The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

down the stairs to the basement storage area. By now, the detectives had made the hole in the wall large enough for her to squeeze through. She paused at the chamber entrance and frowned at the pile of bricks that had been pulled loose.
    “Is it safe to go in there? Are you sure it won’t collapse?” Maura asked.
    “It’s supported by a cross brace at the top,” said Jane. “This was meant to look like a solid wall, but I think there may have been a door here at one time, leading to a hidden chamber.”
    “Hidden? For what purpose?”
    “To stash valuables? To hide booze during Prohibition? Who knows? Even Simon Crispin has no idea what this space was intended for.”
    “Did he know it existed?”
    “He said he’d heard stories when he was a kid about a tunnel connecting this building with one across the street. But this chamber’s just a dead end.” Jane handed her a flashlight. “You first,” she said. “I’ll be right behind you.”
    Maura crouched at the hole. She felt the gazes of the detectives silently watching her, waiting for her reaction. Whatever waited inside that chamber had disturbed them, and their silence made her reluctant to proceed. She could not see into the space, but she knew that something foul waited in the darkness—something that had been shut away so long, the air within seemed rank and chill. She dropped to her knees and squeezed through the opening.
    Beyond, she found a space just high enough for her to stand. Reaching out straight in front of her, she felt nothing. She turned on her flashlight.
    A disembodied face squinted back at her.
    She sucked in a shocked breath and jerked back, colliding with Jane, who had just squeezed into the space behind her.
    “I guess you saw them,” said Jane.
    “Them?”
    Jane turned on her flashlight. “There’s one right here.” The beam landed on the face that had just startled Maura. “And a second one’s here.” The beam shifted, landing on a second niche, which held another face, grotesquely shriveled. “And finally there’s a third one right here.” Jane aimed her flashlight at a stone ledge just above Maura. The wizened face was framed by a waterfall of lustrous black hair. Brutal stitches bound the lips together, as though condemning them to eternal silence.
    “Tell me these aren’t real heads,” said Jane softly. “Please.”
    Maura reached in her pocket for gloves. Her hands felt chilled and clumsy, and she fumbled in the darkness to pull latex over clammy fingers. As Jane aimed her beam up at the ledge, Maura gently pulled the head from its stone shelf. It felt startlingly weightless and was compact enough to rest in her palm. The curtain of hair was unbound, and she flinched as silky strands brushed across her bare arm. Not mere nylon, she thought, but real hair.
Human hair.
    Maura swallowed. “I think this is a
tsantsa.
”
    “A what?”
    “A shrunken head.” Maura looked at Jane. “It seems to be real.”
    “It could also be old, right? Just some antique the museum collected from Africa?”
    “South America.”
    “Whatever. Couldn’t these be part of their old collection?”
    “They could be.” Maura looked at her in the darkness. “Or they could be recent.”
             
     
    The museum staff stared at the three
tsantsas
resting on the museum’s lab table. Mercilessly lit by the glare of exam lights, every detail of the heads was illuminated, from their feathery eyelashes and eyebrows to the elaborate braiding of the cotton strings that bound their lips closed. Crowning two of the heads was long, jet-black hair. The hair of the third had been cut in a blunt bob that looked like a woman’s wig perched atop a far-too-small doll’s head. The heads were so diminutive, in fact, that they could easily be mistaken for mere rubber souvenirs, were it not for the clearly human texture of the brows and lashes.
    “I have no idea why these were behind that wall,” Simon murmured. “Or how they got there.”
    “This building is full of mysteries, Dr. Isles,” said Debbie Duke. “Whenever we update the wiring or fix the plumbing, our contractors find some new surprise. A bricked-up space or a passage that serves absolutely no purpose.” She looked across the table at Dr. Robinson. “You remember that fiasco with the lighting last month, don’t you? The electrician had to break down half the third-floor wall just to figure out where the wires tracked. Nicholas? Nicholas?”
    The curator was