Unmasked Read online

  “Well, two weeks will give you plenty of time to take many photographs,” Chana said. “Afterward, when you’re back home for the rest of your summer vacation, how you pull it all together and present it, now that’s a different story.”

  Lacey thought about that as they approached the wide-open dig. It went down approximately twenty feet at one side and was only about ten feet deep at the other. Some of it was surface level. It was fascinating because it looked into several houses, a stone walkway between them—those stones laid by hand by people and used to build roads and homes and businesses from centuries ago.

  Lacey walked up to the first building and placed her hand on one of the cornerstones, amazed at the sense of homecoming she felt. And yet, there was no reason for it. Maybe it was just the years of wanting desperately to come here.

  She sat down—more a leaning against the cornerstone—and studied the world around her. “It’s amazing how much you’ve done,” she said.

  “Oh, no, it’s not,” Chana said. “It’s slow. We can’t use any heavy equipment in this area, so it’s all done by hand. Lots of trowel work.” She tossed a laughing look at Lacey. “Don’t worry. You might get roped into doing some of that too.”

  “I can’t say I’ve done much hard physical gardening-type work in my life,” she said, “but you know I’m up for anything at least once.”

  “Well, no complaining if you do, you’re forewarned,” her cousin said. She walked to a far corner. The site was approximately fifty feet by maybe sixty-five. “I’m working on the house over here. We’ve unearthed the kitchen area. Little bits of pottery are showing up. We’re identifying each piece, tagging it for the foundation to take back to the center to do some research. I highly suggest you get out your camera gear, take a bunch of test photos, figure out where and what lighting you need, how it’ll work with all this rock, so you can get the best photographs possible.”

  With the reminder how she was here to work, Lacey put down her bag and pulled out her camera. She’d splurged on new lenses before coming over, money she could ill afford with her mother’s estate still hung up.

  But the probate process was already many months in, and she did have enough money to handle her day-to-day needs because of her own teaching position. Only she’d thought her mother’s mortgage was paid off, and it wasn’t. Her mother had never once mentioned it. That left Lacey covering the costs of her mother’s house atop Lacey’s own monthly bills, along with everything else pertaining to her mother, including her funeral and medical expenses, out of Lacey’s own pocket. She’d taken a big hit. The legal paperwork had just gone through a couple months ago that had given her access to her mother’s bank account. That had gone a long way to ease things while paying her mother’s ongoing bills.

  As Lacey put the strap around her neck and took off the cap, checking the light around her, her cousin called out, “Is that a new camera?”

  “No. It’s the same SLR I’ve had for about two years, but I did buy a couple new lenses.”

  “The lenses cost more than the camera, don’t they?” her cousin asked in a dry tone. “Remember how we told you not to spend too much money on that stuff for this dig?”

  “It gave me an excuse to buy the lenses I’ve always wanted,” Lacey said, mollifying her cousin, who appeared to be irritated at the concept. “Besides, it’ll take some practice shots for me to figure out the lighting and the subject matter.”

  “The other photographer only had a simple point-and-shoot camera,” Chana said, waving at Lacey’s camera with all the fancy lenses. “You’ve got a lot of money tied up in those.” She chewed on her bottom lip, as if considering how much Lacey had spent.

  “Are you worried something’ll happen to my gear?” Lacey studied the bag at her feet, frowning. Indeed, she had a lot of her money tied up here. And it wasn’t insured.

  Her cousin shrugged. “Like I said, we’ve had some incidents around here. Could you at least make doubly sure you look after your stuff? I’d hate to see you, or your camera gear, have any kind of mishap.”

  Her cousin’s wording was kind of odd, but obediently Lacey closed up her camera gear in its camera bag, but it had double shoulder straps, more like a backpack. So she wore it on her back and then walked around the area. She focused first on the rocks, trying to get the different striations to show up with only the natural light. With so much gray in those rocks, she wanted to highlight the light bouncing off each one in this pathway between the two buildings. It was stunning to think how many people had walked on each of these stones. How many years these blocks been here, helping people to go where they needed to go? Then in hiding, until brought into the light again.

