A Bookmarked Death Read online

  “But you could find it again?”

  He looked scornful. “After a fire, it shouldn’t be hard.”

  For a brilliant man, Colin wasn’t very practical.

  “I’m talking about before the fire.”

  “Why would I?”

  To make sure Ethan and Sheila got the punishment they deserved?

  But that was absurd. If killing ­people was not my style, it was Colin’s even less. Though he had once grabbed our son Jason by the shoulders in anger, he had never laid a hand on the girls. His way of punishing Ethan would have been to make trouble for him at Brown or report his theft of antiquities to the Society for American Archaeology. “Do you think Ethan crossed any lines as an archeologist?”

  Colin snorted. “I know he did. Probably had governments all over the world gunning for him. He used to pass out money like Mars Bars on digs and walk away with whatever he pleased. That was why he never reported finding anything.”

  “Really? With all the safeguards they have? And he got away with it? How come you never said anything?” Shocked, I machine-­gunned him with questions. “He couldn’t have been doing it for the money.”

  “I think it was a game he was playing, to see how far he could go. Not that wealthy ­people don’t always want more. But in the past few years he’s come under suspicion and I haven’t heard of him going out in the field. Probably he’s moved on to some other scheme.”

  I brought my last bite of bagel to my mouth, then brought it down again. What if some angry investigator had trailed Ethan to the Southampton house and broken in to steal back his country’s archeological treasures? I had heard of obsessed investigators keeping ­people under surveillance for years. Perhaps they had come to the end of their patience, taken their artifacts, then decided to set the fire for revenge. A tooth for a tooth. It was more comforting to blame a band of outraged Egyptians or Syrians than to imagine coming under blame ourselves. Not that we would—­throughout our search for Elisa, Colin had insisted on complete secrecy—­but we did have reasons to exact revenge ourselves.

  Especially since the kidnapping had happened in England and I was having trouble getting the American authorities interested. Once, feeling frustrated, I had tried to pressure Colin. “We have to let ­people know what they’ve done. Tell Nancy Grace or someone like that. Then the FBI and the police would have no choice but to—­”

  “No, Delhi, we agreed on no publicity! We’re not going there. You think Elisa wants everyone knowing her life story? And ours? I’m not going to be known as the guy who was duped by his best friend. Once the media get hold of it, they’ll never leave us alone. We’ll handle this our own way.”

  Now, sitting there, I had the first frisson of uneasiness about what Colin might have considered solving the problem his “own way.”

  Chapter Three

  AS SOON AS Colin left, I started back out to the barn to call Elisa back. Our conversation had been too perfunctory, too short. There was so much more I needed to say to her. I needed to make sure she was all right. What Colin had said was true; this loss was no different from actually losing your parents, if that’s who you believed they were. Passing the pond, I fretted selfishly over what it might do to her just-­beginning relationship with us. Would it draw her closer into our family or set her on a path of independence away from everyone, even Hannah?

  I tried to imagine what I would have felt at her age, what I would have done. The closest I could come was remembering the time I was nine and my mother had neglected a cut on her foot. She had ended up in the hospital with a bad infection and then sepsis. I didn’t know all the details, I was only a child, but I remember the prayer vigils held at my father’s church and my black fear of losing her. When my parents had actually died in their seventies, there was deep sorrow and missing them, but some acceptance as well.

  Inside the barn I slipped into my office chair and pressed Hannah’s number.

  She answered right away. “Hi, Mom.” She still sounded mournful, not far from tears.

  “Hi, sweetheart. How’s Elisa? I’d like to talk to her again.” It was becoming easier to call her Elisa—­the name given to her by the Crosleys. Caitlin, my tiny girl Caitlin, had been left behind in the park all those years ago.

  “She’s gone back to Boston.”

  “What? She’s already gone? She’s driving back by herself?”

  “I tried to tell her I’d go with her,” Hannah said defensively. “She wouldn’t let me.”

  “She didn’t want to stay another day? She shouldn’t be driving!”

  “Mom. If your parents have just burned to death, you don’t ride on a bus.”

  “No, but I’d have come up and driven her back myself. She shouldn’t be on the road alone for five hours!” I told myself to calm down, that I was only making Hannah feel guilty. I was sure she had tried to stop her sister, but still . . .

  “Was she feeling any better?” As soon as I said it, I then realized how stupid it sounded. Feeling better happened when you had an upset stomach, not when you had suffered the tragedy of your life.

  “Well, she’d stopped crying. She’s stronger than I would be, anyway. If it were you and Daddy, I’d kill myself too.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. It would be hard, but you’d survive. Don’t worry about us anyway, we’re fine.” If Colin and I had died in a fire, Jane would have been the one, pale and determined, making the funeral arrangements. Had we ever told her about being cremated? Jason would be stunned though philosophical, but Hannah would be as lost as she claimed. Her need for our love and approval was boundless. Without us in the world, I didn’t know what she’d do.

  I prayed for a long life. “I’ll call her.” But then I worried about distracting her. “Maybe I should wait till she’s home.”

  “She always turns her phone off in the car. That’s one thing she’s careful about.”

