Unmasked Read online

  “Did you get on the internet?” her cousin asked.

  Lacey nodded. “I did indeed.” She finished the last of her comments, shut down her social media sites, closed the lid to the laptop and smiled up at her cousin. “I don’t know how many times I’m going to say it, but thank you for inviting me.”

  Her cousin smiled, waved a hand at her and said, “Are you kidding? I had to get you over here. All I’ve heard about all these years is how much you wanted to visit Pompeii.”

  “When I found out you were here, I did hope I might get an opportunity to come. I could have made the trip sometime in the last five years, if I’d really tried harder. But you know what it’s like. Sometimes the money and time just don’t sync up together.”

  “More like both went into caring for your mother.”

  Lacey’s smile fell away. No reason to argue with Chana’s statement because it was true.

  “You’ve also been working your ass off to keep your mother’s medical bills paid,” Chana said. “You deserve a vacation more than anybody I know.”

  At the second mention of her mother, Lacey’s shoulders sagged. “I was happy to do it. I wish all the money had gone to something beneficial. At the end, all we could do was manage the process so she could die peacefully.”

  “Finding out you’ve got breast cancer at that late stage, there really isn’t a whole lot anybody can do.”

  “True, but she fought the good fight. It just dragged on to a painful end. It was sad because she was still so young.”

  “She was always quite …” Chana fell silent, and then she shrugged. “There’s no real easy way to say it, but your mom never seemed to quite recover from your father’s death. Maybe, in the end, she was happy to go.”

  Lacey nodded. “As much as I hate to admit it, I think you’re right. Dad died a good ten years ago, but she never got over the loss.”

  “And I think, at that point, maybe slowly, but a definite shift in the roles happened between the two of you. You know we’ve talked about this many times. But your mother became more and more dependent on you, as if she was already taking that one step across the line. As if she were waiting for you to be old enough so she could join him.”

  In spite of Lacey’s attempts to hold back her tears, they still burned in the corner of her eyes. She gave a misty smile to Chana. “And, in that case, I’m very happy to think she found him.”

  “Me too.” Chana walked to the fridge, opened it and pulled out a bottle of wine. “Will you have a drink with me?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She poured two glasses of chilled white wine and brought them to the table. The women clinked their glasses gently together with a cheer to the days in front of them.

  “Now that you’ve relaxed a little bit, what kind of problems are you having on the dig?”

  “It’s really hard to say,” Chana said, “but definitely a couple of unexplained accidents that shouldn’t have happened. Like, a wall more than strong enough to be standing on its own suddenly falls, tools go missing, one long-handled shovel snapped in half.”

  Lacey frowned.

  “See what I mean? Nothing major in each event, but it adds up. Some of the locals working with us say we have a site with bad juju to it.”

  Lacey laughed. “Wouldn’t that be something? Almost like a scary movie where you excavate something horrific,” she joked.

  But her cousin was serious when she replied, “We have to accept that not everybody holds our views, and some people here are very superstitious. Compounding that are the thousands of buried people who lost their lives here, and it’s their graves we’re disturbing. That can bring on a lot of different beliefs and fear factors.”

  “I hadn’t considered that,” Lacey said. She nodded slowly, thinking about what it would be like to live in a world where religious beliefs were being tampered with by strangers, foreigners who came into your country, your world, and were, maybe in their minds, desecrating graves of their ancestors. “I guess it’s a balancing act between the locals and the tourists and the researchers, isn’t it?”

  “It is, and that’s stressful. You get down, emotionally, mentally. If some unknown person is causing trouble, you look at everyone else suspiciously,” her cousin said wearily. “This started over a week ago, after we opened up one new section of the dig. But there’s nothing new or unusual about that area. It’s another house we opened up. So far, we’ve reached a room in the back, but it’s empty as far as we can tell. Quite possibly it’s only a storage room.”

  “So it’s likely not connected to what you’re doing but maybe more about the fact that you’re even in that corner perhaps?”

  Chana opened her mouth to say something, but two men walked into the apartment, and the women’s conversation was over.

  Chapter 2

  After introductions, the group set off for the restaurant. Dinner was a little later than planned. By the time they walked into the small café and ordered, it was almost nine o’clock. But then it was Italy, and that seemed to be pretty normal for them.

  Lacey was in love with everything she saw—the atmosphere, the smells, the cheerful happy voices. Very little vehicle traffic occurred in this area, but there were loads of foot traffic.

  They sat outside in a small enclosed patio, people from the dig site on both sides of the long narrow table, and watched the world go by as they waited for their meals to arrive. Before the food came, the rest of the dig crew arrived. Lacey was quickly introduced to the gang and was told several more would arrive in a few days.

  “It’s a popular time for vacations among the interns,” Tom said. “One’s traveled to a wedding, and one’s gone back for a family vacation.”

  Lacey loved hearing the insights into these people’s lives. And this archeological-dig life seemed so normal to them. And yet, to have a job like this was anything but normal to her.

  When her pasta arrived, she was enthralled at how pretty it looked. After the first bite, she fell in love all over again. “This is fantastic,” she mumbled around a mouthful.

