“What, Dad?” I asked. “What happened here?”
“The last place I saw her.”
Sadie stopped pacing. She scowled at me uncertainly, then back at Dad. “Hang on. Do you mean Mum?”
Dad brushed Sadie’s hair behind her ear, and she was so surprised, she didn’t even push him away.
I felt like the rain had frozen me solid. Mom’s death had always been a forbidden subject. I knew she’d died in an accident in London. I knew my grandparents blamed my dad. But no one would ever tell us the details. I’d given up asking my dad, partly because it made him so sad, partly because he absolutely refused to tell me anything. “When you’re older” was all he would say, which was the most frustrating response ever.
“You’re telling us she died here,” I said. “At Cleopatra’s Needle? What happened?”
He lowered his head.
“Dad!” Sadie protested. “I go past this every day, and you mean to say—all this time—and I didn’t even know?”
“Do you still have your cat?” Dad asked her, which seemed like a really stupid question.
“Of course I’ve still got the cat!” she said. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“And your amulet?”
Sadie’s hand went to her neck. When we were little, right before Sadie went to live with our grandparents, Dad had given us both Egyptian amulets. Mine was an Eye of Horus, which was a popular protection symbol in Ancient Egypt.
In fact my dad says the modern pharmacist’s symbol, Rx, is a simplified version of the Eye of Horus, because medicine is supposed to protect you.
Anyway, I always wore my amulet under my shirt, but I figured Sadie would’ve lost hers or thrown it away.
To my surprise, she nodded. “’Course I have it, Dad, but don’t change the subject. Gran’s always going on about how you caused Mum’s death. That’s not true, is it?”
We waited. For once, Sadie and I wanted exactly the same thing—the truth.
“The night your mother died,” my father started, “here at the Needle—”
A sudden flash illuminated the embankment. I turned, half blind, and just for a moment I glimpsed two figures: a tall pale man with a forked beard and wearing cream-colored robes, and a coppery-skinned girl in dark blue robes and a headscarf—the kind of clothes I’d seen hundreds of times in Egypt. They were just standing there side by side, not twenty feet away, watching us. Then the light faded. The figures melted into a fuzzy afterimage. When my eyes readjusted to the darkness, they were gone.