Still As Death Read Free Page A

the main foyer. In contrast to the outside of the museum, the foyer was surprisingly welcoming, bathed in sunlight from the soaring skylights high above the marble floor. The antiquities were housed in the basement and on the main floor, with the European and Americangalleries on the second, third, and fourth levels. The museum was constructed around a central courtyard, open all the way to the ceiling, with wraparound balconies on each floor that led into the galleries. Standing in the courtyard, you could look all the way up to the balconies of the fourth floor high above you.
    The security guard raised a hand and answered, “Hey, Mizz St. George.” She had tried to get him to call her by her first name long ago, but Denny Keefe, who had been working at the museum for thirty years and apparently using the formal address for all that time, wouldn’t budge. “Hot day, huh?”
    “Yeah. Again.” She smiled at him, glad as she always was that the museum administration hadn’t let Denny go for someone younger and spryer, but rather supplemented his presence with a revolving collection of imposing-looking twenty-year-old bodybuilders to safeguard the collection. Denny himself wasn’t a very convincing security guard, but he was a cheerful presence and Sweeney liked him. He had always reminded her a little of a frog, with his large, egg-shaped eyes and his longish white hair, which he kept smoothed to his head with applications of a slippery substance that smelled vaguely of sandalwood. His uniform had never fit him properly and the loose green fabric added to the effect. Sweeney wasn’t sure what he would do if he were actually faced with a determined art thief, but she liked the idea that he might just put out his tongue and …
    She headed up to the third floor, where a series of connected galleries would soon house her exhibition. It had long been a dream of Sweeney’s to plan an exhibit of the things she studied: tombstones and mourning jewelry, death masks and Victorian postmortem photographs, and Egyptian burial items.
    The pieces had all been chosen, and she had spent the previous year working with museum staff to create installations and displays for the items. As she walked into the first of the linked galleries, she saw that one of the Egyptian sarcophagi had already been carried up. Tomorrow they would be bringing up other Egyptian burial equipment from the basement galleries. Though they could nolonger display the museum’s mummy, they could display many of the items that would have been buried with it. The elaborate preparations of the bodies of the ancient Egyptians—first the nobility but eventually those on other levels of society as well—were great evidence for the overriding assertion of Sweeney’s exhibition: that death and speculation about the afterlife were the motivating factor for much of the great art of the world. By choosing representative pieces of funerary art from different eras, she hoped to show the diversity of responses to human mortality.
    Today she had to choose a piece of Egyptian funeral jewelry to replace one that the conservation department had determined wasn’t in good enough shape to be displayed. The catalog was already completed, of course, but she and Willem had decided that they should just choose another piece. She hadn’t found exactly what she wanted among the displayed items, so she went down to the storage areas located beneath the museum to browse the files.
    The art and antiquities displayed in the Hapner’s galleries represented only a tiny percentage of the museum’s holdings. The rest of the items were stored in five large rooms beneath the museum. Banks of file cabinets flanked the large workspace where Harriet Tyler, the collections manager, had her office and controlled access to the rooms of priceless and not-so-priceless treasures.
    Every piece in the museum’s collection, no matter when it had been acquired or donated, no matter how insignificant it