The slender man chuckled, but did not stop working. The sun beat down on his darkened skin and raven-black curls, but still he did not slow. “One of these days, Panhsj. One of these days. If they see you, you might be demoted to doing our wash with the women.”
I harrumphed. “Not likely. They know I’m worth any two of these others.”
My friend finally stopped, chisel in hand and stone hammer at the ready. He turned to look at me with anger in his dark eyes. “I don’t understand you. You take what you want, what you haven’t earned. You choose not to share with your brother… your family, and now you insult me with meaningless boasting while you drink the water Sacmis brought me.” He shook his head.
“Khasek, you are taking things too far—”
“No, you take things too far, Panhsj!” Khasek shouted, his curls bouncing just over his shoulders. His dirty, animal-hide kilt quivered, dancing at his knees from the rage he barely held in check. “Just like you stole Amun’s betrothed, bedded her, and left her and Amun to raise your daughter.”
“Amun’s my brother. We share everything. Why not women? Besides, it isn’t my fault if he can’t keep his fiancée’s passions contained.”
“You got her drunk!” Khasek roared.
“That doesn’t matter,” I said, waving off his concern and tipping the jar to my lips.
“Sacmis is my betrothed. She wants me and served me as a favor. That drink is flavored with her own honey.”
“And it’s good,” I chortled.
“It is mine. I work and earn my place. Who are you to take my gifts?”
“I am your friend, Khasek, always and forever. Why are you so angry?”
My friend’s jaw clenched, framing his broad beak of a nose. He stood to his full height, a good six inches taller than me had I been standing. In the entrance, his head blotted out the sun, leaving his face in darkness. “You take your brother’s betrothed’s flower, leaving her with your seed. You take Sacmis’s gifts. Will you next bed her?” Khasek loomed over me, his hands clenching his tools as though he’d carry them into the afterlife.
A fleeting sense of fear passed through my mind, but it was gone before I finished taking another gulp of the honey-blessed water. “Well, I won’t pursue her, Khasek, but if you can’t keep her reined in, you never know whose bed she might wind up—” Before I could finish my joking comment, Khasek plunged his chisel into my skull and a sharp pain jolted me, but then I felt little more than a muscle spasm as he jerked the tool free. I fell to the ground, staring at the dry, cracked surface of the mountain mere centimeters from my eyes. The clay jar cracked when it hit the ground, the blessed liquid mixing in my bloody hair and washing the joking smile from my face before being absorbed into the soil.
“Dammit, Panhsj! It didn’t have to be this way,” Khasek muttered. The sound of his stone hammer tapping a skillful rhythm on the chisel began again until all sounds faded to nothing.
* * *
“Did you see something?” Dr. Mayna asked, her voice anxious. “Did it work?”
I nodded and licked my lips. “Got any water?” I asked, but almost refused it when she retreated to an office and brought back two, offering flavored or regular. “Regular, please regular.” The honey-flavored water had tasted good, but the memory was fresh in my mind. Finishing half the bottle, I could have sworn there was a metallic aftertaste, almost as if I could taste Panhsj’s blood.
“His name’s not Jack,” I stated and took another drink. Jessie and both the professors leaned in like cattle drifting to one side in their sleep just in time for a cow-tipping event.
“Go on,” Dr. Kamal said, unable to restrain himself after watching so thoughtfully.
“It’s Panhsj.”
They both nodded, but Jessie’s face contorted. “What the hell kind of name is Panhsj?”
Dr. Kamal frowned and placed a hand on Jessie’s shoulder. “An honorable one. It was my great-great-grandfather’s name. It used to be common in Egypt.”
Jessie’s face reddened with embarrassment. “Sorry, professor.”
“Dr. Kamal, I’m afraid Panhsj wasn’t making any friends, and he wasn’t too honorable. I’m sure your great-great-grandfather was a good man, but Jack here, aka Panhsj, impregnated his brother Amun’s fiancée and seemed to be pretty good at pissing people off. From what his friend Khasek said, Panhsj took whatever he wanted. He was also pretty lazy and had an ego the size of the moon.”
