Channeling Cleopatra by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Page A

they were always finding parts
of the floor of this or that structure down here. But this time
there was something wedged between the stones, revealed by the
crack but still half buried in the muck. It was the curved belly of
a jar. Where its surface had scraped against the boards, pushing
them up as the tremor pushed it to the surface, the muck had been
stripped away, leaving a shiny white patch in the middle—the patch
that caught Duke's eye. The sheen was distinctive, though Leda had
seen very little of this substance outside of museums. It could
only be alabaster.
    She felt light-headed all
of a sudden, and her hands shook as she pulled her gloves from her
pants pockets and found that putting them on was like trying to hit
two moving targets. It was so inexplicably difficult she would have
dispensed with the gloves except no one dared dig barehanded in the filth exposed when
the sea was pushed back. She wondered if Moses had experienced the
same problem, warning the Children of Israel to be sure to don
protective galoshes before crossing the part God had provided in
the Red Sea. Reed Sea, she corrected herself. The Bible story had
been retranslated, and now they knew it was a sea of reeds, but the
original version was more poetic, as well as more
intriguing.
    Her hands protected, she
studied the exposed surface of the jar. It could be part of a
statue, a vase, or some other item, but somehow she just knew it wasn't. She was
being unscientific, silly, gullible to think what she was thinking,
but in her gut she knew what its true purpose was. And finding it
was a miracle, a genuine, certifiable miracle.
    From another pocket in her pants, she took a
small camera and a tape measure. Laying the tape measure atop the
jar, she snapped three shots, two bracketing the first. She looked
around like a criminal casing a likely house, but nobody was paying
her any attention so far. She turned the tape measure sideways and
snapped three more photos, then replaced camera and tape in her
pocket.
    Just for a moment, suspicion crossed her
mind. Had it maybe been salted here for her to find? Were the
others playing a trick on the newbie? Or maybe it had been put here
to impress Rasmussen so it could be "found" and the project
therefore made more worthwhile in the board member's eyes. But
nobody else was looking up or paying any attention, and she was
sure either she or Duke would catch onto the joke if that was what
it was.
    Maybe Duke was the one playing a joke on
her. If so, he'd have had to con someone else into planting the jar
for him. He almost never came down into the harbor bed. He said it
gave him the creeps. After the tremor, she knew just what he meant.
But he was pretty tight with most of the Egyptian guards and
workers. They liked macho old guys like him: friendly, amiable,
good storytellers, dangerous if crossed.
    Nah. He wouldn't play that mean a joke on
her. He knew what this meant to her. Besides, he knew he would find
sugar in the tank of his bike and both tires slashed the next time
he tried to ride it if he did such a dastardly deed to his baby. He
wasn't the only one who was dangerous if crossed, and he knew it.
She glanced back up at the dam again thoughtfully, just for a
moment. Pete now, he might do it, for malice, to run her off. But
he had become friends with the old man, and surely he was a shrewd
enough judge of character to figure out that a trick of such
proportions played on her would not endear him to her daddy.
    The hell with it. Her gut was jumping around
as if she'd swallowed a flea circus. If she was cool about this and
called the others over, then she would lose out altogether. Better
to extricate the jar and have faith in her knowledge that she would
be able to tell whether or not it was genuine.
    But, as she pawed the dirt and muck away
from the jar's surface with her gloved hands, a little brush, and a
very gently applied pocket knife to loosen the soil around the
vessel, she felt as if an elevator