Shadows on the Aegean by Suzanne Frank Read Free Book Online Page A

bathroom and a rinse of her teeth, Cammy gratefully climbed back in between the sheets and fixed
     a smile on her face. She wished they wouldn’t come. She felt horribly guilty: just seeing their false-bravado faces made her
     cringe inside. They were unemployed because of her.
    After the lion collapse incident, the Egyptian Antiquities Authority had closed the dig as unsafe. If Camille hadn’t held
     on to the roof, it might not have fallen and they could all still be working. Big ifs that had no effect on the situation
     now.
    Negotiations were under way to reopen the dig, but it was the Middle East. Time was fluid. Today, tomorrow, next week, next
     year … who knew? A dozen people had to be bribed, then they bribed another dozen. The wheels of government weren’t just slow,
     they were only recently hewn. Until that far-off day when they received permission again, the eastern desert dig was sealed,
     an iron grate was installed over the well, and three guards patrolled twenty-four hours a day. The university had pulled the
     grant, terrified of lawsuits.
    Jon was the excavation leader, most recently the lion killer and her rescuer. She got chills when she realized what the lion
     could have done to her. Yet even when he had swiped at her, his claws had been sheathed. It was a strange detail she hadn’t
     noticed until she thought about it afterward. If only she could remember other details.
    Brian the Aussie still wore a white bandage around his head, giving his rakish good looks a piratical twist.
    Clyde, a talented photographer and copyist whose skill rivaled that of Camille’s sister, Chloe, was from one of the Carolinas.
     Blond and slender, with a gentle, slow accent, he had inspired a handful of crushes. All the young nurses wanted to be his
     wives, fatten him up, and give him golden-haired children.
    Lisa was the only other woman on the team. Her specialty was in mid—eighteenth dynasty funerary objects, though she was well
     versed in many other eighteenth-dynasty artifacts. When it was apparent the cavern was eighteenth dynasty, she had come in
     from Cairo.
    “We brought you this,” Lisa said, laying a tabloid on Cammy’s coverlet. “If laughter is indeed the best medicine, this article
     will cure you.
    “It’s amazing what the public will believe about archaeology,” Brian said. “It’s bunk. Just like the ‘Curse of Tutankhamen’
     all over again.”
    Clyde opened the pages for her, and Cammy, mystified by the chortles and giggles of her usually reserved comrades, skimmed
     the headlines that reported Elvis sightings and the scoop on alien lovemaking techniques. “Should I even ask how you found
     this? Which one of you reads it?” she asked.
    Jon turned beet red. “My sister mails me anything that even mentions Egypt. Go ahead, read it.”
    Clyde turned the next page, and Cammy stared, openmouthed.
    A RCHAEOLOGIST T ALKS TO G OD THROUGH M AGIC S TONES ! the headline proclaimed in huge letters. It was always a bad sign when the headline used exclamation marks. The story continued
     in the same overblown fashion. “Renfrock Holmes, the real-life ‘Indiana Jones,’ finds the telekinetic devices to tune
people
into God’s frequency!” read the subtitle.
    “Oh no, please not Renfrock,” Cammy said. “How he even got a degree is beyond me.”
    “Keep reading,” Lisa said. “It gets better.”
    “
Beneath the waters of Israel’s Lake Kinneret, Renfrock Holmes has unearthed the keys to talking to God
.
    “
‘God Himself told me where to dig,’ the world-renowned archaeologist said, pointing to a sandy finger of land that leads into
     this deep lake, the site of much of Jesus’ teaching and the base of operations for the rabbis who wrote the Talmud.”
    Cammy skimmed over the paragraphs extolling Renfrock’s brilliance, his tete-a-tete with God, “
just like Moses, God made me take off my shoes!”
and found the actual details of the artifacts.
    She read it twice and looked up.