“The seeds are remarkable samples for their age,” said Rogers. “They’d probably sprout again if we planted them.”
“What are they?” she asked.
“These”—he held up two tiny seeds, pressed into the flesh of his index finger—”are Prunus maritima, beach plum, native in ocean sand dune habitats from Maine to Delaware, and Oxycoccus macrocarpus, large cranberry, native to marshy areas of northern North America. The Native Americans of New England introduced cranberries to the Pilgrims in the 1600s as a food, and it helped save their butts. And this,” Rogers said, holding up the shell, “is the North American hard clam, also known as quahog. Mercenaria mercenaria. Indigenous to the eastern coast of North America from Canada to Florida. The Native Americans of New England used them for money. Called them wampum. So if all these items were scooped up in the same place, it was most likely somewhere along the North American coastline from Maine to Delaware.”
Her mind was yanked three thousand miles away.
The legendary King Arthur, a man whom historians had been seeking for fifteen hundred years all over Europe, was buried in a simple Native American burial mound on a barrier island beach somewhere just a few hours from her apartment. She started to laugh. The three scientists’ brows all furrowed.
“Why is that funny?” asked Rogers.
“It’s just strange,” she said. “We really appreciate your help.”
“Yes, we really do,” said Anthony.
“Can we keep these?” Rogers asked.
“You can keep those two seeds,” she said.
“Where did these come from? We’ve never seen samples this old,” said Rogers.
“We can’t share that info, Doc, sorry,” said Anthony. Rogers frowned. She collected the shell and remaining seeds and put them back into their sack, which she then stowed in her purse.
“Let us know if you change your mind about that,” Rogers said. “You’ve got a bit of a scientific treasure here. We would like to know where we can find more of these.”
Carys just smiled and nodded.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
“Looks like I’ll finally get to see America,” said Dafydd as the three of them walked back to their car.
“What are you talking about?” Carys asked.
“We should probably try to catch the night flight out of Heathrow,” Dafydd said. “We can make it if we leave right away.”
“You’re going nowhere,” she said. She looked at Anthony, who hadn’t said much. He knew he would not be invited, and he didn’t look like he was going to volunteer.
“He should go,” said Anthony. “You’ll need help.”
“I have plenty of help back home,” she said. “I managed to survive this long without you both.” Anthony winced.
“I’m going,” said Dafydd.
“You can do what you want, but I think it would be a mistake for you to come back with me. You’ll just be in the way,” she said to Dafydd.
It killed her to speak the words. As much as she craved his body again, even at that very moment, she knew he would be excess baggage back in America. Frank Marshfield’s boss was likely still looking for her—and would be as long as she had the manuscript and the tomb and the treasure remained unfound. She didn’t want to drag either man any further into the mess.
When they got back to the apartment, she retreated to her room. The bed sheets were still a tangled mess, and she wanted nothing more than to climb back in and beckon Dafydd to join her. She pulled off the sheets and pillowcases, bundled them on the floor, and put the blanket back on. She laid out her belongings on top of the blanket, taking an inventory to make sure that nothing had been left behind.
She refolded her clothes and shoved them into the overnight bag, followed by the manuscripts and the bag of Dark Age golden jewelry. Then she reconsidered. If she was caught by customs with these, she’d be detained indefinitely.
She carried the bag of jewelry out to the living room. Anthony was reading on the couch, and Dafydd was sitting at the dining room table typing on his cell phone.
“Anthony,” she said. “I need you to do something for me.” He looked up from the couch where he was reading.
“Of course,” he said, hopeful.
She walked over and placed the sack in his hands. It clanked. Dafydd’s head jerked up when he heard the sound.
“Morfran took almost all the treasure out of Arthur’s tomb when he retrieved his corpse,” she said. “So this might be the only remnant of the great treasure of King Arthur.”
Anthony’s jaw went slack.
“I need you to hold onto this until I call you and tell you we’ve found the King’s burial site,” she said. “Once I know we can secure it, I need you to call the British Antiquities Ministry and tell them where we found this.”
Anthony looked like he might cry with happiness. The jewelry and this request were a bond between them, the first in thirty years.
“The buoys will still be there,” she said. “The cave is slightly to the right of where the buoys pointed. Huge flat rock right in front of the entrance. It looks like…” She racked her brain trying to remember what that rock formation had reminded her of.
Lestinus formed faintly next to her father on the couch.
“Stonehenge,” he said quietly. She looked at Lestinus directly.
“Exactly,” she said out loud in Latin, and smiled at Lestinus before she could check herself.
Anthony raised an eyebrow at her. “Who are you talk—”
“Stonehenge,” she said. “It looks exactly like one of the monoliths at Stonehenge. You literally can’t miss it.”
She turned to head back into her bedroom, leaving the two men speechless.
Despite the ungodly hour back in Boston, Annie picked up on the first ring. She sounded like she might cry when Carys told her she was on her way home.
