Last Breath

3

H aving declined Louisa’s offer to show her through the house, Daria unlocked the front door. The recent rain and humidity had caused the jamb to swell, and as a result, it opened only reluctantly after a good shove.

The front entry was long and narrow, with stairs that came down along the left wall. There were parlors to the left and right of the foyer, both with fireplaces, and sheets covering all the furniture. Behind the second parlor was a library straight out of an English novel, with shelves that ran floor to ceiling, an ancient oriental carpet, and a mahogany desk that any antiques dealer would love to take to auction. Chairs flanking the fireplace were, like those in the parlors, covered with sheets. Daria peeked and found both were of well-worn dark brown leather. A spacious dining room just down the hall opened into a butler’s pantry and the kitchen. A small sitting room was off the kitchen, and a glass-enclosed conservatory lay beyond.

Daria was dazzled by all the space, the high ceilings and tall windows. She hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d told Louise she’d spent the last twelve years living in tents. She dropped her bag in the front hall next to the steps, and went into the kitchen carrying the canvas satchel that held the journals Louise had given her. There was a swinging door between the butler’s pantry and the kitchen, and it closed behind her with a slight whoosh.

The appliances were far from new, but Louise had assured her they worked. The cabinets were old but had been painted fairly recently. She opened one after another, pausing to examine the contents of each. A set of Fiestaware in colors popular in the 1930s, some pottery bowls, some glasses, but not surprisingly, no food.

She opened the refrigerator and noted that it had been turned on but stood empty. Behind the freezer door, ice trays had been filled. She popped a few cubes from a tray and slid them into a glass she took from the cabinet, then filled it with water from the tap. In the field, there were times when ice was more precious than gold. The first time she’d seen a refrigerator that dispensed not only ice water but ice cubes and crushed ice as well, she’d been fascinated.

Now, of course, such appliances were commonplace, and it seemed that every time she came home, there was more technology to be learned. For someone who owned so little, who spent more time in the past than in the present, the accoutrements of modern life were mind-boggling.

Daria had no such problems with computers, however, and used them in almost every aspect of her work. Remembering that she needed to charge her battery, she went back to the front hall, took her laptop from her shoulder bag, and plugged it into an outlet. She wandered upstairs, going from room to room, wondering which of her relatives had spent a night in this bed or that. It gave her an odd feeling, knowing that three generations of her ancestors had slept under this roof.

At the front of the house she found the master bedroom, complete with four-poster bed, bath, sitting room, and a balcony that overlooked the back of the campus. She thought of poor Iliana, who had spent many a night here alone after Alistair died.

Then again, maybe not, Daria mused. No one seemed to know much about Iliana. Maybe through her diaries and her husband’s journals, Daria would get a glimpse of the woman who had been her great-grandmother.

Daria went back to the kitchen, opened the canvas bag and took out all the journals. She sat at the kitchen table in the corner of the room and leafed through them, hoping to put them in chronological order. When she felt she had it right, she took the top leather-bound book from the stack and began to read.

The year was 1864, and fourteen-year-old Alistair had just read the epic in which life in the city of Shandihar was described, written in the sixth century.

There were houses several floors high, wherein dwelled the merchants and their families. There were slaves from the four corners of the world, and comforts such as cannot be described. There were foods such as we had not tasted, from cities far beyond the mountains, beyond the desert. And in the temple of the goddess, treasures unknown to any man…

The journal told how Alistair had been drawn in by the tale of the city of riches in the desert of Asia Minor, how he memorized every word ever written on the subject, and how, by the time he was twenty, he was convinced that not only had the city been real, but that he knew where to find it.

It took years, but in Benjamin Howe, he had finally found someone who believed him.

Daria closed the journal and rubbed her eyes, then glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was almost seven-thirty. She’d been reading since one. In her eagerness to get to Alistair’s journals, she’d declined Louise’s offer to join her for lunch. Now she needed dinner, and couldn’t remember where the dining hall was. She locked up the house and drove directly to the diner in Howeville, where she read over the notes she’d taken from Alistair’s desk while she absently picked at crab cakes and a salad. On her way back through Howeville, she stopped at the renovated train station and picked up a cup of rum raisin ice cream-large, since she hadn’t had this favorite in longer than she could remember-and returned with it to McGowan House. She took the last of the journals into the library where she removed a dusty sheet from an overstuffed chair and sat, reading and eating ice cream, long into the night.