  “Okay, I’ll wait.”

  “And Mom? I promised her we’d come for her graduation. It’s soon, on Friday. Is that okay?”

  Graduation? I hadn’t even thought about Elisa’s graduation, the fact that it would still go on with or without the Crosleys. “Of course. But are you’re sure she wants to go through with it?”

  “She says it’s what they would have wanted.”

  ­People always said that, but how could you know? If something happened to me just before Hannah’s graduation, would I want the family to carry on with the pretext that they were doing it for me? I didn’t think so. Selfish mom.

  “She doesn’t have to be there to get her diploma,” I pointed out.

  “Mom, it’s what she wants!”

  “Okay. Of course. Of course we’ll be there.”

  But I knew we would be a poor substitute.

  BECAUSE I COULD not think of anything else to do, I Googled “archeologists stealing artifacts.” As usual, the Internet did not fail me. I read stories about three German archeologists who had bribed an inspector to escort them to a site after hours and made off with treasures from King Cheops’s tomb. A British archeologist served time in jail and was released, only to return to the field and steal more. Ironically, the second time he received a suspended sentence, as if in recognition of his expertise. He was caught when a colleague recognized the two vases he was offering for sale on eBay.

  There was another instance, closer to home. An archeology professor had smuggled arrowheads from a New Mexican site not far from where Colin conducted student digs. I wondered if the two knew each other. That archeologist had also received a suspended sentence after he returned the arrowheads, admitted wrongdoing, and pledged to help stop other looters in the area.

  As far as I knew, Colin had never purloined anything. Fueled by curiosity and the promise of recognition for his discoveries, he seemed to have no trouble handing his finds over to whatever government owned them. All he wanted was a chance to
study and catalog each piece first. Of course, the pottery and small sculpture and tools that he excavated did not have great monetary value. Ethan, I was sure, had gone for bigger prizes than arrowheads.

  No, Colin was above temptation. I was the one who would have been tempted to slip a gold bracelet into my backpack if given the chance. Because of my feelings about rare books, I could understand wanting to own something unique, something priceless. Many archeologists handled beautiful objects. Even if they were not collectors themselves, the prices artifacts commanded on the black market had to be a temptation. Ethan had the funds to go after bigger prizes, golden statues from South American temples and rarities from Egyptian tombs.

  I wondered why his name was not mentioned in any stories about illegal activity. Not even once. Whatever he had done, they had not been able to prove it. Without evidence there was no story. Colin said that he had handed out bribes, bribes meant to seal the mouths of inspectors as tightly as any tomb. With suspicions but no hard evidence, how could any government succeed in building a case against him? Once again I let my imagination run free and pictured a foreign agent tracking Ethan’s whereabouts for years and becoming so frustrated he had decided to end it last Saturday night.

  What the Internet was filled with were Ethan’s achievements, the lectures he had given, the awards he had received. He had set up scholarships and started several foundations. I kept scrolling and did find one odd story that mentioned him in passing.

  Seven years earlier an Egyptian national who was attached to one of Ethan’s digs was due to be arrested and charged with antiquities theft. Instead, Youssef Elsar had disappeared. There was no evidence of foul play, only that he had slipped away and was never able to be found.

  Ethan had not come under suspicion.

  TRYING TO GIVE Elisa time to get to Boston before I called her, I listed some books for the Internet, then walked around the yard. The ground was still muddy from snow melt and the forsythia had recently faded, but everything else was competing like a botanical garden. Walking past the back steps that led to the kitchen, I saw the row of our boots, khaki green rubber with yellow soles. In past years they had been lined up by size and used all the time. Then the children had drifted away and outgrown them,

  Yet the boots remained. A rotting wooden sled had stood next to them until recently when I dragged it to the curb for the trash pickup. Passing close now, I saw that the ground around the boots was patted smooth, as if a knife had been run across the top of a cake. Perhaps the runoff from the gutters had evened it. I also noticed that there was an empty space where a pair of men’s boots had once stood. Had Jason, when he was last home in March, taken them back to Santa Fe with him?

  I walked around to the front of the house. The crocuses beside the porch had finished their purple and white show, and even some tulip petals were beginning to droop. The lawn between the house and the street was thin and brown. Impossible to believe that it would ever turn green and need mowing. I knew if I walked to the road I would see hostas starting to push up, dark anthill shapes.

  Back to the barn. If I found Elisa was still on the road, I could always leave a message on her phone for her to call me. As I settled into my desk chair, I thought of the last time I’d seen her in March when all the children had been at the house. Seeing my twins together for the first time in so many years, I had been shocked at how alike they looked, how their dark blond hair sprouted from its part in the same way, how they had the same wry grins. Identical, though Hannah had put on weight at college and Elisa had a curved white scar on her chin created by falling on her ski pole when she was seven.

  “My mother wanted me to get plastic surgery,” she’d said, referring to Sheila. “But my father said it was part of my history.”

  “You still could,” Jane said.

  “She doesn’t want to. It’s who she is,” Hannah insisted protectively.

