Cries from the Lost Island

by Kathleen O'Neal Gear

  “I have. Thanks, but I don’t want a bodyguard. I’ll be fine.”

  She started rolling up the sleeves of her ivory-colored shirt. “All right. The offer remains open, so let me know if you change your mind.” With an edge in her voice, she asked, “Do you have a gun?”

  “No. Why would you think that?”

  She shrugged. “They’re available on every street corner, and you’re from the American West. It occurred to me that you might have purchased one.”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Just wanted to make sure.”

  Roberto didn’t show the slightest interest in this conversation. He kept his eyes forward, just walking to breakfast.

  As we neared the cook tent, the sweet earthy scent of teff filled the air. We collected bottles of water, bowls, and spoons, then got into line. As we slowly moved forward, I said, “Sounds like you know something about Colorado?”

  “A little. The Royal Ontario Museum occasionally works with the Denver Museum of Natural History, so I’ve been there a few times. Lovely city. The mountains are beautiful.”

  As I scooped cereal into my bowl, I searched through the crowd for Samael. I didn’t see him. He was probably still sleeping. I didn’t see Sophia Mallawi either, but Moriarity sat at the closest table. True to his word, he’d saved us two places.

  Corbelle said, “I’m going to sit with my crew, Hal. Why don’t you find me when you’re finished with breakfast, and we’ll head out to the grave.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Corbelle and Lacey split off and went to sit at the last table, while Roberto and I slid onto the bench beside Moriarity. Unfortunately, Jones sat across from us. I tried not to notice him as I spooned warm cereal into my mouth. I also tried to avoid looking at the evidence of my mad flight last night. The broken pieces of the table I’d demolished lay stacked like firewood down near where Corbelle and her crew sat. Losing one table meant there were even fewer places to sit for meals. People kept giving me dirty looks, and I knew that was probably why. Not to mention the fact that my shrieking had dragged them from their tents in the middle of the night.

  Moriarity finished his cereal and picked up his coffee cup. After a drink, he said, “Tell me what happened last night, Hal.”

  Swallowing a lump of cereal, I said, “Somebody hit me from behind, knocked me flat, and slammed my head into a table leg.”

  “I know that much. Sophia told me. Did he say anything to you? Why did he attack you?”

  If Moriarity was the man who attacked me, he knew the reason. If not, I didn’t want to discuss the dagger in front of a table filled with strangers.

  Lifting my gaze, I found Jones watching me with curious unblinking eyes.

  “Where’s Dr. Mallawi this morning?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

  “In bed. She hasn’t been feeling well since she arrived in Egypt. She’s been throwing up all morning. I think it’s a touch of malaria. She’s battled the illness off and on for her entire life. You didn’t answer my question, Hal. Why were you attacked last night?”

  I wondered if that was true, or if he just didn’t want anyone to know his wife was pregnant.

  “All the guy said was ‘Hal Stevens,’ then he beat me up and ran off.”

  Jones’ mouth quirked in disbelief.

  Moriarity loudly scraped his bowl with his spoon, ate the last bite, and shoved his bowl aside. “That doesn’t make any sense. Did you get into a fight with someone on the site? Was this a payback?”

  Moriarity’s bearded face was stern, foreboding, as though he blamed me for the attack. I forced myself to maintain eye contact with him.

  “No fights.”

  “Why were you at the cook tent at midnight? You should have been in bed. If you had been, none of this—”

  “He was out wandering the off-limits part of the city,” Jones said. “One of the women on Corbelle’s crew saw him step out of the temple and run for camp.”

  Moriarity raised his voice. “What? My God, Hal, that was foolish and dangerous! We only have six guards at this site. What if a terrorist had sneaked in and secreted himself in the temple? It’s the perfect place to hide. You would have walked right into his rifle.”

  Roberto shifted to my right. “Yeah, well, he didn’t, did he? He was attacked in camp, right where we’re sitting, by someone who knew his name. Get it?”