Jessie smiled. “Damn, a man after my own heart.”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,” I added. “He got his brother’s fiancée drunk in order to steal her virginity. What kind of man does that?”
Jessie’s smile turned down at the edges. However, it vanished when Dr. Kamal turned a glaring frown on him.
“Jessie,” Dr. Kamal said in his thick, Egyptian accent, “you and I, we will talk.” Gripping the back of my friend’s neck, the visiting professor forcibly escorted him out of the labs.
Dr. Mayna watched with an expression that seemed caught between horror and laughter. Then she turned back to me, and the wide-eyed, childlike curiosity returned to her eyes. “So what did he do? Who killed him? What happened?”
It took longer than it should have to answer her questions, and we wound up grabbing two cushioned stools alongside the windows in order to continue the interrogation. She was intrigued by anything and everything: the sights, smells, tastes, and especially the emotional mistrust in the relationship between Panhsj and Khasek. After the first few answers, she pulled a notepad out of her lab-coat pocket and began jotting down my answers in some version of shorthand. It took an hour before she was finally convinced to move on, saving the rest for later. Surprisingly, Dr. Kamal and Jessie still had not returned.
“So, Dr. Mayna, what do you know about Jill?” I asked, rising from my seat and stretching my stiff knee. “I’d like to move on. This is taking quite a bit longer than I anticipated. I’m happy to help, but still have a killer on the loose and less than four days to find her.”
The professor nodded and strode back between the skeletons, her low heels giving a subtle click with each step. “Well, there’s not much to say about Jill. She’s from the same period as Jack. They were excavated at the same time and from the same worksite. Hence the connection with the names. Aside from that, we can tell she was young, but nothing else seems out of the ordinary. Sickness, maybe?” she said, speculating.
“Maybe. Not sure I can help with her. Panhsj—or Jack as you know him—was murdered. It seems the bones of the wound were able to keep the memory.”
“Yes, it would seem so,” Dr. Mayna replied, her skepticism all but gone, but I sensed an undertone of shock and disbelief, as though her mind and emotions were in conflict. “If you’re right, and you already tried the corpses in your murders, the bones might still hold some memory of the horrible killings, but I doubt it. Fire changes the chemical composition of things.”
“Yeah, you said that before,” I mumbled, scanning the floor in despair. “It explains why I got nothing from the victims’ charred skin and the bone fragmen—wait.” I glanced at the professor and held up a hand, waving it as though emphasizing each syllable I spoke. “We got to the last four victims before they were completely burnt. What if their skin doesn’t hold a clue, but their bones still do? Could that be possible?”
Dr. Mayna thought for a moment and frowned. “It’s possible, Detective Drummond—”
“Alex, please.”
“Fine,” she replied, acknowledging the interruption with but a word. “It’s possible, Alex, but from the looks of those photos, the bones aren’t the same anymore.”
“But they’re still bones,” I said, struggling to hold on to some semblance of hope.
“Yes, they are,” she said with a nod, “and it’s possible. You’re dabbling with something few people believe and even fewer have experience with. However, it isn’t likely.”
My chin fell to my chest and I stared at Jill’s skeleton. Only the top layer of dirt
had been removed. They’d excavated the entire block of ground surrounding her body, leaving the bottom half of the bones submerged in hardened dirt and freezing her position in death better than any picture could have. Something nagged at me, tugging at the back of my mind and making the back of my head tickle. I scratched it and continued to assess the skeleton. It—she didn’t look content. It may have been the low-hanging jaw or the partially bent legs, but each thing I analyzed I dismissed a moment later. Then my focus landed on her hand and the nagging itch turned to pain as something jerked a clump of hair from the back of my head. I jumped and spun around, expecting Jessie to be up to another practical joke, but instead of a person, a small clump of hair drifted to the tiled floor.
“What is it?” Dr. Mayna asked.
I rolled my head from shoulder to shoulder, popping my neck, then took a deep breath and let it out. “You’re still taking in the whole visions thing, right? Not really sure about me, although, I’m pretty sure you believe more now than before.”
Dr. Mayna gave an embarrassed frown. “Can you read minds now too?”
I shook my head. “No, just people. You don’t want to know what that was.”
