"Oh, but I love the ones you send," she assured him. "It wouldn't feel like my birthday without them." She gave him a mischievous glance. "What could be better than your beautiful camellias?"
"Something that will always make you think of them," he assured her.
"I can see her; she's down by the lake," Daniel Bradford said, looking through the window facing the dark lake. "I think your neighbor is talking to her. The short, blond fellow, the one whose name I can never remember."
"Valentin Jaus. Of course it would be him. He trots after her like a dog whenever she goes down there." Meryl sipped a dainty measure of bourbon from her glass. "He's walking her to the steps, isn't he?"
"He's not chasing her around them." Daniel chuckled. "I've seen the man from a distance, mostly in his car when it comes and goes, but I never realized how short he is. He's the exact same size as Jema." His voice grew thoughtful. "Is he interested in her?"
"He's nosy and pushy," Meryl told him. "That's all."
He might have been more, but Meryl had taken steps long ago to assure he never would be. She despised Valentin Jaus as much she had as his pompous ass of a father. Valentin Sr. had harassed her for years, calling to check on Jema when she was younger, offering his help where it wasn't wanted, and sending his ridiculous flowers to the house every year on Jema's birthday. It was as if the older Valentin had been trying to taunt Meryl: Happy birthday to your daughter, Jema. If not for me, she'd be dead.
Meryl had been overjoyed when the old man had died during a trip to Europe. Then his son came to take possession of the estate, and picked up right where his father had left off.
"You're brooding again," Daniel told her, coming over to take the glass of liquor out of her hand. "You're also drinking too much."
"You're right. What do I have to worry about? She'll probably live forever. You two can bury me." Meryl heard the soft buzz of the zone alarm as a door opened and closed at the back of the house. The sound had a Pavlovian effect; she instantly relaxed.
"There, you see?" Daniel patted her hand. "She's home, safe and sound."
"Don't patronize me." Keeping Jema safe and whole had been one of the two greatest torments in Meryl's life. Every day was precious; she held on to them and Jema with tight, unyielding determination.
Jema's job at the museum was an unnecessary risk. However, the situation had been unavoidable. It had been the result of the professional indiscretions of a renowned anthropologist in Germany, who had been forced to retire after allegations that included botching and falsifying the carbon dating of historically important specimens; every reputable museum in the world was reexamining their inventories.
Meryl Shaw had resisted the idea of having her husband's artifacts subjected to reexamination, but in the end was forced to concede to the board of directors. That they had offered the job to Jema only added insult to injury.
"Your father sacrificed his life for the museum," Meryl had told her. "A man doesn't do that to perpetuate fraud. Refuse the position."
Jema, who had followed the international uproar over the counterfeiting of antiquities, had defied Meryl. She felt there were too many sites around the world "salted" with artifacts of dubious origin in order to attract archeological teams, and she saw the job as a way to keep her father's name and reputation from ever being questioned.
The irony was that Jema had no idea that her father had committed one very large professional indiscretion. One that, if it became public knowledge, would ruin his name forever.
At least now I can get some work done. Meryl flicked the switch on her wheelchair and maneuvered it over to her desk. "Leave me alone, Daniel."
He replaced the stopper on the crystal liquor decanter. "No more bourbon, Meryl. Your ulcer has taken enough abuse this week." He bent as if to kiss her cheek, and then thought better of it and straightened. "I'll see you in the morning."
Meryl waited until Bradford had left before unlocking her desk drawer and removing the inventory files. In them were detailed lists of every artifact that James Shaw had brought back from his digs.
"It has to be in the last lot from Athos." She shuffled the lists and studied the one marked lot A-G240. "But where?"
The Athos dig had been the last she and James had worked together before his death. When he had first proposed the site, she had thought it a complete waste of their time.
"We won't find a village; it's in the middle of nowhere," she protested when her husband had shown her the position of the find. "Maybe some exile set up a goat farm, but there was nothing else even built there."
James insisted they go to Athos anyway. He had found a mention of the village charged with a sacred duty in a prayer scroll taken from another, more prestigious dig. The scroll hinted that the villagers bargained each year with the gods to win the gift of immortality. James also became convinced that there was an object involved, and after many comparisons to other ancient texts, he began to regard it as a Greek version of the Holy Grail.
