Rings of Anubis: A Folley & Mallory Adventure

by E. Catherine Tobler

  Eleanor came closer to Mallory as they watched the work. This close, she could see he was shaking more than a little. “Cleo tells me that the first agent assigned to the Lady was dismissed. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Mmm.” Mallory crossed his arms over his chest. Whatever tremor possessed him passed. “Agent Emily Ward. The partial report I retrieved implied she engaged in inappropriate behavior with her supervisor, and thus was asked to leave her position.”

  Cleo snorted, but said nothing, gesturing for fresh plates from Usi and Auberon. Usi moved the exposed plates to the other side of the room, and Auberon slotted the fresh ones into the trays beneath the table. Cleo allowed the men to handle the plates, and Eleanor grew curious if her mechanical fingers might react poorly with the chemicals.

  “Yet her supervisor remained in his position, though he likely engaged just as inappropriately?” Eleanor asked.

  Mallory inclined his head in a partial nod, his entire body trembling with a new shudder. “It would seem so. Gin is attempting to locate Agent Ward’s records. I’m hopeful his inherent charm will aid in the s-search.”

  Cautiously, Eleanor placed her hand on Mallory’s arm, and his eyes met hers. She thought back to their time in the temple, how he had needed a focus. Were the tremors from wanting to transform into a wolf or from the lack of opium? She hoped they could later talk of such things. Maybe on their pyramid climb. Under her hand, though, he calmed.

  “I think,” Cleo said as she gestured to Auberon and Usi and the plates they readied, “this will be our last set, and once they dry, we can move back to my office and see what the Lady has revealed to us. Gentlemen, I thank you.”

  Cleo bowed to Auberon and Usi, the latter of whom returned the movement. Auberon only watched Cleo bow, forgetting the photographic plate he held.

  “Don’t drop that.”

  Cleo’s murmured directive sent him into motion once more, sliding the last plate into place.

  Eleanor was both relieved and reluctant to cover the Lady over with muslin again and watch Cleo push her back toward her normal storage area. Usi took the machine and fled, singing softly as he rolled on toward the elevator.

  Back in Cleo’s office, Eleanor sat beside Virgil, feeling as though she were awaiting bad news. Of course, she reasoned, anything they learned would be helpful. Wouldn’t it?

  With the photographic plates dry, Cleo handled them with ease, Auberon adjusting a lamp so they all could see better. The first plate Cleo held up was an image of the Lady’s skull, curving bright against the darker areas of muslin around her.

  “Ah, see here.” Cleo’s thin gold finger hovered over what looked like a thread in the image. “Her skull looks fractured.”

  Eleanor took a closer look at the image. The fracture ran from the base of her skull to the centerline.

  “Possible cause of death?” Auberon asked.

  “It would be hard to say. With the fracture being to the back of the skull, it’s unlikely she sustained the injury when she fell.” Cleo tilted her head. “If she fell. She could have been tossed into the desert and was simply unable to rise.” She looked to Eleanor in silent question.

  “I’m not sure how she came to be out there, either,” Eleanor said. “My mother’s research and notes weren’t helpful there.” She wanted to tell them the story her mother had given her, that this woman had fled, but the memory of such stories was still too dear to her own heart.

  “And there’s never been anything built on the site,” Virgil added, “at least that we can determine, so it doesn’t appear she was headed specifically there.” He pointed to a bright smudge on the photographic plate, his silver ring gleaming in the light. “What is this, Cleo?”

  Cleo studied the smudge on the plate. “I have no idea, although . . . ” She shifted the plate to Auberon, who set it to the side while Cleo brought another one up. “Here it is again.” Cleo touched the bright smudge. “It looks like something along her jawline. Something in her mouth?”

  Eleanor stared at Cleo, uncertain what to make of that suggestion. Why would the body have anything in its mouth?

