Relic

Wait a minute, she thought. The journal had said they encountered the old woman before entering the deserted hut. And yet, the letter she found wedged in the lid of the crate clearly stated that Whittlesey discovered the figurine inside the hut. He didn’t enter the but until after the old woman ran away.

The old woman was not looking at the figurine when she cried out that Mbwun was in the crate! She must have been looking at something else in the crate and calling it Mbwun! But nobody had realized that, because they hadn’t found Whittlesey’s letter. They’d only had the journal for evidence, so they’d assumed Mbwun was the figurine.

But they were wrong.

Mbwun, the real Mbwun, wasn’t the figurine at all. What had the woman said? Now white man come and take Mbwun away. Beware, Mbwun curse will destroy you! You bring death to your people!

[269] And that’s just what had happened. Death had come to the Museum. But what inside the crate could she have been referring to?

Grabbing the notebook from her carryall, she quickly reconstructed a list of what she had found in Whittlesey’s crate the day before:

Plant press with plants

Blow darts with tube Incised disk (found in the hut)

Lip plugs

Five or six jars with preserved frogs and salamanders (I think?)

Bird skins

Flint arrowheads and spear points

Shaman’s rattle

Manta

What else? She rummaged in her handbag. The plant press, disc, and shaman’s rattle were still there. She laid them on the table.

The damaged shaman’s rattle was interesting, but far from unusual. She’d seen several more exotic specimens in the Superstition exhibition.

The disk was obscure. It showed some kind of ceremony, people standing in a shallow lake, bending over, some with plants in their hands, baskets on their backs. Very odd. But it certainly didn’t seem to be an object of veneration.

The list wasn’t helpful. Nothing inside the crate had looked remotely like a devil, or whatever else could inspire such terror in an old woman.

Margo carefully unscrewed the small, rusty plant press, its screws and plywood holding the blotter paper in place. She eased it open and lifted off the first sheet.

It held a plant stem and several small flowers. Nothing she had ever seen before, but not particularly interesting at first glance.

[270] The next sheets in the press contained flowers and leaves. It was not, Margo thought, a collection made by a professional botanist. Whittlesey was an anthropologist, and he had probably just picked these specimens because they looked showy and unusual. But why would he collect them at all? She went through all the specimens, and in the back found the note she was looking for.

“Selection of plants found in overgrown abandoned garden near hut (Kothoga?) on September 16, 1987. May be cultivated species, some may also be invasive after abandonment.” There was a little drawing of the overgrown plot, showing the location of the various plants. Anthropology, thought Margo, not botany. Still, she respected Whittlesey’s interest in the relationship the Kothoga had to their plants.

She continued her inspection. One plant caught her eye: it had a long fibrous stem, with a single round leaf at the top. Margo realized it was some kind of aquatic plant, similar to a lily pad. Probably lived in an area of floods, she thought.

Then she realized that the incised disk found in the but showed the very same plant. She looked at the disk more closely: it depicted people harvesting these very plants from the swamp in a ceremony of sorts. The faces on the figures were twisted, full of sorrow. Very strange. But she felt satisfied to have made the connection; it might make a nice little paper for the Journal of Ethnobotany.

Putting the disk aside, she reassembled the press and screwed it down tight. A loud beeping sounded: the centrifuge was finished, the material prepared.

She opened the centrifuge and slid a glass rod into the thin layer of material at the bottom of the test tube. She carefully applied it to the waiting gel, then eased the gel tray into the electrophoresis machine. Her finger moved to the power switch. Now for another half-hour wait, she thought.

[271] She paused, her finger still on the switch. Her thoughts kept returning to the old woman and the mystery of Mbwun. Could she have been referring to the seed pods—the ones that resembled eggs? No, Maxwell had taken those back himself. They weren’t in Whittlesey’s crate. Was it one of the frogs or salamanders in jars, or one of the bird skins? That seemed an unlikely locus for the son of the devil himself. And it couldn’t have been the garden plants, because they were hidden in the plant press.

So what was it? Was the crazy old woman ranting about nothing?

With a sigh, Margo switched on the machine and sat back. She replaced the plant press and the incised disk in her carryall, brushing away a few packing fibers clinging to the press, packing fibers from the crate. There were additional traces inside her handbag. Yet another reason to clean the damn thing out.

The packing fibers.

Curious, she picked one up with the tweezers, laid it on a slide, and placed it under the stereo-zoom. It was