by Cherry Adair
Click. Turn page.
She repositioned the phone so she could take more pictures. There’d be plenty of time when they returned to Stormchaser to look and analyze. But, oh! She wanted to sit down, the large book in her lap, and try to read every intriguing, tantalizing, ancient word. “I can’t wait to get back.”
“Me, too, if it gets you this excited.” Jonah’s soft chuckle caused the already overstimulated little hairs on her body to stand up even more. Which showed how powerful her attraction to him was, because despite the incredible findings in her hands, she was still hyperaware of Jonah. All the time.
Callie heard the chink of china before she heard Eliades’s shuffling gait heading back to the library. She glanced over at Jonah, who was already slipping his phone into his back pocket.
Quickly and reluctantly returning the two heavy books to their previous spaces, she stacked other books in front of them. Exactly as they’d found them. She hoped.
Taking a later manuscript with her, Callie sat down just as the old man trundled in, carrying a large, tarnished silver tray with cups and a tea-stained cozy-covered pot.
Jonah strode over to take the clearly heavy burden from Eliades’s gnarled hands, then set it on what looked like an eighteenth-century Oeben marquetry mechanical table, which was probably worth double what her condo in Miami cost.
“You will take tea with an old man?” Eliades addressed Callie first, then looked to Jonah. “I would very much enjoy the company.”
“We’d be honored,” Callie responded, also in Greek. She didn’t want to waste time sipping tea or chatting. What she’d seen so far had her too excited even to sit still. But she got up to pour three cups of almost black-colored tea, passing them out before returning to her chair with her own cup and mismatched saucer.
The tea was far too strong and bitter, but she politely sipped it anyway. Jonah set his cup and saucer on the table beside him and crossed one ankle over his knee, stretching his arms out on the wide curved arms of his chair, looking perfectly relaxed. “We appreciate you allowing us access to your library. There is material here, I’m sure, we couldn’t find anywhere else.”
“There have been people living on Fire Island for centuries, possibly longer. What you see here is an accumulation of writings passed down from the oldest son in each family for generations. This scriptorium has been here as long as my ancestors were alive. A very, very long time.”
“This room was originally a scriptorium?” Callie asked, cradling her tea in her palm.
“What’s a scriptorium?” Jonah asked.
“In medieval monasteries it was a room devoted to the copying of manuscripts. Are you an order of monks, Kyrie Eliades?” It would certainly explain the black robes and isolated living, and the fact that she hadn’t seen any women other than Anndra Spanos. Callie suspected the young woman was the exception to the rules.
“No. Not monks. A different, more ancient order. You do not speak Greek, Mr. Cutter?” Eliades asked over his cup, sipping his tea.
“Only the most rudimentary words and phrases, I’m afraid. But I understand more than I speak. Dr. West is fluent, however.”
The non-monk smiled. “Yes,” he said in heavily accented English to Callie. “You have an excellent ear for my language.” He waved an expansive hand around the book-lined room. “You have found what you were looking for? So difficult in a room of this size with so many works to choose from in a small amount of time.”
“I think I have, yes.” She indicated the book on the table beside her. “Have you lived here all your life,” Callie asked, her eyes going to the hundreds if not thousands of dusty manuscripts and texts she was dying to get her hands on.
“I have, yes. Many, many years.”
“And Kallistrate Spanos? Has he lived here all his life?”
“He left sixt—many years ago, and returns every few months to—to rejuvenate himself. This time we are fortunate to have his young sister visit as well. We hope that he will adjust once again to the simple life and teachings of Fire Island, and make his permanent home here with us again.”
“I haven’t seen any women. Are they too shy to come out?” Callie asked in a teasing tone.
“Other than Anndra, there have been no women here for many years. We are … caretakers of the island.” He rested the cup on his knee. “Did you find anything of interest?”
Callie nodded, tamping her enthusiasm. “I think I’ve found a written report of a story from the correct time period. It mentions a Chinese boat being swallowed by the fire from the volcano. I’d like to ask—would it be possible to borrow some of these books for a few days? I promise to take excellent care of them, and return them as I find them.”
“That book.” He pointed a gnarled finger. “No more.”
Disappointed, Callie reminded herself that they could come again, take more photographs. “Thank you, I’ll be very careful with it. May we come back soon to look at more?”
“Here. Yes.”
It was lovely and warm sitting in the sunshine pouring in through the dusty windows, but she wanted to get back to the ancient texts, which predated the sinking of the Ji Li by hundreds of years.
“We’ve encountered a strange anomaly in a localized area near where Stormchaser is anchored,” Jonah said easily. “A dense electrical fog that’s scrambled our equipment. The weather bureaus are insisting there is no fog. Is this something you’ve ever encountered?”
The old man shrugged even as he confirmed the oddity. “This is something no one has understood for centuries. The fog comes and goes. Once, twice a year. No one understands it. It is never wise to question God’s will, yes?”
When it was obvious that the old man had settled in for a pleasant afternoon with his company, Jonah signaled Callie, and they both got to their feet. “Thank you for your hospitality, and for lending me the book.”