  “It doesn’t look like bone, see.” Cleo pointed out the differences in the way bone photographed and the way the bright smudge looked. “It doesn’t appear to have any blood vessels. Definitely a for—”

  The door to Cleo’s office burst open before she could finish, and Gin stood there, flushed and perspiring, as though he had run the entire way. In his hands, he held a small round box that might have held a hat once. Its sides were faded and brown, paper curling upward from the lid.

  “You . . . are not going to . . . believe this,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

  Auberon came to his feet. “The director has returned?”

  “No.” Gin lifted the box he carried, giving it a shake. Something inside shifted with a papery sound.

  “The original files?” Eleanor stood up, barely daring to hope they were.

  Gin nodded, though when Auberon made to take the box, he dodged. Clearly he wanted to be the one to show off the contents. Gin’s eyes met Eleanor’s and he looked at her as though he had never seen her prior to this moment. Eleanor’s skin prickled, a faint whisper coursing along the edge of her memory.

  “You didn’t always have that scar,” Gin murmured and traced a line against his chin.

  Eleanor’s hand came up to her own chin, feeling the faint mark left there the day they had both found and lost the Lady. Those men had dragged her into the sand, biting and clawing . . .

  “What a damned curious thing to say,” Mallory said. He moved beside Eleanor and his arm came around her, supporting her just as she felt she might swoon. She had never swooned in her life. Terribly ladylike, she supposed, but couldn’t take her eyes off Gin.

  “What is in that box?” she whispered.

  Gin stepped further into the room, rounding the desk to place the box upon its surface. He waited, almost like a magician about to reveal his best trick, then drew the lid off with a flourish. Everyone peered inside and at first, Eleanor found nothing odd. Mostly, it looked like stacked papers. Then Gin lifted a small brass case from the collection.

  “A photograph?” Cleo guessed.

  The case was the right size for a photograph one would carry with them. The photo of a loved one, an image someone wanted to keep close. The brass was worked with small flowers, forget-me-nots, curling in bright silver leaves. Despite the cake of patina upon the metal, it was a beautiful piece and familiar to Eleanor. But it couldn’t be. No.

  “This was found with the Lady,” Gin said in a hushed tone. His long fingers pressed the leaf-shaped catch that held the case closed.

  The case came open and Eleanor found herself looking at her own face. It was a younger Eleanor who peered from a thin sheet of metal, an Eleanor who hadn’t yet lost her mother or disobeyed her father. She felt her entire world shift, darkness gobbling the edges of the world away until she couldn’t breathe properly. How terribly ladylike, she thought.

  Dublin, Ireland ~ December 1884

  Four years could pass in the blink of an eye. Eleanor stood across the cobbled street from Folley’s Nicknackatarium and tried to suck courage out of a cigarette. Rain poured from the sky, dribbling over the edge of the green awning above her. She didn’t think she could be any colder or wetter.

  How can I walk into that building? It was still an eye-catching place, the brick bulk of the Nicknackatarium situated on a busy corner; a covered porch of brick arches enclosed the display windows that were usually covered in nose- and fingerprints. The Folleys owned the house next door and rooms above, to keep a better eye on their artifacts. Lights glowed from the uppermost floor, curtains drawn against the storm.

  The front door would be locked, but she still had the key. If her father hadn’t changed the locks—she knew he hadn’t, he wouldn’t—getting inside would be no problem. Walking across the street was the problem.

  Admitting defeat. Saying aloud for the fi
rst time that she hadn’t found enough information to justify her continued search.

  She slipped her hand into her jacket, into her blouse, and held the gold ring she had taken from Christian a few months before. She had fled and he had followed, but she’d managed to stay one step ahead of him . . . and Caroline, if that was her name.

  After her near-fatal encounter with Caroline in the cathedral in Port Elizabeth, she had realized the woman had her own deadly motives. She doubted whether her alliance with Christian still existed.

  Eleanor’s one advantage was that she’d never mentioned this place to Christian, so he could never have given the information to Caroline. Granted, he could probably track her here, for he knew exactly whose daughter she was, but, so far, he hadn’t—and she hoped he wouldn’t. She exhaled.

