The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

her.
    Frost was not alone.
    The woman standing beside him was in her forties, dark-haired and strikingly beautiful. She wore faded blue jeans and a black pullover, but on her lean, athletic frame even that casual garb looked elegant. She said not a word to Jane but slipped right past her into the room and ordered: “Lock the door.”
    Even after Frost had turned the dead bolt, the woman did not relax. She crossed immediately to the window and yanked the drapes more tightly shut, as though the narrowest chink might admit the gaze of unfriendly eyes.
    “Who are you?” Jane asked.
    The woman turned to face her. And in that instant, even before Jane heard the answer, she saw it in the woman’s face, in the arched brows, the chiseled cheekbones. A face you’d see painted on a Greek urn, she thought. Or on the wall of an Egyptian tomb.
    “My name is Medea Sommer,” the woman said. “I’m Josephine’s mother.”

THIRTY-FOUR
     
    “But…you’re supposed to be dead,” Jane said, stunned.
    The woman gave a tired laugh. “That’s the story, anyway.”
    “Josephine thinks you are.”
    “That’s what I told her to say. Unfortunately, not everyone believes her.” Medea crossed to the lamp and turned it off, plunging the room into darkness. Then she went to the window and peered out through the slit in the curtains.
    Jane glanced at Frost, who was barely a silhouette standing beside her in the shadows. “How did you find her?” she whispered.
    “I didn’t,” he said. “She found me. You were the one she really wanted to speak to. When she found out you’d left for Maine, she tracked down my phone number instead.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me this on the phone?”
    “I wouldn’t let him,” said Medea, her back still turned to them, her gaze still on the street. “What I’m going to tell you now has to stay in this room. It can’t be shared with your colleagues. It can’t be whispered anywhere. It’s the only way I can stay dead. The only way Tari—Josephine—has any chance of a normal life.” Even in the dark, Jane could see the taut outline of the curtain she was clutching. “My daughter is all that matters to me,” she said softly.
    “Then why did you abandon her?” asked Jane.
    Medea spun around to face her. “I never abandoned her! I would have been here weeks ago, if only I’d known what was happening.”
    “
If only you’d known?
From what I understand, she’s been fending for herself for years. And you were nowhere around.”
    “I had to stay away from her.”
    “Why?”
    “Because being around me could mean her death.” Once again, Medea turned toward the street. “This has nothing to do with Josephine. She’s just a pawn for them. A way to draw me out into the open. The one he really wants is
me.
”
    “You care to explain that?”
    With a sigh, Medea sank into a chair by the window. She was just a faceless shadow sitting there, a soft voice in the darkness.
    “Let me tell you a story,” she said. “About a girl who got involved with the wrong boy. A girl so naïve that she couldn’t recognize the difference between sweet infatuation and…” She paused. “Fatal obsession.”
    “You’re talking about yourself.”
    “Yes.”
    “And who was the boy?”
    “Bradley Rose.” Medea released a shuddering breath, and her dark form seemed to shrink in the chair, as though folding in on itself for protection. “I was only twenty. What does any girl know at twenty? It was my first time out of the country, my first excavation. In the desert, everything looked different. The sky was bluer, the colors were brighter. And when a shy boy smiles at you, when he starts to leave you little gifts, you think you’re in love.”
    “You were in Egypt with Kimball Rose.”
    Medea nodded. “The Cambyses dig. When I was offered the chance to go, I jumped at it. So did dozens of other students. There we were in the western desert, living our dreams! Digging by day, sleeping in tents at night. I’ve never seen so many stars, so many beautiful stars.” She paused. “It was a place where anyone could have fallen in love. I was just a girl from Indio, ready to finally start living. And there was Bradley, the son of Kimball Rose himself. He was brilliant and quiet and shy. There’s something about a shy man that makes you think he’s harmless.”
    “But he wasn’t.”
    “I didn’t know what he really was. I didn’t know a lot of things until it was too late.”
    “What was