Alexis shot to her feet, while Andrew gave a low cry and clutched onto Maggie’s hands.
“However,” the doctor continued, holding up a hand of caution and warning. “That isn’t to say that she will pull through. I’m afraid that she’s in a very serious condition. It will require not just all of our expertise and skill in treating her, but also a fair stroke of luck. There are cases in which people have recovered from this deep level of hyperthermia when they were brought back to a healthy core temperature quickly enough, but they are few and far between. The much more likely outcome is that she will not survive, and I want you to prepare yourselves for that. We could still end up looking at total organ shutdown or an inability to revive her from her coma.”
“So long as she’s hanging on, we’ll hang on too,” Maggie said fiercely.
“Is there anything we can do for her?” Andrew asked. “I know our blood types are the same. If there’s anything she needs donated…”
“That won’t be necessary,” the doctor said, inclining his head kindly. “I’m sure she will appreciate that you were willing to go that far for her, but right now it’s all about heat. Getting her body temperature up and hoping that her organs and systems will be able to fire back to how they were before.”
“Do you have any idea of a timeline?” Laura asked. It would make all the difference, after all. They couldn’t sit here and just wait if it was going to take days.
“For the moment, she’ll remain in an induced coma,” the doctor replied, looking at her hard as if he was offended by the question. “It will stay that way until at least the early afternoon. There won’t be any chance of her waking up before then.”
Laura nodded. That was what they needed to know. She didn’t see a point in stirring the pot by answering him back in any way, even to thank him, given the look he’d sent her way.
“Then we’ll leave you to it for now,” she said, glancing around at the gathered siblings. They didn’t have much else to give her, she could tell. Everything was a dead end on a dead end. And if they thought of pressing questions at any time during the day, it would be easy enough to come back here and find the siblings to ask them. She nodded at Nate, who also nodded back his agreement.
They made for the door as the others started peppering the doctor with questions about Alana’s care and her chances, none of which seemed to receive positive responses. Laura was glad when it closed behind them and blocked out the sound. She was feeling less and less confident that Alana was going to make it herself, and it was too painful to hear her loved ones discovering the same.
“We should go to the museum and see if there’s anything the staff or their archives can tell us,” Nate said. “What do you think?”
“We might as well,” Laura said wearily, not because she was annoyed at him this time, but because she was tired of feeling like they were never going to be able to solve this case, tired of people dying, and tired of feeling like all the hope in the world existed only for other people.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“What can you tell me about the history of the region?” Laura asked, leaning on the display case. When the middle-aged, frumpy-looking woman who sold the tickets at the museum entrance frowned pointedly, she stood up straight again. “Is there anything that would put you in mind of what’s happening now?”
The ticket seller frowned and shook her head. She had horn-rimmed glasses with mother-of-pearl inlays that flashed slightly in the light. “No, not really. I mean, not with murder. But with ships in general around the world, there are some comparisons one could draw.”
“Like what?” Laura asked. She almost wished she had asked Nate to stay with her instead of going to interview the other two employees. The woman was intimidating, in that school lunch monitor way. She had the constant feeling that she was about to be sent to the principal’s office.
“Well, figureheads are a very common feature on old ships, and you could almost say that the killer is creating his own figureheads,” she said. Laura got a shiver down her spine. She was talking so casually about a case that involved someone she actually worked with daily. “And punishment on ships is very common in history as well. Like keelhauling, for example.”
“Keelhauling,” Laura muttered. “I think I’ve heard the term, but…”
“It was a form of punishment made famous by pirates, though how much it actually happened historically is debatable. Sailors would be chained and dragged from one side of the boat to the other under the water. It was done fast, but there was still a chance they would drown. And if they didn’t, well, the underside of the ship was covered in sharp barnacles. It was a brutal way to go.”
“But that has nothing to do with the figurehead, does it?” Laura asked.
She tilted her head slightly. “You could consider what happened to pirates, prisoners, or other unsavory individuals,” she said. “It was a common practice to display the bodies of those whose punishment was death. It was considered a deterrent. I would not be surprised to find a historic source of someone being hung, dead, in a cage from the front of a ship, in front of the figurehead.”
“What do the figureheads mean?” Laura asked, suddenly realizing she didn’t really understand that, either. And the killer must understand it, in order to have come to this method of display. She thought they were decorative, but perhaps there was more to it.
“They’re usually connected to the name of the ship,” she said. She sounded like she was reciting a textbook. “So, for example, if your ship was named after a woman, you might get a carving to resemble her. Or if your ship was named after a figure from mythology, then you know what to carve. But in terms of what they represented—the Vikings thought they warded off evil spirits, the Greeks and Romans thought that carvings symbolizing attributes like speed or fierceness in battle would endow the ship and sailors with it, and some believed that they were homes for little creatures that would guide the souls of dead sailors to the afterlife. In later years, often they were just used as a way to tell the ships apart.”
“Spirits and the afterlife,” Laura said thoughtfully. “It could tie into that, I suppose.”
“Only if you were a madman,” the ticket seller said coldly, but Laura knew that killers came in all shapes and sizes—some of them very rational indeed on the surface—and that it often took very little provocation to turn some people from fantasy to action.
“Thank you for your time,” Laura said politely, seeing Nate coming across from the other side of the small, dusty museum. “If we have any more questions, I’ll be in touch. And if you think of anything that could help, please do call us immediately, no matter how small it may seem.”
“I will,” she nodded, pulling a cloth out of her pocket. As Laura stepped away and then glanced back, she saw her polishing the display case Laura had leaned on, as if the whole place wasn’t badly in need of a real clean.
“Anything?” she asked Nate in a low tone, meeting him halfway across the floor and then turning both of their steps toward the exit.
“I took a look at the employee files,” he said. “There’s someone we need to look into further. You?”
Laura shook her head. “There’s no explanation why the museum in particular would be targeted, or our victim herself. I did find out some interesting bits of myth and legend that might explain our killer’s mindset, but until we know more about him, that won’t help us too much. Tell me about this employee.”