Her brows knitted together in confusion. “What do you—”
I waved the question off. “You’re not ready for it. Just trust me.”
She shook her head with hesitance and took a deep breath of her own.
“Take a look at her hand,” I said, pointing more to divert her attention back to the task at hand more than anything. “This is probably the position she died or was buried in right?”
Dr. Mayna nodded and leaned in.
“Is it just me, or does her hand look like it’s clutching something. The fingers—they’re not relaxed. They’re positioned as though encircling something. See, her thumb isn’t even visible; it just disappears on the underside of the dirt.”
“Yeah, but so do most of her other fingers. How can you tell her hand wasn’t relaxed?”
“Well, rigor mortis sets in—”
“I know about rigor mortis,” she said, rolling a finger for me to get on with it.
“Rigor mortis doesn’t go away for twenty-to-thirty hours, and it looks like in this case she was buried as is. The dirt kept her skeleton in place, and you can see that all of her fingers at the base of the knuckle—”
“The proximal phalanges,” Dr. Mayna supplied.
“Yes, those are all in line. When your hand curls at rest, they aren’t all aligned like that. It’s unnatural.”
“So you’re saying…?”
“That she might have something in her hand,” I finished.
Dr. Mayna’s eyes widened. She grabbed a brush, a small pick, and a narrow chisel from a wooden box of tools in her office at the corner of the L-shaped room. The box was old and looked like it could have belonged to Galileo. Then she began scraping the dirt away from each side of her hand, trying to uncover Jill’s thumb and whatever was inside her curled fingers.
I watched with anxious curiosity, thinking to myself, This must be what it’s like at a dig, never knowing what you might unearth. Soon, the end of something long and cylindrical revealed itself, one brush stroke at a time. A rounded, wooden cap stuck out from Jill’s hand looking cracked and petrified. “What is it?”
She shook her head and brushed away more dirt from the small cavity she’d created. “It can’t be,” she whispered.
Ten
Jill’s Secret
September 16, 2011
“What is it?” I asked again.
“A… a container… It looks like a small, cylindrical container, although it could be a cylinder seal.” Prying more dirt from the base of the cap where it met the skeleton’s thumb, Dr. Mayna said, “Oh wow! It’s not a cylinder seal. It really does look like a container, like a small case for something.”
“Like for scrolls and old documents, right?” My hand itched to reach out and touch it. The thought of what it might reveal was both intriguing and scary. “She might have died for this.”
“She might have,” Dr. Mayna confirmed.
Unable to restrain myself, I asked, “Can we get it out?”
“Not right now. To do more, I need to get a camera set up and gather my team. This has to be recorded. It could be incredibly valuable. Who knows what’s in it, what it might tell us about Jill’s past and the culture of her time? Unfortunately, being subjected to the weather, water, heating, and freezing, it doesn’t look like the wood held up that well, but the wax seems to still be in place. They sometimes coated the insides to waterproof them, so who knows if whatever’s inside is still legible?”
I licked my lips and felt another tingling sensation on the other side of the back of my head. I nodded, ignoring it. “Okay, I’ll do it.”
“What?” Dr. Mayna asked.
“There’s another way,” I mentioned, “to find out right now.”
Dr. Mayna glared up at me. “We’re not desecrating these remains. To break any of the skeleton’s bones would be sacrilege.”
Another yank pulled more hair from my scalp. I winced, but didn’t turn around. “I w-wasn’t thinking that,” I stammered. “I have a feeling there’s more to this than you realize. I think Jill was murdered.”
Dr. Mayna’s eyes drew to slits. “Detective Drummond, everything you came up with about Jack was interesting, but I have no way to verify it. I don’t know whether to believe you or not. Everything you said seemed genuine, and I have to admit that I was excited by it, but it was almost too good to be true.”
“Let me try,” I pleaded. The fear of experiencing yet another gruesome death had been overshadowed by curiosity and what I could only assume was Jill’s ghost prompting me the only way she could.
