Buried Secrets

by Kristi Belcamino

  Out at the site, they were introduced to their new partner, Australian archeologist, Danny O’Brien, who had the ruddy cheeks and blonde hair of a surfer.

  “Good day, boss lady,” he said with a grin. “It’s an honor to meet you. You’ve been a bit of a legend in my circles since last year when you first shared your theory about Taposiris.”

  Dallas blushed. “No offense, but your circles must be mighty small if I featured prominently in them. And I’m not your boss. Not even close.”

  He laughed. “Let me show what I’ve got started while we wait for Mr. Randall. I’ve been told he will arrive tomorrow?”

  Dallas nodded. “Yes, Sam is on his way.”

  She’d spoken to Sam the day before. The Daughters of Isis had paid for a private nurse to care for his mother while he came to Egypt and had purchased one of the surveying machines he’d helped invent.

  He told Dallas that he didn’t want to leave at first, but his mother insisted. She was “ridiculously” excited for him to go, he said. And besides, his older brother’s leg was doing much better so he should be able to take over driving and caring for their mother soon. Dallas couldn’t wait to see him in Egypt.

  Meanwhile, O’Brien directed them towards a large tent where the survey equipment had been set up.

  “This will allow us to look deep underground. And with Mr. Randall’s equipment we should be able to locate any underground tombs or chambers.” He frowned.

  “What?” Dallas said, instantly on alert.

  “We will wait to confirm with Mr. Randall’s program, but we did stumble on something yesterday that could possibly put a crimp in some of our plans.”

  His furrowed brow worried Dallas more than his words.

  He pointed to something on the screen.

  “An aquifer?” Colton said.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Dallas exhaled loudly. “That could be a problem”

  “Yes,” O’Brien said. “We won’t know until we get in there.”

  “Let’s do it. Show me what you want me to do.”

  O’Brien laughed again. “My dear, I am your assistant. You are in charge here. I am at your disposable.”

  For a brief second fear raced through Dallas but then she felt Colton reach for her hand and squeeze it and she pulled back her shoulders and pulled out a chair in front of the screen.

  “By my theory, we should concentrate our first efforts over at this spot.” She pointed. O’Brien nodded.

  She went on to explain and then the crew got to work.

  That night, when they returned to the hotel, sweaty and exhausted, Dallas and Colton ordered room service and each turned into their respective beds.

  The next day Sam arrived.

  He came mid-day so he rented a car to take him to the dig site. When it pulled up, Dallas dropped everything and ran to him. When he stepped out of the vehicle, she barreled into him and gave him a bear hug.

  He drew back with red cheeks.

  “Sam Randall, am I ever glad to see you!”

  He smiled and shook his head. “This is freaking awesome!” He looked around. “I can’t believe I’m here.”

  Dallas smiled. “I can’t imagine doing this without you!”

  She led him directly into the tent where he met O’Brien and got swept up in another hug, this time from Colton.

  “I don’t think I’ve been hugged so much since my confirmation,” he said.

  Danny O’Brien pushed out a chair. “Do you mind if I bring you up to speed on what we’ve been doing?”

  “Can’t wait.”

  The two men pored over the computer monitors discussing what they were viewing in low voices. After a few minutes, Sam stood and turned to Dallas and Colton. “I’ll go grab my gear, but this could be tricky. An aquifer could be a problem. But maybe we can figure out a way to dig around it.”

  For a week, the same pattern followed. Each night after a long day at the temple excavating at what felt like an excruciatingly slow pace, Dallas crawled into bed exhausted and fell instantly asleep.

  That didn’t mean that some days she would watch Colton at the dig and marvel at how damn attractive he’d become to her. Every once in a while, he’d catch her looking and smile and she’d feel a little wobbly. But her attention always returned to the dig. Keeping track of the maps and special equipment was all encompassing. They had little time or energy for anything else. It was both exhilarating and exhausting. Each day brought some little find that reassured Dallas she was at the right temple.

  For instance, a little bowl or tool or piece of jewelry here and there that could be traced back to Cleopatra’s time. The more artifacts from Cleopatra’s time, like the coins, that could be tied to the dig site, the more likely it was that the Queen of the Nile was buried there.

  On the eighth day, the crew made an amazing discovery. Dallas had been surveying the site from the highest spot, the same spot she’d gone to the first day she’d visited Taposiris. While she was up there she noticed that there was something odd about the ground that lay between her and the actual beginning of the temple. It was lumpy and uneven land. There were sunken rectangles dotting the ground. The shapes of graves.

  By the end of the day, every crew at the temple had relocated to the area and were digging. By sunset, the first mummified body had been unearthed. And it appeared there were dozens more. It was an entire cemetery. And if this mummy represented all of them, the bodies were posited toward the temple.

  “Colton? Colton this is huge.”

  “I know.”

  The positioning of the mummies was like a big neon arrow pointing to the temple indicating that an important personage was buried there. Not important like a rich businessman. Important like a king. Or queen.

  Just then one of the crew members shouted. Dallas and Colton ran over. Beside the mummy was a cloth bag full of coins.

