The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (3 page)

“Come on, Katrina!” Jeff began shouting at me again in our living room. “Use logic. Ask yourself if I am behaving like a cheater.”

“You mean like disappearing for four days solid?”

Jeff swallowed and looked down. Then he approached me and put both hands on my shoulders. He looked into my eyes, and in his I thought I saw desperation for the first time since meeting him.

“I meant that a cheating man is not interested in the conversations we had while I was away,” he said quietly. “A cheating man is eager to get off the phone with his wife.”

“Sure,” I scoffed, “unless his lover knows he’s married! Maybe she’s also married and has something to lose. Maybe she would sit there and wait for you to talk to me. Maybe she was off somewhere talking to her own husband at the same time. You’re not stupid, Jeff! You would know exactly how not to get caught. God, I can’t believe we are actually having this conversation!”

But in my heart, I also could not believe Jeff would want that, any of that. It was not Jeff. Either I was wrong now, or I had been wrong about my husband all along.

“Where were you for four days, Jeff?”

He let out a sigh and sank back down onto the living room sofa. There were tears in his eyes.

“Sweetheart, listen,” he said quietly. “I can’t tell you. I am sorry for that, I really am. I have never lied to you before. I have never kept anything from you. I am sorry for lying to you about the conference. I hate myself for that. But I can’t tell you now, either. Please, you just have to trust me…”

Four days later, the silence of the empty house was maddening. Apart from my own ragged breathing and the steady, persistent ticking of our grandfather clock—a nagging reminder of the transience of time—there was only a void where a couple in love had lived.

I sat down heavily on the carpeted floor next to Jeff’s desk in our office. My eyes were burning from a morning of almost constant crying. My fingers were swollen and sore from scrubbing Jeff’s blood from our terrace and the yacht, and they trembled as I scrolled through the screens on Jeff’s cell phone.

In Jeff’s recent call history was an international phone number. I did not recognize the country code, and I might not have noticed the number at all—except for the fact that it appeared fifty-six times over five weeks.

The record began with an incoming call to Jeff. After that, both incoming and outgoing calls between Jeff’s cell phone and the international number occurred daily, sometimes several times per day, with the exception of a single four-day time span.

I recognized the dates immediately. They were the same four days as the conference in Seattle. This was the number of the person Jeff was with over those four days.

For a few long moments, I only stared at Jeff’s phone as if the number itself would suddenly speak, explaining to me the inexplicable. Finally, I dialed the number.

“Dr. Wilson!” a woman answered with an excessive enthusiasm that made me prickle. Her voice held a barely perceptible accent.

“Actually, this is Dr. Stone,” I said coolly. “Jeff Wilson’s wife. With whom am I speaking?”

There was a long pause, and when the woman spoke again the enthusiasm was gone. “I’m sorry, Dr. Stone,” she said. “This is Alyssa Iacovani. I am an old classmate of your husband’s from UCLA.”

Jeff had done his undergraduate work at UCLA, and we kept in touch with several of his college buddies. None of them had ever mentioned an Alyssa Iacovani.

“I am the director of the Piso Project,” the woman went on. “This is an antiquities research project with
Il Museo Archeologico Nazionale
, the National Archeological Museum in Naples, Italy. I apologize for my sense of urgency, Dr. Stone, but I was expecting a call from your husband several hours ago, and he has not called. I was just about to phone him instead. I must see Jeff immediately.”

For a moment, I struggled to comprehend her audacity as well as her statements.
Antiquities research? Italy? What could she possibly need to speak to Jeff about?

“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “My husband has been called away on family business and will be unavailable for at least the next couple of weeks.” Another lengthy pause ensued, and I began to wonder if she was still on the line.

“In that case,” the woman said at last, “Dr. Stone, I apologize again, but I must see
you
immediately.”

In one of these buildings there has been found an entire library, compos’d of volumes of the Egyptian Papyrus, of which there have been taken out about 250; and the place is not yet clear’d or emptied… Of these there are many in my custody.

-Director of the Museum Herculanese

Camillo Paderni (1720–1770)

Chapter Three

I caught the next flight to Naples, Italy.

When it landed, I stepped off the airplane, found my driver, and instructed him to take me directly to the National Archeological Museum.

Once in the limousine, I laid my head back and closed my eyes. Well accustomed to the frequent travel mandated by my career, I usually sleep as soundly on an overnight flight as in my own bed at home. This time, my restless, shallow sleep was a theater for recurrent loops of horrifying dreams.

Act One starred my husband, a river of blood flowing from his abdomen, steadying himself with our terrace railing, turning to look at the shooter in our bedroom whose face I could never see. In Act Two, Jeff would lie dying on the deck of my otherwise gleaming anniversary gift, a circle of blood expanding around him, a red death slowly enveloping his life. In Act Three, a black blanket would enfold his naked corpse, and then a black hearse would enfold the blanket, and then a black night would enfold the hearse.

