Time Enough to Die by Lillian Stewart Carl

Author:Lillian Stewart Carl [Carl, Lillian Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Romance, Fiction, General, Fantasy, Mystery & Detective, Horror, Crime, cookie429
ISBN: 9780809556625
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Tuesday morning dawned clear and bright. The students streamed up the side of the fort, chattering happily in the sunshine. Gareth reserved judgment—one sunny day doesn't make the summer, his grandmother had often said.

He settled his shovel on his shoulder and inspected the pavement beside the bowling green wall. He saw no footprints clear enough for a cast. Matilda might not have sensed anyone hiding there. She might not have sensed last night's episode of the Great Roman Soap. She wouldn't be the first intelligent, perceptive person who'd let her perceptions run away with her.

And yet, Gareth thought, she'd told him every detail of last night's vision, confident she could prove its truth. And she would prove it. It was no longer Matilda's intuition that was irritating, but his growing trust in it.

"Ah, March!” Howard Sweeney was seated in a lawn chair atop the fort, looking like a pharaoh overseeing his slaves. “Are we making any progress?"

At least six students and Ted Ionescu were well within earshot. Gareth answered, “That's for you to say. I'm merely writing up your results."

"And you'll do a smashing job of it, I'm sure. Matilda!"

Matilda emerged from the Miller trench. “Yes, Howard?"

"Are the group leaders doing their paperwork properly?"

"Ashley, Bryan, Manfred,” called Matilda. “Are you doing your paperwork properly?"

"Yes—no problem—jawohl," they answered in chorus.

She gave Sweeney a look that would have withered a rhinoceros. “Anything else I can do for you?"

"No, no, carry on,” he replied with a wave of his hand. “Ted...."

Ionescu sprang to attention.

Matilda disappeared. Gareth followed her into the cool, damp shadows of the ravine. “A pity Sweeney's not the one got the concussion,” he said.

"His offensiveness is a shield,” she replied, “and a darn good one at that. I remember thinking when I first met him, at a conference in Boston six or seven years ago, how little of the real man I could sense through the bravado. I suspect he's protecting something rather small and raw inside. Many hard-working, ambitious people are."

"Right,” Gareth told her, not about to touch that one. “Did you tell Sweeney about—about what you saw last night?"

"More or less. He'll take me seriously when he sees the evidence."

"That's good police procedure. Where shall we start?"

Matilda pointed to a column drum lying just free of the muddy side of the trench, about ten feet from the pit left by the thieves. She'd used string and stakes to mark off a small area behind it. “There. The cellar treasury is on the other side of the foundation wall from the Mithraeum. I'm sure the balk—the trench wall—was originally vertical. Miller was a good archaeologist for his time. But sixty years of erosion and inquisitive feet have broken off the soil at the top and let it accumulate at the bottom."

"In other words, the wall's at enough of a slant we can cut into its base without bringing its top down on our heads."

Matilda took a notebook and measuring tape from her pocket and began taking measurements of the Mithraeum.

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