The King Stone by S.A. Beck

Author:S.A. Beck [Beck, S.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beck Books

15

The weather cleared up just as the weatherman said it would, which was a bit of a surprise because British weathermen were even less accurate than American weatherman, although correctly predicting anything about the weather in England counted as a minor miracle.

Della made sure she arrived at the dig site first. She squished through the mud in her Wellingtons, glancing to the left and right to check if anyone was watching. The line of trees and underbrush past the King Stone looked dense and threatening, and she remembered how she herself had hidden in them and remained undetected, or at least unrecognized.

She hoped.

As a summer day in England, it was already light, with the sun winking through the trees and the sky a pale, clear blue. Rich smells of wet earth rose to her nostrils, and the air felt cold and clammy in the June morning.

She moved to where the excavation was covered by a patchwork of tarps, each square outlined by a little puddle of water pushing down the waterproof material. Gingerly she tugged at the end of her square’s tarp to slough the water off to the side and onto the grass, then pulled up the tarp fully to reveal her square.

Now came the tricky part. Another glance to check she was alone, and then she shoved the little metal disk into the mud formed by the water that had leached through the edges of the tarp. She smoothed over the mud to hide the hole the disk had made, then moved the mud around a bit to hide that she had smoothed it over.

It still didn’t look quite right. A trained eye might notice that the ground had been disturbed, and there were far too many trained eyes on this excavation. Looking over her shoulder to make sure no one else had arrived, she put the tarp back over the square and pushed it down until it pressed against the half of the square where she had put the disk. That way, it would look like she hadn’t secured the tarp properly and it had sunk down from the weight of the rain. A simple mistake. Not one she was prone to but believable enough.

Della removed the tarp again and examined her handiwork. It still didn’t look one hundred percent right, but it would have to do.

She sighed. Now there wasn’t anything to do but wait. She’d putter around the site until everyone arrived, getting rid of the water from the rest of the tarps and greeting everyone like it was just another day. Then Dr. Olding would come and she’d get to work on her square. After a few minutes of work, she’d “discover” the artifact Lucas had given her.

Della shuddered as she went through the motions of preparing the site for another day of work. Her movements were practiced, automatic, the product of a score of months of doing the same thing each morning on digs in the United States, Israel, Ireland, and all over England.

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