Andie arrived on their heels, carrying a folder. “Donald made his decision,” she said, handing Diane the folder. “I also brought you the original museum budget for comparison.”
“Thanks, Andie. How is Donald?”
“Odd, even for him. I gave him your message and he sat for the longest time, stroking that desk of his. I thought maybe he’d been going quietly nuts all this time and this was somehow the final straw.” Andie shook her head. “I don’t know. He really took your attack hard. Hard enough it made me suspicious of him-but if the attack on you was about the skeleton, I don’t see how that makes any sense.”
“It might, if he thought it was connected with the Graysons.” Diane told Andie what Mike had related to her about the switched drinks.
“Why, that flashy, trashy bitch,” said Andie. “Can’t you have her arrested?”
“For what? Apparently, she’s the one who ended up with the drug.”
“Serves her right. Why would they go to such lengths?”
“This.” Diane handed her the paper Korey had given her. Jonas looked over her shoulder. She watched both their eyes widen until they were almost round. Andie, with her remarkably curly hair, looked like Little Orphan Annie.
Between the sheriff and Korey, Diane was feeling optimistic for the first time in a while. There were still a couple of hours to go before the meeting, so she sat down and relaxed with Jonas and their game of chess. It was a lot more fun sitting at the chess board than E-mailing moves back and forth.
Korey knocked on the door and came in just as Jonas captured Diane’s queen with his rook.
“Looks like you’re in trouble, Dr. F.,” said Korey, looking at the chess board.
“It’s not over until it’s over,” said Diane.
“Andie sent me to escort you to the meeting,” he said.
“Escort me?”
“You’re supposed to be in the hospital.”
“OK. It’s time, then.” She turned to Jonas. “Well, I suppose the endgame is starting.”
“You talking about the museum or chess?”
“Both.”
Jonas chuckled. “For our game, you could resign now.”
Diane smiled and left with Korey to go up to the third-floor meeting room. In the lobby they met Mark and Signy Grayson, who both looked surprised and a little disappointed at seeing her.
“You must not have been as bad off as people have been saying,” said Mark.
“I’m very sorry to disappoint you. I’m injured but not dead. And how is your cold, Signy? I’ve been concerned about you after that strange episode after the party. I hope you’ve changed your cold medication.”
“I’m fine, thank you.” She gave a thin smile, and Diane noticed that both she and Mark eyed her closely.
“I’m going to the meeting room,” said Mark. “I’ll see you there, Diane. Glad you could make it.”
Diane watched him stride confidently to the conference room. She started to follow, but the elevator doors opened and Vanessa Van Ross stepped into the lobby.
“Mrs. Van Ross,” acknowledged Signy. “You’re looking well. I’ve seen your limousine at the hospital more than once. I feared you were ill.”
“No. I’ve just been visiting the Center for Research on Aging there at the hospital.”
“Looking into the latest research on longevity?” Signy gave her a bright smile.
“My dear, are you hoping I’ll hurry and move on to the next world and make space for you and your husband?”
“Nonsense. Why would we want that?”
“You think if I were gone, Diane would be more vulnerable-in fact, you think many of Mark’s other real estate ventures would be easier. I’ve been a thorn in his side for quite a while, opposing all those zoning changes he wants.”
“I think you’re just oversensitive. We don’t wish you ill.”
“Good, then you’ll be happy to know that not only is my mother still alive and kicking, so is my grandmother.”
“Your grandmother? That’s not possible,” said Signy.
“Yes, dear, it is. If you and Mark weren’t so self-absorbed, you’d know that my grandmother is the second oldest person in the United States. So, dear, when you’re my age I’ll probably still be alive and going to those city council meetings to oppose Mark and his self-serving projects.”
Diane and Vanessa left Signy standing openmouthed in the lobby. “The herpetologist is putting in an interesting exhibit,” she heard Korey telling Signy.
Almost everyone was in the meeting room when Diane entered. They all greeted her with surprise and sympathy. Her usual seat was vacant, and Craig and Mark had taken up their positions on either side of her.
She sat on one end; Vanessa Van Ross on the other. If it were chess, Vanessa would be the queen defending her king-the museum. She was the one who wielded the greatest power for Diane’s side. Diane wasn’t sure what she was-a pawn, perhaps. No, a knight. A good guard with power to move in creative ways.
She looked at the faces of her board members as they studied Mark’s figures.
“Good to see you,” said Kenneth. “How’s that computer working out?”