“I’ll hopefully be back tonight if I can make it to the airport by this afternoon,” she said.
“How is your father?” asked Annie.
“He’s fine,” she said. “He was actually…uh…he was helpful.”
“Who could have predicted that? Someone very wise no doubt,” Annie said with an audible grin.
“Shut up.”
“Absolutely,” Annie said.
“I’ll call you in half an hour with my flight info.”
“I’ll pick you up at the airport,” said Annie.
“You don’t have to—”
“I know, but I’ll do it anyway,” said Annie. “Love you.”
“Love you back,” said Carys, and hung up.
She put the last of her belongings and the remaining shells and seeds into the bag next to the manuscripts. Those she could get through customs without a problem. At some point, once this was all sorted, she’d need to give the Morfran manuscript back to the British authorities as well. She was, she realized, more concerned with breaking antiquities law than being an accomplice after the fact to murder.
Lestinus watched her silently.
“You must never feel guilty about what happened on the boat, Carys,” said her hallucination. “There are worse things than killing.”
She nodded silently to him and left the bedroom. The two men were sitting at the dining room table now. They’d obviously been talking.
“I have to go,” she said.
“Please tell me when you’ve gotten home safely,” said Anthony, rising from his seat. “I need to know you’re okay.”
“I will. I promise,” she said. She put down her bag and took a step toward him. “I will be in touch. Please keep your eyes open and your family away from your house until we’re in the clear. Both of you. Someone is still out there, looking for us. And for those.” She nodded down at the sack of artifacts on the table.
“I will,” said Anthony.
“Maybe, when this is all over, I’ll come back for a proper visit,” she said. Neither one of them made a move toward the other. “One where no one is trying to kill us or anything.”
She smiled at him. His eyes were red and beginning to fill with tears.
“Carys,” Anthony said, taking that last, final step into the space between them. He grabbed her with both hands and held her so tightly against his chest that she couldn’t breathe.
“My beautiful girl,” he said softly. He released her and turned away.
She turned to Dafydd, who sat watching them both.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” Dafydd said, and got up. She kissed Anthony on the cheek again.
“Thank you for all your help. If we find him, it’ll be your find, too. Put that jewelry somewhere very, very safe,” she said.
Anthony nodded and looked away, embarrassed by the tears now streaming down his face.
Dafydd walked behind her as she left the apartment. They walked in silence down to her rental car, and she tossed her bag onto the passenger’s seat and turned to find Dafydd moving her into an embrace.
“Dafydd,” she said, “last night was amazing.”
“Yes, it was,” he said, grinning down at her. “You can’t expect me to just let you go.”
“You’re going to have to,” she said. “I have work to do. You know that. When this is over, maybe we can try to figure out some way—”
“Way to what? See each other? How romantic. No, you’re heading home. You’ll forget all about me,” he said.
“There’s no way I could do that,” she said. “And the three of us are bound. If any of us talks about what happened this week, mentions it to anyone, we’re all at risk. None of us can ever walk away from that.”
“You can,” he said. “You live thousands of miles away. I don’t know where you live or where you work. I didn’t even know your real name at first. You could just disappear.”
“Finding me would be the easiest thing in the world,” she said with a smile.
As the words came out of her mouth, she got a cold feeling in her stomach. This was a true thing. Anyone could find her in a minute. For the first time, it occurred to her that it might make sense not to go home. Maybe she’d hole up for a while at Annie’s until the search was over. Or she gave up on it.
Dafydd was still holding her, the heat from his arms and belly making her sweat.
“I have to go,” she said.
He bent down and kissed her, softly and deeply, and her knees literally went weak. She grabbed onto him more tightly to steady herself, and they kissed for a long minute. It took all her strength to pull away from him.
“I will see you again,” she said.
He simply smiled and backed away as she got in the car. As Carys drove away, she looked in the rear-view and saw him raise his hand goodbye.
Trading the living for the dead.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
As she approached Cardiff, Carys finally called Harper. She told him about the lab results on the shell and the seeds, and she could hear him smiling across the phone connection.
“Remarkable,” he said. “All this time. Right under our own noses.”
“There’s still a hell of a lot of terrain to cover,” she said. “At least Morfran’s journal didn’t use a damn poem. I’ll need to do a more thorough reading of the manuscript to see if we can tease out any more clues as to specifically where Morfran made landfall.”
“I’ll start research on the tribes of that era,” said Harper. “It’s funny. I know everything about what was going on in the British Isles at that time, and I know absolutely nothing about what was going on in the land under my own feet.”
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Getting through passport control at Boston Logan International Airport was a long but relatively painless process. There was no extra scrutiny of Carys’s fake passport—they obviously didn’t run it through the international database of stolen IDs. As a white woman with a Christian name, Carys had racial and religious profiling as her ally. She pocketed the passport, patted the bag of shells and seeds in her pocket, and strode through the waiting throngs at the exit into the main terminal. She scanned the faces.