  Chana laughed. “It is, isn’t it? It’s also one of the cheapest places here. In the midst of a heavy tourist spot, we have to watch where we eat. Otherwise our budget money doesn’t go very far.”

  “What about buying groceries and cooking?” Lacey asked.

  “We do that too. We always have breakfast at home and make our own lunches, but dinners out are just the perfect thing at the end of a very long hot day.”

  Agreed. How many times did Lacey come home from dealing with a classroom of difficult kids, their homework laden in her arms, knowing she had hours and hours of marking to do, and the last thing she wanted was to cook a full meal? “I tend to go for salads at a time like that.”

  “But it’s hard to keep functioning in a physical job on just salads.”

  She winced. “Never thought of that.” Her pasta was made with olive oil, fresh tomatoes and some local cheese she’d never heard of.

  It was simple fare but extremely tasty. When she finished her meal, she pushed away the empty bowl, picked up her glass of wine and settled in to listen to the conversations. There had been a lot of muted discussions about the troubles at the site. She could hear some but not all of it. She was at one end of the table, so it was hard to hear the conversation at the other end. She leaned closer to her cousin and said, “They seem to be worried.”

  Her cousin nodded. “They are.” But she didn’t elaborate.

  Not wanting to intrude or to bring up issues while they were still in public, Lacey sat quietly. By the time they made it back to the apartment, she thought they were all returning to the same place but then the group split into two.

  Back in the apartment she was still keyed up and didn’t think she could sleep, but she knew her cousin was desperately in need of rest. Not only had the worry of the day taken its toll, but Chana had put in long physical hours.

  After Chana finally changed into her pajamas, she lay down in bed. �
�I know you probably still aren’t ready to go to sleep yet, but I’m just beat. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lacey said. “I can sit here in bed on my laptop for a little bit. I should be tired, but jet lag is a funny thing.”

  “See you in the morning.”

  Lacey wandered through the internet, stopping at her favorite news sites and then checking out her daily horoscope. She read them with a wry expression, always wondering how much these people got paid to make up this stuff. But, every once in a while, they noted something so on target that Lacey found it very difficult to completely dispel astrology. As it was, all her horoscopes had mentioned her upcoming trip. Sure, she was reading into it what she wanted to, but it was interesting to see what they would say. The weekly one though caused her a little concern. Danger stalks your footsteps. Be careful. Be extra-vigilant. Don’t trust anyone.

  Lacey slowly closed the lid on her laptop, tucked it on the floor beside her bed and pulled the blankets over her. That last horoscope was hardly guaranteed to help her sleep. Still, she was someplace she’d been trying to get to for a long time, and it was hard for that euphoria to calm down.

  Eventually though, she did fall asleep. She woke several times in the night to audible footsteps in the strange space. At one point, she got up and walked out to the living room to see who was up. But the area appeared to be empty. The bedroom door to the other room, where the two men slept in similar beds, was closed. Lacey could have sworn she’d heard somebody leave. And, of course, they could have. They could have walked right through the living room and out the door. It wasn’t like she had come out of her room immediately.

  She looked out the window to see a city covered in darkness. Enough lights were all around to shine in an odd, eerie glow. But nothing was ominous about it. To her fascinated gaze, it was just one more fantasy element to her trip.

  She turned and walked back to her room, feeling an odd chill to the air. She dashed into her bed and pulled the covers up. The bedroom was warm, intensely so. Eventually she fell asleep again. When she woke, it was six a.m. Her cousin was already up, making coffee from the wonderful aroma reaching her nose. Lacey quickly dressed and joined Chana in the kitchen. “What time are we starting?”

  “We’ll try to be there at seven,” Chana said calmly. She poured Lacey a cup of coffee, placing it on the table. “The earlier we can work the dig, the cooler it is.”

  “That works for me.” Breakfast was granola with yogurt and fresh fruit. She enjoyed it. At home she tended to either skip breakfast or to grab a piece of fruit or toast as she raced out the door. She knew it wasn’t healthy, but sometimes she didn’t care. She was so busy that breakfast seemed too much effort.

  By the time they had packed up and were ready to go, she was beside herself with impatience. Her cousin just laughed at her.

  “Look at you. You’d think we were going on some big trek or something. We’ll cross to the gates and head up to the site. It’s a fifteen-minute walk.”

  Lacey bounced from side to side. “But that’s okay. You know how I feel about this.”

  “I do indeed,” Chana said, shaking her head. “What I don’t know is why?”

  “I can’t explain it rationally,” Lacey said.

  On that note, they left the apartment, walked down the stairs and outside.

  Lacey continued, “But I’ve had a ton of dreams, and I’ve always felt drawn to this place.”

  Her cousin nodded, watched the traffic, led Lacey across the road and moments later they walked through the ruins.

  Lacey gasped in joy. “Just look at it,” she cried out. “How can anybody not stop and stare?”

  “I’ve done this trek a thousand times,” Chana said, “and it never fails to astound me how advanced the society was for their time and how absolutely devastating the volcano eruption was.”

  “That’s the thing to remember, isn’t it?” Lacey nodded, rushing to catch up with her cousin. “All of this joy inside me came about because of a great human catastrophe.”

