Lauren could imagine the gossips dragging his name through the mud. “They should consider themselves lucky to have you fixing the place up,” she said. “They couldn’t have approved of an old mansion falling into decay, either.”
“It’s hard to tell with the roof gone,” Elsa said, cocking her head, “but is this French architecture, Uncle Lawrence?”
Brightening, Lawrence confirmed that it was. “A perfect fit for a museum named in honor of Napoleon.”
Mullioned windows reflected the sun on three levels.
Freshly fallen snow draped a sparkling mantle over the grounds, which rolled away from the house like a bolt of satin until it reached a lacework of bare trees, their every limb encased in crystal. The tops swayed in the wind, and branches cracked as ice broke off and fell soundlessly into the snow. If she looked past the soot-stained limestone château, the sprawling grounds reminded Lauren so much of her childhood home outside Chicago, it nearly took her breath away.
“You’ll have to imagine the mansard rooftop and a large sign out front that reads, ‘The Napoleon House.’ Spelled in English, French, and hieroglyphs. I’ll consult with you to get that right, Doctor.” He winked at her.
“I’ll bill you,” she teased, turning up her collar against a raw, damp wind. “Shall we?” She offered her father her arm to steady his ascent up the steps.
Inside the house, he closed the door, ensconcing them all in a patchwork of shadows and the scant light coming through the windows. “The electricity hasn’t been turned back on yet as a safety precaution. We need another inspection of the rewiring job they did after the fire.”
“Smart.” Lauren stepped into the spacious entryway. Before them was a double staircase. Beautiful, but impractical for older patrons and for moving large or heavy artifacts. “Are you putting in an elevator?”
“Already done.” Lawrence walked forward, leading Lauren and Elsa past the staircase to see a shiny brass elevator. “Another gigantic headache, but that’s over and done with, and here we are.”
Nodding, Lauren slipped into what must have been a grand parlor.
Elsa gasped. “Lauren! Did you see this?” Still outside the room, she pointed to a spot to the right of the door.
Lauren joined her. On the wall, a brass plaque read,The Dr. Lauren Westlake Gallery.
“I hope you don’t mind.” Her father clasped his hands. “Each of us board members dedicated a room to a person of our choice. There’s no one I would rather honor above you.”
Lauren stepped back, feeling thrown off guard and unbalanced. “Why?” The gesture, though lovely, didn’t make sense. “Isn’t there a colleague or a mentor who’s been more influential in your career? More deserving?” Her protest escaped her before she realized it might offend. “I hate to sound ungrateful,” she added. “I simply don’t understand.”
“Any colleagues I had were only temporary, our relationships over at the end of a given dig. My mentors are no longer walking this earth, God rest them. This—” He spread his arms to encompass the house. “What I’m doing here is building a legacy. A legacy that will last beyond my lifetime. My only other legacy is you. In my mind, dedicating one to the other is only fitting.”
Lauren didn’t know how to respond. She could translate an ancientlanguage. She knew how to tell a fake from the real thing. But she didn’t fully trust herself to interpret her own father.
She managed a “thank you,” then went back inside the largely empty room. It would be a giant security risk to keep items of any value in a house that was rarely in use. Still, a few crates sat on the floor, beckoning.
Elsa engaged Lawrence in conversation in the hallway, where he sat in the only chair they had seen on the first floor so far. Kneeling beside a crate, Lauren removed the lid and peeked inside at the nest of wood shavings. After trading her woolen mittens for the cotton gloves she kept in her purse, she carefully drew her fingers through the packaging material until she found something to grasp.
Several somethings, in fact.
She shifted to sit more comfortably. One by one, she placed each shabti on her lap. She had seen and handled thousands of these funerary objects in her lifetime. A single tomb could contain up to four hundred of them. But the small carved figures held an entirely different significance here, in a gallery named for her, with her father sitting outside the doorway.
Her memory scrolled backward to her as a little girl, sifting through a box of treasures her father had brought back from Egypt after an eight-month absence from her life. She’d found a set of three wooden shabti, which appeared to be a man, woman, and girl. At the age of nine years old, she knew their purpose. These objects were buried with noble Egyptians so that they could come alive and perform manual labor for the deceased in the afterlife.
But to Lauren, they looked like a family. They were even better than the paper dolls Nancy had given her to keep her quiet when her mother had lain in bed for days at a time.
Lauren turned over one of the shabti in her lap now, admiring the fine detail.O shabti, one read,if I be summoned to do any work which has to be done in the realm of the dead, you shall act for me on every occasion of making arable the fields, of flooding the banks, or of conveying sand from east to west: “Here I am,” you will say.
Here I am.Those three little words called up another memory in Lauren’s mind.“Here I am!”she had wanted to shout as a child, as though she were playing a never-ending game of hide-and-seek. But no one was looking for her. Her father found what he wanted in a country on the other side of the world. Her mother rarely left her room.
No one was looking for Lauren.
She closed her eyes and saw a much younger Lawrence enter the study, where she was playing with the shabti.
“This is a family,”she’d told him, holding up the mother, father, and daughter. Willing him to understand this was the way they should be: together.
Smiling, he’d told her she could keep them.
He didn’t understand what she was trying to say. How could he be so happy when she felt inside out and upside down? Buried hurts had boiled to the surface, and after keeping them corked for so long, she finally released the pressure.“Take this one back.”She’d thrust the male figure toward him.“He’s never around. We don’t need him.”Her voice had cracked on the lie.“He doesn’t want to be around these two, and I don’t need him, either.”