  Moriarity’s mouth pinched into a white line. “Yeah. I do. But I don’t understand why. What possible reason—”

  “He wanted the same thing you did,” I answered in a low voice and chewed another bite of my cereal. Across the table, Jones perked up, and his gaze slid to Moriarity.

  Moriarity’s face slackened. “Did he get it?”

  “Someone stole it from our tent earlier in the day. I didn’t have it,” I answered and shoveled another bite into my mouth.

  The air seemed to go out of Moriarity’s body. Sagging forward, he set his coffee cup down and used his fingers to massage his forehead. Jones watched him with a curious expression, as though he thought he ought to say something, but didn’t know what.

  Finally, Jones asked, “What was stolen? I could start asking around. You know, see if anyone has seen it.”

  Roberto elbowed me and tipped his chin. “Corbelle is finished with breakfast. We should hurry.”

  At the far end of the table, Corbelle had just stood up. I quickly gobbled the rest of my cereal. She said a few last words to her students, then walked toward us. I noticed that all of her crew had started rising and were filing out toward the temple.

  Moriarity called, “LaSalle, I need to line out today’s work with my crew chiefs. Why don’t you and the boys go ahead without me, and I’ll meet you at the burial in a few minutes.”

  Corbelle nodded. “That’s fine.”

  We slid across the bench, and I smiled at her as she approached.

  Extending a hand, she said, “Lead forth.”

  Roberto walked out front as we headed for the mysterious entwined skeletons. I walked beside Dr. Corbelle.

  “You look a little better, Hal. Is your headache easing after the aspirin?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  Which was sort of true, though I kept seeing things from the corner of my eye—floating shapes, starlike, flashing off and on. They seemed to swoop in from the marshes, then hover right in front of me before winking out. Some had a reddish tint; others shone a pale yellowish-white. One reddish-brown light kept flying straight at me. Which I found interesting. In ancient Egyptian artwork, males were usually depicted with reddish-brown skin, while females were painted lighter, their skin a mixture of yellow-and-white paints. Maybe the lights were the souls of long-dead men and women who had once lived here? If so, what did they want? I wasn’t sure I liked my newly acquired skill of talking to the dead. As a matter of fact, I knew I didn’t. More likely, however, the flashing lights were evidence of a mild concussion. Or maybe I had a migraine coming on and this was part of the aura? God, I hoped not.

  “Going to be a hot one today.” Corbelle lifted her ivory sleeve to wipe her face.

  Already sweating to beat hell, my heart was pounding as well. “I have to admit I’m not looking forward to that. In Georgetown, Colorado, it’s probably going be seventy-five to eighty degrees today.”

  She smiled, and the world seemed to brighten. The colors of the site actually glowed. The distant green of the marshes turned luminous. “You’re not adapted to Egypt yet, Hal. And today, of all days, you might want to sleep during the heat of the day.”

  “If I start feeling badly, I will.”

  It was always stunning how fast the temperature rose out here. Despite the constant sea breezes, by seven in the morning, you could feel the night’s coolness evaporating and the air warming up.

  “Dr. Corbelle? I notice that your students call you LaSalle, and I w
as wondering—”

  “I’d be delighted if you called me LaSalle. What took you so long? Most of my students just do it automatically.”

  “I can understand that. You’re a lot more open and approachable than Dr. Moriarity.”

  “Well, Jim is . . . Jim.”

  That had been one of the first things I’d noticed, Moriarity’s students called him Dr. Moriarity, and LaSalle’s students immediately felt comfortable calling her by her first name. That simple little thing bridged the gap between professor and student and made it easier to ask questions and, therefore, to learn more. At least, for me it did.

  “Maybe sometime you could tell me more about biological anthropology? I don’t understand why Dr. Moriarity and Dr. Mallawi disagreed about the sex of the skeletons.”

