“Well, that was strange.” I looked from Peaches to Evan once the couple had retreated. “Fly in to bring her home—really?”
Peaches swore. “You’d think you had been out prowling the streets picking up stray men or something. What were you doing?”
“I’ll tell you later. Is everything clear around here?” I asked her.
“If you mean did I find anyone lurking in the shadows, no. I did my rounds floor-by-floor while you were gone and the roof is latched from the inside now. Nothing looked out of place up there besides your stuff all over the terrace,” she told me. “I gathered it up and put it back in your carpetbag, by the way. It’s on your bed.”
“Oh, thanks. And nobody tried to jump you?”
“Hell, no. I’d hoped they would so I’d get my swinging arm back in use but I’m not interesting enough apparently.”
“So, no signs of anyone else besides the Merediths?” Evan asked, stepping forward, his bag in hand, and gazing around at the balconied levels.
“Nada,” Peaches said. “I gave all the rooms a cursory check but they looked empty.”
“But I’m sure they’re here. I’m working on a device that will pick up body heat signatures in rooms of a limited size but I didn’t have the right equipment with me in Venice,” Evan told her.
She looked at him in amazement. “Seriously, you can do that?”
“That and more,” I said, “but don’t let it go to his head. Maybe we should check all the rooms again just in case.” I was looking up at the balconies, every room but mine and the Merediths’ wide open. Each were dark, which made for perfect hiding places unless thoroughly checked. “There still could be somebody hiding up there.”
“Smoking them out would take too long and require more person power than we can spare at the moment, given our time restraints,” Evan said. “We need to find this thing before the staff returns in the morning. We’ll deal with problems when the time comes. Let’s get right to work. Where can we go that has a blank white wall?” he asked.
Blank white anything was notably absent in this pattern upon pattern environment but we led him into the smaller courtyard where the back wall had managed to remain undecorated. Following his directions, we busied helping him set up his laptop on a table dragged from Peaches’s room while he fiddled with his equipment. I had no idea what he was up to.
“You didn’t mention he was gorgeous in his list of attributes,” Peaches whispered when we were inside her room bringing out chairs for the evening’s operations.
“Will you stop,” I said, my exasperation playful but my point firm. “He’s Rupert’s assistant, remember, not one of your man-chest heroes.”
“But I bet he’s got one just like that.” She pointed to one of her paperbacks tossed on the bed—a bare muscled chest holding a puppy dog. She went through those things like vitamin pills.
“He’s here to help us prove that neither Rupert nor Nicolina are responsible for Maria Contini’s death because she was killed to get to whatever’s buried here. We find whatever it is and hopefully put that and the killers where they belong. Forget the romantic fiction.”
“I’m only interested for aesthetic reasons.”
“He’s not my type,” I hissed, grabbing a chair by the rail back.
“Oh, yeah, what type is that—short, fat, and bald?” She grinned.
“Lean, murderous, and wolfish apparently. Look at Noel. Anyway, I’m just exorcising one man from my heart so the last thing I need is another, chest or no.”
“That’s exactly what you need, sister, and that guy’s got the goods, that’s all I’m saying.”
We differed on the fundamentals of romance. “Let’s get to work. Anyway, what’s wrong with short, fat, and bald? I’ve met guys like that who would melt your socks off.”
“Wouldn’t know. I’ve only just started seriously wearing socks.”
Back in the courtyard the two of us stood gazing in wonder as an image projected onto the wall. Hovering as if in midair, the lines and angles took a second to focus.
“Is that the diagram up there?” Peaches gazed from the laptop to the projected image.
“That’s the diagram Nicolina sent, yes,” I said.
I stepped forward. Evan, standing in a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up over his substantial biceps, turned and explained. “Before Nicolina sent the diagram, I photographed it in sections using a program that has the capacity to break down levels of any geometrical design, enabling one to study it from multiple angles in 3-D. Watch.”
He touched the keyboard and sections of the diagram fell apart into separate areas like a folding screen. Touching the keyboard again raised the images up as if we were gazing at them sideways. Each time he tapped, the triangles, rectangles, and spheres realigned to create a new design, each as incredibly complex and beautiful as the last, like kaleidoscope mosaics.
“Like sacred geometry?” I whispered.
He smiled. “‘There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music spacing of the spheres.’”
“And he quotes Pythagoras, too,” Peaches marveled. She reached out a hand as if to touch the image. “Cathedrals were built on the principles of sacred geometry. It’s everywhere in ancient architecture hidden in such plain sight. The universe is engineered on geometry.”
“It is,” Evan agreed.
“Can you spread the sections apart on a flat level?” I asked.
He tapped the keyboard. “Done.”
As the sections rearranged themselves, Peaches stepped closer. “Bring the top square over here and move that rectangle there.”
“Here, you do it.” Evan stepped aside. “Move the sections around with your fingers. The screen is touch-enabled, all drag and drop.” She did as he asked, moving each section around with her fingers until they formed a series of connected rectangles, large and small. Now we were looking at a schematic that looked surprisingly like a blueprint with triangles littering the top of the screen as if waiting to be placed. “This is the riad,” Peaches said. “See, the central courtyard is this large rectangle here and this smaller courtyard is where we stand. If I rearrange these blocks around, it forms the other rooms, only I don’t get what to do with those triangles up there.”
