Bed & Breakfast Bedlam - Abby L Vandiver Page 0,5

still standing there.

Dummy.

Yeah, I called you dummy.

I started grinning. “I got out of that one,” I said aloud. “And he’s none the wiser. Some kind of detective he is.”

I drove over the bridge to the Interstate, I was going back home to Ohio. Do something nice for my mother. I turned on the car’s GPS and Track Rock Gap popped up on the screen.

I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror, my light-brown skin glistening from my attempt at escape and I thought about what I had done. The grin started to fade.

I really was turning into a criminal. Breaking onto government property, lying to FBI agents and then feeling good about it. That, suddenly made me feel terrible.

A remorseful criminal. Geesh.

I picked up my cell phone and punched in my mother’s number. I was ready to admit I needed her help.

Chapter Four

I had decided that I should actually go to Stallings Island.

I realized that I didn’t want that FBI guy to check up on me and I wasn’t where I said I’d be. I didn’t want him to know how big a liar I had turned out to be.

My mother knew how to make me be on Stallings Island – legally – happen. She’d know about any excavations there and how I could join a team.

When I got her on the phone, my mother, Dr. Justin Dickerson, famous, or in some circles, infamous, biblical archaeologist told me that Stallings Island was, much like Track Rock Gap, ran under a federal agency. And, she enlightened me, traffic to the island had in fact been shut down long ago to the public due to looting.

“Criminals,” she had said and sucked her teeth. “I never could understand why people would break into places like that and desecrate our history.”

If she only knew that her baby child had become one of those “people.”

I decided to come clean with her. I had to tell her what I did in order for her to use all of her clout to get me on the island so that my credibility in the science world wouldn’t be shot.

Only I wasn’t sure how much clout she had anymore.

My mother had discovered, way back in 1997, that hidden with the Dead Sea Scrolls were manuscripts that described an alternative history to man’s origins. The manuscripts said that man – people just like us, same DNA as she liked to say – had originated on Mars.

Yeah, right. It made my mother seem kind of wacky.

Unfortunately, before she could make it known to the general public, people that did know started getting killed over it, and secret societies that had government ties were trying to take the information from her. So she decided the world wasn’t ready for what she knew.

Big decision for her to make. I know. But my mother is smart. Super smart. And if she thought it was best, well then so did I. So our family – including me – helped her hide all the evidence.

“One day,” she had said, “this information will be rediscovered and the world will be ready to accept it for what it is and put it to good use.”

She was good at cover-ups.

That’s another reason I called her.

So my mother, after hearing my story and fussing at me for a good ten minutes about my impertinent and cheeky behavior and total disregard for the law, said she could probably get me permission to go to the island through her contacts with the Archaeological Conservancy, the agency now in charge of it.

Yay! She still had clout.

But, she cautioned, she didn’t have the faintest idea how I was going to fake an excavation. She was sure that excavations real or fake, weren’t allowed. But she also said she’d keep trying to get me permission.

Maybe I could learn to listen a little bit more to my mother before I head out trying to do things on my own.

She told me that Stallings Island was about eight miles outside of Augusta. And to try and be safe and truthful from here on out.

I promised I would.

I punched in Augusta on my GPS and headed south down the Georgia coastline. I opened up the window and let the breeze off the Savannah River flow through me. I turned up the music, Maroon 5’s Sugar, and enjoyed the drive.

Just off the highway, to my left I watched sea gulls fly over the sandy dunes, bluffs and wind swept sea oats that led to the blue water and barrier