“Carys!”
She jerked her head to the right. Standing directly behind the barrier was Annie, waving. She walked straight to her and grabbed her in a bear hug across the waist-high metal barrier.
“Keep moving along, miss,” said the security guard behind her. “Please exit the area.”
She pulled away from Annie, who was grinning wildly and looked like she hadn’t slept in a few days. Carys jogged around the barrier and over to Annie again, and they embraced a second time.
“You look good!” said Annie. “How is that even possible?”
“I managed to sleep on the plane,” she said. “You look tired.”
“I’ve been worried sick, bitch.”
They walked, arm in arm, out of the terminal toward the parking garage. They climbed into Annie’s car. She chose her words carefully as they drove through the twisting, logic-free streets around the airport.
“We found it, Annie,” she said. “We found his tomb. It was right where the manuscript described.”
Annie did her best to keep her eyes on the road, but Carys could see she was jolted.
“Oh my god,” Annie whispered. “Was the body there?”
“No. Someone moved it. Fortunately, he left us directions. That’s why I’m back. We think he moved it here.”
“Wait, Boston?”
Carys couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
“No, but pretty close. We think somewhere along the coast.”
“Where?” asked Annie.
“That’s the million-dollar question, right? According to the manuscript that we found, he’s in a Native American burial ground on a barrier island or peninsula somewhere along the northeast coastline. That’s all we’ve been able to make out so far. There are sand dunes. That’s it. We just have to figure the rest of it out.”
“So it’s really just a process of elimination then?” asked Annie.
“There’s a lot of coastline,” she said.
“Did you see any sign of Frank Marshfield? Any chance he followed you to Wales, or followed you back here?”
Carys stared through the windshield into the shifting landscape of the highway. She could feel the cold waters off the coast of Bardsey. She could taste the metallic, salty panic as she struggled to breathe. Could hear the splash of Marshfield’s body as it was tossed into the ocean.
“Carys? What happened?” Annie asked, staring at the side of Carys’s face.
“I don’t think I can—”
“Jesus,” said Annie. She inhaled sharply. “Tell me when you’re ready.”
Carys needed to change the subject.
“I met a man.”
“Did he try to kill you?”
“No. I had sex with him.”
Annie’s face broke into an enormous smile, a smile that always made Carys feel fifteen years old again.
“When did you have time to get laid?” Annie asked.
Carys started to laugh.
“Well, it was in the middle of the night. I didn’t really have anything else planned at that hour.”
“Oh, that’s good. I’m glad to hear that you weren’t being distracted from your mission. What’s his name?”
“Dafydd. I probably will never see him again. But he sure has left a fine memory,” she said.
“I’m glad to hear it. How were things with your father?”
“He was fine,” she said.
Annie flashed her a smile. “I’m so glad I called him,” she said. “By the way, they let Harper out of the asylum.”
“Already? I just talked to him this morning. He sa
id they were just considering it.”
“When he found out that you were coming back, he somehow managed to convince his doctor to discharge him immediately,” Annie said. “And I think there might have been some mention of a lawsuit. He hired a police detail at the house for protection.”
Carys frowned. At least Harper would be safe. But what about her—and Dafydd, her father, Annie? She let the Boston landscape drift by, wondering when the man who sent Marshfield would dispatch the next goon to come after the King.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Martin Gyles sat in his leather recliner in his mahogany-paneled library overlooking the lights of Piccadilly Circus. When he couldn’t sleep, this view usually relaxed him, but it wasn’t working tonight. He spun his silver Montblanc pen between his fingers and flexed his feet up and down nervously several inches above the ancient Oriental rug that nearly filled the large room. The Lagavulin 30 neat sat untouched on the desk in front of him. He stared down at the drunken tourists milling around the statue below.
Where the fuck was Frank?
He reached over and flipped on his desk lamp. His reflection appeared, bald and wide-eyed, like a giant bug, in the room’s picture window. It gave him a start.
He’d been calling Frank’s burner phone for the past two days. He wasn’t even getting a ring tone on the other end. His texts were no longer registering as delivered. It was like the guy had fallen off the face of the planet. As had Jones, her father, and the diver. The men he’d sent to Aberdaron the day before had found no trace of any of them—it was like they’d never been there. The man he’d sent to Jones’s father’s home yesterday had found no sign of the father or his family. Something had gone very wrong.
This left him with a significant problem.
The client who had hired him to retrieve the manuscript from Jones was threatening to pull the deal entirely and find someone else to do it. This person—man, woman, group; he didn’t know who it was—was growing increasingly agitated. This person had been exceptionally skilled at keeping him-, her-, or itself hidden. Which was bad. It reduced his options for recovery if things went south. He could always convince people to do what he wanted as long as he knew who they were. He could identify their weak spots, their vulnerabilities. But he had no such leverage with a nameless, faceless client. He made a mental note to never make this mistake again.
The Ghost Manuscript Page 29
