Cate aimed the brochure at the trash can and fired it with a flick of her wrist, where it landed with a swish amid a lot of other things that she didn’t need and no longer cared about.
The digital clock on her desk flipped from 9:29 to 9:30 and Anne Walters leaned in the door. “Dr. Wells? Ms. Shaw is here for her appointment.”
Cate turned her back on the trash can and its obnoxious contents. “Thanks, Anne. Send her in.”
“I’m going to run out for another coffee. Want one?”
Anne knew the location of every espresso bar in a ten-block radius. “You are a goddess. Extra-large, no whip.”
“Back in fifteen.”
Morgan Shaw, tall, blond and professional, came in with a confident stride and a hand outstretched in greeting. When Cate shook it, she got the impression of self-assurance mixed with a whole lot of anticipation. Whatever the woman had to show her, it meant a lot to her.
Ms. Shaw shook back her mane of hair and smiled. “Dr. Wells, thank you for seeing me.”
Cate waved her into the guest chair in front of her desk and settled herself in her own. “Did Anne offer you something to drink?”
“Yes, she did, thanks.”
“No trouble finding us?”
“Not at all. I got very good directions from my sister, Cassandra. I’d like to thank you personally for rescuing her a few months ago.”
Cate grinned with delight. Earlier in the year she had escaped the city and had been four-wheeling through the woods upstate, on her way back from her therapy cliff—the one she climbed when she really needed to clear her head and find her center again. She’d offered a lift to a couple of stranded hikers, and had stayed in touch ever since. “Cass is your sister? Then I’m doubly pleased to meet you. I understand you have an artifact that you wanted to show me,” she prompted. “How did you come by it?”
Morgan leaned over and pulled her leather tote into her lap. “I have an antique shop in Fairfield, Connecticut. I found this in a late-Victorian dresser that was part of the stock I bought along with the shop.” She opened a cardboard container much like the ones the post office used, and extracted a wooden box. “I was hoping you could tell me a little about it.”
Cate pulled the box closer. This was no relic from Uncle Lester’s attic. Weighing no more than her low-profile laptop, the box was so ornately carved that there was no room for a single extra figure on its surface. She tried to separate the images to discover some meaning or clue as to its provenance, but the figures merged into one another, almost seeming to lose themselves before she could fix them in place. There were flowers, a sun and a hawk, what looked like a tree and the wavy lines that in most cultures denoted water. There were animals—a hippo, a lion—and plants. A lotus. Reeds, maybe. There were musical instruments—a lyre, or was it a harp? A flute—or was it a reed next to a crocodile? And among the images were symbols, regular and uniform enough to indicate written language.
“This is amazing.” When Morgan nodded, Cate realized she’d spoken aloud.
“I can’t even tell what kind of wood it is, much less figure out what the carvings mean,” Morgan said. “I thought maybe cherry? Walnut? Not ebony, because it’s kind of reddish-brown.”
“That much I do recognize.” Cate turned the box over to examine its underside. She caught a faint whiff of some kind of spice. “If I’m not mistaken, it’s bubinga, an extremely hard and durable wood from Africa. The person who carved it was obviously a very skilled craftsman.”
“Can you tell how old it is?”
“Other than ‘old’?” Cate, with the box at eye level, smiled over the top of it at her visitor. “I can’t be sure, but at a guess I’d say more than two thousand years. From some of the cuts in the curved lines, here, I’d say they used a hand awl, which might even put it at three thousand years.”
Daniel would know.
Yes, but the likelihood of Daniel seeing this box was nil, wasn’t it?
She lowered the box and ran her fingers along a row of what looked like monkey heads. Or maybe they were irises. The more she looked, the harder it was to tell. “How does it open?”
Morgan lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I was hoping you could tell me. There’s a compartment inside, I know that much, because I ran it through the security check at the train station on the way here and peeked at the monitor. But I have no idea if it contains anything, or how it’s opened.”
Lost Treasures of the World, whispered that treacherous voice in her head. Daniel might have some information.
Cate stifled the voice and glanced at Morgan. “Do you mind if I take some photographs? I could show the pictures to one or two of my colleagues and they might be able to identify the culture that produced these carvings.”
Morgan shook her head. “Not at all.”
Cate kept her field camera in the office just for moments like these. She put in a fresh roll of high-resolution film and tore the top sheet off her desk blotter to make a clean white surface. A ruler next to the box gave perspective. Then she carefully photographed each side in close-up, at midrange and from a couple of feet away, just as she’d been taught all those years ago in Mexico.
“We can learn as much from the matrix in which a piece of pottery is embedded as we can from the potsherd itself.” The voice of their supervising prof, Dr. Andersen, sounded in her memory. “Your photographs should include this information. It could be important.”
Cate was surprised she remembered that much—the day they’d excavated the midden and found the fragments of pottery was the day Daniel Burke had arrived. Cate’s memory of anything but him after that point had been burned away by the force of their attraction. There was a thesis for you—The Passionate Flame: Biological Urges and the Death of Brain Cells.
“—long it might take?”
Cate blinked and resisted the urge to roll her eyes at herself. Damn that Daniel Burke anyway. Now she looked like an airhead.
“I’m sorry, what was that?” She put the camera back in its case and ran a slow hand over the surface of the box. She was not normally given to touching things. Her colleague Julia was always doing that, though—rubbing fabric between her fingers, stroking passing dogs in Central Park. Now Cate felt the same urge to touch this box. Something about the carvings invited you to follow them with your fingers, to touch them as though they were braille and had a message for you.
“I was just wondering how long it might take to get an opinion from your colleague,” Morgan said, doing a good job of disguising her eagerness. But Cate knew that feeling—that excitement when you were this close to finding an answer that had eluded you. Some said that curiosity killed the cat. But curiosity was an archaeologist’s best friend.
“I’m not sure,” Cate hedged. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the glossy brochure advertising the conference, facedown in the trash.
Daniel might help.
No. No way. Not to satisfy her own curiosity, not to help out Ms. Morgan Shaw, would she get on a plane and fly across the country to see Daniel Burke strutting around Big Sur as though he were God’s gift to archaeology and women.
“A couple of weeks? A month?” Morgan persisted.
What are you afraid of?
Nothing. The thought was ludicrous.
So he had a rep for flamboyance. So he’d been on Jah-Redd last night. The fact remained that he was an authority on ancient symbology, and if anyone would know about this box, it would be him. Besides, she