  Directing the crew, the bag was brought over to a tarp and carefully opened with Dallas’s gloved hands. Coins spilled out. Dallas smiled. They featured the same profile of Cleopatra that the other coins had, but they also had another face on the opposite side. Marc Antony.

  O’Brien ran over.

  “Mama mia!” he said, whipping off his hat and slapping his leg with it. “I’ve never seen the likes of this before. Coins with both of them?”

  It was rare enough that Cleopatra had coins minted with her own profile, Dallas thought, but to have them made with Marc Antony’s as well, was astonishing.

  Dallas leaned down. Underneath their images were the words Osiris and Isis, respectively.

  “She really did believe they were the incarnation of gods, didn’t she?” Dallas said, her voice full of marvel.

  Colton nodded.

  “Another sign that you are on the right track, my dear,” O’Brien said.

  “I just feel it in my bones,” Dallas said, standing and giving a long whistle. Her foreman, Eban, who was kneeling overseeing the excavation of the first mummy, looked up and gave a wave before heading over.

  “What do you think of this?” Dallas asked Eban when he got to her side. The Egyptian man was tall and lanky and had black hair pulled back in a long ponytail. His face was dark from years working on dig sites. Eban was known to be the best excavation foreman in Egypt. Dallas trusted his judgment, after all he’d been working Egyptian digs for the past thirty years.

  He was also the only one in the crew who didn’t act as if they were afraid of her. Dallas blamed it on the death of the worker last year. Secretly, she worried they blamed her for it.

  This new crew did an elaborate ritual each morning before they began to work. It seemed both religious and superstitious at the same time. Dallas tried not to pay attention so the men would have privacy in whatever it was they were doing each morning. But she couldn’t help but notice that every once in a while, one of them would look her way. And seemed afraid.

  Now, Eban knelt and examined the coins and then sat back on his haunches, wiping his brow. �
�It says Osiris and Isis, but it is the likeness of Cleopatra and Mark Antony.”

  “Yes. That’s what I think, too,” Dallas said her voice rising with excitement.

  O’Brien nodded. “We need to call the ministry. What with the mummies and these coins? I think this calls for an extension to our permit. It’s going to take at least a month to figure out exactly what we have here.”

  Dallas’s chest filled with hope. This was what she’d needed. Some concrete proof that she was on the right track so the dig would be extended. Boom.

  She looked up in triumph to meet Colton’s eyes. He smiled.

  “Let’s do this, Jones.”

  They spent the rest of the day making a plan about how to excavate the cemetery. But the entire time Dallas was thinking past that. If the mummies were pointing toward the temple, that’s where the tomb was.

  Before they turned in for the day, she left the tent where the planning meeting was going on and climbed back to the elevated spot where she’d first spotted the sunken ground indicating the graves.

  If she were the queen and wanted a religious spot where would she locate the tomb in the temple? Dead center, right?

  However, Cleopatra also needed to keep her tomb a secret so that meant she would not locate it where everyone would expect it right? So where would she have it? What was most dear to Cleopatra? Egypt. Ruling her country. She sacrificed it all for her country. Gave her life for it and her children. And what represented Egypt to Cleopatra? Alexandria. She would be buried in the corner of the temple closest to Alexandria.

  Dallas just knew it.

  Everything Cleopatra did was symbolic and so especially when she was planning the most important and last act of her life—where she would be entombed. And now, based on what the Daughters of Isis had told her, Dallas knew that there was even more reason for Cleopatra to keep the location of her tomb a secret.

  The fate of the world depended on it.

  Dallas eyed that corner as the last sliver of sunlight moved across the temple. A dark cloud drifted overhead, putting the temple I shadow. Dallas peered upward. It would soon pass. And it did. Just in time for the last sliver of sunlight to light up that corner.

  It was a sign.

  She would start digging at that spot first thing in the morning.

  Sixteen

  Dallas hardly slept. The corner of the temple seemed perfect for so many reasons.

  As she tossed and turned, Dallas couldn’t stop thinking about the temple. It had been abandoned as a dig site years before, but why? In many instances, governments would deliberately shut down a dig site or purposefully leave it unexcavated. Sometimes it was to preserve the sites for future generations. Makes no sense to me, Dallas thought. In other cases, it was to preserve the way of live for nearby residents–in other words, protecting their homes and lives from the disruption a major excavation could cause. But why exactly did excavation stop at Taposiris?

  Dallas got out of bed and logged onto her laptop Three hours later, she’d located a possible answer in an obscure online magazine by a conspiracy theory group. According to this group, one of the workers had talked to their magazine staff off the record. He said that the dig had been shuttered because workers had found evidence that the temple was damned.

  A stone tablet with hieroglyphs had been found while excavating a corner of the temple.

  Damned. What did that mean? Cursed? Maybe, Dallas thought. And what corner?

  Dallas quickly flipped through her files, scanning dates of past digs. The first true excavation had begun in 1985 and then abruptly came to a halt in 1986. Yes. That was the last time the temple had been excavated—the year workers found the tablet.