My mouth had gone dry. “Triangles combine to make stars. Look.” I dragged each of the triangles down, squeezing the images to reduce them in size and placing two overlapping equilateral triangles in the center. “A hexagram.” I brought out my phone and thumbed to the Bartolo picture. “And the bride is standing on a hexagram. If we can find this geometric configuration somewhere in this riad, we might find the dowry.”
“Even though the hexagram wasn’t claimed as the Star of David until two hundred years later?” Evan asked.
“It wasn’t acknowledged as such until the seventeenth century but it appeared all over the ancient world long before then. The star has always been a symbol of power and hope.” My eyes met his.
“It must be hidden in the mosaics,” Peaches said, “but the original tile work must have been replaced long ago.”
“Or covered over,” Evan suggested, turning away to stride across the courtyard. “It’s far less expensive to tile over something than to dig it up and start fresh.”
Together we gazed at the tiled floor. “It must be beneath these tiles somewhere. But we ran the detector app across every inch of tile and found nothing,” I said.
“So it must be buried someplace the scan can’t reach,” Evan pointed out.
“The center of the riad.” Peaches turned to the door, her excitement mounting. “These buildings were always built around a central courtyard from which everything else radiated outward. So where’s the center of this one? The pool!”
We followed her out into the central courtyard where the three of us stood gazing deep into the blue water. “Impossible,” she whispered. “They wouldn’t have built a pool this deep back in the 1500s. Water was scarce—is scarce—in the desert. If there was anything buried here,
it would have been found when they excavated for the pool in the last couple of decades.”
“Water has always been sacred to desert communities and seen as cleansing, purifying, and ultimately preparing the faithful for worship,” I pointed out.
“And there are two courtyards here,” Evan said quietly, “one much less public than this but no less important to a family centuries ago. It is where they would have washed and prayed before meals.”
Turning, we dashed back into the smaller courtyard and stood by the fountain, staring. It was a small fountain set in a basin no bigger than a birdbath. “So, it must be underneath here,” I said. “A fountain of one form or another probably existed in this spot centuries ago and the latest electrical addition could have been installed without significantly disturbing anything below it. I’m betting that if we dug here, we’d uncover an old mosaic featuring a hexagram much like what we see in the Bartolo.”
“Underneath which lays our missing dowry,” Evan added. “Let’s start. First, I’ll disengage the fountain by lifting it up—no need to damage anything. The electricians would have rigged it for easy repair. Then I’ll start removing the top layer of tiles. The biggest issue will be draining the basin but I think I’ve got that worked out.”
“I bet you have.” Peaches nodded.
“We’ll help,” I said.
“It’s better if I do the digging while you two search the riad for stowaways. Now’s the time,” Evan said without looking up from the fountain. He seemed deep into calculation mode. “The sound of digging will draw them out so we’d better be ready for interruptions.”
That made sense.
“Do you even have a shovel?” Peaches asked, always the practical one.
Now he was lifting up a long narrow bag strapped to his valise and zipping back the cover. “Of course. I always come prepared.” Out came a fold-out shovel. “If I change the head, it turns into a rudimentary pickax but I doubt I’ll need that.” He looked up. “Do either of you have a gun?”
“I have a knife.” Peaches pulled out her gleaming blade.
“The wicked sister took mine,” I told him, spreading my hands, “but apparently I have a taser.”
“Take mine.” He pulled a pistol from his holster and passed it over, butt-first. I took it, finding it heavy, made for bigger hands. Still, I nodded and thanked him. “But while you’re digging, you’ll be exposed to anyone sneaking up behind you if Peaches and I are in another part of the riad,” I pointed out.
He quirked a smile, holding up his phone. “A motion detector. If I activate that feature and place it in the floor behind me, it will pick up movement coming through the door up to a distance of ten yards. That’s enough to send a warning.”
Peaches whistled between her teeth. “Let’s get to it, then,” she said, turning to me. “Any suggestions on where to start?”
“At the top floor. You guard the stairs while I check each of the rooms. Between the two of us, we should be able to catch a rat if it bolts.”
“Sounds perfect except that we have a bathroom issue and I don’t mean that kind. While you check each bathroom, you’ll be out of my sight for seconds and your back exposed to being jumped from behind.” She had more commando experience than I did and it showed.
“Yeah, I see. Let me figure that one out,” I told her.
We left Evan straddling the fountain while twisting it from its pedestal, his phone pulsing a blue light in the center of the floor.
I wasn’t nervous about checking each of the rooms, though I probably should have been. With Peaches watching from the top of the stairs with her phone light beaming down the corridor (we still hadn’t located the master light switch) and her knife at the ready, she had my back. That left me to grip the gun in one hand and my phone in the other, theoretically. Practically, the gun was too heavy for me to manage comfortably while holding the phone in my wounded hand but that’s exactly what I tried to do.
