Researching the cult ritual that might have inspired Helen’s murder—and could provide the key to preventing others—was the best proof yet that myth and story mattered. Despite the sadness still shadowing him, Theo felt reborn. He was always searching for battles to fight, causes to champion. Now, for the first time, his knowledge could actually save lives. With a feeling of growing urgency, he jogged up the stairwell and into the Classics offices in Hamilton Hall.
“Theo!” He came to a resigned halt when an all-too-familiar voice called his name.
Nathan Balinski, short and broad, with a smattering of red freckles that kept him looking younger than his forty-odd years, called to him from down the hall. “Heard you were with Everett when he got the news. Rough, man. I guess I should call him or something, but you know I’m not the best shoulder to cry on.” He took a swig of something from a tumbler. It looked suspiciously like scotch.
Theo suppressed a disgusted grimace. That’s an understatement—how could Nate, a man without morals, provide moral support to anyone? Theo and Nate had known—and disliked—each other since grad school, where Nate, although nearly a decade older than his classmates, had spent most of his time stoned and drunk at Theo’s roommate’s orgiastic parties. When Theo inevitably slipped away from the revels, Nate had coined the nickname “Theo-bore,” which he still let slip whenever he was feeling particularly dickish.
Theo felt the nearly unbearable urge to slug Nate in the face. Thankfully, Violet Macon, the office administrator, saved him from himself by waddling toward them, waving a copy of the New York Post.
“This is so horrible,” she choked, passing the newspaper to Theo.
MURDER MOST FOUL! it blared, in an atypically literary headline over a front-page photo of Helen. Theo knew the shot—he’d taken it. She stood on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her blond hair streaming, her smile so bright it outshone the sunlit marble around her. They’d gone together to the Greek and Roman galleries and laughed over the erotic vases like two undergrads. That afternoon, they’d made love for the first time.
“Yes,” Theo said. “It’s terrible.” How many other ways were there to describe it? Dreadful. Shocking. Nefarius. Horribilis. No words of dismay would bring her back.
“You must be so upset.” Violet’s penciled brows drew together as she patted him on the shoulder. “I know how you felt about her.”
“We all liked Helen,” interjected Nate, unwilling to let Theo best him even in grief.
“Yes, but Theo loved her.” Violet ignored Theo’s wince. “Don’t you remember, they dated for a year before Everett showed up? Now Theo, have you spoken to Bill yet? He’s been calling everyone to see if they’re all right.”
“That’s uncharacteristically sensitive of him.” In Theo’s eyes, Bill Webb never cared for anything except his own reputation. When the chairman was diagnosed with throat cancer a few years back, Theo had instantly regretted all the horrible things he’d said—or at least thought—about his boss. But Webb’s illness had made him, if anything, even more of an asshole than ususal. “I haven’t heard from him, no.” Unsurprising, since of everyone in the department, he likes me the least.
Nate started to say something, but Theo wasn’t in the mood to listen. He turned to go.
“I’ll see you at the vigil tonight, all right, hon?” Violet called after him. “And the university’s planning a memorial service for Sunday. Details are in the memo.”
“Memo?”
“In your in-box. You know, the one you never check,” she chided. Theo’s determined resistance to all memos, meetings, and functions he considered purely administrative was the bane of Violet’s existence.
He dutifully collected the unruly mountain of envelopes from his in-box, resting the Post on top of the pile. As he walked back to his office, Helen stared up at him from the newspaper. Memories of those first days with her came flooding back.
“Moments like this make me want to live forever,” she’d purred, curled in his arms. Theo felt cold and hot all at once, sweaty where she pressed against him, chilled where the air conditioner panted against his back, fighting off the humid July heat.
“If life is so extraordinary, how can we bear to die?” she asked, suddenly serious.
“I don’t think we have much of a choice,” he’d murmured, tracing the perfect shell of her ear.
“But if we did, I’d stretch this moment, here with you, until the end of time,” she went on.
“I’m not sure I’d want to live forever.”
“Then I’d be like the Dawn. I’d tell Zeus to make my lover immortal, whether he wanted to be or not.”