  Her blonde brows drew together. “I don’t either, honestly. It’s usually a slam-dunk if you have a skull or pelvis. Are they missing from this burial?”

  “The skeletons looked whole to me, but I don’t know anything.”

  She smiled again. “I suspect you know more than you let on, Hal. Have you ever noticed that when you speak, people listen? That’s because they’re learning something. You’re a natural teacher.”

  The praise made me sheepishly stare out at the Roman fortress wall. It cast a long shadow this time of morning. “Thanks, I appreciate you saying that, but I know how much I don’t know. I’m looking forward to getting to college where I can study what I want to.”

  “Is high school getting boring?”

  I lifted a shoulder. “I’m kind of a misfit, so it’s not much fun.”

  “Well, of course, you are,” she said, and gave me a strange look. “I was, too. You don’t know it yet, but you’re going to be brilliant at whatever you choose to do. I, frankly, hope it will be anthropology, but I know right now you’re more interested in focusing on history.”

  “Are they incompatible?”

  “Not at all. In fact, I insist that my students study both. It’s the only way you can actually understand a culture. Why don’t you come study with me in Canada?”

  “Do you teach? I thought you just worked at the museum?”

  “I work full-time at the museum, but on the side I teach a couple of courses in biological anthropology, as well as consulting with police departments across North America. Besides, I’ll give you a part-time job at the museum which should cover your tuition. You’ll enjoy it.”

  “Thanks. I’ve always wanted to visit Cana—”

  “What the . . .” Roberto came to a dead stop in front of us, then broke into a dead run. “Hal?”

  It didn’t matter that I had no idea what had set him off, I charged after him at full speed, trying to catch up, shouting, “Roberto? What’s going on?”

  LaSalle’s feet pounded after me. She was tall and athletic, but my legs were longer. I outdistanced her pretty fast. All across the site, people straightened from their work, and looked in our direction. A wave of students began walking toward us.

  By the time Roberto reached the excavation pit, I was still ten paces behind, but I saw what had caught his eye. The pit walls had caved in, half-filling the excavation.

  Roberto leaped down into the pit and started scooping out dirt with his hands. I ran as hard as I could. When I got close enough, the sight that met my eyes made me stumble.

  “Oh, my God!”

  I jumped down beside Roberto and helped him throw out the dirt. He worked at the bottom of the excavation, while I cleaned out the top portion. When I finally got down to the skulls, I sucked in a breath. The stela sat at an angle, covering most of the skulls. “They . . . They’ve been crushed.”

  LaSalle arrived and climbed down into the pit with us. Gently, she said, “Please move aside, Roberto. I need to take a look.” But the expression on her face told me she already knew the answer to the question of “why?”

  Roberto climbed out of the pit and knelt on the edge looking down. “It looks like somebody used the stela to bludgeon the skulls to bits.”

  “Maybe. We can’t be sure yet.”

  LaSalle pulled her trowel from the sheath on her hip, and started carefully scraping away the fresh dirt. As the skeletons slowly emerged, it became clear that fragments of the skulls scattered the dirt.

  LaSalle stood up and studied the positions of the skeletons in the grave. Most of the bones remained exactly as they’d been yesterday, placed as though each had been gently lowered into the grave, then their arms arranged around each other. But it was no longer easy to tell, because there was still a lot of dirt over them.

  “Looks like somebody out here is superstitious,” she whispered to herself, then carefully scooped away some of the dirt from the hip bones of the skeletons, whereupon she frowned. Her gaze darted back and forth between the crushed skull of the larger skeleton and the hip bones.

  Rage filled me. I had no idea why I was so upset over this desecration, but the crushed skulls really stunned me. “Why would someone shatter the skulls of ancient skeletons?”

  People began shouting and running toward us.

  Exhaling hard, LaSalle leaned back against the crumbling pit wall. “There are many possibilities. Someone may have wanted to make sure the Ka souls could not escape and wander around the site. Or the person who did this was trying to prevent us from identifying the remains. And there are about a million other possibilities. I know this is a shock, but vandalism like this occurs all the time at archaeological sites. This might even have been an accident.”