First, I worked out a sequence. I approached the first room with confidence, flicking on the bedroom light and striding forward like I knew what I was doing. Slipping my hand in around the darkened bathroom wall, I switched on the light with the back of my hand while still holding the phone. Satisfied that the bright jolt of patterned color jumping out at my eyes was totally of the tile variety, I next gave the shower stall a sweep before backing out. On my way out of the room, I checked under the bed but it turned out that the mattresses sat on platforms with no space beneath. Next, I opened the wardrobe. Every room had a carved wood variety requiring me to swing open the door and wave my gun inside at anybody who might be lurking within. After the first sequence, I vowed that checking the wardrobe first made more sense.
All the empty rooms on that floor received the same treatment, my own getting extra care seeing as Noel had recently been there. It’s like I felt his presence imprinted in the space he’d left behind and the thought stabbed me in the heart. A quick glance in the bathroom mirror at my own reflection was enough to bring me back down to earth. I looked like parboiled hell with a bruised cheek and hollow eyes. Wincing, I turned away and returned to my task, following the same sequence three times more on the top level. Tiptoeing past the Merediths’ room, I was relieved to see the lights out under the door and that all seemed peaceful.
“All clear. On to the next level,” I whispered when I met Peaches at the stairs minutes later.
She held up her hand. “Listen.”
All I could hear at first was the deep chunk-chunk of Evan digging before a second sound came through, something like a chair scraping across the floor on the main level. Then we heard a clatter on the level directly beneath us. “That’s deliberate,” I whispered. “They’re trying to separate us.”
“Well, it’s going to work, isn’t it? We can’t leave them to run all over this place. You get the one below and leave the one on the bottom floor to me.” She made it sound like we were sharing treats. I watched as she bounded downstairs with her knife in hand, leaving me with no choice but to continue down to the second floor without her.
None of the rooms were booked on this level and now I had no one to watch my back, either. Why did that bother me? Maybe because my gun arm was tiring and my other hand had begun to throb. Had I the choice, I’d wimp out in a nanosecond but choice was not optional. Shoving my phone into my pocket, I gripped the pistol with both hands and prowled the floor. This time I flicked on each of the lights closest to the doors but made no move to go inside. If my hunch was right, someone was waiting for me and my task was to stay out of their clutches.
I was halfway down the row when a clang came from the room at the end of the hall—brass banging against brass. Someone wanted me to know where they were or think that. All right, then, I’d just go as far as the door and maybe shoot a warning shot to the ceiling, see if I could flush them out. Or that was the plan. By the time I’d heard the footfalls behind me, it was too late to even turn around.
I was pushed to the ground face-first, the force hard enough to throw me but not heavy enough to keep me down. The gun fell from my grasp. I bucked, which shifted my attacker to the left, giving me time to shove her off, regain the gun while scrambling to my knees. She was just as fast but no trained fighter and now we were facing each other on our knees, both of our guns pointed at the other’s chest.
Petite with dark curly hair with a fierce yet delicate face, she stared at me with angry eyes. Maybe forty years old, she looked as though she’d been dragged through life by the scruff of the neck. “You think you escape us, Phoebe McCabe,” she said, “but you don’t escape. We are here now and will claim what is ours.” I had the sense that she wanted to sound fiercer than she was. Her hand trembled.
“Who are you? What do you want?” I asked.
“You know what we want,” she said.
“No, I don’t. Tell me.” I had to get that gun away from her without getting shot. She must know that we were close to locating the dowry so she’d have no reason to keep me alive
. “Why did you burn that building down while I was in it? Why did you kill Maria Contini?”
“That was accident! We did not want to kill! My brothers, they struggled to get key and she fell, hit her head.”
“Wow—what, four of you against one woman?”
Pain crossed her eyes. Not the first time, I guessed. “So you struggled to get the key to the warehouse, and when she wouldn’t just let you have it, you killed her.”
“By accident, I said.”
“Oh, really? Killing must have been your intention all along; if not yours, then your brothers’. They have anger management issues written all over them.”
“Not me!” she protested. So I was correct.
“Your brothers, then. And was trying to burn me alive an accident, too?”
“We thought building deserted! We wanted only to find old deed and burn any secrets to take back what is ours. This riad is ours.”
That surprised me. “But it’s belonged to the Continis continuously for centuries.”
“Not true!” She practically spat the words. “It was sold to our family in 1986 and then stolen back six months later because of secret buried. All their money, they used to bribe. Now we have nothing.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. “What?”
“My aunt Zara came to work for Continis when young girl. She worked here in riad first and she went to Italy with them—like all big family. Many years pass. Signora Contini likes my aunt, wants to give her good life because her family—us—very poor, so she sell riad to her for family here at low price. Every dirham we had, we put to buy house. My aunt, she had savings. There was deed, all legal, and then—” she snapped her fingers “—gone.”
Both our pistols were lowering now. Weird as it was, we were kneeling there having a conversation. “Gone? But how can that happen if you’d legally bought the riad?”
“Signore Contini made deals.” She jerked her head toward the medina as if crooks were lurking behind every wall. “He discovered secret, wanted riad back to find treasure because his money now gone. Papers were signed. Said our deed illegal. My brothers were given money but it was nothing, a cheat!”
The Carpet Cipher Page 25