“So, like Tithonus, I’ll grow older and older, and never die, until eventually I shrivel into a grasshopper? Then you can put me in a box and carry me around in your pocket.” Theo made a convincing cricket chirp in her ear.
Helen sat up, flipped her hair out of her face, and frowned at him.
“I’m serious. I never want this to end.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? I say I want you to be with me for eternity and that’s the best you can do?”
He laughed. “As a grasshopper? I doubt I’d live for eternity. If the lawnmower didn’t get me, some Japanese food cart would.”
“Okay, fine, what if I’m Selene instead, and I look down from the moon, and I see you lying here, my beautiful Endymion.” She traced the valley of his chest with a finger. “And I grant you eternal sleep so you’ll never age and never die.”
“Better. You know how I hate waking up in the morning.”
“You’re always joking,” she pouted. “You know it’s part of why I love you, but it’s a defense mechanism. You’re too scared to say how you really feel.”
“That’s not true.”
“Okay, then promise me we’ll always be brutally honest with each other. Starting tonight. Tell me what you’re thinking. Right now.”
He couldn’t stop himself from kissing the gentle curve of her breast. She pulled away.
“Don’t show me. Tell me. I know you don’t have a problem talking.” True, he’d spent much of their lovemaking quoting Catullus.
I’m thinking that you scare me, he’d thought about saying. You cling so tightly I feel sometimes like I’m a fig tree, and you’re the strangler vine, using me to reach ever higher toward the sun. But at the moment, her embrace felt pretty damn good. So instead, he said, “I’m thinking that maybe talking’s overrated.” He’d kissed away the rest of her protests.
Theo closed the door to his office and summarily tossed the contents of his in-box onto the floor. I’d be your grasshopper now, he thought, if only it would bring you back. He tore the front page off the Post and threw the rest of the newspaper into the recycling bin. Then he push-pinned Helen’s picture above his desk, where it stared down at him like an icon at a shrine.
When she’d started dating Everett, Helen had been brutally honest, as promised. Theo had let her down, made her feel small, and she wanted someone else. Theo felt guilty about all of it—he should’ve just broken things off cleanly with Helen once he realized the relationship was doomed. Instead, he’d been too chicken to confront her. How could he tell her that she loved him too much? He hated sounding like a typical male—turned off by a “clingy” woman and afraid to commit. It was more than that—Helen’s single-minded devotion to their relationship made him wonder if she was incapable of standing on her own two feet. He’d interpreted her intelligence and determination as strength, but the more tightly she clung to him, the weaker she appeared. So he’d pulled away gradually, unwilling to hurt her feelings, until she got fed up and left on her own. He’d been unsurprised that she’d found Everett so soon—it only confirmed his suspicions about her dependencies. Still, he couldn’t help being a little hurt. It didn’t feel good to be so easily replaced. Perhaps that’s why he’d gone home with her that night. After barely seeing Helen for months, he’d run into her at Book Culture, one of the last independent bookstores left in a neighborhood once replete with them. She’d been picking up a fresh copy of the Pocket Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary (her copious annotations had made her original copy illegible), and he’d been browsing the science fiction section, looking for a new escapist adventure. A quick hug and a few self-deprecating jokes later, Theo found himself staring at her naked body while studiously avoiding looking at the ring on her finger. It’d been dumb and dishonorable—and they’d done it anyway. His stupid male ego couldn’t help preening at the thought that she’d come back to his apartment because she wasn’t satisfied with Everett. And for all her faults, Helen was a brilliant scholar and a beautiful woman. She was hard to resist.
Groaning, Theo pulled the photo back off the wall. For the first time in nearly a year, he allowed himself to feel angry with her. Not for leaving him, not for tempting him back again, but for abandoning him now. Barely aware of his actions, he tore the picture in half. Then he ripped it again, and again, until Helen’s image lay in mangled fragments in his palm. Ashamed, he thrust the shreds into his desk drawer.
Theo turned his attention back to his research. Helen had focused much of her energy on deciphering and translating fragments of papyrus from the Oxyrhynchus horde. It was as good a place to start as any. There was no obvious correlation between the papyri and Greek cults, but with the Oxyrhynchus Project, anything was possible.