  She had loved Christian, she knew, and hated herself for it. For compromising her reputation, her future prospects—everything that hadn’t mattered a whit when she was knee-deep in the Egyptian desert, but mattered now that the proper world rose up around her again. What would people say . . . what would her father say? She tried to shake those worries off, but they curled their insistent fingers into her and clung.

  Still, her opinion of Christian had changed over the years. She had been allowed to see beyond the reputation, to the truth of the man, and she doubted he shared that with many. Seeing him pay for an ancient artifact rather than discover it himself had been but the first crack in his armor. It was easy to pay your way. Had Christian earned any of his renown, or simply bought it?

  She drew a last smoky puff from the cigarette and dropped it into the puddle at her feet. It went out with a quick sizzle. The street was silent, appearing abandoned. Lit by hazy streetlamps, it was something from a dream. How many times had she stood here in her dreams, after all? Perhaps this was simply another.

  She couldn’t make herself believe that. The water dripping into her collar was too real. The rain slicked off the trees on either side of the Nicknackatarium, dripping patterns that she wanted to find sense in. Anything to delay stepping inside, where her father would roar in triumph and tell her what a foolish girl she was.

  The key stuck in the lock, and Eleanor feared her father had changed the locks after all. She jerked the key out and with shaking hands dried it on her shirt. She tried again, willing her hands to steady, and nodded when it fit.

  The entry was heavily shadowed, little light from the street making its way inside. The curtains had not all been pulled, so here and there, a dim sliver of gaslight painted the wood flooring. Eleanor looked up at the encased statue of Horus and felt calmed by his familiar features. An identical case stood across the aisle, empty when Eleanor had left, but now home to a statue of Osiris. She strode to his side, to look at his pale green face. She tried to find some measure of reassurance there, but finding such from Osiris would mean she was dead.

  She felt dead, dead inside and alone, and wishing—as a child would—for the reassuring touch of her mother’s hand against her cheek.

  Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years! I am so weary of toil and of tears, toil without recompense, tears all in vain.

  Eleanor closed her eyes, allowed herself to remember that touch. She whispered an apology to her mother, for failing, for abandoning the search, for—

  “If you run, I’ll shoot yer arse end.”

  Her father’s familiar voice made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She had no doubt he was holding a weapon of some sort, and she stepped away from the statue to turn and face him. He stood a short distance away, holding a sling that looked like it had come from his collection rather than a weapon that he used with any regularity.

  “You know the range on those things is poor,” Eleanor said, painfully aware she was dripping rain on her father’s fine carpet.

  “Ellie!”

  Renshaw Folley dropped the sling, value be damned, and ran to her. Eleanor dropped her pack so she could wrap her arms around him as he caught her. Still strong, even for a man approaching fifty. Fifty! she thought with amazement. She had missed so much!

  “Ellie, my Ellie.” He feathered kisses over her wet face and smoothed her damp hair back from her cheeks.

  He smelled like whiskey and like wood from the fire; like the man who had shown her so much of the world and taught her all he could. Eleanor realized she was crying. It was the last thing she wanted to do in front of him. Her father kissed the tears away, and that only made it worse. Eleanor bowed her head to his shoulder.

  “Da.”

  The low sound that broke from him nearly took Eleanor to her knees. She held him fast and squeezed until they were both crying. He pulled back to look at her, and had only smiles for his child.

  “Come on.” He picked up the sling and her pack, and wrapped his free arm around her shoulders. “I was making tea when I heard the door. I hoped it was you, but after all these years—”

  “I waited too long—”

  “You did fine.” He pressed a kiss against her temple. “I have your letters. You wait and I’ll show you each one.”

  Eleanor was glad now that she had taken the time to write, even though at the time her cheeks burned with embarrassment as Christian chided her for writing to her “Da.”

  “Ellie, did you—”

  He didn’t finish his question. He didn’t have to. It weighed between them, crouched and ready to spring like a wild animal.

