The Cabinet of Curiosities by Preston Douglas && Child Lincoln

Author:Preston, Douglas && Child, Lincoln
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: FIC031000
ISBN: 9780759527713
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2002-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

SIX

NORA TOOK HER TROWEL, KNELT, AND BEGAN PRYING UP ONE OF THE OLD bricks that made up the ancient floor. It was rotten and waterlogged, and it crumbled under the trowel. She quickly plucked out the pieces, then began prying up its neighbors, one after the other. O’Shaughnessy stood above her, watching. They had worked through the night, and past noon of the following day, widening the excavation to eight square meters. She felt weary beyond description. But this was still one task she wanted to do herself.

Once he’d gotten wind of their progress, Pendergast had forced himself out of his hospital bed—despite the fearful protests of the doctors and nurses—and made the journey down to Doyers Street himself. Now he lay near the digsite on an orthopedic mattress, newly delivered from Duxiana. He remained there, arms across his chest, eyes closed, moving infrequently. With his black suit and pallid face, he looked alarmingly like a corpse. At Pendergast’s request Proctor, his chauffeur, had delivered a variety of items from the Dakota apartment: a small table, a Tiffany lamp, and an array of medicines, unguents, and French chocolates, along with a stack of obscure books and maps.

The soil beneath the floor of Leng’s old laboratory was waterlogged and foul-smelling. Nora cleared a one-meter square of the floor bricks, then began digging a diagonal test trench with her trowel. Anything under the floor would not be deep. There wasn’t much farther to go. She was almost in the water table.

She struck something. A deft bit of brushwork revealed a rusted, rotten nineteenth-century umbrella, only its whalebone skeleton intact. She carefully cleared around it, photographed it in situ, then removed it and laid its rotting pieces on a sheet of acid-free specimen paper.

“You’ve found something?” Pendergast asked, eyes still closed. A long white hand removed a chocolate from a box and placed it in his mouth.

“The remains of an umbrella.” She worked more quickly. The dirt was looser, muddier.

Fourteen inches down, in the left-hand corner of the grid, her trowel struck heavily against something. She began clearing away the sodden dirt around it. Then her brush hand jerked aside reflexively. It was a circlet of hair about a smooth dome of brown bone.

A distant rumble of thunder pierced the silence. The storm was still upon them.

She heard a faint intake of breath from O’Shaughnessy.

“Yes?” Pendergast’s voice came instantly.

“We’ve got a skull here.”

“Keep digging, if you please.” Pendergast didn’t sound surprised.

Working carefully with the brush, heart pounding uncomfortably in her chest, Nora cleared away more dirt. The frontal bone came slowly into view, then two eye sockets, slimy, sticky matter still clinging inside. A foul smell rose and she gagged involuntarily. This was no clean Anasazi skeleton that had been buried a thousand years in dry sand.

Plucking her T-shirt up over her nose and mouth, she continued. A bit of nasal bone became exposed, the opening cradling a twisted piece of cartilage. Then, as the maxilla was exposed, came a flash of metal.

“Please describe.

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