“You may keep it as long as you want to,” Eliades said magnanimously, pushing to his feet as well.
Callie topped his height by at least a foot. “I’ll take the tray to the kitchen and then be on our way.”
The old man wouldn’t hear of them carting the tray off, so they said their goodbyes and stepped outside into the sunshine. Eliades stood outside the front door, hands tucked into his sleeves, watching them leave.
“I wonder what happened to your little friend Anndra?”
Jonah shrugged. “Probably off somewhere doing her nails, or curling her eyelashes.”
“She’s stunningly beautiful.”
“I guess.”
Callie glanced over her shoulder as soon as they were clear of the small group of houses. Jonah had just taken his phone out, presumably to call or text Thanos, when Callie grabbed his forearm with both hands. Barely able to control her excitement, her words ran over each other. “Holy crap, Jonah! I can’t wait to get these images back to Stormchaser to see what we have!”
His eyes narrowed. “You pulled those two documents from the back of the bookshelf. How did you know what was in them?”
“I didn’t. But when I looked at all the shelves when we first walked in, I noticed how the dust was pushed back in several places. Those books were hidden from us in plain sight. Someone with not very good eyesight moved them to the back, and pulled others forward to block them from view.”
“Will you be able to decipher what you got?”
She’d studied—briefly—the discipline of reading, deciphering, and dating historical texts. But it would take more than her basic skills. “Maybe. I hope I can at least get an idea of when they were written, and see how much I can read. The style of alphabet in every language evolves constantly.
“One has to know the various characters as they existed in various eras. I only took a semester of the study of ancient writing, but I have a friend in Spain who’s a specialist in palaeography. Miguel’s made it his life’s work, and he’s amazing, I’ll send him what we have right away and see—”
Jonah put his hand on her wrist as s
he took out her phone. “Let’s wait until you take a look yourself. If those texts allude to Atlantis, I don’t want anyone else knowing about it until we’re ready to announce it to the world.”
Callie frowned, her anticipation fueling her agitation at Jonah trying to stonewall her efforts to decipher the images. What would take her weeks, maybe even months, would take Miguel only hours or days at most.
“If the images we have allude to Atlantis, chances are I won’t know because I can’t read them!”
“Let’s wait until we get back to the ship and your lab and go from there, okay? No point going off half-cocked asking for help until we know how much and who we can trust.”
She pulled her tingling wrist out of his grasp. “I trust Miguel.” She didn’t want Jonah touching her. Overreaction caused her heart to thump and her nerves to jump. Maybe she was running a fever?
“Then you’ll still trust him in a few days when we see what you can do with your one semester of palaeography.”
God the man was stubborn. “Two days.”
“A week.”
Ridiculous when a find of this significance was at their fingertips. “Three days.”
“Four.”
Callie crossed her arms, clutching the book she’d borrowed to her chest like a shield in battle. “Okay, but on the morning of day four I’m sending these images to Miguel to work on.”
“Fair enough.”
“Your buddy back there said several very interesting things today.” Callie stared ahead as they picked their way down the winding path through the rock and brush.
“Like?”
“He referred to the library as his before he caught himself.”
“Yeah, I noticed that. Perhaps Spanos and his sister are nightmare houseguests who never left.”
Callie locked her gaze on Jonah’s piercing blue eyes. How could such a cool color give the impression of so much heat? She imagined his gaze was hot—for her. Translated that look into the feel of his hands touching her all over. She shivered in the hot sun.
It was a mistake to look at him directly like this. It was as if those eyes were tractor beams, holding her immobile while her pulse raced and a dull ache radiated from between her legs to throb in her breasts.
“Before he caught himself,” she said, adjusting her depth perception, focusing on a shrub over his left shoulder, “it sounded as if he were about to say Spanos left sixty years ago. Is he that old? I thought you said he was in his early forties.”
His gaze dropped to her mouth. “Maybe he’s just well preserved. Left when he was a baby.”
“Sure.” That was possible. But Callie’s gut told her that just like the hidden books, there was more being concealed here than just a few dusty tomes.
* * *
Jonah copied the images off their phones to his computer’s hard drive, as well as a thumb drive, then backed everything up twice more.
Fortunately, all the systems knocked out by the electrical interference were back in working order as if there’d never been a problem once the strange fog disappeared. And that had disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.
Still suspicious, Jonah called one of the most reliable weather stations in Europe, and spoke to their head meteorologist, Robin Waugh. Jonah trusted Robin, still enjoyed her company all these years later, and on hearing her sultry and very unscientific voice again seriously considered making a quick trip to Paris for a booty call.
He’d debated for all of thirty seconds as he watched Callie talking to the others while he was on the phone. Her elusive scent spiked the air in the cabin, making him all too aware she was within touching distance if he just reached out and … Not going to happen. He told Robin he’d catch up with her the next time he was in Paris, but they both knew he meant over coffee, not in the sack.
Robin checked back records and confirmed what Eliades had told him: The electrical storms and fog were intermittent, coming and going without warning. According to her weather station’s records, the anomaly went back to the 1950s and, she suspected, giving it an educated guess, further, way further back than that.
“Jonah?”
