Free The Keepsake: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel by Tess Gerritsen Page A

bricks out,” said Jane, “and see what’s on the other side.”
    Robinson looked alarmed. “If you start removing bricks, it could all collapse.”
    “But this obviously isn’t a weight-bearing wall,” said Tripp.
    “Or it would already have fallen.”
    “I want you all to stop right now,” said Robinson. “Before you go any further, I need to speak to Simon.”
    “Then why don’t you go ahead and call him?” said Jane.
    As the curator walked out, the four detectives remained in place, a silent tableau poised for his departure. The instant the door shut behind him, Jane’s attention shot back to the wall.
    “These lower bricks aren’t even mortared together. They’re just stacked up, loose.”
    “So what’s holding up the top of that wall?” asked Frost.
    Gingerly, Jane eased out one of the loose bricks, half expecting the rest of them to come tumbling down. But the wall held. She glanced at Tripp. “What do you think?”
    “There’s got to be a brace on top supporting the upper third.”
    “Then it should be safe to pull out these lower ones, right?”
    “It should be. I guess.”
    She gave a nervous laugh. “You fill me with such confidence, Tripp.” As the three men stood by and watched, she gently eased out another loose brick, and another. She couldn’t help noticing that the other detectives had backed away, leaving her alone at the base of the wall. Despite the gap she’d now opened, the structure continued to hold. Peering through, she confronted only pitch blackness.
    “Give me your flashlight, Crowe.”
    He handed it to her.
    Dropping to her knees, she shone the beam through the gap. She could make out the rough surface of a facing wall a few yards away. Slowly she panned across it, and her beam came to a sudden halt on a niche carved into the stone. On a face that stared back at her from the darkness.
    She stumbled backward, gasping.
    “What?” said Frost. “What did you see in there?”
    For a moment, Jane could not speak. Heart thudding, she stared at the gap in the bricks, a dark window into a chamber she had no wish to explore. Not after what she’d just glimpsed in those shadows.
    “Rizzoli?”
    She swallowed. “I think it’s time to call the ME.”

EIGHT
     
    This was not Maura’s first visit to the Crispin Museum.
    A few years ago, soon after her move to Boston, she had found the museum listed in a guidebook to area attractions. On one cold Sunday in January, she had stepped through the museum’s front door, expecting to compete with the usual weekend sightseers, the usual harried parents tugging along bored children. Instead she’d entered a silent building staffed by a lone docent at the reception desk, an elderly woman who had taken Maura’s entrance fee and then ignored her. Maura had walked alone through gallery after gloomy gallery, past dusty glass cases filled with curiosities from around the world, past yellowed tags that looked as if they had not been replaced in a century. The struggling furnace could not drive the chill from the building, and Maura had kept on her coat and scarf during the entire tour.
    Two hours later, she had walked out, depressed by the experience. Depressed, also, because that solitary visit seemed to symbolize her life at the time. Recently divorced and without friends in a new city, she was a solitary wanderer in a cold and gloomy landscape where no one greeted her or even seemed aware of her existence.
    She had not returned to the Crispin Museum. Until today.
    She felt a twinge of that same depression as she stepped into the building, as she once again breathed in its scent of age. Though years had passed since she’d last set foot here, the gloom she’d felt on that January day instantly resettled upon her shoulders, a reminder that her life, after all, had not really changed. Although she was now in love, she still wandered alone on Sundays—particularly on Sundays.
    But today’s official duties demanded her attention as she