She kept staring at the Temple of Dendur, the silent gray building, nothing more than a few ancient walls dug from the muddy banks of the Nile River.
She calmed down, pulled herself under control. She was all right, she realized. She didn’t have a psychic episode, she realized. She had seen herself as she had been as a young woman in Egypt. She had married Amenhotep—Kirk, in this reincarnation. She had seen Phoebe Fisher but not Kathy Dart. Why was Phoebe in her Egyptian days and not Kathy? The spirit of the Pharaoh said Tamit had killed her when she was Roudidit and married to the warrior Amenhotep.
The guard moved toward her again and signaled that the museum was closing. Jennifer nodded and stood up, collected her bag. She glanced over at the temple, half expecting to see more shadowy shades from her reincarnated life drifting through the vaulted arch, appearing like a whiff of memory. Nothing now surprised her. But there was no image, nothing but the empty gallery, the silent walls of the temple. Jennifer stood and followed the last of the tourists from the Sackler Wing, taking the exit doors and going through more long, low-ceilinged hallways and galleries filled with the artifacts from the Old Kingdom of Egypt, at the time of the First Dynasty, over twenty-five hundred years before Christ.
In the last gallery, Jennifer stopped momentarily to look at a huge map of Egypt. She wanted to see where the Temple of Dendur had been located on the Nile River, but what caught her attention immediately was the vast expanse of Lower Egypt and the names Kush and Ethiopia.
There had been great civilizations on the Nile River before the ancient Egyptians, and before those, man had traveled north out of the primitive jungles of Africa. She remembered what Kathy Dart had said in Washington, how her connection with Habasha had come from a piece of crystal found in Ethiopia. Habasha had been alive then, 4 million years ago, and his spirit was on earth even before that, over 23 million years ago.
Jennifer kept staring at the old map of Lower Egypt, at the vast expanse of the Sudan desert and the high plateaus of Ethiopia. It was here, deep in the the gorges of southern Ethiopia, where Habasha had lived, that man first stood upright and changed from a beast of the jungle to a creature possessing a spirit, having a soul, a reincarnated soul that he carried with him throughout time and filled with all the memories of all his lifetimes.
Phoebe Fisher had not told her the truth, Jennifer realized. The spirit of the Pharaoh was not her first moment in time. Her spirit, her oversoul, which had moved the heart-shaped planchette, had existed before the great civilizations of Egypt. It had said she was the first human!
She was like Habasha—that was the connection! She, too, like Kathy Dart, went back to the dawn of mankind, to the first moments of the human spirits, millions of years before the Temple of Dendur. She had been reincarnated as a member of the divine harem in the temple, had married Amenhotep, and died in Egypt. Her body, she was sure, had been mummified and ferried across the Nile to be entombed. But she now knew she had lived even before this great civilization of pharaonic Egypt. She had lived with Habasha. She had lived at the same time as Kathy Dart’s first incarnation. And now, she realized, Phoebe Fisher had been there, too. That was why the channeler had kept her from learning more from the Ouija board. They had all been alive together in their first incarnations on earth. And something had happened to them, there at the dawn of time.
Jennifer glanced around, suddenly afraid, fearing that Phoebe had followed her to the museum. But the Egyptian gallery was empty. The Metropolitan was closing.
The answer, she realized, would not be found here in the great dynasties of Egypt and in the days of Ramses the Great. Yes, she had suffered and died, murdered by Tamit, but this was not her first life nor her first death. She had to return to the prehistoric exhibition at the Museum of Natural History, where she first realized she had lived in the primitive hut from the Ice Age.
She walked out through the front doors of the museum and stood at the top of the stone steps, looking down at Fifth Avenue, crowded now with rush hour traffic. The city skyline was already aglow with lights and bright flashing signs. She needed to hurry. Kirk’s flight was due from Chicago, and she needed to be with him. But first she had to telephone Kathy Dart and Phoebe Fisher. She wanted both channels to meet her at the Museum of Natural History. She wanted them to walk with her through the Ice Age exhibition. It would be there, Jennifer knew now, in that prehistoric graveyard, that she’d remember what had happened to her spirit when they had evolved as humans and come down out of the trees to walk upright as man.
Jennifer smiled. For the first time in weeks, she knew exactly what to do. She knew how to solve the mystery of her past, of all her reincarnated lives, and she hurried down the stone steps, rushing to meet her lover, her great love, she realized, of all her lifetimes, and she smiled with anticipation, her face suddenly bright and shiny with hope.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
THE FRONT DOOR OF her apartment had been replaced and the locks changed. Jennifer took the set of keys given to her by the superintendent and unlocked the door, but she didn’t step across the threshold. The apartment was dark.
“What’s next?” Kirk asked. He was standing beside her, still holding their luggage.
“I’m not sure. I thought perhaps Tom would be here. I called his apartment while I was waiting for your plane and just got his machine.”
“Is he at work?”
Jennifer shook her head. “No, I called his office, too.” She stepped into the room then and realized at once that something was wrong. She flipped on the entrance light and peered into the living room. Her furniture was in order, and what she could see of her small kitchen looked untouched. In the three days that she had been gone, the super had cleaned the entrance and the living room. There was no trace of the dog’s blood.
“Do you want me to look around?” Kirk asked, edging past her to set down their bags.
“No,” she said. She moved a few steps farther into the apartment and glanced to her right. “Do you smell anything?” she asked Kirk.
He sniffed the air and shook his head. “The place could use a little fresh air, though. Shall I open a window?” He stood with his legs apart and his hands deep in the pockets of his red jacket.
“No, don’t do anything. Please.” Jennifer was apprehensive, but she tried to keep her voice steady. She slipped off her coat and dropped it on the living room sofa, then turned toward her bedroom.
“Hey, Jen!”
“It’s okay, Kirk. Everything is all right.” She didn’t look at him.
The bedroom door was slightly ajar. Jennifer stepped over and pushed it with one finger. Light from the street filtered through the closed blinds and left dim streaks on the opposite wall. She could see the clutter on top of her dresser. Everything was just as she had left it. She moved farther into the room and looked at the bed. It hadn’t been touched.
“Hey, Jen, what’s going on?” Kirk’s voice trembled slightly.
Jennifer didn’t answer him, just held her hand up in a gesture for silence. There was someone here, she knew. She felt someone’s presence. But who? And where?
All at once, a breeze blew the heavy window curtains out, scattering the loose papers on her desk. Tom was here, Jennifer realized. She could feel his presence. But why would he hide from her? Was he waiting for her? Did he want to kill her?
“Tom?” she asked, turning and scanning the room.
Kirk remained standing in the bedroom doorway. He was afraid to enter, she guessed.