“Are you all right? You ready?” Joe cupped his hands around her shoulders, resisting the urge to draw her close. The betrayal he’d felt from his own father was nothing compared to what she suffered from Lawrence Westlake. He’d take this pain upon himself if he could spare her.
He couldn’t do that, but he could see that justice was done, at least in the legal sense. Joe would have arrested Lawrence by now had it not been for Mr. Clarke’s delivery today. He didn’t want to riskother forgers going underground. They needed to see how Clarke would explain Hatsudora’s coffin.
Lauren double-checked the small microphone clipped to the back of the necktie she wore over her blouse. The wire had been carefully stitched in place all the way down the tie so that when she buttoned her suit jacket, no one could tell it connected to a recording device attached to the waistband of her skirt. “Ready.” Her beautiful face was stark and pale.
But she was stronger than she knew.
Lauren’s nerves tangled while Mr. Klein tapped the mallet to the crowbar around the edges of the crate’s lid. Mr. Clarke looked on, his eyes glowing. Stroking his silver beard, he leaned toward her.
“The old ticker is thumping now, I can tell you.”
She managed to smile. Her pulse raced, too, but not for the same reason. She’d sent a telegram to Mr. Lythgoe and Mr. Winlock, asking them to confirm the final destination of Hatsudora’s coffin. If the French team had gained ownership, there was a small chance they’d sold it to Clarke’s team for a price impossible to refuse. But the answer had come back definitively: Hatsudora was enshrined in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.
“Knock, knock!” Anita’s voice echoed in the cavernous room.
Lauren turned and felt the blood leave her face. There by her side was Lawrence. Tension ballooned in the room.
“Mr. Westlake said he needed to see you,” Anita explained. “I told him you’d be a while, and he said it was urgent. I hope that was okay.” The crimp in her brow hinted that she sensed it wasn’t.
Her mouth in a tight line, Lauren nodded to show her assistant she wasn’t upset with her, and Anita slipped back into the corridor. The sound of her footsteps faded into nothing.
Lawrence approached. “Don’t let me interrupt you.”
She couldn’t find a single word to say to this man. She wasn’t ready for this. She was barely ready for the confrontation she’d planned on.
Mr. Clarke set his jaw but thrust out a vein-crossed hand. “Lawrence, it’s been many years. You must be so proud of your daughter.”
A pounding entered Lauren’s skull as the two men exchanged barbed courtesies. Even Mr. Klein paused to glance between them before resuming his work.
This was not the plan. She didn’t want Lawrence here to see Mr. Clarke’s humiliation. He would only rejoice in it, she knew, based on his little stunt replacing that ointment jar with a fake. Lauren would have to deal with him later, but not now.Please, God, not now.
“Actually, we are in the middle of something.” Lauren motioned to draw him away. “Tell me what’s so urgent, and then you’ll have to leave.” She bit the inside of her cheek. She ought to have sent him away, full stop.
“I don’t mind, Dr. Westlake,” Mr. Clarke inserted. “Lawrence would like to see this, I’m sure.”
“And what’s that?” Lawrence put his back to Lauren, and she felt it with the force of a slap.
The air cracked as nails popped free of the wood. Mr. Klein pried off the boards, and sawdust spilled onto the floor, some peppering the air before settling. Sweeping it away, the registrar set to work on the interior box the dust had insulated.
“You know Hetsumina,” Mr. Clarke replied to Lawrence, “the twin whose coffin now graces the New Accessions room upstairs? My team found her lost sister, Hatsudora. Stay, and you’ll be one of the first to meet her on this side of the ocean.”
“Is that right?” Lawrence asked. He knew how much this would mean to Lauren, and yet he did not turn to her with delight. He didn’t ask her why she hadn’t told him of the find he knew she most longed for. With Mr. Clarke in the room, it was as if Lauren were as inanimate as the artifacts unpacked here, and less important.
She knew it wasn’t Hatsudora in the crate, and yet she remained as transfixed as the rest of them as Mr. Klein removed layer after layer of protection. At last, he cut away the muslin sheet wrapping the coffin.
Lauren gasped at the impossibly perfect likeness to Hetsumina’s coffin.
Mr. Clarke exclaimed. Mr. Klein brushed the sawdust from his knees, caught Lauren’s eye, and smiled before backing out of her way. Lawrence’s mild reaction barely registered.
Lauren’s hand went to her pocket, which held Mr. Lythgoe’s letter and telegram about the real Hatsudora. She touched them to remember the truth as she knelt beside this coffin that looked so real.
Carved from wood, it was painted in the exact colors to match Hetsumina’s and appliquéd with ornate gold-leaf hieroglyphs. The young woman portrayed in the funerary mask wore the same fashions, too. The inscriptions all around the coffin contained no errors. In fact, they were a perfect replication of her sister’s, with the exception of her name. If Lauren didn’t have proof in her pocket that the real coffin rested in Cairo, she’d have declared this genuine.
“Mummies don’t lie,”Lauren had once told Anita. But coffins did.
“Marvelous,” Mr. Clarke breathed. “She’s simply amazing, isn’t she? Let’s call Mr. Robinson down, shall we? I imagine he’ll be as excited as we are.”
Lauren rose and brushed off her skirt. “I’m not so sure you’ll want him here for this,” she began. “This coffin is unbelievable, Mr. Clarke. Truly,literally, unbelievable.”