  “No.”

  Eleanor knew then she wouldn’t show him the ring she wore. It would only take them back in time, to a place he didn’t want to go. She saw the years around his tearing blue eyes, the wrinkles that crowded his half-frowning mouth, and she refused to do this man any more harm. Four years was time enough.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Cairo, Egypt ~ October 1889

  Virgil was not well acquainted with fainting women. When Eleanor went limp against his side, his arm snared her before she could slide to the floor. He eased her toward the leather divan and carefully settled her there.

  He could hardly pull his attention from the younger image of her; the tintype had borne the years well, enclosed in its golden case, Eleanor’s eyes ever-bright. She was perhaps nine, her hair longer and loose down her back. Captured outside, rolling hills stretched behind her. The hills looked grassy, which put her out of place in her pith helmet and field jacket.

  Once Eleanor roused, Virgil kept his questions to himself at Cleo’s insistence. The woman clicked her tongue like a mother hen and escorted Eleanor out of the offices and up to her private rooms. Virgil was left with Auberon and Gin, and the photographic case. He wanted to lose himself in those hopeful eyes, to not feel the hunger that wanted to consume him. The beast was restless, wanted out, while he wanted only the privacy of a locked room and a pipe.

  He had difficulty wrapping his mind around the idea before them, that the modern photograph case had been in the grave of an ancient Egyptian. Telling himself that the body was not as old as they all presumed it to be didn’t improve the situation. It raised dozens of new questions which Gin was content to spout as they came to mind.

  “It couldn’t possibly be her mother, could it?” Gin asked, pacing a track in front of Cleo’s desk. He swung his arms in wide circles, restless. Virgil grew tired watching him move.

  “Who knows what that portal does,” Gin said. “It’s possible she found her way back after all, by some means other than the rings? And perished right there after coming through? What mother wouldn’t take a keepsake with her—naturally she carried her daughter’s likeness!”

  “What’s simple is true,” Auberon said, perhaps in an effort to silence Gin. “I don’t doubt Dalila Folley would have carried her daughter’s likeness. When they were attacked that day, it’s possible the case simply fell out of her pocket, into the grave.”

  Auberon’s calm theory only added fuel to Gin’s outlandish conspiracies.

  “No, no, and no,” Gin said, turning and making another pass before Cleo’s desk.
His hands flickered through the air now, drawing shapes only he understood. “Look at the age on that case. If the Lady were first unearthed, what, eighteen years ago? Granted, that’s a goodly amount of time, but not enough to explain how tarnished and damn aged that thing looks. Add to that Miss Folley’s reaction. She fainted dead away. There is nothing simple about this explanation, no.”

  While Virgil knew Gin had a tendency (and indeed a predilection) to exaggerate, he didn’t feel the man was doing so now. Something was amiss, and rather than sit here and continue to be plagued by questions and Eleanor’s young face, he excused himself. He encountered Cleo emerging from the elevator, and she gave him a look that would have been more familiar coming from his mother.

  “She should rest, Virgil,” Cleo said. “The last thing she needs is you demanding answers she cannot provide. Or those she isn’t yet ready to give.”

  Virgil’s brows drew together. “You think she knows more than she’s telling us?” He wasn’t sure that was the case, but then he hardly felt objective when it came to Eleanor Folley.

  “I am not saying that.” Cleo didn’t stop Virgil when he took a step beyond her, resigned to him ignoring her admonition. “When you speak with her, do it with some courtesy. I agree we need answers, but breaking Eleanor to get them is a thing I would rather avoid.”

  Virgil wanted to protest, but silently acknowledged he had done such in the past, permitting the beast inside to come when cases demanded it, but this case was different. Eleanor was different. If she harbored a beast the way he did, he understood the internal conflict eating away at her. Coupled with the distress she felt over her mother, Virgil felt certain Eleanor was close to breaking all on her own.

  “While I may have done so on prior cases, I don’t mean to now. I only know, were it me, I would want someone nearby.”