  Thinking of the hands that had touched each of these stones, she lost herself in her work, snapping photographs of her surroundings. She started wide, laying a grid of what she would be looking for as reference points later. Then she went in closer, making a grid out of each quarter section.

  By the time she put down her camera and reached for her bottle of water, it seemed everybody else had shown up for work too. She walked over to join them. There were smiles and a couple of teasing comments about the size of her lenses. She’d heard it all before. “What are you all working on this morning?” Lacey asked. There was a sudden silence. She raised an eyebrow. “Did I say something wrong?”

  They shook their heads. “We’re chipping into a new section this morning,” Tom said, “if you want to take some photographs before we start.”

  She walked over to the indicated area, about eight feet long, three feet wide at the one side and about five feet high. “If this is a room, why the strange shape?” she asked as she picked up her camera and clicked. The roof was slopped off to the side.

  “We suspect something’s underneath it or in it, but we don’t have any way to know until we get there.”

  Tom, Mark and two other men gathered around and chipped carefully away at one corner. Lacey took several photographs and realized this would entail long hours of tedious work. She stepped back a little to take more photos and then lost interest as they worked intently. Chana was right about how slow the handwork was.

  She heard a cry and turned around to see Tom standing, holding his finger against his mouth. Chana walked over. “Are you okay?”

  He nodded. “Just a foolish accident.” He headed to where they had their bags gathered and pulled out a large Band-Aid. He wrapped it around his injured finger, then picked up his bottle of water and took a drink.

  Lacey kept clicking, thinking about the human efforts that went into all this work. The blood sweat and tears to open up these places of interest. As she watched, one of the other men, Brian, cried out when a rock crumbled from above, striking his shoulder. They all turned to look at him. “Lots of accidents,” Lacey murmured.

  Silence.

  She glanced over at the interns. “I’m not accusing anyone,” she said hurriedly. “I was thinking of all the effort that goes into this work.

  “There are always accidents on sites,” Tom said brusquely. “As long as no one is seriously hurt, our work keeps its integrity.”

  “Lots of times it’s Mother Nature, … and sometimes it isn’t.” Chana nodded. “We came in one day, and one of the mummies had been damaged.” She glanced at the others, then added, “At least that’s what we reported, but the damage looked more human oriented than due to Mother Nature.”

  Lacey winced. “I’m sorry. That’s not easy to deal with.”

  “It’s catastrophic,” Tom said harshly. “Our reputation is only as good as our work is. And, if people see damage like that, then there’s a good chance we’ll get run out of here.”

  “Sabotage?” Lacey asked slowly. “Maybe the locals wanting to stop the dig?”

  Tom and Chana both looked at her and nodded slowly.

  Lacey’s stomach sank.

  Chana pointed at one of the new spaces they’d opened. “Somebody cracked open the coffin cover and attempted to steal the mummy inside
and damaged it in the process.”

  Lacey stared at them. “That’s terrible. Why would someone do that?”

  They looked at her, looked at each other, then back at her. “We have no clue.”

  “And you should have reported that to us,” a voice on ground level announced in exasperation and anger.

  Chapter 3

  She spun to see a man in jeans and a T-shirt but also wearing a mantle of authority that had everybody backing up slightly.

  “I know that,” Chana said quickly. She stepped forward as if realizing what her instinctive step backward had meant. “I was going to tell you …”

  He waved a hand and cut her off. “When?”

  She glanced helplessly over at Tom.

  Tom stepped forward and said, “I asked her not to, until I could figure out what the hell was going on.”

  The stranger stood with his legs in a wide stance and his hands on his hips as he glared at them. His gaze drifted from one person to the next before coming back to land on Lacey’s face. He frowned. “Who are you?”

  She stepped forward. “Lacey. I’m the new photographer.”

