The Bone Vault

27

Clem’s flight had been delayed by thunderstorms west of London. When Mercer called to tell us that he had picked her up and was on his way to the hotel, Mike and I checked into her suite and directed security to bring them right up to the room.

Mike turned on the television in the living room and gnawed on an apple from an elegant arrangement of complimentary fruit and wine. He listened to a cycle of headline news then moved toJeopardy! Before going to commercial break, Trebek announced that the final category was “Patriotic Poems.”

I put my twenty on the mahogany side table and Mike did the same. “You may be Ms. Iambic Pentameter, but I get the prize for patriotic.”

Trebek read the final answer, printed in the cobalt blue box that was enlarged on the screen. “‘Author of poem, regarded as our national hymn, composed while standing on Pike’s Peak.’”

“Suck it up, Chapman. It’s mine.”

“Wait, blondie. It’s not Key, ‘cause he didn’t say national anthem. What the hell’s the one that Kate Smith used to sing?” I shook my head. “Hymn? Like ’Mine eyes have seen-‘”

I swept the money off the table. “Who is Katharine Lee Bates?”

“You’re right, Mrs. Falkowicz,” Trebek told the only one of the three contestants, a librarian from Boone, North Carolina. “She wrote ‘America the Beautiful’ as a poem, and never even met the gentleman who set it to music, using a song found in a church hymnal.”

“Wellesley College, class of 1880.”

“So you had the alumni advantage this time. That’s almost like cheating.”

“And there’s a street named after her in Falmouth, Massachusetts, which I drive by every time I take the ferry to the Vineyard. You’ve got to get around more, Mikey.”

The door buzzer rang and I went to open it. Standing beside Mercer Wallace’s six-foot-six frame was a woman barely five feet tall. Her dark brown skin and luminous green eyes were framed by a helmetlike shock of straight black hair. She stepped into the room and looked up at me as I introduced myself.

“I’m Clem. Clementine Qisukqut.”

“Mike Chapman. I’m a homicide detective. I’m handling Katrina’s case.”

Mercer carried her small bag into the bedroom and placed it on the luggage rack.

“I’m sure you’re exhausted. If at all possible, we’d really like to get started with some questions this evening.”

“That’s fine. All I did was sit the entire day. May I just clean up a bit?” She excused herself and went inside, returning to the living area ten minutes later.

We all settled into comfortable sofas and armchairs and let Clem begin. She seemed anxious to tell us about Katrina Grooten.

“I met Katrina a couple of years ago, not long after she started working at the museum. It was a year before we began to spend time together on the joint museum show.”

“But you were at Natural History, is that right?”

“Yes. I had a friend who was in the last year of a postdoc here in the States. He worked at the Cloisters before he went back to Europe. I met Katrina at a party at his apartment. It was a regular thing he did, to get some of the foreign students together. It gets quite lonely here, as you can imagine, since most of us arrive without family or a network of friends.”

“Did you two become close?”

“Not right away. We didn’t have that much in common. Our backgrounds were so entirely different, and our professional interests were, too. There’s probably no small museum more beautiful than the Cloisters, but I don’t quite see the relevance of Gothic art and architecture. I couldn’t connect to whatever it was that fascinated Katrina.”

“You’re an anthropologist?”

“Yes. A cultural anthropologist.” She smiled. “And it was quite the same for Katrina. She couldn’t fathom my interest in primitive civilizations, even though the entire history of evolution was the underpinning of my work.”

“How did that change?”

“Slowly. Mutual acquaintances kept bringing us together, unintentionally, of course. If there was an exhibit at the Met that one of the graduate students thought would interest others of us, someone would call or e-mail and we’d end up hanging out together. Sometimes go to dinner afterward, usually in a small group.

“It was early last year, when the office for the bestiary show was set up at my museum, that she began to spend time at Natural History.”

Clem had kicked off her shoes and had her feet curled up beneath her. “Would you mind very much if I had a drink?”