“Great,” said Diane. “I love it. I loaned it to Frank. I told him his unit should get some.”
“That’s my girl,” said Kenneth. “It’s a honey of a computer.”
Laura entered, out of breath. “Diane. I went by the hospital and they told me you’d left temporarily. Are you all right?”
“I’m doing fine. The doctor wants me to spend the night there, so I have to go back. He suspects I have internal injuries.”
“Should you be here at all?” said Harvey Phelps. “You look pale.”
“This won’t take long,” she said.
She met Gordon Atwell’s gaze. He held hers for a moment and looked back down at the figures Mark had handed out. Diane wondered if it was he or someone he told who requested “In the Hall of the Mountain King” at the reception.
“Are we all here?” she said. “Mark, I believe you have a presentation.”
He stood and cleared his throat. “I have the figures Laura asked for at the last meeting. I think the numbers speak for themselves, and the museum would indeed come out ahead making a move to the Vista Building. I’ll be glad to answer any questions.”
“Are these figures accurate?” said Harvey Phelps. “How much were the original renovations?” He looked at Diane.
Laura frowned; so did Kenneth. His numbers did look good, but Diane had no doubt he’d fudged some of them. Only Vanessa’s eyes twinkled as she fanned herself with the budget.
“I have a question,” said Diane.
“All right,” answered Mark.
“I don’t see any mention of the museum’s one hundred million dollars’ worth of assets in paintings reflected in these figures. Nor do I see how you plan to accommodate them in the new building. You know, of course, I would expect to remove them before this building is sold to your investors.”
Everyone except Vanessa and Mark looked, bewildered, at Diane. Vanessa still fanned herself. Mark had turned several shades of red.
“What’s she talking about, Mark?” Craig Amberson frowned as he looked at Mark across the table.
“A hundred million dollars?” said Gordon Atwell. “Mark, do you know what she means?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Kenneth Myers and Harvey Phelps together.
Madge Stewart kept flipping through the pages of the budget. “I don’t understand. There’s nothing here about paintings. Isn’t that a lot of money for paintings?”
Donald, sitting by Madge at the end of the long table, looked relieved. Diane supposed it was because in the end he’d chosen his side correctly.
“You didn’t tell them, Mark?” said Diane. “You weren’t going to share all that profit, were you?”
“Shut up, you fucking bitch,” Mark exploded, standing up, red-faced, staring down at Diane, looking like he wanted to strangle her.
Madge audibly sucked in her breath.
“Here, here,” said Kenneth. “Mark, I think you have some explaining to do.”
Diane didn’t take her eyes from Mark. “In case you were wondering, Signy wasn’t incompetent the night of the reception. She successfully slipped me the glass with the-was it Rohypnol? — but someone saw her and switched the glasses back.” She looked at the group. “That was what that strange episode was about at the last board meeting. Signy got the drink meant to make me look like a drunken fool in front of all the contributors.”
“I didn’t sign on for that,” said Craig Amberson, rising to face Mark.
Gordon Atwell nervously tapped his fingers on the table.
Mark took another look at Diane. She saw in the depths of his gray eyes that she’d made an enemy for life. They were so filled with hate that she wondered if it could have been him behind her attacks-just diverting attention to the skeleton because it was a handy red herring.
“Do you have anything to add to your report before we vote?” she said, not unlocking her gaze from his.
He turned and left the room.
“I’ll take that as a no,” said Diane after the door slammed behind him.
The remaining board members seemed to be stunned into silence.
She turned her attention to the other conspirators. “What I want to know, Mr. Atwell, is was it you or someone else who requested ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ at the reception?”
He said nothing, but she could hear the labor of his breathing.
“You have grandchildren. So do you, Craig. You know how cruel that was. Is this the kind of men you are? If so, I want your resignations from the board.”
“I told Mark that was perhaps unwise,” Atwell said finally.
“Perhaps unwise. Yes. Perhaps it was.”
“Will someone tell me what’s going on?” said Harvey Phelps.
“The paintings on the wall in the Pleistocene and dinosaur rooms are remarkably valuable. We had an expert from the Metropolitan Museum of Art come in today and appraise them.”
“The ones with the unicorns?” said Madge.
“Yes. Mark apparently had them appraised several weeks ago by someone at the Heron Museum of Art. He knew their value. That’s when he got the idea of buying the museum building and the paintings and moving us out to that second-rate Vista Building.”
She hoped she was sufficiently rubbing Craig’s and Gordon’s noses in it.