For what had seemed to be hours, I dug through the dirt, where once bricks made of baked mud had formed walls. Upon the stone floor, beneath the sand, the mosaic outline of a woman was clear. With my hands, I brushed away the debris until the whole of her form was clear. She stood upon a lion, eagle talons where her toes should be and wings upon her back. In each hand she held an arrow, and upon her head was a tall crown. Around her, a ring of lapis lazuli formed a circle, and I knew immediately who she was, and what I’d found.

The Queen of the Night. Ereshkigal, the goddess brought from Mesopotamia by the earliest settlers of the city. The Queen of the Underworld.

I felt the breath leave my lungs as I stared upon the face of the goddess, a face that had not been seen since the great earthquake buried Shandihar beneath the desert sands…

Daria blew out the breath she’d been holding. The goddess Ereshkigal was well known to her, indeed, to anyone who’d studied the early cultures of the Near East. In Mesopotamia, she’d been the sister of Inana, one of three great goddesses. Once transported to Shandihar, however, she had become supreme, the only deity, one who demanded total fealty and expected nothing less than total devotion. Her priestesses had ruled the city in her name, and for several centuries, all passing through Shandihar had been required to pay a toll. It was said that by the time the desert had reclaimed the city, its treasure had rivaled that of Solomon.

Daria closed the journal and took another long look at the work notes Alistair had left behind, but the ink was far too faded to make much sense of them in this light. She finished the ice cream and took the cup and the journals into the kitchen. She closed up the house and took her belongings along with the canvas sack to the second floor. On the landing, she debated which room to sleep in.

“Oh, why not?” she said aloud, then went into Iliana’s room and switched on the light.

She took a long hot bath in the claw-foot tub, every word she’d read that day and night etched in her brain. Her great-grandfather had found an uncommon treasure. Much like Heinrich Schliemann had done in Troy, Alistair McGowan had used the tale of an ancient storyteller to find an ancient city. That he’d never doubted himself was clear in his writings, from the time he’d made his first journal entry as a teenager, until he was a man in his forties standing at the brink of an immense treasure. He’d never stopped believing that the city existed, and that he would be the one to find it. It had taken him four expeditions, but he’d been proven correct. Finding Shandihar had been his destiny.

Was bringing it to the eyes of the modern world hers?

“You understand how very costly this is going to be, Louise? It’s something the trustees have to consider.” First thing in the morning, Daria went to Louise’s office, and over coffee laid out her plan.

“I do. I’d be relying on you to appraise the collection so that we’d have a number to take to the bank for the loan.”

“I’m going to need staff. At the very least, to start, I’m going to need an assistant, preferably a fellow archaeologist who specializes in the region.”

“We have Dr. Bokhari on staff,” Louise said thoughtfully. “She’s out of the country right now supervising a group of graduate students on a dig, but I expect her back well before the start of the fall term. I’m sure she’ll want to be involved.”

“Sabina Bokhari?” Daria asked.

“Yes. Do you know her?”

“I know of her. We have mutual friends. I think she worked on a dig in Afghanistan several years ago.”

“She was on sabbatical then.” Louise nodded.

“And she’s on staff here?”

“She’s head of the archaeology department.”

“You’re very lucky to have her,” Daria said. “She has a fine reputation.”

“And you’re wondering why she’s here.” It was a statement, not a question. “I’ve asked myself that. Every time she makes an appointment to come to see me, I hold my breath, hoping that she isn’t coming in to resign.”

“Why didn’t you ask her to work on this project?” Daria asked.

“It did cross my mind. She’s certainly qualified,” Louise told her, “but once the trustees decided to go ahead, they felt it necessary to start immediately. Sabina had already committed to being out of the country for part of the summer. They also felt-as I do-it was fitting that a descendant of the man who found the treasures be the one to supervise the exhibition. And frankly, they wanted a bigger ‘name’ in the field. Your name alone will make this of interest in the academic community.”

“And if I’d been unavailable, or said no?”

“You still haven’t said yes,” Louise reminded her.