“Sorry. What were you saying?”
Seated on the comfortable sofa in the salon, he and Callie looked at each page of text up on the big-screen television. They’d been at it for six hours; everyone else had hit the hay a while ago. The aroma of coffee lingered in the air despite their cups having gone cold.
With the lights dimmed for better viewing, the room was far too intimate. Callie was curled up at the other end of the deep sofa, but she didn’t look the least bit relaxed as she leaned forward, holding a pen and a notebook, eyes fixed on the image in front of her.
She pointed with the pen. “See how this passage is written in a consonantal form from left to right?”
Jonah tipped his head to the side, still unable to make any sense of the squiggles and smudges. He was amazed she could identify anything resembling language there at all and now completely understood why she had wanted her friend’s expert help.
“I’ll take your word for it. It all looks like chicken scratches to me.” How could she tell something this old and faded had been written left to right, or upside down? He wasn’t even sure that he was looking at letters and not ancient fly guts. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m as eager as you are to see if and how this relates to Atlantis, but my eyes are crossing, and my brain is about as thick as that fog.”
“Go ahead and go to bed then,” she muttered absently, chewing the corner of her lip as she leaned forward, elbows on her knees, staring at the screen. “I think I can figure out the next passage…”
Jonah loved watching her think. The twin lines of concentration between the wings of her eyebrows, the way she nibbled at the corner of her lower lip. He could almost hear the wheels turning. He bet she wasn’t even aware he was sitting three feet away, watching her, or that leaning forward like that gave him a mind-numbing view of her cleavage. Who the hell could concentrate on a page of ancient text when something so delectable was on display in the same room?
“This appears to be written in Linear B syllabary, which was always on clay tablets. Mycenaean. The earliest Greek writing.” Her voice rose with excitement, and she leaned forward, eyes fixed on the screen. “I’ve never seen it on parchment, and never like this. Holy crap! This appears to be prose. It’s always been held that Mycenaean literature was passed on orally, because nothing was ever written down. Or not anything ever found anyway. Linear B doesn’t lend itself to the sounds of Greek.”
“Hmm.”
“This is remarkable … The only Linear B documents ever discovered were prosaic lists. Mainly for trade. Inventory. They think perhaps some poetry. Never prose. But isn’t a list—see—there aren’t any short lines, which would indicate word dividers. That’s prose. Prose!” She scrolled to the next image and dragged in a breath. “Linear A. Hieroglyphic script. I’ve seen it on seal stones, but those have yet to be deciphered.
“My God, Jonah…” Callie turned shining eyes to him. Pale as peridot, and filled with wonder. She said with quiet awe, “The few pages we have from just two manuscripts could be the Rosetta stone of ancient Greece.”
Jonah heard the wistful bliss in her voice, he understood the magnitude of the discovery, but in that instant his entire world shifted on its axis, and it had fuck-all to do with ancient writings.
She kept talking, her excited voice a sensual hum in his ears. He wanted to lie with her on a field of green grass under the sunshine so he could look at every inch of her body. He wanted to touch and taste, and linger while he did it, and then start again. He wanted to pick up that thick rope of braid and slowly unravel the strands, and spread them out around her in a dark silken blanket.
The light caught the long shiny scar on her arm, and Jonah’s heart twisted in empathy. When she’d told him about the car accident, he’d been furious with her irresponsible parents. His father had been a drinker, too. More when he’d been around Zane
, Logan, and Nick than he’d ever been around Jonah. But even as a kid, he’d had a problem with his father’s social drinking.
It was fascinating to Jonah that while he and his brothers had lived a world and life apart, none of them drank more than one beer. He noticed Callie didn’t drink at all.
“How old were you when your parents died?”
She blinked him into focus, her frown deepening. “Wow. That’s out of the blue. What made you think about that now?”
“I was looking at your scar. It’s hellish, and a badge of your courage. You said they were alcoholics. My father also had a drinking problem. More so when he was with my brothers, but he drank a lot.”
She frowned, the light of discovery dimming in her eyes, crowded out by more unsavory memories. Interestingly, she made no move to cover the scar, as most people would do when mentioning what they perceived as a flaw. Callie wasn’t most people. “We have that in common then.”
“I don’t think so. My mother was there to protect me from the worst of it. I never saw him anything more than slightly tipsy. But my brothers have told me some of the stories, and it’s like he was another man when he was with them.”
Callie rested her chin on her knees. “Are they alcoholics, too? It’s not uncommon.”
“No, none of us drink. No more than a beer once in a while.” He paused for a moment. “So how old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Who took care of you after your parents died?”
She gave him a surprised look. “I took care of myself. I became an emancipated minor right after the accident. Their life insurance paid my way through college. I was fortunate I didn’t have to go into debt.”
Her life didn’t sound fortunate at all. “Is that when you met Adam?”
Callie nodded. “His sister has been my best friend since junior high, so I’ve known him since I was thirteen. I spent a lot of time at their house. He has an older brother who was basically the man of the family. Their mom was more a mother to me than my own mother ever was. I was more devastated by her death than I was when my own mother was killed. I’m still close to them all. They’re family, and family is everything.”