"Oh, please, Morgan. I did nothing of the sort." Not that I wouldn't have, if he'd asked. At least that is what I'd concluded at three a.m. And it was rather funny she'd said gobbling, after that story of his about the goose.
"Honestly?" she said. "You didn't go to bed with him?"
Why is this happening to me, I wondered, as the door bell rang. "Honestly," I said as, holding the phone in one hand, I accepted a large box that promised flowers.
"So why were you there?" she said.
"I believe we discussed how I would need to talk with him about the Venus's provenance, did we not?"
"And?" she demanded.
"He told me how he found the diaries, and from them the Venus," I replied. "I could see nothing very wrong with his story." That wasn't entirely true, but having opened the box with the phone cradled between shoulder and chin, I'd found twenty-three gorgeous long-stemmed roses. Presumably I was supposed to be the twenty-fourth rose. It was a bit of a cliche perhaps, but it had been a long time since anyone had sent me roses.
"Whose side are you on?" she said.
"Will you please stop asking me that question? Either you want my help or you don't." I hit the End Call button. There was much to be said for these fancy phones, but there was no question it would have been a lot more satisfying to slam the phone down very loudly instead.
May I see you again? the card said. There was no name, but that would hardly have been necessary.
The phone rang again. Fancy technology told me it was the Watson residence. I debated about answering, but finally did.
"I'm sorry," Morgan said. "Look, I am going to trust you with something. I know you won't let me down and rat on me." She was almost whispering. "I had an affair with him. Karoly I mean, and I don't mean in college. Very recently. He threatened to tell my husband. I made a significant donation to the museum at his request to prevent him from doing that. He's far too subtle to ask for the money for him self, and large donations make him look good. I'm telling you this because even if you didn't sleep with him last night, you need to know what kind of person you're dealing with. He is slime of the worst kind." She sobbed just once, then blew her nose.
I sighed. It did not take a genius to realize that either Karoly or Morgan was lying. She had been holding a check in her hand when I saw her, and he'd thanked her for the donation. But he'd said he'd broken off with her. Maybe she'd thought a donation would get him back?
"Thanks for the warning," I said.
"What next?" she said.
"I'll have to think about that. I got a lot of information last night that I need to digest before deciding."
"Okay," she said. "But remember what I told you. Be careful around Karoly Molnar!"
What to do? Part of me had wanted to tell Karoly that his former classmates were out to destroy his reputation by proving that his most cherished achievement was a fake. The other part of me didn't trust them either. Having spent a little time getting reacquainted had reminded me why I hadn't bothered to stay in touch after I graduated. Cybil was always running herself down in a way that very quickly became tiresome, and when she'd left a year before she was to graduate because, as she'd put it, she got knocked up, she'd got into the married couple thing with a vengeance, and her single friends found themselves left out. Diana was just plain crabby much of the time, and absolutely certain her opinions, which she stated with firm conviction, were correct.
Grace had been nice enough but always a little distant, and she sure hadn't been kind to me while I was seeing Karoly for reasons I had finally understood only a few nights ago. It would have been a lot more sensible if she'd just told me what the problem was, rather than sulking for a year, although to be fair, I was so besotted with Charles I might have overlooked the obvious. Now, in my opinion, she was just downright sanctimonious, particularly where her opinions about my drinking habits were concerned. Morgan I'd always liked, but she'd gone off to Africa or somewhere upon graduation, then taken up modeling in Europe and we'd completely lost touch. One of the things I'd always liked about her, though, was that she had a vivid imagination. In other words, one was never entirely sure when she was telling the real truth, or the truth as she saw it.
Karoly I had been wildly in love with, no doubt about it. I still found him very attractive, but it did strain credibility to think that he was always telling the truth, while the Divas never were. While I had told the Divas that I could find nothing questionable in what he had to say, that was simply not the case. He had reeked of sincerity the previous evening, and there was no question he hadn't forgotten our college experiences, but that, to my mind, meant very little if I left my emotions out of it, difficult though that might be.
So again the question. What should I do? If there were not still a lacuna, a hole, in my recollection of events, a rather worrisome one, about what had happened that evening, the part when I was a semiconscious drunk, I would simply have walked away. I didn't need a new romance, or even an old one revisited. And I'd managed quite nicely without the Divas for many years. The people I held most dear I had met after I graduated, when I'd found an occupation I loved. What I did need was to know what happened the night the Venus was unveiled. I couldn't live with even the slightest doubt about my possible culpability in either the break-in at the Cottingham, or much worse, Anna's death. As tempting as it might be, I couldn't just forget it. Not with the vision of that little piece of blue cloth caught in the railing of the Glen Road Bridge. Not with the memory of a dent in my car that no body shop could ever erase, and the slash of silver paint on the rock near the bridge. Not with Alfred Nabb's words echoing through my mind.
Desperate for something to take my mind off these anxieties, real or otherwise, I picked up The Traveler and the Cave, noted briefly the dedication, to Lillian Larrington, then turned to the foreword by one Karoly Molnar, and started to read.
In 1995 I was working in the Bramley Museum in London, England, on a collection of papers belonging to a man by the name of C. J. Piper who at one time held the same position I did at the museum, that of Chief Curator.
One of the files caught my attention, although I would not appreciate why for some time. It was an account of a meeting of a group of scientists, including some from the Bramley Museum, at which a paper had been presented on a discovery in the Biikk Mountains of northern Hungary. The paper itself was in the collection, although it took me several days to find it. It was dated February 15, 1901. The paper was presented by Piper, and given the rather excited tone of the minutes of that meeting, he had made quite an impression. In it, he claimed to have found evidence of prehistoric man in a cave in the Biikk Hills. The site, located at a depth of two meters, contained evidence of fire, and of cooking. There were remains of animal bones, the skull of what Piper maintained was a cave bear, as well as primitive implements. In another part of the cave, Piper found what he believed to be a sacred site, a grave containing the skeleton of a man touched with red ochre, and garlanded with shell necklaces and bracelets. Judging from the skull, Piper determined that this was not a Neanderthal, but indeed early Homo sapiens. He also found what he believed were votive offerings.
Piper's paper included some drawings of the site, a very convincing description of the actual excavation, and some sketches of the grave goods. A drawing by Piper, an obviously talented artist, of the skeleton in situ was a very prominent part of the presentation, and the minutes of the meeting made much of it.
I am not an anthropologist. I am an art historian and curator. So it is doubtful that I would have paid much attention to this file, nor have reason to remember it later, but for one aspect of the drawing of Piper's discovery. That was that amongst the profusion of beads and some primitive tools that lay with the skeleton, there rested an exquisite small carving of a woman's head and torso, which had apparently been found in the grave. It was impossible to tell the material, but Piper's paper did make reference to ivory objects.