“Korey and Dr. Allison Onfroi from the Metropolitan Museum of Art are working on protecting them,” she added.
Craig Amberson and Gordon Atwell looked defeated. Apparently, Mark Grayson hadn’t told them about the paintings.
“I think this meeting is adjourned. We aren’t selling the museum. For our next board meeting we need to get down to the business of the museum, and put this mess behind us.”
Diane sat back in her chair, exhausted. Just as soon as she talked to Jonas about the provenience of the arrowhead, she was heading back to the hospital. Vanessa Van Ross smiled at her as she continued to fan herself with the budget figures.
Diane got the room across from Frank again. She didn’t think she’d ever be glad to be in the hospital, but the bed felt good, and all she wanted to do was sleep. Even though Jonas hadn’t yet received the fax about the sites where the arrowhead may have come from, she felt optimistic. The last thing she did before getting Laura to take her back to the hospital was to fax the sheriff all the information she had on the skeleton. Surely, someone somewhere would recognize the description.
Getting Grayson off her back and rooting out the vipers among her board members was a major relief. And although Jonas didn’t know it, she was going to beat him at chess with her queen sacrifice. Adding to all of that, Frank was much improved-and it was only five thirty. Now all she had to do was wait for the sleeping pill to kick in. She didn’t even know it when she fell asleep.
She dreamed of snakes. Black snakes crawling across the table in the boardroom. The boardroom was ankle-deep in them, with no place to step. Diane jerked awake. She hated snakes.
The hospital was quiet. She looked at the clock next to her bed. Three thirty-two in the morning. That was a long sleep, and her bladder was full. She went to the bathroom. When she came out, she felt like she needed to walk. She put on her robe and walked out into the dimly lit hallway. At the far end of the corridor two nurses were chatting at the nurses’ station. She walked across the hall and peeked in Frank’s room.
Henry was dozing in a chair. Frank was asleep. Her presence roused Henry, and he came out to talk to her.
“How are you feeling?” he said.
“Better. Restless. I imagine you and your brother are pretty restless yourselves.”
“We’re doing OK. Actually, it’s hard to get Linc to take a vacation. He tends to be a workaholic. Now he has nothing to do but rest. His wife told me to keep him here for as long as I can.” He and Diane laughed together.
“I haven’t seen your sister lately.”
“She went home to see Mom and Dad.”
Diane shook her head. “All this must be really strange to you and your brother.”
“Well, yeah, it is. I feel like I got dropped into a Sam Spade movie.”
Diane and Henry talked a while. She enjoyed getting to know Frank’s family. She’d have liked to get to know his sister too.
“You look like you need to get back to bed,” said Henry after a while.
“You’re right. Thanks for the company.” She walked back into her room and climbed in bed and went to sleep. She could see Henry standing outside Frank’s door. For the first time in a long while, she felt safe.
Diane dozed for a while and then jerked awake. She wished she had another sleeping pill. An uneasy feeling that there was something she should know stood on the edge of her dreams like an apparition shaking her awake every time she slipped into comfortable sleep.
The clock in her room said it was five twenty. She tried to go back to sleep, but it was no use. She got out of bed and went to Frank’s room. Henry was sound asleep; so was Frank. She picked up the computer by Henry’s chair and went back to her room. There was a chair in the corner of the room near a phone jack. She pulled another wooden chair up and sat the computer on it as if it were a desk. She plugged in the computer, booted it up and connected the phone cord to the jack. She’d remembered that missing persons for each state are posted on the Internet. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? She could look herself. But instead of going to the missing persons site, she went to the Google Internet search engine and typed in the words missing, male, hockey, spring break, 1998.
It occurred to Diane that people oftentimes put up Web pages seeking help in finding a loved one-a way of tacking up missing persons posters across the world.
She got 1753 hits on the first search. Too many. Glancing down the list, she saw that one hit was about a missing male cat whose owner played field hockey. She needed to tweak her search parameters. It was amazing how many hits she got with what she thought was an unusual selection of key words. She got short stories and lots of hockey sites. On her third tweak of the parameters, she realized she should put quotations around “spring break” so that it would be read as a phrase by the search engine. That cut the number of hits down to 512. After almost an hour of looking at Web pages, she was about to give up and go through missing persons records, state by state. It would take a while, but the current strategy was apparently turning into a wild goose chase. Before she gave it up, however, she added vegetarian and archaeology to the search criteria. This time there were four hits. The title of the first hit was: “Will you help me find my son?”