning items from the death-obsessed Victorian period. Sweeney had included a whole cabinet of hairwork mourning jewelry, and looking at the delicate pieces arrayed on green velvet, she couldn’t help but think of Brad Putnam, her student and friend, whose murder she had gotten involved in investigating because of its connection with a collection of mourning jewelry. It was how she’d met Quinn, and as she thought of Brad now, she felt an overwhelming sadness at the pointlessness of his death.

The last room of the exhibit would include contemporary funerary art, loosely defined. Sweeney had lately become interested in impromptu memorial displays, the piles of flowers and teddy bears, liquor bottles and candles that appeared on the sites of highway accidents or murders. She still had to finish choosing the pieces for this final installment of the exhibit, but she was hoping to include some modern examples of mourning jewelry she’d heard about, pieces of plastic into which ashes were pressed, as well as some examples of memorial decals, the stickers that some teenagers had started putting on their cars to honor friends dead to gang violence or suicide.

She was finished for the day, but she didn’t feel quite ready to go home, so she decided to go back to the library to see what more she could find out about Karen Philips. She left her things at the museum and walked over in the late-afternoon heat. The heat wave had gone on for nearly three weeks and the city felt permanently steamy. Sweeney, who hated the heat, nevertheless tried to take the long view. It wouldn’t be long before she was complaining about the fourth snowstorm of the season.

The library kept bound copies of the university’s student-run daily newspaper going back thirty or forty years, and Sweeney thought these archives might be a good bet for further information about Karen Philips’s death. She knew the university tended to keep a stranglehold on information about anything as ignominious as a student suicide. But the student paper would have been able to interview Karen’s friends and classmates.

She found the four papers for the month of March 1980, and quickly found the front-page story on Karen’s suicide. She had been found by a friend named Deirdre Holt who had stopped by Karen’s room to pick her up for lunch. Deirdre Holt had entered the room—the door had been left unlocked—when she didn’t get any answer to her knock, thinking she would wait for Karen. She had found Karen dead, and the Cambridge police had been called in. The official verdict was that she had hanged herself sometime the night before.

Karen Philips had been an art history major with a special interest
in Egyptology, the article said, and she had worked at the Hapner Museum as a student intern during both her sophomore and junior years.