  His frown deepened as if sifting through faces and people’s names and relevant memos in his head. Then he gave a clipped nod. “Right. I do remember that.” His gaze returned to Chana. “I want to know exactly what’s happening here. And I also want to know why nobody contacted the office. The only way this foundation functions is if we have complete transparency.”

  “We do understand that, sir,” Tom said. “It was a misjudgment on my part.”

  “No,” Chana said sadly. “I was okay to go along with it. We were hoping we could solve it before we had to tell you we were having trouble.”

  Lacey’s gaze went from Chana to the stranger. This must be the Sebastian Bentley she’d heard about. She took another step forward. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m sorry it’s not under better circumstances.”

  Some of the tension eased from his shoulders. He dropped down into the dig site so he stood on the same level as she was, reached over and shook her hand. “Ditto.” He turned to the other two. “Now I want the full explanation. Then you’ll show me all the damage.”

  A frisson of fear whispered across Chana’s face. Lacey wondered what was behind it. There were undercurrents of something strange going on here. She followed along helplessly as they explained about the mummy they had worked so hard to excavate and how they had returned the next morning to find the back of the mummy’s head caved in.

  Sebastian stooped and took a closer look. Frowning, muttering to himself, he pulled out his cell phone, turned on the flashlight and tried to see inside the coffin. He nodded but didn’t say anything. He straightened to look around. “Other accidents? Even small ones?”

  Chana listed off the same events she had given Lacey last night.

  “And then this morning, I cut my finger, but that was my fault,” Tom said, holding up his bandaged hand. “Plus one of the guys got hit in the shoulder by a falling rock.”

  Sebastian nodded. “Show me where both happened.” They took him toward the area Tom had been working on when he’d hurt himself.

  Lacey went to follow, but Chana held her back. “Something is weird about those newest sites over there,” she muttered in a low tone. “Better for Sebastian to see it right now, and, if there’ll be a verbal thrashing about this, it’s best it happens while we’re a little farther away. It’s hard on Tom to get a dressing down in front of us.”

  Lacey glanced at her in surprise. “It’s hard on anybody. I don’t know why it would be any worse in front of us.”

  Chana rolled her eyes at her. “That’s because we’re female. Tom’s male ego might take a bit of a beating.”

  Lacey didn’t think so. There didn’t seem to be anything retiring or shy about Tom’s ego. Thankfully though, she wasn’t witness to any altercation as Sebastian crouched in front of the area where the rock had come down.

  “How long ago was this?” Sebastian asked.

  Tom looked over at Chana.

  She checked her watch. “An hour maybe?” She glanced at Lacey for confirmation.

  Lacey nodded. “It probably wasn’t much more than that.”

  Sebastian studied the large oddly shaped room they’d been unearthing. “It’s empty.”

  “That’s not unusual, is it?” Lacey asked, curiosity piquing her voice.

  “Yes,” he said, “it is. Everything had a purpose in the Old World. Time, energy, money was all at a minimum. When you only live to be forty-seven, and that’s considered a ripe old age, time takes on a very different meaning. To have an empty room like this, it’s odd.”

  “Grain storage?” Lacey hazarded a guess.

  He turned to look at her.

  The expression on his face had her cracking-up laughing. “I guess that was a foolish answer, huh? I’m not a student of archaeology. I’m a history teacher. Although not of Pompeii. They would never allow me to teach much on that curriculum. I really wanted to though,” she confessed.

  He nodded absentmindedly and wandered off to one of the other corners, Tom anxiously at his heels.

  She glanced over at Chana. “Are you guys in big trouble?”

  Chana shook her head. “No, but we should have told the head office. They can only minimize the bad press if we let them know what’s happening, and too often this stuff gets ahead of us, and we don’t see or hear anything until it’s too late. That’s not fair to the bosses. Control is a necessity if we want funds to keep flowing.”

  “Ah, grant funding. Yes. Got it.”