I was the star of the finale, desperately sopping blood from my home, where it continued pouring in faster than I could clean, like a macabre variant on Mickey Mouse’s unruly swirling basin in
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
.

Three times, this grisly Shakespearean tragedy was interrupted by flight turbulence, which brought on highly uncharacteristic airsickness. By the time the plane landed at ten o’clock in the morning Italian time, I was exhausted, hungry, dizzy, and cross.

“Ma’am, we have arrived,” the limousine driver said, waking me. I shook my head to clear the fuzziness.

I stepped out of the car and entered the museum.

I passed through a ground floor lobby adorned with marble sculpture to arrive at the museum’s coat check desk, where I checked my hastily over-packed luggage. Following the directions given at the desk, I went back across the lobby to the stairwell, my pace and my heart rate increasing with every step. By the time I reached the lower floor, I was practically running.

I rounded a corner and skidded to an abrupt halt as I almost collided with a six-foot-long crocodile. Mummified and encased in glass, the large reptile appeared a bit thin, but otherwise it looked almost normal and as if it were sleeping. An accompanying description, written in both Italian and English, explained that crocodiles were thought by the ancient Egyptians to have special powers.

I glanced around the room and realized I was in the section of the museum I had been looking for. Several mummified human forms surrounded me, along with a second crocodile, this one just a baby. It was bright green, no more than a foot in length, and could have been confused with someone’s pet lizard. It, too, was impeccably mummified.

“Dr. Stone?” a voice behind me inquired.

I turned and sized her up for a moment before answering. I had been expecting Alyssa Iacovani to be a brunette, given the Italian last name and slight accent. Instead, straight pale blonde hair flowed like spun gold to her shoulders, which were tan beneath a lightweight sleeveless top. Her green eyes were both intelligent and inquisitive.

I briefly remembered the first time Jeff passed a hand through my waist-length auburn hair. “I love that you’re a redhead,” he had said. “I’ve always thought redheads were the sexiest.”

“We have the most fun, too,” I teased. “My sister always told me that was supposed to be blondes, but, then again, she’s a dumb blonde.”

“I have never been into blondes, dumb or otherwise,” Jeff had responded with a smile.

“Dr. Iacovani,” I said, stepping forward to shake the hand of the lovely blonde woman who might have been my husband’s classmate.

“Please, call me Alyssa,” she said.

“Katrina,” I said in kind.

“Nice to meet you, Katrina, and thank you for coming so quickly. I’m sure you have gathered that time is of the essence, so I apologize for dispensing with any small talk. I’ll get straight to the point. How well do you know your husband’s research?”

I raised an eyebrow. “I am the co-founder of
our
company,” I said.

“Of course”—Alyssa appeared unfazed by the jab—“but you are the head of the biology division. Jeff is head of chemistry. What I was asking is this: How well do you understand the chemistry? Do the biologists and chemists fully understand each other’s work, or are the two areas too different from one another?”

“We have a loose understanding of each other’s work,” I said. “He and the other chemists design and chemically synthesize the molecules, but once I see the synthesis scheme I can follow it. My function is to design and implement the biological assays, but Jeff and the other chemists can follow what we biologists are doing once we explain it to them. Why do you ask?”

“Ugh, where do I begin?” Alyssa looked around and made a sweeping gesture with both hands, calling my attention to the artifacts in the museum exhibit. “I noticed you surveying the Egyptian rooms when you arrived. I put these rooms together.

“I did my doctoral work at the Yale Egyptological Institute in Egypt, mostly doing field research at the Fayoum Oasis outside of Cairo. After graduate school, I came here.

“
Il Museo Archeologico Nazionale
is the direct descendent of the Royal Bourbon Museum, one of the largest and oldest museums in all of Europe. It contains one of the world’s most valuable collections of Roman and Greek antiquities.

“I believed that my expertise in Egyptian antiquities could be a valuable asset here. As I’m sure you are aware, it is impossible to fully appreciate any one of these ancient cultures without an in-depth knowledge of the others. I came to Naples to strengthen my understanding of the Greek and Roman cultures while bringing my extensive background in Egyptian culture to the museum. I have been here ever since.” She smiled. “People tell me I have even picked up the accent a little.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“As I mentioned to you on the phone, I was an undergraduate at UCLA with Jeff—”

“Excuse my rudeness,” I said, “but I don’t remember Jeff ever mentioning you in the past. I only heard your name for the first time a few weeks ago.” It was a lie. I had first heard her name the previous day—from her—on the phone.