In 1896, two British Egyptologists had discovered a massive trove of over four hundred thousand papyri fragments buried in a rubbish heap at the site of the ancient Hellenistic city. Egypt’s dry climate had allowed for the preservation of documents that would have moldered away two thousand years earlier in Greece or Italy. At first, elated archeologists were sure they’d uncovered the lost plays of Sophocles or the final works of Pythagoras. But before long, it became clear that most of the fragments, some no bigger than an inch across, were unreadable, blackened by exposure to minerals or damp. In a century of work, archeologists had succeeded in translating a mere four percent of the total horde.
But in 2005, new multispectral imaging technology revolutionized the field of papyrology, allowing for the decipherment of previously illegible texts. The researchers at Oxford had put the entire trove online so scholars all over the world could participate. Theo’d joined the project for a year, gaining instant acclaim for his uncanny ability to piece together the fragments with the same speed he’d shown reconstructing vases. For a while, at least, he’d enjoyed the mind-boggling game of ancient Tetris. But depressingly, most of the documents he translated were household accounts, tax receipts, and marriage contracts. The most interesting thing he’d ever translated: a deed for the purchase of a parcel of uncultivated land for twelve drachmae. A far cry from the earth-shattering discoveries he’d hoped for. The scholars at Oxford were loath to let his talents go, but Theo, who preferred to study myth and epic, had moved on. Helen, however, had never lost the conviction that the papyri held secrets worth learning. When she joined the faculty at Columbia, she’d already been working with the Oxyrhynchus Project for years. Theo had happily shared his own techniques with her and wished her luck on her search.
Theo pored over the project’s recent publications. Perhaps the last year had uncovered new information on Aesculapian worship—the city of Oxyrhynchus had been a Greco-Roman society, and even as Christianity spread through Egypt in the fourth century AD, the inhabitants would have known about pagan cult ritual. But after reading for hours, Theo concluded that no such discovery had been made—at least not by the official project at Oxford. That doesn’t mean Helen didn’t find something, he reminded himself. She’d always been very secretive about her research, but she hinted often enough that she was keeping some revolutionary discoveries for inclusion in her first book.
Still, his reading wasn’t a total waste. One thing caught his eye: a newly discovered version of the myth of Narcissus. In the familiar Roman tale as told by Ovid, the beautiful young man fell in love with his own reflection while resting beside a pool. Unable to tear his gaze from his own beauty, Narcissus eventually wasted away, disappearing mysteriously and leaving in his place only the bright narcissus flower that bore his name. Theo had never been able to walk by a daffodil without remembering the story. As he told his students, it symbolized the numbing death that occurs when an individual or a society embraces materialism rather than altruism. But in the recently discovered Greek version found in the papyri, Narcissus wailed and wept, violently stabbing himself; his blood seeped into the ground, where it transformed into the eponymous flower. Violence hides behind the gentlest of myths, and there are always untold stories within stories, hidden meanings, and lost symbolism, Theo reflected. The early Greeks were far more bloodthirsty than their later Roman translators admitted. The thought made his stomach twist. What sinister findings did Helen uncover?
Unfortunately, without access to her closely guarded research, he might never know. She’d always seen the ancient world a little differently than other archeologists. In her disregard for academic orthodoxy, Theo found a kindred spirit—he’d known they had a connection from the very first time they met, at a Classics faculty meeting two years earlier. As an archeologist specializing in the ancient world, Helen had attended, even though she wasn’t technically a member of the department. Theo and Helen sat across the conference table from each other, listening as Martin Andersen launched into a typically soporific diatribe against the department’s tolerance for substandard Latin grammar.
“To those who say our scholarship is slipping, well, there’s a grain of truth there,” Andersen intoned. “Exempli gratia: the use of Salve as the greeting on our web page. Even our freshmen know to use Salvete when addressing plural readers.” He placed his hand over his heart, repeating somberly, “A grain of truth, I tell you”—and Helen’s eyes met Theo’s for the first time.
He’d smiled impulsively, and something in the quirk of her mouth made him glance toward Andersen and roll his eyes. A mean gesture perhaps—Martin was a harmless old coot—but Helen’s ensuing grin made the sin worthwhile.
