Canyon of the Sphinx (27 page)

She didn’t know how long she sat
there before noticing a pair of shoes standing within close proximity. She
glanced up, noting jeans, a yellow collared shirt, and enormous forearms with
fuzzy blond hair on them. By the time she reached the face, it took her a
minute to realize who was standing next to her.

Christopher Murphy smiled weakly.

“I’ve been on three floors and
innumerable corridors in this building that all look the same,” he said. “I
felt like I was in the labyrinth of Minotaur. I was about to lose my mind.”

Kathlyn blinked; a long,
drawn-out gesture simply because he was the very last person she had ever
expected to see. She was, in fact, baffled.

“Dr. Murphy?” she stood up,
slowly. “What on earth are you doing here?”

He made no move to shake her hand
or have any manner of physical contact with her. He could see she was uncertain
and surprised. “You startled me one time by showing up on my dig all of a
sudden. I thought I’d return the favor.”

The low-key humor struck again.
Her shock fading, Kathlyn managed a weak snort. “Good job. Now we’re even, if I
can get my heart started again.”

He laughed softly. “Actually,
I’ve come to see your husband on important business. I’m assuming he’s around
here somewhere.”

“He’s in the cafeteria,” She
forced herself to relax. “You came all the way to Los Angeles to see him?”

He looked so very pleased, like
the expression of a man who had just been told his wife was going to have a
baby. It was a dreamy, happy expression.

“I know you two have so much on
your mind and I swear I wouldn’t have come if it hadn’t been important,” he
said. “But the site where you said my city was… well, you were right. It is
there.”

Kathlyn understood why he was
here and why looked so happy. “You found it?” she repeated. “That’s great news,
Chris. I’m really thrilled for you. But you didn’t fly thousands of miles to
tell us that, did you?”

He shook his head. “No. I came to
show Dr. Burton pictures of our elusive sphinx. We found that, too.”

“Really?” Kathlyn lit up like a
Christmas tree. She felt more excitement at that moment than she had in months.
This was what she lived for and the spirit within her, the one that had been
damaged and weakened, ignited back to life. “Do you have them with you? Can I
see them?”

“Sure you can see them,” he said.
“But I’d really like to show Dr. Burton. I’ve been waiting years for this
moment; to actually identify the statues as Egyptian or not. I’m not sure if
you can understand just what this means to Mesoamerican history. It’s like
finding the Holy Grail. It’s that big.”

Kathlyn was smiling broadly. “Oh,
believe me, I understand perfectly.” She moved past him, grabbing his arm as
she went. “Come on; let’s go find him. I can’t wait, either.”

They took the narrow escalator up
to the fourth floor where the cafeteria was. Kathlyn almost tripped coming off the
last step, so great her excitement. Christopher followed along behind, watching
her closely, thinking that she had lost a lot of weight. But she looked every
inch as gorgeous as he remembered and the feelings had had spent months chasing
away threatened to return. But he fought them. It wouldn’t do any good now,
anyway. When they finally entered the old-style cafeteria of the courthouse
that had been around since the nineteen forties, he was almost running to keep
up with her.

He spied Burton almost immediately,
an enormous man paying for several cups of coffee. Kathlyn ran to her husband,
grabbing Murphy and dragging him along with her as if afraid he was going to
escape.

“Marcus,” her face was flushed
with exhilaration. “Look who I found downstairs. He’s brought photos of Site B.
And guess what? They found the sphinx. He’s come all the way here to show you
the pictures. Isn’t that wonderful?”

Considering the last time that
Marcus and Christopher had faced each other had been in the heat of mortal
combat, Marcus was more than surprised to see the man. Kathlyn wasn’t oblivious
to the fact, but she wasn’t going to shy away from it, either. Marcus had
admitted his wrong doing and in the midst of her excitement, she was more than
curious to see how he would react. This moment would define whether or not he
had truly learned his lesson, and if he had truly meant any of his apologies.