“I’m going to ask that you permit me to take an inventory first. If in fact the collection has been overstated, or if the artifacts aren’t in condition to be displayed, it may not be worth it for the university to invest so much-to mortgage itself, in effect-if the return won’t compensate.”

“You’ve read the journals?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know what Alistair described having found.”

“Yes. But what I don’t know is how much of it made its way back to Howe, and what condition it’s in. Let me take a look, and we’ll go from there.”

“All right.” Louise opened her top desk drawer. “Here’s the key to the building; this one is for the room you were in yesterday.”

“Thank you.” Daria reached out a hand for the keys. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to start.”

“Absolutely. Go. Good luck.” Louise stood and crossed her arms over her chest. “We’ll send you some lunch around noon. I expect you’ll forget.”

Daria had forgotten. It was Vita who’d brought her the covered dish with a chicken salad sandwich, an apple, some grapes, and two brownies-“Because one is never enough. I made these, and they’re amazing, if I do say so myself”-and a thermos of iced tea.

“How can you stand it in here? It must be a hundred degrees. And the dust!” Vita coughed for emphasis. “The air is just thick with it.”

“Is it?” Daria looked up from the desk where she’d been poring over the inventory Alistair had written. “I suppose I might have kicked up a bit, opening the crates.”

“So, is it as wonderful as you thought it would be?” Vita’s eyes gleamed in the overhead light.

“What? Yes. I suppose.” Daria stood and stretched. “I’ve only gotten through a few crates, but judging from what I’ve seen so far, it was a spectacular find.”

“How can you be so calm?” Vita frowned and peeked inside an open crate.

“If I let my emotions take over right now, I won’t be able to do my job.” Daria smiled and uncovered the platter. “Thanks a million for bringing this, by the way.”

“Dr. B. was afraid you’d get caught up in your work and forget to eat.”

“Dr. B. was right about that.”

“So is there anything you can show me?” Vita touched the paper wrappings in the crate hopefully.

“Sure.” Daria took a bite of sandwich, then got up and walked to the crate. She took out the object Vita had been poking. “This was a ceremonial goblet. See the figures here? The woman with the wings and the eagle talons for feet? This is Ereshkigal. She was the goddess around whom the culture in Shandihar was built. There were no minor goddesses, or-heaven forbid-gods. This was strictly a matriarchal society. Women ruled. And the most powerful women in Shandihar were the high priestesses of Ereshkigal.”

“What’s that in her hand?” Vita took a closer look.

“That’s a human head,” Daria told her. “With its tongue cut out. See how the mouth is empty?”

“Oh, Good Lord! That’s just gross.” Vita backed away from it. “Why did they put that on the cup?”

“Ereshkigal ruled the afterworld. Her followers believed that when you died, you came before the gates that separated heaven from hell. In each hand, you brought an offering to the goddess. And you would stand at the gate and tell of all the good deeds you had performed while you were alive.” Daria set the goblet on the desk and picked up her sandwich and took another bite. “The punishment for any transgression was to cut off the hands of the offender. Because if he showed up at the gate without an offering, he would not be admitted. Likewise, if he failed to tell of his good deeds, he would not get past the gate. So people who broke the law, or displeased the goddess or her priestesses, were punished by having their hands cut off, or their tongue cut out. Or both, if they’d been really bad.”

“No thirty to sixty days plus probation?”

Daria shook her head. “Not in Ereshkigal’s world.”

“Guess the rate of recidivism was pretty low.”

“Good point.”

“Okay, then. Guess I’ll head on back to the office.” Vita paused in the doorway. “Doesn’t this place give you the creeps?”

“No, why?” Daria frowned.

“No reason, I guess,” Vita muttered as she left the room. She stuck her head back in and said, “Dr. B. said to let us know if you need anything.”

“Will do. Thanks.”

Daria rewrapped the goblet and placed it back in the crate, upon which she’d drawn a large number one. On the inventory sheets, she’d located each object she’d found in the crate, and marked it with a number one to designate where it could be found. She moved through crates two, three, and four, and by the end of the evening, her heart was beating so fast she was afraid it would beat out of her chest. Not because of what she’d found, but because of what she hadn’t found.