“He probably didn’t remember me,” she said, shrugging. “We were not friends in college; in fact, I doubt he even knew who I was.” She smiled sheepishly. “In my required freshman chemistry sequence—which I
loathed
, by the way—I knew him by name and by sight as the guy who was in the habit of throwing off the curve. I even knew people who tried to sabotage his efforts. They didn’t succeed, as Jeff published his first paper in
Nature
one year later, as a college sophomore. Aside from that, Jeff was gorgeous, charming, brilliant, and an outstanding surfer. He was hard to miss, and everyone knew he would one day do something extraordinary. After graduation, I read about Jeff from time to time when he would receive yet another prestigious award, so I was always vaguely aware of his career path.

“Recently, I stumbled upon a puzzle in my own research. I believed that this puzzle had a strong and unique chemical component. Knowing that Jeff would be the absolute best person on Earth to riddle it out, I decided to give it a shot. I looked him up and I called him. I don’t think he had any idea who I was.

“The thing that surprised me, to be honest, was his eagerness to help. Jeff became practically obsessed with the document. He started calling me daily, sometimes several times a day. I think he forgot about the time difference between Naples and San Diego because a few times he even woke me up in the middle of the night.” She laughed heartily.

I felt a sudden, intense wave of nausea and struggled to process the information I had just been hit with.
Ancient Egypt? Unique chemical component? What document?
Panic welled up inside me when I realized I was supposed to already know.

Jeff should have told me.

“Of course,” I bluffed. “As you said, he is certainly very excited about… the document. But I must admit, I have been so busy lately that I haven’t followed the development of the situation as closely as I should have. Perhaps it’s best for you to bring me up to speed from the beginning.”

Alyssa gave me a strange look.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked then.

“No, thank you, I’m fine.” It was another lie. I felt dizzy and nauseous. I looked again at the mummified humans and animals surrounding me and wished for a moment of fresh air.

“Katrina, how well do you know ancient Egypt?”

“Not very well,” I said, gazing longingly out the open door of the room.

“Of course not. That’s what I was afraid of. History is not your area any more than biology is mine.

“Obviously, I cannot make you an expert on the subject in one conversation, but there are certain concepts that you
must
grasp. Please feel free to stop me if I am either speaking over your head or insulting your intelligence.”

Alyssa motioned toward the mummified crocodile. “One thing you need to understand about the ancient Egyptians is that they were a culture of superstition. Natural phenomena were explained as acts of the gods. The Greeks were similar, and the Romans borrowed heavily from both cultures.

“During the time of the first Caesars, just before the birth of Christ, all three cultures were heavily intermingled. And it was during that time that a powerful change in thinking began to evolve.

“The ancients became increasingly motivated by empirical data, things they observed. They began to build hospitals instead of temples to cure their sick. They conducted autopsies to explain causes of death. They developed sophisticated surgical instruments, some of them similar to instruments still used to this day. They developed scientific methods and drew conclusions based on hard, experimental evidence—”

I snapped to attention. “Sorry, what?”

“In short,” she said, “during this era, these three cultures began a shift in thinking, from superstition to true science.”

“And this is the era you study?” I asked.

“It is.”

“What caused the change? What led these cultures toward science and away from superstition?”

Alyssa smiled. “That is the central question around which my research has been focused for nearly twenty years,” she said. “I believe it was the work of one woman.”

Alyssa guided me to an elevator. We stepped inside, and she pushed the button for the top floor of the museum. When we stepped out, in sharp contrast to the mummified crocodiles, ordinary objects now surrounded us.

Curio cabinets lining the walls contained a large assortment of metal and ceramic dishes and vases. Centered in the room was a large case containing a single blue vase, clearly a treasure from a lost era. I approached one cabinet that caught my eye. Inside it, several blue-and aqua-colored pieces of glassware sparkled elegantly, the lighting in the room passing through the glass of the curio cabinet and ricocheting playfully back from the glass of the objects.

“They’re lovely,” I said offhand.

“They are two thousand years old,” Alyssa replied. “We are now in the part of the museum dedicated to artifacts retrieved from Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae. All of the objects in this room were preserved, untouched, beneath several feet of volcanic lava, ash, and mud following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. That eruption, and the stunning preservation of those cities that accompanied it, gave us the most complete picture of the ancient world we have ever been able to observe.”

I peered more closely at the fragile glass items. “How did they survive the eruption without being crushed?”

“Because a four-hundred-degree-Celcius pyroclastic flow of hot gas enveloped the area with such intense heat that the water vaporized out of organic objects, and ash fell steadily for hours, reaching a depth of more than ten feet. Objects were essentially carbonized before the ash fell, and then the ash encapsulated everything, forming a seal which remained for seventeen hundred years.”