Countdown - Iris Johansen [97]
Jane shook her head. “Good heavens, I had no idea that a museum this small could boast a collection of reconstructions like this. There must be eight or—”
“Eleven,” Eve said. “It’s what keeps the money from the tourists pouring in, and they need it desperately to buy these specially constructed cases to preserve the skeletons. Those airtight cases are terribly important. That’s why Egypt is losing so many of their artifacts and skeletons. This museum had several skeletons recovered from the marina at Herculaneum, but reconstructions of the skulls give everyone a better picture.” She moved down the case to the end. “This is Giulia.”
“Just like the photos.” Jane stared in puzzlement at the reconstruction. The girl must have been in her mid-teens, with fairly regular features except for the slightly splayed nose. Not a homely girl but certainly not a beauty. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“Guilt.” Eve turned and headed for a door at the end of the exhibit room. “Come on. I want to get this over.”
Jane slowly followed her down the length of the room. Guilt?
Eve threw open the door and stepped aside for Jane to precede her. “Good. Toriza has the lights on. This is the museum workroom. I’ve become very familiar with it in the last few years.” She gestured to the reconstruction in the clear rectangular box in the center of the worktable. “Giulia.”
“But the reconstruction in the exhibit hall is Giulia. How can—Dear God.” She whirled on Eve. “Cira?”
“I don’t know.” Eve shut the door and leaned against it, her gaze on the reconstruction. “It certainly looks like her. But if this is Cira, then she wasn’t the beauty everyone thought she was. The features are coarser, not as cleanly defined as those of the statue. And Toriza says her skeleton showed years of hard labor. Possibly indicating a life of bearing heavy burdens.”
“Cira was born a slave.” Jane couldn’t take her gaze from the reconstruction. “I suppose it could be that—” She shook her head in rejection. “That’s not Cira.”
“And it’s only a coincidence that the features are so similar at first glance?”
Jane shook her head in confusion. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t think that would be—” She sank down in the chair at the worktable. “But this isn’t the Cira I’ve been living with for the past four years. You’ve . . . pulled the rug from beneath my feet.”
“And what’s your first reaction?”
“Why, that I have to find the answers. . . .”
“That’s what I thought you’d say,” Eve said wearily. “At first I thought it might put an end to that obsession you have with Cira if I left the reconstruction as I did it the night before we left Herculaneum. If you thought the search was over and that she died at that marina, it was possible you might abandon trying to find more about her and the gold Julius gave her.” Her gaze shifted to the face. “The resemblance was there, but it wasn’t absolute. And I knew that if you had questions, this reconstruction would only spur you on. It would whet your appetite and give you another carrot to lead you down Cira’s damn tunnel.”
“You . . . lied?” Jane couldn’t believe it. “You’re the most honest woman I’ve ever known. You never lie.”
“I lied that night. I smoothed out any resemblance to Cira in the reconstruction and did it over. I sent that lie back to the museum.”
“Why?” Jane whispered. “My God, that was a violation of your professional ethics.”
“It was a two-thousand-year-old skull, dammit.” Eve tried to steady her voice. “You were seventeen and going to college the next year. You’d just gone through a horror of an experience with a maniac who wanted to slice your face off. You were having nightmares about Cira. You were tired and confused and the only thing you needed was to get away from Herculaneum and heal.”
“You shouldn’t have lied to me.”
“Maybe not. Probably not. But I made the choice. I wanted to give you the chance to walk away and forget about Cira and everything that had happened