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vision. What difference does it make how the visit to the eye doctor went?"
    'Victoria!"
    Vicki sighed and pushed her glasses up her nose. "Sorry. Nothing's changed."
    'Then it hasn't gotten any worse." Her mother's tone acknowledged the apology and agreed to drop the subject. "Have you managed to line up any work?"
    She'd finished an insurance fraud case the last week of September. There hadn't been anything since. If she were a better liar… "Nothing yet, Mom."
    'Well, what about Michael Celluci? He's still on the force. Can't he find you something?"
    'Mother!"
    'Or that nice Henry Fitzroy." He'd answered the phone once when she called and she'd been very impressed. "He found you something last summer."
    'Mother! I don't need them to find me work. I don't need anyone to find me work. I am perfectly capable of finding work on my own.
    'Don't grind your teeth, dear. And I know you're perfectly capable of finding work, but… oops, Dr. Burke just walked in, so I should go. Remember you can always come live with me if you need to."
    Vicki managed to hang up without giving in to the urge for violence but only because she knew it would be her phone that suffered and she couldn't afford to buy another new one right now. Her mother could be so… so… Well, I suppose it could be worse. She has a career and a life of her own and she could be after me for grandchildren . She wandered back to the shower, shaking her head at the thought; motherhood had never been a part of her plans.
    She'd been ten when her father left, old enough to decide that motherhood had caused most of the problems between her parents. While other children of divorce blamed themselves, she laid the blame squarely where she felt it belonged.
    Motherhood had turned the young and exciting woman her father had married into someone who had no time for him, and after he left, the need to provide for a child had governed all her choices. Vicki had grown up as fast as she could, her independence granting a mutual independence for her mother-which had never quite been accepted in the spirit in which it was offered.
    Vicki sometimes wondered if her mother wouldn't prefer a pink and lacy sort of a daughter who wouldn't mind being fussed over, but she didn't lose any sleep worrying about it, given that her decidedly non-pink and non-lacy attitudes had no effect on her mother's fussing as it was. While proud of the work that Vicki did, she fretted over potential dangers, public opinion, the men in Vicki's life, her eating habits, her eyes, and her caseload.
    'Not that my caseload doesn't need fussing over," Vicki admitted, working up a lather on her hair. Money was beginning to get tight and if something didn't turn up soon…
    'Something'll turn up." She rinsed and turned the water off. "Something always does."
    'This is absolutely ridiculous! I won't stand for it!" Dr. Rax threw himself down into his desk chair, slamming the upper edge back into the wall. "How dare they keep us out!"
    'Calm down, Elias, you'll give yourself an ulcer." Dr. Shane stood in the office doorway, arms crossed. "It's only until the autopsy comes back and we know for sure it was a heart attack that killed that poor janitor."
    'Of course it was a heart attack." Dr Rax rubbed at his eyes. Trapped in a cycle of frighteningly realistic dreams about being buried alive, he'd welcomed the phone call that'd freed him in the early hours of the morning. "The police officer I talked to said you could tell just from looking at him. Said the mummy had probably scared him to death." He snorted, his opinion of anyone who could be scared to death by a piece of history clear.
    Dr. Shane frowned. "Mummy…?"
    'Oh, for God's sake, Rachel. You can't have forgotten the baron's little souvenir."
    'No, of course not…" Except that for a moment, she had.
    Dr. Rax rubbed at his eyes again; they felt as though bits of sand had jammed up under the lids. "Funny thing is, I knew young Ellis. Talked to him on a number of