Cobalt blue eyes locked with pale
blue. For a moment, they simply stared at one another. Kathlyn held her breath
until Marcus, very slowly, extended a hand.

“Dr. Murphy,” he greeted. It was
close as he could come to being pleasant.

Christopher was much more
congenial, but he, too, had been anticipating this moment. He was still
convinced that he had deserved everything Burton had dealt him. He shook his
hand. Burton squeezed, he squeezed, and they ended up nearly breaking each
other’s knuckles.

“God only knows how busy you are,
Dr. Burton,” he said in his soft, gentle voice. “But I really need a moment of
your time to look at these. I didn’t want to call or email. This is something I
wanted to show you personally, considering how helpful you and your wife were
with my site.”

Marcus nodded, struggling to push
aside his normally-cold demeanor. He knew Kathlyn was watching every move he
made and he didn’t want to upset her, this day of all days. But Murphy’s
appearance had him rattled.

 “I can give you a few minutes,”
he looked around for a private corner in the vast cafeteria. “Let’s go over by
the windows. Less people.”

He moved in that direction, one
coffee cup in each hand. Robert, his blue eyes curious, caught Kathlyn’s
attention with a curious wriggle of his eyebrows.

 “Robert, this is Dr. Christopher
Murphy,” she introduced them. The men shook hands congenially. “Chris, this is
my brother, Robert, who also happens to be our attorney.”

“Nice to meet you,” Robert said.

“Pleasure.”

Robert had heard the saga of
Christopher Murphy. When Kathlyn and Marcus had been briefly separated, the
entire soap opera had come out one night when his sister had imbibed too much
wine. She had also said a few things that Marcus should probably never know,
like how she thought that Murphy was a hunk and didn’t have the temper that
Marcus had. Things said in a drunken state that she hadn’t remembered in the
morning. Robert scrutinized Murphy as they took their seats at the plastic
cafeteria table, wondering if all archaeologists were male-model material.
Marcus certainly was, and Murphy was no exception.

Knowing the history as he did, he
made sure to plant himself strategically between Murphy and Marcus. If things
became brittle, he wanted to be able to at least throw a body block to stop any
potential altercation. He could tell just by looking at Marcus’ expression that
the man was flustered. Truthfully, he thought Kathlyn could have handled
Murphy’s appearance a little more tactfully. She had very nearly thrown it in
Marcus’ face and had expected him not to react.

Marcus handed his wife her coffee
as she settled in next to him. He opened his mouth but Kathlyn took the lead.

“So let’s see the photos, Chris,”
she commanded.

Christopher dutifully produced a
standard white envelope out of his back pocket. He emptied the three by five
photos on to the table, shuffled them, and picked out the photo on the top. As
if he was making an offering to a god, he handed it over to Marcus.

“We found this buried under three
feet of mud and rocks,” he said as Marcus’ intense gaze devoured the photo.
“This is the initial photo, before we did any excavating and clean up on it. After
a couple of days of continued excavation, this is what it looked like.
Additionally, we found four more of them, in a row. We expect to find more when
we uncover the mud and over-growth.”

He handed Marcus a second photo.
Kathlyn was practically sitting on Marcus’ back trying to gain a better view of
what he was looking at. Marcus spread the photos on the table so that they
could both catch a look at them. As Kathlyn
oooh’d
and
aaaah’d
,
Marcus clinically evaluated the images.

Murphy almost couldn’t stand the
silence. He’d waited so long that additional seconds ticked away at him like
tiny torture devices.

 The second photo revealed the
cleaned sphinx and a partial column behind it. Traces of paint were still
visible on the relics; the mud that had incased them had been heavy and
clay-like, acting like a seal and beautifully preserving them. Hints of white,
yellow and blue were clearly visible and on the sill of the column were the
faint carvings of what looked like wide, delicate flower petals.

As Marcus deliberated, Kathlyn
ran her fingers over the edges of the photo that showed the column section
particularly well. She was fascinated.

