The Eye of Horus Read Online Free PDF

just being polite. “No thanks, but I’ll have a glass of wine. The house red.”
    Vince had followed them and took their order. When he left, Dr. Cavanaugh sat back as if he expected her to makeconversation while they waited. When she didn’t, he volunteered, “This kind of weather is why I left Michigan after my residency.”
    The Michigan coincidence was almost too much, but Kate didn’t want to divert him from what he was about to propose. Fortunately, a waitress brought their drinks right away, and he poured some beer into the frosted mug, then tasted it before glancing across at her. “If you’re not an Egyptologist, what are you doing with that X ray?”
    She was beginning to see a pattern in the way he
didn’t
react immediately to something that puzzled him—first the head between Tashat’s legs, then who or what Kate was at the museum. A cautious man, yet he obviously had acted on impulse as they were leaving the museum. Now it sounded as if he was having second thoughts.
    “What I’m supposed to be doing are forensic illustrations to display with the mummy,” she replied. “How Tashat’s body probably looks right now, under the cartonnage, what she may have looked like in life, and an in-the-round head if I can get accurate enough measurements to duplicate her skull. Unfortunately, I need to get the story I’m going to tell clear in my head before I can draw it. With Tashat, that’s not happening.” She paused, anticipating his reaction, then took the plunge. “I’m a medical illustrator, on temporary assignment at the museum as a favor to Cleo Harris, a friend from college.”
    He came close to stuttering. “You’re a phy—an M.D.?”
    Kate didn’t intend to confess to any stranger why she’d dropped out of medical school, let alone one of
them.
That the decision was hers to make didn’t matter; that she had worked hard to succeed at something she really cared about and failed, did. Five years later it still felt as if she’d walked into an ambush, mostly because she had gone in believing she could work around her old nemesis just as she had in college—by observing how a classroom was arranged and manipulating most situations so she could concentrate on one voice at a time. And she had, until they started grouphospital rounds. That’s when it hit home that she’d never be able to trust herself—to know for sure she hadn’t missed something crucial because too much was going on at once. Too much noise. Trying harder wasn’t enough. She’d finally had to accept the reality of her own inadequacy.
    “No, I’m not,” she replied, opting for the truth but not the whole truth. “I know a lot of medical illustrators are, but I’ve got a solid grounding in physiology, plus I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember.” He watched her the way a cat eyes a bird, without blinking or moving a muscle. “I did give med school a shot,” she continued. ‘Two years. By then my drawings were in such demand I decided illustration was what I really should be doing.”
    He continued to stare at her. Then, without a word, he lifted his beer and drained half the glass. Kate recognized the pattern. Worried that he might be backing off, she grabbed on to the first thing that came to mind.
    “Were you at Ann Arbor?” He nodded, still watching. “It’s an odd coincidence is all. That X ray of Tashat was taken by a team from the dental school in Ann Arbor back in the late sixties, when they took a portable unit over to study the effect of genetics on dentition in Nubian children. The people at the Egyptian Museum, in Cairo, asked them to return the next year, to x-ray the royal mummies and try to trace familial connections through dentition and craniofacial features. While they were at it they did several mummies that had been stored in an attic room for some thirty years, mostly priests and government officials from the New Kingdom. Tashat was among them.”
    “How did she get