  That weekend had been wonderful, a time for my children to get to know each other finally. Yet it had also been bittersweet. It had felt to me like Elisa was a long-­lost niece, coming to meet her cousins, not the sister they had never gotten to know. They had spent hours sprawled in the living room before the fireplace, discovering everything they had in common and many things they didn’t. Elisa loved skiing and snowboarding and was the only one who adored books and reading—­like me. She had met presidents, jumped out of airplanes, and gone on safari.

  “You didn’t shoot animals, did you?” For Hannah, about to enter veterinary school, that could have been a deal breaker.

  But Elisa had given her an easy smile. “Of course not. My father taught me how to shoot, but only at targets. I was good at target practice, but I’d never hurt anything living.”

  Several times I’d noticed her blue eyes watching me speculatively from under tawny lashes. The last time I’d seen her we had disagreed over my need to see the Crosleys punished. Despite the fact that I had shown her photocopies of the Stratford-­upon-­Avon newspaper that told how she had “drowned” and our terrible grief at losing her, she hadn’t believed the drowning had been staged by the Crosleys. I knew she blamed me for their having to flee from Providence and Brown University to the estate they owned in Barbados to avoid prosecution. What she wanted to believe was that she had been stolen by criminals and offered to the Crosleys at a price, that they had known nothing of her abduction.

  I sat with my elbows on the desk, chin in my hands. Was that the only reason for the barrier between us? Did she feel I was pushing her too hard to be part of the family? By discounting the Crosleys, did she feel like I was invalidating her own life, trying to dismiss the experiences she had had as nothing? Maybe I was no more than an intrusive stranger to her, a seatmate on a plane determined to engage her in my life.

  No, it was more complicated than that. That Saturday night at dinner, when Jason and Jane had been teasing me about forcing them to read the books I had loved as a child, I’d suddenly noticed Elisa. Her expression was wistful, that of an onlooker, as if she was seeing the way they had known and loved me all their lives, the in-­jokes we shared, and feeling that she could never catch up. Yet in the next minute she was telling a story about rock climbing in Bataan to her admiring brother and sisters.

  When the twins left that Monday morning, Elisa had given me a quick hug. “Delhi, thanks so much! It was wonderful to meet the rest of the family. You really put yourself out.”

  “That’s what mothers do.”

  She’d ignored the comment and I had not heard from her until now. Fortunately Elisa and Hannah started spending every weekend together after that, alternating between Cornell and St. Brennan’s College in Boston. Soon they would both be graduating and I wondered what would happen then. I hoped that Elisa wouldn’t move on to her next adventure, her next safari, leaving Hannah devastated. To Hannah, everything in life was either magic or tragic.

  “DELHI?” ELISA ANSWERED halfway through the song as if surprised to hear from me. It threatened to swamp me. I was her mother, damn it. If I had been able to raise her the way I should have, she would have been expecting my call.

  “Are you back now?” I asked.

  “I got here a few minutes ago.”

  “I just—­I had to see how you were doing. I’m so, so sorry! I can’t imagine anything worse.”

  “I know. I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it. They weren’t the kind of ­people this happens to, they weren’t victims. I told them not to come back, but my father was determined.”

  “I would have driven you home if I’d known you wanted to go back so soon.”

  “There was no point in staying in Ithaca. But it was horrible anyway. I’d get distracted and forget what had happened, then when I remembered it was like being punched. I kept having to pull over. This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me!”

  I was shocked at how angry that made me. If the Crosleys hadn’t stolen her, disru
pted her life, she wouldn’t even be suffering this agony.

  I pushed my resentment away. Be here now. “Hannah said you had an adopted brother?” Hannah had mentioned it several weeks ago, and I’d remembered that Colin had seen him when he was a toddler.

  An intake of breath. “Oh, my God—­I have to let Will know. I stopped and left him a message on the way home, but he hasn’t called back. What if he sees it on the news?”

  “He’s in school?”

  “No. He didn’t want to go to college, so he was working for my father. Then a few months ago they had this huge blow-­up about something, I don’t know what, and Will stormed off. But they never really got along. Will was so beautiful, beautiful to look at and really charming, but he was always in some kind of trouble. In school, everywhere. My parents did everything they could think of, but nothing worked. I think that’s why my father gave him a job.”

  “A job doing what?” Surely not as his research assistant.

  “I don’t know. My father’s always had a lot of ­people working for him.”

  Why would an academic need a whole staff? But then I remembered his wealth and his archeological digs, He would need managers and ­people to do the legwork.

  “The last I heard Will was in New York, in Spanish Harlem. He broke my father’s heart.”

  It sounded as if Elisa had come down on the side of the Crosleys. I didn’t let myself think about Ethan’s heart. “Did Will know about the Southampton house?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t he? We used to spend summers there. But if you’re suggesting that Will set the fire—­I can’t imagine that. How would he even know they were out there so early?”

  Would that have been so hard for him to find out? Just because they were estranged didn’t mean he wasn’t still emotionally involved, especially if they had rejected him. If he had gone looking for the Crosleys in Rhode Island and learned they were not there, wouldn’t it be logical to think next of their vacation homes in Barbados and Southampton?