“Flores blancas que dan vida, el
loto,” she murmured.

Christopher nodded, a smile on
his lips. “You remembered.”

She grinned at him. “Looks like
you actually found it. God, I love it when a legend becomes truth.”

“Well,” Marcus finally spoke,
interrupting their repartee. “I can tell you what they’re not. They’re not
Egyptian.”

It was the confirmation Murphy
had been waiting for. “You’re sure?”

“Pretty sure. I could go back
into early Dynastic reference materials to see if I could come up with
something, but I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t find anything similar. For one
thing, even though the body is that of a canine or feline creature, the face is
far too blunt. It’s almost pug-looking.”

Kathlyn gazed at the first photo.
“Marcus has a photographic memory. If he says he’s never seen anything like
this in Egyptian culture, then you can take that to the bank.”

Christopher nodded. That was good
enough for him. “I will,” he said. “So now we know what it’s not. Any ideas as
to what it is?”

Marcus lifted an eyebrow, taking
the rest of Christopher’s photos and carefully going through them. “I really
couldn’t guess. You’re positive this isn’t any ancient Latin American tribe?”

Murphy shook his head. “This
doesn’t match anything I’ve ever seen. Olmec, Toltec, Totonac, Aztec, Mayan… it
could, conceivably, be something from the Zapotecs, who were the first real
organized society in the area, but I’ve never seen artwork like this from them.
Their work is usually much more angular, rough-hewn, certainly not polished and
skilled like this. This is foreign to anything I’ve ever come across in all my
years in the annals of Mesoamerican culture.”

Kathlyn set the photos down. “So
the sphinx isn’t Egyptian and it isn’t Zapotec. There were many sea-farers in
that time and there are recorded instances of the Americas being explored by
Vikings, Phoenicians and the like. So we know what it isn’t. Now to find out
what it is.”

Marcus grunted. “The first thing
to do is date it.”

“Already done,” Christopher said.

“And?”

His pale blue eyes glimmered.
“You’re not going to believe it.”

“I’m all ears.”

“We had a section carbon dated
between twenty one hundred B.C. and fifteen hundred B.C.”

Kathlyn’s eyebrows rose. “Are you
serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

She glanced down at the pictures
again, her fingers gently toying with them. “Do you remember when I first
described your city, Chris? That night when…” not wanting to go into that
destructive night those long weeks ago, she recovered quickly. “Do you remember
that I told you I had the sense it was much older than you thought it was?”

“Sure I do. Why do you think I
wasn’t surprised when these results came back?”

She could only nod her head in
concurrence. Then she looked at Marcus, who had on his best poker face. He,
too, wanted to stay away from the subject of that fateful night.

“If the test results are
confirmed, that’s pretty damn early for the Americas,” he said evenly.

Christopher agreed. “I know.” He
looked between the two of them. “Look, I’ll be honest. I came here to
personally beg you two to come back to the site when all of this legal nonsense
is over. I’ve had more success since Dr. Trent walked onto my site than I have
in the entire fifteen years I’ve been down there. I don’t want to spend another
fifteen years trying to figure out what this is. Dr. Trent, I don’t know what
kind of gift you have, but I believe in it. I’m asking if you will help me.”

Marcus didn’t say a word. He
literally bit his tongue. He looked at Kathlyn, who was focused on Christopher.

“I appreciate your position,
truly,” she said steadily. “But when all of this is over, Marcus and I are
going back to Egypt. Please don’t think I’m being rude, or that I don’t care
about this, but your university hired me for one objective. I’ve achieved that.
You have your city and I’m afraid that’s all I can help you with.”

Christopher held her gaze for a
long moment before relenting into a weak smile. “I understand. But I had to
ask.”

“Of course you did.”

It seemed like the conversation
as over. Robert, who had remained silent throughout the entire exchange, was
glad to be done with it without bloodshed. He had a trial to focus on. But
Christopher suddenly shifted in his seat and pulled out another envelope. From
the envelope, he drew out another photo.