  “Well, technically it was Mother Nature’s catastrophe with an extremely high count of human devastation.”

  They kept walking until Chana pointed out Stabian Gate. “This is the entrance we use. This gate, in itself, is very famous.” She launched into a historical recital about when it was unearthed and opened up in the early 1800s, but it wasn’t until the early 1900s that people came back to do more. “Pompeii is a never-ending archaeological site,” she explained. “And still probably ninety percent of it is buried.”

  At that, Lacey studied how much was open and unearthed. “It’s absolutely amazing that so much has been excavated already.”

  “It is,” Chana said. “And it’s ongoing. A vast number of houses and walkways and tunnels and markets are left to be explored. But it won’t all happen in my lifetime.”

  That hint of sadness in her cousin’s voice had Lacey turning to glance at her. “Is that just the passage of time you feel, marking your life, or is something else going on?”

  Chana looked at her in surprise. “Nothing is going on. Why? Did I sound sad?”

  “Yes, you did,” Lacey said with a laugh. “I was afraid for a moment there that you had some sort of illness you hadn’t told me about.” Her cousin didn’t answer, so Lacey pushed the issue. “If something was wrong, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?” Her cousin had been off all morning, pensive, as if thinking about all the problems at the site—or something else. It was the something else that bothered Lacey. “Right?”

  “Of course I would,” her cousin rushed to reassure her. “You know I would.”

  Lacey frowned, not sure she believed her cousin. “How is your family, by the way?”

  “You’d probably know better than me. I understand Mom attended your mother’s funeral, but I haven’t talked to her much since then.”

  “I saw your mom a few weeks ago, before I left.”

  “Did she know you were coming over?”

  “Not until I told her,” Lacey said, remembering she found that odd too. “I wondered if you were going to tell her.”

  “I don’t think at that point you had booked your flight, so I held off, in case something came up and you didn’t come.”

  It was on the tip of Lacey’s tongue to ask why Chana hadn’t wanted to let her own mother know about Lacey’s arrival here in Pompeii. But it wasn’t any of Lacey’s business. Chana and her mother. There was a distance between them from way back when. They were more cordial strangers than relatives.

  Chana’s mother, Lacey’s aunt Charlie, had married four times already. Chana had walked away from any remaining relationship with her mom somewhere around the time of the second husband’s divorce, not approving of her mother’s system of catching her next husband or those individual partners. But Chana had gone her own way early in life, so she had a tough edge to her, whereas Lacey was the nurturer. She’d stayed home to look after her mother, and losing her had devastated her. She’d buried herself in her work and in the kids she loved so much.

  “Mom is Mom,” Chana said. “I learned early on not to get too involved or to tell her too much. She reads things into the conversations that I never intended.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Can you? Aunt Millicent was absolutely divine. I’d have done anything to have had her as my mom,” Chana said. “I’d have given everything for that kind of a relationship.”

  “I’m sorry. I know Aunt Charlie wasn’t the easiest to live with.”

  “Not in the slightest,” Chana said. She motioned up ahead. “We’re just around the corner.”

  Lacey had been busy looking around and keeping track of the conversation, but there was just so much to see. She knew she’d be dazed this whole two weeks, just sitting and absorbing the completely different geographical looks to the place. So much history was here, and so much of the finds they uncovered here on a day-to-day basis were steeped in personal stories. She said out loud, “Two weeks won’t
be enough, will it?”

  “Nope, not even close.” Her cousin glanced at her and grinned. “What happens if you don’t go back in September?”

  “I won’t have a job,” she said simply. “I could stay for the summer though.”

  Her cousin nodded but didn’t say too much. “We’ll see how it goes,” she said.

  “Besides, it’s not your decision anyway, is it?”

  Her cousin shook her head. “Nope. None of us ever has job security here. These are all charity foundation projects. I know I have a job for the rest of this calendar year, but, past that, it’s anybody’s guess.”

  “Hey, at least you know that much,” Lacey said with a big grin.

  “Absolutely,” Chana said. “Some things in life are just what they are. One day at a time. That’s what we work on here. But it’s a slow process. There’s only so much we can excavate.”

  “And you must get value from your finds, whether intrinsic or economic or historic.”

  “Which is why you’re here,” Chana said. “Take pictures, find the story of what we’re unveiling and make it real. Something people can relate to.”

  “That’s a tall order,” Lacey said lightly. “Pictures, yes. Maybe a story, yes. But making it magical so everybody can relate? I don’t know.”

  “I do. Our photographer isn’t coming back. We’re not paying you because we can’t afford to,” she said.

  Lacey interrupted her. “You know I don’t want a paycheck.”

  “Good thing,” Chana said cheerfully. “Because there’s no budget money. But, at the same time, you could make a huge difference here, and I think it could lead to an incredibly valuable change in your career, if you wanted, if you did it successfully. You’re very talented in many ways. I know you think you suck but you used to be a great sketch artist too.”

  “Ha, I haven’t done any artwork in a long time. Besides two weeks isn’t terribly long though to accomplish all that.”