"They were told to make this tremendous climb up a mountain every year, just after the harvest. Once they reached the mountain's summit, they presented the homage to the gods. If the gods were pleased, they would transform the homage into a powerful icon that granted one of the villagers immortal life." He laughed at her expression. "Yes, I know to you it's nothing but a myth. But the homage was real, material. Even Hesiod wrote of it, describing it when transformed by the Gods as a source of great power and beauty."
"It sounds like an early version of the Prometheus legend," Meryl said, trying to hold on to her temper, "with immortality instead of fire. What happened to this homage? Why did the ritual stop?"
"The usual: greedy gods versus greedy mankind. Too many immortals were made," James said. "The king of the gods became angry at the power they wielded over other humans. So he made the homage turn immortals' blood into poison, and cause their touch to be deadly to ordinary men."
"I suppose their hair became snakes, and their faces so ugly that to look upon them would turn you into stone?" Meryl demanded. "For God's sake, darling, listen to yourself. You're a scientist. You can't seriously start believing in fairy tales now."
"You'll see," was all James would tell her after that.
From the beginning, the Athos dig had a series of disasters. They had difficulty finding men willing to work the deserted mountainside site, as it was regarded by the locals as a combination of holy ground and the gates to hell itself. The men they could hire worked at a snail's pace, walking off the site at twilight and never returning. Then there was James's insistence on searching every cave they found no matter how small or insignificant; the mountain was riddled with them.
Meryl had refused to go back to the States when she discovered she was pregnant. Her family had disowned her the moment she'd announced her engagement to James, so they would have nothing to do with her. James was an orphan, so there was no one on his side to help her with the birth. Going back to Chicago would mean sitting in an empty house for the next seven months.
No, James had put this baby inside her, and Meryl was determined to stay with him until it was born.
"Women all over the world work up until the minute they give birth," she told her husband when he argued with her about remaining at the site. "Besides, this is going to be our life. Our child will go where we go."
It was toward the end of her pregnancy that Meryl noticed her husband was slipping away several nights during the week, waiting until he thought she'd fallen asleep before sneaking out of camp. She had tried to follow him more than once, but James always seemed to sense it and would circle around to come back to camp, acting as if he'd gone for nothing more than a pleasant evening stroll.
James had a new woman on the side, of course. Meryl had never enjoyed sex, so she didn't resent the other women. She had ignored them; she could ignore this one. And she had, until the day James found the Phaenon Cave.
Meryl stared down at the inventory list in her hands, her eyes wide and unseeing. Everything that had gone wrong in her life had started the moment James broke through the seal of the cave. She should have never stayed with him. If she had listened and come back to Chicago, she wouldn't be in this wheelchair, or this mess.
"This is it, this is the one," James had said as soon as the men had cleared the brush back from the rough slabs of slate rock that had been stacked and crudely mortared together to seal the entrance. "I knew it."
Meryl had been in a terrible mood. Her back had been killing her ever since she'd dragged herself out of her tent at dawn to accompany James to the dig. Because she had never had a child, she hadn't recognized the constant ache as labor pain.
"It will be just like the fifty other caves we've unsealed on this godforsaken rock," she warned him. "I'm beginning to think someone in nine thousand B.C. had a very twisted sense of humor."
Unlike the other caves they had explored, this one presented a unique set of problems. When the top half of the sealing stones were removed, so was the support for the soft soil above them, which immediately began to crumble. A support beam and struts had to be hastily fashioned and wedged into place before the entrance could be completely cleared.
Then there was the smell. Meryl was used to subterranean gases, but this one was particularly vile, as if the interior were filled with sulfur and something that had drowned and rotted in it. Every man who tried to enter the cave grew sicker with every step; after a few feet their eyes began streaming and they began to choke. Even James couldn't bear the stench.
"At last," Meryl said as she sourly observed the workers rushing into the brush to vomit, as she had every morning for the first three months of her pregnancy, "there is some justice in the world."
James refused to leave the site unexplored, and fashioned a mask for himself out of a cloth soaked in water and a pair of protective goggles.