“Look, you’ve been very helpful, but this skeleton is off limits now. I see no evidence of foul play. The other one I wanted you to look at is over here.” She turned, gesturing to the third, most-broken skeleton I’d seen upon entering. From a few yards away, it appeared as though they had mismatched some of the bones, but my gaze found its way back to Jill’s skeleton and the cylinder cap protruding from her hand. Dr. Mayna’s last brush stroke revealed ornate carvings around the edge and across the top, but there was too much dirt encrusted in it to tell of what. A curious swirl caught my attention and I brushed the dirt away with my thumb. Immediately, the aroma of aged leather wafted to my nose. The pressure of a hand settled onto my shoulder. Then Jill, Dr. Mayna, and the room swirled into blackness.
* * *
“Sacmis, you can’t be this way. What will the others say? All over Set Maat, it will be said that you left me for him. I will be shamed,” pleaded a voice I knew.
The darkness dissipated, replaced by twinkling stars over a desert valley, the brief light of the crescent moon painting the cliffs and bedrock an off-white.
Khasek shook his head and stepped toward me, his black curls dancing around his strong jaw. The whites of his eyes bore into my soul when he loomed near, and the sweet smell from the dried clove he was chewing drifted to me. “Give it back,” he demanded, holding his hand out for the cylinder. “The letter in it was meant for you, not all of Set Maat.”
“I don’t care. I love him,” I cried in a language and feminine voice that wasn’t my own. Warm tears flowed down my cheeks as though attempting to match the currents of the Nile, and I clutched the wooden object tighter. In my other hand I held a quivering knife, its blade extended toward the man.
“You cannot. You belong to me!”
“I’ll show your confession to the elders, Khasek. We are not married. I can—”
“You can do nothing without my permission!” Khasek interjected and pried the knife from my hand. I then realized the ornate curls of the engraved wood cylinder were leaving a painful impression in my right palm and knew what letter he was referring to. I tried to calm down, to loosen my grip enough to assuage the pain, but thoughts of the small case vanished when Khasek ran the edge of my knife along his own cheek, the sha
ped-rock blade trimming a swath of his nightly whiskers. “This is mine now,” he whispered, “until you learn to use it without threatening to hurt people.”
Questions flew through my brain as I tried to decipher the situation, but they were overridden by the growing panic and fear in Sacmis’s mind. “Please let me go,” I pleaded in a mournful whisper.
“Go where?” he asked, his eyes glazed. “Panhsj is dead. Before, I could understand you wanting to run after him, but now you know the truth. There’s nowhere to go, no way to get to him.”
“But I love him!”
Khasek shook his head and tsked. “I do everything right, treat you like the queen herself, as good as a goddess, and still you love him. Maybe I should have done it sooner. Maybe then even Amun’s wife wouldn’t have been desecrated by his touch.” He paused and brought the tip of the shining, black blade to my bare shoulder. “Did you and he ever touch?”
I tried to continue looking at him, into his angry eyes, but the answer forced my gaze to turn toward Set Maat, where torches flared along the paths and the rectangular-walled borders. I didn’t answer.
“You did,” he said with a chuckle and pressed the point into my skin, his hand shaking with rage. “You laid with him, didn’t you?”
I glared at Khasek, the truth helping me find support and keeping me from collapsing under quaking knees. “No, I didn’t,” I hissed. “I loved Panhsj in a way you’ll never understand, and this…” I held the cylinder up to his chest, mimicking his position with the knife. “This will be my release. When Anubis weighs me, Maat’s feather will prove my truth and my love. Osiris will welcome me into his home with Panhsj at my side. You will fail. The people of Set Maat, my family and yours, will know what you did.”
His teeth clenched, the edge of the dried clove peeking from between his flattened lips. “I do not fail,” he swore.
True fear blossomed in my stomach as he clamped a hand over my mouth and with the other slid the knife blade across my throat. Panic and pain mixed with the blood and air in my throat. I gurgled, struggling to pull a breath through his tight fingers. I grabbed his arm, but it held firm until I was coughing blood and sputtering. Stepping back, he allowed me to stumble away until I fell at the base of a large palm tree on the outskirts of the walled town, the broad leaves breaking up the moonlight streaming overhead. I felt a warm, thick fluid coating my neck and chest, soaking into my white gown.
A Life of Death: Episodes 9 - 12 Page 5