  Leaving the others to sort out the problems, Lacey returned to her photographing. Now that she was where the mummy’s coffin had been opened up, she took a moment to take photographs of the entire thing.

  No matter what she did, she couldn’t stop looking at Sebastian. He was obviously in great physical shape. Not exactly required for an office worker or an overseer for a group of workers. Something about that heavily muscled chest under his T-shirt and his bulging biceps as he shifted and moved. She felt like an idiot for even thinking about it. She put it down to hormones and too long since she’d had a serious boyfriend.

  Yet it was more than that—he had presence, radiating power just standing here. It was very attractive. When she’d decided to move in to look after her mother, her boyfriend at the time had decided Lacey was more of a burden than he was willing to bear. She’d watched him go and hadn’t felt a pang of regret. Because, if that was his attitude, she wanted nothing to do with him.

  But it had meant the next year and a half had been sometimes very lonely as the grief threatened to overwhelm her for her upcoming loss. There was no cure for her mother’s condition. It was a case of taking every moment they had together and enjoying it. And, for that, she was grateful her former boyfriend wasn’t in the picture, so he didn’t steal any of those moments from her and her mother.

  Almost an hour later, intent on capturing the photos she’d been asked to take, Lacey heard that deep rumbling growl of Sebastian in the background.

  He didn’t fit her concept of an archaeologist in any way. Yet he seemed just as comfortable here among the rocks as he would commanding a big company. It had something to do with that presence of his.

  Heavy footsteps sounded the team’s approach. Trying not to make it obvious, she took photos as they studied their array of broken tools, making notes of the tools now gone, stolen.

  Sebastian’s striking voice was hard as he demanded, “Are you sure you locked everything up, put everything away?”

  Her cousin Chana said, “Yes. We have a routine. We do it every night. And the locks weren’t broken.”

  He straightened and pivoted slightly to look at her.

  Lacey pointed her camera and caught that jaw, that nose, those aquiline cheeks. Click. Click. Click. Then catching Chana’s gaze, Lacey quickly turned away.

  Chana frowned as she understood what Lacey had been doing.

  Feeling the heat r
oll up her neck and cheeks, Lacey hid behind the camera. She changed the angle ever-so-slightly to get a panoramic view. She slowly, methodically took pictures of the entire circle around her. If nothing else, it would provide a hell of a memory afterward.

  Finally the group walked away with Sebastian. Lacey stayed behind, taking pictures of the broken tools and visible footprints. It was so fascinating to see where people walked now versus where they had walked thousands of years ago. She couldn’t help it. She bent close and took photographs of one shoe imprint and then another and then another.

  “What are you, a detective?”

  She gave a shriek and spun around to see Sebastian glaring at her. She took a deep breath, stabilizing her shaky hands. “I was thinking of the contrast,” she said steadily but had enunciated very carefully, so there was no misunderstanding. “Of footprints today versus the footprints of nearly two thousand years ago.”

  He stared at her suspiciously for a moment before he relaxed and gave her an approving nod. “That could make quite a story.” He turned and strode away.

  She let out her pent-up breath, only to suck it in again as Chana whispered angrily in her ear, “What are you doing?”

  “Taking photos,” Lacey said, hating her defensive tone. “What was I supposed to be doing?”

  “You don’t need to be taking pictures of the boss.” Chana spun on her heels and followed Sebastian.

  Lacey stayed where she was, needing a few minutes away from the group and Chana’s prying eyes.

  Calmer, Lacey wandered this section, seeing stairs appearing out of the dirt. No way to know how far down they went because the undisturbed ground met the seventh step downward, still not fully uncovered. They hadn’t excavated any farther. She walked to the top of the stairs and snapped a photo as she took every step down, thinking about the people who had walked these stairs, carrying burdens, holding children by the hand—the old, the young, the weak, the pregnant. She moved carefully, and, where the stairs stopped, she bent to capture that partially buried step from many angles. The wonder of the past meeting the present flowed through her.