  “An accident?” Roberto said. “How do you accidentally smash skulls?”

  “Think about it, guys. If someone were trying to move the heavy stela by himself, he might have stumbled or lost his hold and accidentally dropped it on the skulls. This is not necessarily a malicious act.”

  “But what was he doing trying to move a stela in the middle of the night? That implies he didn’t want to be seen.” Roberto propped his hands on his hips and grimaced as the first of the students began to arrive and encircle the pit.

  LaSalle’s blonde brows pulled together, which deepened the crow’s-feet at the corners of her blue eyes. “Most of the students here knew nothing about this burial, but some of them probably heard rumors. If one came out to take a look in the moonlight, he may have gotten excited, tried get a better look, and accidentally dropped the heavy stone.”

  “And then tried to cover it up by caving the pit walls over the top of it?”

  “Possibly. What I’m saying is let’s not jump to conclusions.”

  When people started crowding around us, I backed up, then wandered a short distance away. Roberto trotted over to stand beside me.

  LaSalle called, “Everything is all right, folks. Just some vandalism.”

  “Let me through, please! Coming through. Move!” As though he’d been occupied elsewhere and only just heard the news, Moriarity pushed forward to stare down at the shattered skulls. “Who did this? Somebody knows! Tell me right now?”

  In the back, murmurs started: “Bates must have been drunk as a skunk when he . . .”

  “Can’t say that, he . . .”

  “I was with him last night after dinner and he was talking about . . .”

  Moriarity gingerly lowered himself into the pit and knelt beside the crushed skulls. “Jones! Get over here.”

  Jones’ dyed platinum hair shone whitely as he passed through the students and crouched near Moriarity.

  “Where’s Bates? Send someone to find him this instant. Then I need to re-excavate this burial so we can determine the extent of the damage.”

  “Got it.”

  Jones tapped someone on the shoulder, issued instructions, and the young man took off at a run.

  “LaSalle, did you find any evidence of who did this? Tracks? Anything left behind?” Moriarity stared at her through enraged eyes. “You must have come to
some conclusions. You routinely work with the police—”

  “All I have are guesses. The soil shoved over the burial is pretty dry, so this is hours old, but—”

  “Give me a time.”

  “If you pressed me, I’d guess the vandalism probably occurred between ten last night and around two.”

  Jones straightened up and clenched his fists at his sides. As though he was calculating in his head, his eyes darted around, then they came back to me with the force of a blow to my belly. “That’s the time Stevens claims he was attacked last night.”

  “So?” I said.

  “So, you’re a liar. I checked for footprints this morning. All I found were your tracks running from the temple to the cook tent. There was no one behind you and no signs of a fight by the tent.” He flexed his fists at his sides. “Setting up an alibi, boy?”

  Roberto shouted, “There were a hundred people around the tent for breakfast! Any tracks left from last night were long gone. There’s no way you could have determined there hadn’t been a fight.”

  All eyes turned to me.

  I felt like I’d been body-slammed. I couldn’t breathe.

  “That’s enough.” LaSalle ordered. “There is no evidence that this is anything but an accident.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Jones clenched his jaw. “The only people out here who might have been ignorant enough to pick up a heavy stela are these two.”

  Moriarity aimed his trowel at Jones. “Jonathan shut your mouth. I’m tired of your bullshit.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Moriarity ordered, “All right, go back to work. This is over. Return to your excavation units.” When the gathering did not immediately disperse, Moriarity clapped his hands. “Right now! Go on.”

  Students wandered away, but their dark voices rode the wind. Many turned around to stare curiously at me, then whispered to each other.

  As though searching for anything reassuring to cling to, my gaze fastened on LaSalle, where she stared down at the entwined skeletons. Wisps of blonde hair had come loose from her braid and blew around her somber face.