He doodled through the rest of the meeting, and when it finally ended, he handed her the product of his labors. A detailed cartoon of the professors in the conference room, each dressed as an Olympian. His best caricatures: Chairman Bill Webb as a stooped, peevish Zeus and Andersen in drag as a dour, bespectacled Demeter, Goddess of Agriculture, holding aloft a sheaf of wheat and saying “A grain of truth!” while the other gods snoozed around her. He’d cast himself as a caduceus-wielding Hermes: floppy fair hair, wire-rimmed glasses, pointed chin, and a mischievous smile. Not a bad representation. Helen, of course, was Aphrodite, perched on an overlarge scallop shell, sea foam spattering her long blond hair. As she took the paper, he was surprised to notice that her head barely reached his shoulders—something about her confidence had made her seem taller when she was sitting across the table. She took a long look at the drawing, then stood on her tiptoes to whisper in his ear, “Not bad. But I’m a better Persephone. Because I’m going to bring this department back to life.” She walked away with a wink. He watched her go, noting the way her hair swayed in time to her light step.
Helen’s prophecy proved true, at least for a time. She certainly gave Theo a whole new reason to attend faculty functions. But eventually, after she and Theo broke up, she grew so consumed by her research that she nearly disappeared. She’d stopped teaching undergrad classes entirely, confining her professorial duties to a single graduate seminar meeting once a week and spending most of her time either with Everett or in the library. She’d become something of a recluse, all the passionate intensity she’d once showered on Theo now transferred to her fiancé and to her pursuit of knowledge.
But what, exactly, had she discovered? Theo plowed back into his research, searching for information on human sacrifice within Aesculapian cult practices, but growing more disheartened by the minute. The connection with Helen’s murder just didn’t make sense. Most other gods in the Greek pantheon contained both benign and maleficent aspects. Asclepius’s father, Apollo, for example, was known as both the Plague-Bringer and the Savior. His twin Artemis was the Stormy One and the Good Maiden. Even Athena—Goddess of Wisdom, Civilization, and Crafts—was also a Goddess of War. Asclepius, however, was an entirely benevolent deity. He was the Healer. Associating him with the murder of an innocent woman was simply nonsensical. On top of everything, no Greek cults were known to even involve human sacrifice in the first place. Bulls, goats, birds, sure. But people?
Theo’s adrenaline leaked away. He found himself staring, glassy-eyed, at his computer screen, wondering if Gabriela was right and his research was merely an obsession to be used up and thrown away after a week or two, a distraction to stave off the grief that crouched just out of sight, ready to strike. How likely was it that the theft of a snake from the Natural History Museum correlated with a murder in Riverside Park? Had Helen really worn a chiton and a wreath? Maybe Selene DiSilva was just some delusional voyeur.
Theo rose from his battered desk chair and stretched. Tea, he thought. I need very strong, very sweet tea if I’m going to keep this up. As he moved toward the door, he knocked over the pile of papers from his in-box, sending them into a long fan across the floor. There, buried amid the memos, lay a small envelope addressed to “Theodore” in a minuscule, flowery script that only his long months of practice allowed him to easily decipher.
Theo picked up the envelope and sat back in his chair, his hands gone cold. How long ago had Helen left it? For half a second, he considered that he might be tampering with police evidence. Then he tore the envelope open.
Her usual stationery, with its gilt Greek meandros along the border.
Grasshopper—
I’ve been working up an abstract of my book to present at the conference next month and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. I’ll send over the manuscript, but in the meantime I’ve enclosed a little preview. Enjoy the challenge.
Syn philoteti,
H
In the bottom of the envelope lay four irregularly shaped paper scraps, each no more than two centimeters across. He dumped them on his desk. Ancient Greek covered each shred. Xeroxes of papyri fragments from the Oxyrhynchus horde.
There was no date on the letter, but from the memos surrounding it in the pile, he interpolated that Helen had probably left it for him five or six days ago. It was just like her not to send an e-mail or leave him a voice mail. For someone who’d made her reputation using new technology to piece together papyri, she had a surprisingly old-fashioned affinity for handwritten notes and fine stationery. “A thousand years from now, it only seems fair that some fool will have to piece together my thoughts from charred fragments of paper,” she’d said once.