Mike walked to the cabinet under the television and unlocked the minibar. “Name it.”

“Any Jack Daniel’s there? I’ll take it neat.”

He poured two small bottles into a cut-crystal glass.

“I’m afraid I’m not your typical scholarly grad student. I’m a bit friskier than most, which is why I was booted out of here. I guess the first time I pushed Katrina’s buttons was when I tried to do a little rabble-rousing about the meteorite.”

Chapman was intrigued. He could sense that there was a more interesting undercurrent in the anthropologist’s personality than he had expected. “No offense, Clem, but I can’t see that’s there much to get too worked up about in these great old museums. Space rocks?”

“Ah, but you’re so white. Sorry, Mr. Wallace. You and Ms. Cooper, just like Katrina.”

Mercer laughed.

“‘The Mighty Quinn,’” Mike repeated. “Let’s get right down to it, Clem. I was expecting a full-out Eskimo, and here you are with these piercing green eyes and no whale blubber.”

“Danish mother, Mr. Chapman. Greenland’s a dependency of Denmark. My mother went there to teach school when she was twenty-two. Married my father. Eskimos as long as the island’s been inhabited.” She lifted a clump of her shiny black hair and it fell back in place. “The hair and the skin, those genes were pretty dominant.”

“What does that have to do with a meteorite?”

“The Willamette Meteorite, the centerpiece of the museum planetarium, you know it?”

“Yeah. Great hunk of rock. It’s the largest one in the world, isn’t it?”

“Fifteen and a half tons. And it was found in Oregon, on land that belonged to an Indian tribe. Clackamas Indians. The meteorite crashed to earth thousands of years ago. Museum explorers brought it back here and it’s been on display since 1906, almost one hundred years.”

“What’s the beef?”

Clem was doing a good job on her bourbon. “To the Indians, the meteorite had great spiritual significance. It was something the tribe worshiped for centuries, representing a union between the earth, the sky, and the water.”

“Didn’t they sue to get it back?” I asked.

“Yes, and a few years ago there was a settlement. The tribe dropped its claims for repatriation in exchange for the museum’s agreement to use the meteorite for education about its religious and cultural history. But there was a snag.”

Mike was responding to Clem’s enthusiasm. He listened attentively.

“Turns out before the deal was made, the museum had cut off a twenty-eight-pound chunk.”

He laughed.

“You think I’m being silly? You know how much a collector will pay for a piece of a rare meteorite? Thousands of dollars anounce. That twenty-eight-pound chunk is worth millions. Literally, millions.”

“What became of it?”

“The museum traded the whole thing to a private collector, in exchange for a small piece of a meteorite from Mars. What does that guy do? He starts auctioning off tiny slices.”

“Pissed off the Indians?”

“And me.”

“So you rallied the troops?”

“You bet I did. Just a grassroots effort to help the Indians. We even got two of the buyers, including a chiropractor in Oregon-how’s that for spiritual?-to donate smaller pieces of the Willamette slivers back to the tribe. I think it was Katrina’s first attempt to understand the sacred nature of a primitive people.”

“Wasn’t any of her South African background-”

“Think about it, Mike. May I call you Mike? Katrina’s parents lived their lives under the apartheid system. She was born into that society, educated in white schools. Goes off to study in England and France, and what becomes of her? Immerses herself in medieval studies, which transported her even farther away from the real world. She needed a soul, the girl did, and I tried to give it to her.”

“This was before she was attacked?”

“Raped? In the park? Yeah. We began to make ourselves a bit unpopular with the administration here last spring. Didn’t matter for her, because she worked for the Met. For me, it meant trouble. Had a sit-down with Mamdouba. Given a good talking-to. Stick to my specimens and stay out of museum affairs.”

Mike sat forward on the edge of his chair. “I’ve heard a lot of motives for murder, Clem. I’m finding it hard to think a girl could die for slivers of rock.”

“You’re quite right about that, Mike. It’s the bones. I do believe she died for the bones.”