And then she screamed.
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
JENNIFER LEFT KIRK ON the street, telling him only to wait for her, and entered the museum from West Eighty-first Street. It was after ten o’clock. They had spent most of the night and early morning with the police, at her apartment, and downtown at the office of the Justice Department, giving statements, explaining where she had been for three days.
They were due back at the Justice Department later that day for more questions, but Jennifer had told the police she had to meet someone at the museum, that it was important for her job. She didn’t tell Kirk that she had arranged for Phoebe Fisher and Kathy Dart to meet her when the museum opened.
She took the elevator to the third floor and followed the signs to the prehistoric exhibits. It was early, and the museum was virtually empty as she walked quickly through galleries, heading for the one where the prehistoric fossils were displayed. It wasn’t until she approached the special exhibit that she grew frightened. Stopping between two life-size models of reptiles, she tried to decide what to do next. She realized then that she had no plan for the confrontation. Phoebe Fisher had told her that she couldn’t trust her rational mind, but that was wrong. She had listened to Phoebe and to Kathy Dart; she had let her emotions dictate her response, and she hadn’t used her common sense. Well, she would figure it out as she went along.
Reminding herself to keep calm, she pushed open the glass doors and resolutely stepped into the darkened room, filled with artifacts of prehistoric man. She moved slowly past the glass displays of mammoth bones, the enlarged photographs of cave drawings and primitive sculptures. She kept herself from glancing to either side, afraid that seeing some ancient engraving would trigger a past life. She had to be alert. She had to be ready. She had to keep her attention focused.
She watched the few other museum visitors—couples, mothers with babies in strollers, school kids scribbling notes for a class assignment. She kept away from the center aisle and moved toward the rebuilt hut that dominated the exhibit.
It was here that she had first experienced the strange vibrations, here that she had told Tom the Ukraine model was built wrong. He had looked at her as if she was crazy. Well, she thought wryly, she wasn’t crazy. She was worse than crazy. She felt herself tense up, become more alert to her surroundings, to the other people in the gallery. She was an animal on the prowl. She kept walking, moving slowly toward the next gallery, the one built with the remains of man’s first family, the fossils of “Lucy” and the other early Australopithecus found on the banks of the Hadar River in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia.
In the dark passageway between the two rooms, she caught a scent. She paused and sniffed the stale air of the closed rooms. Yes, she realized, someone was ahead of her, hiding perhaps in the next gallery, the large diorama that had been been built to resemble an African water hole. Through the thick leafy underbrush, she spotted several giraffes and the hunchback of a black rhinoceros, wallowing in the muddy African waters. And beyond them, reaching into the fig bushes, was a cluster of male and female hominid models, constructed by the museum to show how the first family of Australopithecus lived with the beasts of the African jungle.
Jennifer raised her head and snorted, then kept moving closer, keeping to the wall and out of sight as she approached the water hole. She was ready. Her blood was pumping through her body. Her neck muscles swelled; her nipples hardened. She kept moving.
Jennifer caught Kathy Dart’s distinct scent, then spotted her on the other side of the diorama, near a grassy plain that had been built into the horizon, as if one could step into the museum diorama and travel to the horizon. Kathy was looking away from her, searching the room. She was looking for her, Jennifer realized. She sniffed the air. She was downwind, and Kathy hadn’t caught her scent, hadn’t realized she had come into the exhibition from the rear exit.
Jennifer flattened herself against the wall. She watched Kathy Dart, waited for Habasha to stir, waited for Kathy to realize what she had finally understood at the Temple of Dendur, that all of them had lived together at the dawn of time.
Jennifer moved from the pocket of shadows and stepped closer. She was less than twenty yards from the jungle water hole when she spotted Phoebe. She was standing away from Kathy and also watching the main entrance of the gallery. They had expected her to come that way, she realized, and smiled, pleased that she had outsmarted them.
She knew she wanted to battle now, and this realization surprised her. She had been terrified before by her primitive strength; now, as she gazed around the strangely familiar diorama, she felt stirrings of recognition deep in the lymphatic system of her brain that stored and carried through time all of her emotional memories. Yes, she had been here before. Jennifer knew that now for certain. She had felt this earth beneath her webbed feet, she had once climbed down from those thick branches and reached with short and hairy fingers to pluck sweet figs from the low bushes. She snorted again and crouched low, creeping closer to her enemy, this tribe that shared with her family the muddy water hole, here by the edge of the great lake and in sight of the smoldering volcano.
She spotted a mother with a child in a stroller glance at her and scurry away, as the deer did in the forest, frightened by the mere sight of her and the others who slept together in trees and lived off the fresh sweet fruit of the forest.
Jennifer took a deep breath, thinking: I will draw Kathy Dart away from Phoebe. She will attack if it is me that she has been stalking.
Jennifer left the hidden protection of the museum wall, stepped into the center of the gallery and closer to the African diorama. Then she shouted and waved her arms to attract Kathy Dart’s attention.
Kathy saw her, smiled, and mouthed a hello across the wide water-hole diorama. Kathy did not rush her. Jennifer stared back at Kathy; she waited, breathing harder now, her body coiled and ready to defend herself.
“Are you all right?” Kathy asked, mouthing the words across the silent gallery.
Jennifer cocked her head. She heard Kathy and understood what she had said, but Jennifer was remembering another morning in a distant time, when she had come out of the trees to find a mate among the males who had gathered to forage for fresh sweet fruit. She remembered now how she had been killed. And she screeched, recalling her anguish.
From the corner of her eye she saw the black museum guard looked alarmed and was coming at her. Jennifer knew that man. She had seen him once before on a paddleboat in the James River. Jennifer moved at once, she jumped over the low railing surrounding the water hole diorama.
“Be careful!” Kathy shouted at her.
Jennifer stood up straight. She saw that the guard was talking on a portable phone. More guards were running toward the gallery, coming at her from the other exhibits. But Jennifer was in the middle of the African jungle now, standing in the underbrush, surrounded by thick, hanging vines, enormous mahogany tree trunks, and the posed figures of short, hairy hominids, dull eyed and dumb, who stared at her.
She hooted for their attention, to get them away from Kathy Dart, to let her fight this woman who also had stepped forward and come into the re-created ancient water hole.
“Jenny! Jenny, you don’t understand!” Kathy was saying. She spoke softly, as if to reason with her voice.
The museum guard glanced back and forth between the two women.