almost walked into a partially fallen beam as he’d turned his head to talk to her. She held her torch up. The small flame flickered with the movement, casting oddly shaped shadows, but illuminated the stone… lintel? “I think this means we’re entering a chamber. Maybe it has a back door.” They ducked and passed through the V beneath the thick strut where it had wedged against one wall. The room was disappointingly empty. Reliefs had been scribed on the sandstone walls from ceiling to floor, but not painted, and she couldn’t see them well enough to try to decipher their meanings even if she knew how to read hieroglyphics. Couldn’t begin to know the room’s original purpose.
And damn it, she was so thirsty! All she could think of was a vat of sparkling Diet Coke filled with bobbing ice cubes. She’d swim in it for a week.
They passed through the empty room to another, slightly larger chamber. Here the walls were covered in crude pictures of daily life. She raised her torch as she walked. Even in the dimness, the colors of barges and blue herons, beaked gods, and women washing clothes were still as pure and beautiful as the day they’d been painted.
She automatically reached for her camera case on her hip, then dropped her hand. She could spend all day documenting her find for her father. But now wasn’t the time.
“Isis?” Thorne called from the shadowy doorway across the dusty space where he stood waiting for her.
“Coming.” She closed the gap between them. “Okay, so our first suspect is Yermalof. Who else wants to kill you?”
Thorne smiled. “Surprisingly few people want to off me, actually. Let’s look at the professor for a moment.”
“You think my father wants you dead?” She shot him a teasing glance as they walked into another corridor. Here the floor was marble, smooth under a drift of coarse, gritty sand. Their shoes crunched as they walked.
This corridor was beautifully painted with soldiers going into battle. Mark Antony? Her heartbeat sounded loud in her ears. “He doesn’t know what you’ve done to his sweet baby girl, so I don’t think so. Not yet anyway.”
Could she believe what her eyes were trying to tell her, or was she starting to add two and eleven to make ninety-three?
“No, I know your father didn’t put out a hit on me. But consider for a moment what would be at stake if he truly did find Queen Cleopatra’s tomb.”
“He’d be vindicated.”
“He’d go down in the history books. He’d be feted, asked to travel the world lecturing about his discovery. There’d be endorsements, and sponsorships—”
“Thorne, even if that was all true—my father can’t take advantage of or enjoy any of that. He has Alzheimer’s. If—when we find Cleo’s tomb, it will give him justification for all his claims.” The scenes of war changed to hunting scenes. Pretty brutal, Isis observed absently as the lights passed from one group of images to the next. “But as for him enjoying that vindication—he’s not capable of doing so anymore.”
“He isn’t. But that doesn’t mean someone on his team wouldn’t be itching to take the glory for themselves at your father’s expense.”
“Dylan…”
“Possibly. He’s also got motive. Let’s take the bits and pieces you know, and let’s say they’re gospel. Tell me again what happened.”
She exhaled, telling Thorne again what she knew by heart. “He found Cleo’s tomb in the late afternoon of May seventeenth. The crew had camped at an oasis about a mile away. While dinner was cooking he went back to the tomb. Knowing my father, he went back to touch the rocks at the entrance. Immerse himself before the dig started. It was a little ritual he had.”
One of the images snagged her attention, and her steps slowed. The green-skinned man, with a pharaoh’s beard and partially mummy-wrapped legs, wore the distinctive crown of two long ostrich feathers. Osiris? Isis’s heart leapt. Oh, my God. Was it possible…?
Osiris, she knew, was the god of the afterlife and the dead. It made sense that he’d be in every tomb…
“All this artwork leaving you a little breathless?”
“I’m fine,” she said automatically, her words monotone because her brain was suddenly going a thousand miles an hour. Catching up with Thorne, she blew on the end of her torch to encourage the small red glow so she could look at the eight-foot-tall people depicted along the walls. Before she took a wild leap, she had to be sure…