  That’s when Dallas realized why the workers at her dig did an elaborate ritual and acted fearful at times. She thought it was because of her, they were wary of her because she’d been in charge of the last dig when a man died. Now she realized they weren’t afraid of her. They were afraid of the curse or believed the temple was damned.

  She’d speak to Eban about it first thing in the morning, but for now Dallas was excited. This seemed to be proof that Cleopatra was buried there.

  The sky was growing lighter when Dallas crawled in bed, setting her alarm for an hour later. She needed to at least try to get a little sleep before they headed out. It was going to be a big day.

  She kept thinking about the curse and about the dig site being damned. A trickle of fear ran down her scalp. It wasn’t a real curse. It was simply a tale constructed to keep grave robbers away during ancient times. It was a way for Cleopatra to keep her tomb safe and sacred and undistributed.

  Even though she tried to convince herself of this, Dallas fell into a sleep rife with mummies and zombie-like creatures chasing her through underground passageways.

  The next morning when their car arrived at the temple, the guards were not positioned at the gate. A police car was parked closer to the dig site in the parking lot above.

  Fear shot through Dallas.

  She leaped out of the car when it stopped in the parking lot near the police car.

  Abet said something in Arabic to the police officer.

  The officer glanced over at Dallas and spoke in a low voice to Abet who translated.

  Apparently, the officer had been called out in the middle of the night to keep an eye on the dig site until they arrived his morning. When he finished speaking, he reached for the handle of his car.

  “Where’s he going?” Dallas asked, frowning.

  There was a flurry of words exchanged before Abet turned back to her. “He said now that you’re here he has to get back to work in the city.”

  “But who is going to guard the site?”

  Abet shrugged.

  “And where are the guards?”

  They quit, the police officer said before driving away.

  Dallas and Colton stood and watched the police officer drive away.

  Soon Sam and Danny arrived.

  They rushed over. “What’s going on?” Danny asked.

  Dallas explained.

  “Let’s go make sure nothing was disturbed,” Colton said.

  A quick survey of the area showed it was exactly as they’d left it the night before.

  The three huddled in the tent for a few minutes until they heard the sound of a vehicle.

  Sam and Danny stayed inside doing computer work while Dallas and Colton stepped out to greet the workers. But when they did, they saw that only one lone white truck had arrived. At that time of morning Dallas expected three beat-up trucks filled with workers. This was not good.

  Eban got out of the truck with one other man.

  “I’ll go speak to them,” Abet said.

  Dallas was impatient, but figured Abet wanted to speak to the men alone for some reason. She watched the small group. The worker, an older man with gray hair, looked over toward Dallas and Colton. Even from afar, Dallas could read the expression on his face. He was afraid.

  When Abet came back over, he explained.

  The guards had quit. They’d had the courtesy to call the police first. That’s why the squad car ended up out there overnight. The guards said their families had been threatened. They were told to quit or they would be killed. Apparently, every single member of the crew received the same threats last night.

  Dallas looked over at the lone worker standing with Eban.

  “Why did this guy show up then?”

  Abet looked down as he answered. “He is a man of honor. He said he was hired to do a job. But also, I think he is so desperate for money he cannot afford to quit.”

  Dallas thought for a second.

  “First off, both Eban and he shall get paid three times the wages of everyone else simply for showing up today. And tell him to go back and tell the rest of the crew that if they come back their daily wages are doubled.”

  Colton shot her a glance. While Abet walked over to convey the message, Dallas was filled with doubt. Had she just done a good deed or bribe
d the men to risk their family’s safety—and maybe lives?

  “That’s a lot of money,” Colton said.

  “We’ll make it work,” she said in a low voice to him. “I’m not going to pay these men slave wages. I didn’t know their circumstances were so dire. And they need that incentive if they are going to take the risk to go against somebody threatening their families. I don’t even know if I’m doing the right thing.”

  Colton put his arm around her. She hadn’t realized she was so close to tears until she felt his embrace.

  “Damn it, Colton.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said.

  She shook her head to clear it and smiled. “Thanks for your faith.”

  Her mind was whirring, doing calculations in her head about how much money they had left and how it would be spent. The Daughters of Isis had deposited a large sum into her account, but it wasn’t endless. But Dallas was determined to make it stretch. If it meant paying the men better and her doing without, so be it.

  The first thing she would do is downgrade her own accommodations. If Colton felt okay spending some of their precious funding on a fancy hotel room, fine, but she didn’t.

  She’d rather pay the workers more and stay in a place with a single bed and no Wi-Fi. She could head to the corner café for Wi-Fi if she needed it at night. But the way things were going, she usually came home too exhausted to do anything but eat and fall in bed and then was up again early the next morning. All she really needed was a bed.

  But right now, what they needed was to figure out how to keep the site guarded at night. Her brow furrowed as she thought. How would they find someone?

  “We can’t leave the site untended at night? Grave robbers will come.” Or worse.

  Colton turned to her. “You stay here and oversee the dig. I’ll go into town with Abet and he can help me find some new guards.”

  “Thanks, Colton.”