The Keepsake Read Free Page A

T-shirt.
    “Beautiful, isn’t she?” murmured Dr. Robinson. He’d moved beside Maura, and for a moment she wondered if he was referring to Madam X or to the young woman. “She appears to be in excellent condition. I just hope the body inside is as well preserved as those wrappings.”
    “How old do you think she is? Do you have an estimate?”
    “We sent off a swatch of the outer wrapping for carbon fourteen analysis. It just about killed our budget to do it, but Josephine insisted. The results came back as second century BC .”
    “That’s the Ptolemaic period, isn’t it?”
    He responded with a pleased smile. “You know your Egyptian dynasties.”
    “I was an anthropology major in college, but I’m afraid I don’t remember much beyond that and the Yanomamo tribe.”
    “Still, I’m impressed.”
    She stared at the wrapped body, marveling that what lay in that crate was more than two thousand years old. What a journey it had taken, across an ocean, across millennia, all to end up lying on a CT table in a Boston hospital, gawked at by the curious. “Are you going to leave her in the crate for the scan?” she asked.
    “We want to handle her as little as possible. The crate won’t get in the way. We’ll still get a good look at what lies under that linen.”
    “So you haven’t taken even a little peek?”
    “You mean have I
unwrapped
part of her?” His mild eyes widened in horror. “God, no. Archaeologists would have done that a hundred years ago, maybe, and that’s exactly how they ended up damaging so many specimens. There are probably layers of resin under those outer wrappings, so you can’t just peel it all away. You might have to chip through it. It’s not only destructive, it’s disrespectful. I’d never do that.” He looked through the window at the dark-haired young woman. “And Josephine would kill me if I did.”
    “That’s your colleague?”
    “Yes. Dr. Pulcillo.”
    “She looks like she’s about sixteen.”
    “Doesn’t she? But she’s smart as a whip. She’s the one who arranged this scan. And when the hospital attorneys tried to put a stop to it, Josephine managed to push it through anyway.”
    “Why would the attorneys object?”
    “Seriously? Because this patient couldn’t give the hospital her informed consent.”
    Maura laughed in disbelief. “They wanted informed consent from a
mummy
?”
    “When you’re a lawyer, every
i
must be dotted. Even when the patient’s been dead for a few thousand years.”
    Dr. Pulcillo had removed all the packing materials, and she joined them in the viewing room and shut the connecting door. The mummy now lay exposed in its crate, awaiting the first barrage of X-rays.
    “Dr. Robinson?” said the CT tech, fingers poised over the computer keyboard. “We need to provide the required patient information before we can start the scan. What shall I use as the birth date?”
    The curator frowned. “Oh, gosh. Do you really need a birth date?”
    “I can’t start the scan until I fill in these blanks. I tried the year zero, and the computer wouldn’t take it.”
    “Why don’t we use yesterday’s date? Make it one day old.”
    “Okay. Now the program insists on knowing the sex. Male, female, or other?”
    Robinson blinked. “There’s a category for
other
?”
    The tech grinned. “I’ve never had the chance to check that particular box.”
    “Well then, let’s use it tonight. There’s a woman’s face on the mask, but you never know. We can’t be sure of the gender until we scan it.”
    “Okay,” said Dr. Brier, the radiologist. “We’re ready to go.”
    Dr. Robinson nodded. “Let’s do it.”
    They gathered around the computer monitor, waiting for the first images to appear. Through the window, they could see the table feed Madam X’s head into the doughnut-shaped opening, where she was bombarded by X-rays from multiple angles. Computerized tomography was not new medical technology, but its use as an archaeological