She worked through most of the night, and into the morning. Louise had stopped by with a box holding some dinner, but Daria had not uncovered it. By ten the following morning, Daria was exhausted and shaking with dread. Telling herself she needed to open every crate before panicking, and admitting that fatigue might be getting the best of her, she relocked the room, then the front door, and asked Louise to assign someone from campus security to guard the building through the night. She returned to McGowan house and slept for six hours. She got up, showered, changed her clothes, and returned to the basement, this time asking Louise to join her.

“I realize you’re busy, but if you could spare me a few hours,” Daria had asked.

“Of course. What would you like me to do?”

“I need a hand with the inventory,” Daria told her without voicing her suspicions. “But you might want to change your clothes. And bring some bottled water. You might get thirsty.”

Louise did just that, and for the next ten hours, crossed off the artifacts as Daria unwrapped them. At the end of the day, Daria sat at the desk and covered her face with her hands.

“Daria?” Thinking the archaeologist was overcome at having handled so many priceless objects in one day-as she certainly was-Louise patted Daria on the back and said, “I know this is overwhelming, but imagine what Alistair must have felt when he first found these objects. It’s like a fantasy, gold and jewels and treasure like you dream about when you’re a child and read of such things. Remember the story about Ali Baba and the forty thieves, and their cave of treasure? I feel as if I’ve walked into it. So I don’t blame you for being blown away. God knows I certainly am.”

“Louise, is there anywhere else on campus we might find other pieces from the collection?”

“No, why?” Louise frowned. “No. Nothing was ever taken out of this room.”

“I’m afraid that’s not true.”

“What do you mean?” Louise put down the golden mask she’d been admiring and turned to Daria.

“Some of the objects that should be here, according to Alistair’s notes, are missing.” Daria ran an anxious hand over her face. “I went through everything last night, but there are items that are not accounted for. They’re on the inventory, but not in the crates. That’s why I asked you to help me go through it all again today. I needed to make sure.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that between the time Alistair inventoried his find and today, someone’s made off with some very important artifacts.” Daria’s face was white.

“Are you certain?” Louise looked stunned. “Daria, you counted the crates. There should be fifty-seven. There were fifty-seven, correct?”

Daria nodded her head.

“And you yourself removed the seals from those crates,” Louise continued. “The inventories prepared by Alistair show check marks next to every item. And every item was checked. So why would you think something was missing?”

“Several items checked off on Alistair’s list are not checked off on mine. So unless some of the objects were removed and placed elsewhere in the university, or sold…”

“There is no record of that,” Louise insisted.

“Then I’d have to say they were stolen.”

“Stolen!”

“I can’t think of any other explanation. As you pointed out, the crates were sealed and Alistair’s inventories show that every item was checked off by him-found, examined, then rewrapped and repacked in its shipping crate. But see here…”

Daria pointed to an entry and read aloud. “Two large solid-gold griffins clutching arrows, lapis lazuli eyes and rubies at the mouth.” She looked up at Louise and said, “There should be two. There are none. Not in this crate, not in any of the others.”

“Maybe we missed them somehow.”

“I’ve looked through every crate twice. When I asked you to give me a hand, it was to help verify my findings. I thought perhaps I was tired; maybe I’d overlooked a crate or two. Which is why I started marking the crates with an X on the corner after you and I went through the contents and checked off every item.”

“Maybe we should go through it all again. Maybe something was misplaced, returned to the wrong crate and you only think we missed it.”

“We’ve spent an entire day going through every single piece that’s here,” Daria said wearily. “I’m convinced.”

“Then convince me,” Louise told her. “We’ll take one more day.”

The two women worked until nine that night, then locked the room when they went for dinner. The dining hall had long since closed, so they cleaned themselves up as best they could and drove into Howeville for pizza, which did nothing to revive either of them. They agreed to leave guards posted overnight, and to resume working at eight the next morning.

By three the following afternoon, Louise had to accept what Daria had been telling her for the past twenty-four hours. None of the missing items had been found.

“I’ll call the police.” Louise patted her pockets for her cell phone.

“No, not for something like this.” Daria shook her head and starting searching her purse for her wallet. “You’re going to need the FBI, not the local police. I met someone who works for them. I have his card in here somewhere, and if it’s all right with you, I’d like to call him…”