Still As Death Read Free

being fussed over.
    He looked meaningfully at her plate, still smeared with egg yolk, and she set it on the counter for him. In a few seconds, the plate wasclean and shiny, and the General used one huge paw to wash his whiskers before disappearing again out the window. “Have a nice day,” Sweeney called after him.
    Once she’d washed up, put on jeans and a linen blouse and tied her hair up and out of her face against the heat, she leaned over the bed and brushed its occupant’s dark fall of hair away from his forehead. “Ian?” she whispered. “I’m heading out to the museum. It’s seven. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”
    He opened his eyes and looked up at her, squinting into the sunlight. His glasses were on the bedside table and she knew he saw only the vaguest outline of her face. “But it’s early,” he said. Ian didn’t usually get to his office until nine or ten.
    “I know, but the exhibition opens in three weeks and I still have so much to do. The catalogs are done and I have all this text to write. They’re still painting the galleries and I need to make sure all the framing is right. I told Fred and Willem I’d get in early.”
    “Okay, okay, I can take a hint. However …” He reached up and pulled her back into bed. “I assert that I ought to be allowed to have a small memento of your existence, since I shall have to do without you all day.”
    “But I have so much to do …” She ran her hands over his bare chest, trying to decide if she wanted to be seduced. His skin was as warm as sun-baked stone, his arms around her sure and familiar. It had been almost six months since he’d arrived in the states to open a Boston office of his London auction house, and Sweeney often found herself surprised at how quickly they’d settled into domesticity. They had known each other for nearly two years now, she supposed, so even though they’d been in the same city only since January, it made sense that there had been no need for prelude. But still … Sometimes when she came home at night and found him reading the papers on her couch or wrapped in his navy blue, monogrammed bathrobe and cooking dinner, she had the sense of having entered someone else’s house. She sometimes thought to herself,
Who is this man?
for a moment before she remembered,
Oh, it’s Ian
.
    In any case, she thought, looking at him, he was a very handsome man and a very kind one and, at the moment, a very sexy one.
    “Just one thing you have to do here, though,” he murmured, unbuttoning her blouse. She thought about protesting, then relaxed into his arms.
    “Okay,” she whispered into his ear. “But only because you’re so persuasive.”
    Forty minutes later she was walking through the front door of the Hapner Museum of Art, holding a cardboard cup of coffee. The Hapner was arguably among the most distinguished college or university art museums in the country, and like most art museums connected with institutions of higher learning, the Hapner had a strange and eclectic collection, largely dependent on original holdings and gifts by alumni or benefactors. In addition to works of American, European, and Near Eastern art, the Hapner housed the university’s well-rounded collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities—thanks to the interest of its director and Egyptologist Willem Keane and the proliferation of wealthy and well-connected alumni associated with the university through the years.
    The grand gray stone façade of the museum presented a paternal and imposing aspect to passersby which, Sweeney had always thought, seemed singularly uninviting. She stopped for a moment to look up at the banner over the main entrance. STILL AS DEATH: THE ART OF THE END OF LIFE it read, announcing Sweeney’s exhibition of funerary art from the museum’s collection. It panicked her to see the words up there when she hadn’t even finished putting everything in place.
    “Hi, Denny,” she called out as she climbed the ten stone steps to