Theo spread the four paper fragments out so that the letters on each faced upward. She hasn’t called me Grasshopper since we broke up, he thought, pushing together two fragments with matching shapes. Why now? Theo pushed away such questions—it was too easy to get pulled back into futile hypotheticals.
With only four small fragments to work with, it didn’t take him long to string them together into the semblance of a sentence. Small holes scattered across the papyri made translation more challenging, and many of the letters were blurred beyond recognition. But that had never stopped him before. A few minutes later, he’d written down his best approximation:
ΟΡΩ T__ΕΛΕΥΣ__ΚΑΙΤΩΝΙΕΡΩ____ΟΝΑΜΥΣ__ΗΣ
He stared at the second group of letters for a moment. “Eleus…” he said aloud. Then he glanced at the end. “Mus—es.” After a moment, a slow smile spread across his face.
If he was right about the cultic connection with her murder, the words could only be Eleusina mustes. From there, he easily determined the full sentence:
Horō tēn Eleusina kai tōn hierōn gegona mustēs.
I see Eleusis. I have become a mystes of the sacred things.
He spun to his bookshelves, pulling down his copy of Burkert’s The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth and flipped to the chapter on the Eleusinian Mysteries. Like any classicist, Theo knew about the famous ritual, but he remembered it as a cult dedicated to Demeter, the Goddess of Grain, and her daughter Persephone, the Goddess of Spring—not to Asclepius. Still, it wasn’t unusual for the larger cults to incorporate the worship of other, tangentially related deities. The gods were syncretic, after all; their numerous epithets and titles were reminders of the foreign deities they’d absorbed and the many, often contradictory, aspects they embodied. He skimmed ahead. Sure enough, one day of the rite had been devoted to Asclepius. And that wasn’t the only correlation. The book said that the Mysteries at Eleusis had taken place in the early autumn: The timing matched up perfectly with Helen’s murder. And Helen did have a thing about Persephone…
Theo flipped back to the beginning of the chapter. It explained that on the first day of the ritual, Demeter’s priests processed to Athens, carrying with them two holy vessels—a kiste and a kalathos. Theo couldn’t help a muttered, “Holy shit-buckets.” The two stolen pots from the Met.
He called the front desk from his office phone. “Violet?”
“Just leaving, Professor.”
“Hold up a sec. Did Helen leave a manuscript for me sometime this week?”
“Nope.”
He cursed himself for his disorganization. “You sure?”
“Sure as sugar, hon.”
“Do you know if she gave anyone a preview of the abstract she was working up for the conference?”
“I didn’t hear anything about it. You know how she was about her research.”
“I know. Like a miserly dragon defending her horde. You don’t have keys to her office, do you?” Last year, as her work on Hellenistic sources grew more intense, she’d moved her office out of the Art History and Archeology Department and into Hamilton Hall to be closer to the classicists.
“Wouldn’t do you any good if I did. The police were here, took a few boxes of stuff, and sealed it up already.”
Theo dove back into his research, searching the Oxyrhynchus site for anything on Eleusis and coming up empty. Next, he tried to reconstruct the structure of the Eleusinian ritual from the available primary and secondary sources, many of which were overlapping and contradictory. Thankfully, piecing things together was one of Theo’s many specialties. By four in the afternoon, scribbled outlines shrouded his desk and index cards plastered his walls.
Reaching into his pocket, he fingered the scrap of take-out menu with Selene DiSilva’s number on it. He imagined her voice, calm and cold, then warming as he told her what he’d discovered. She’d been right about the Greek connection. Maybe they could work together to figure out who killed Helen, track him across the city, and bring him to justice. He felt a slight, anticipatory flutter. Her with her silver eyes and fearsome hound, me with my glasses and teetering piles of books. The image was ridiculous.
Who am I kidding? This whole situation is horrible enough without getting mixed up with some disturbed private investigator. The last time he’d felt such instant attraction to a woman had been with Helen. And now he knew how that had turned out.
He reached for a fresh index card and penned:
Selene DiSilva. Moon Goddess.
Probably deranged. Definitely dangerous.
Contact only if desperate.
DO NOT BE AN IDIOT.
He push-pinned it to the wall with a single angry jab, then sat there staring at it, still unable to banish the image of her glowing eyes.