The building manager looked up at him. “Yeah?” he asked belligerently. Apparently, he didn’t like to be interrupted.
Hunt remained standing in the doorway. “I wonder if you might remember the party who moved out of apartment 4C last fall?”
The man stared at him in disbelief. “You gotta be kidding me!”
“No, sir, I ain’t.” Leroy felt an urge to haul that cracker up by his collar and teach him some manners. Of course, it would be hard to get any useful info out of him through a crushed windpipe. “Might of been a short gal, dark hair. Went by the name of Cassie Forsythe?”
After giving him a dirty look, the manager turned in his swivel chair and scooted over to a filing cabinet in the corner. He flipped through a row of manila folders and finally pulled one from the drawer. Laying it flat on his desk, he studied it before shifting his attention back to the cowboy.
“My records say that the lease to 4C was transferred from Sybil Forsythe after her decease to her sister Cassie. It looks like this Cassie paid the last month’s rent in October and moved out.”
“You got any particular memory of that transaction?” Hunt asked, already knowing the answer. “It would of been a little brunette gal who paid you.”
The manager rolled his eyes. “It might have been a brunette girl. It might have been a little green space alien. I don’t remember. Buddy, this building has a hundred apartment units. I don’t know any of the tenants from Adam. All I care about is that I got my money. It says so right in the paperwork. End of story.” He flipped the manila folder closed with a loud slap.
Leroy wordlessly tipped the brim of his hat, turned on his heel and left the building. Instead of finding some answers, all he’d gotten for his trouble was a skull full of questions. He climbed in his truck and pulled away from the curb, intent on finding the nearest watering hole where he could mull over the day’s events. By his reckoning, Miss Cassie would have been dead for months before little Hannah came knocking on her door. So, who did the gal meet when she got here? And who paid the building manager off? Most important of all, who arranged to have Miz Sybil’s things carted away? All those “who’s” were making more noise in his head than a nest of barn owls. One thing he knew for sure. It would take some serious drinking to sort this mess out.
Chapter 15—Sitting Pretty
Much to her teammates’ amazement, Cassie strolled into the hotel dining room the next morning appearing rested and cheerful. Erik’s look of relief told Cassie that he had braced himself for another day of moody complaints. After eating a hearty breakfast, the trio wandered to the hotel lobby where they waited for Oluoma’s return.
Their guide bustled through the entrance punctually at eight o’clock and greeted them all with a broad smile. Cassie noted that Oluoma was wearing a cotton blouson in a bright fuchsia and white print over a long black skirt. Her feet were clad in sandals. Given the heat and humidity, this seemed a wise decision, but the rest of her attire caused the pythia to ask, “Will you be comfortable hiking in that outfit?”
Oluoma gave her a dubious glance. “Hiking? No, no. There will be no hiking. The monoliths are practically in the middle of town.”
“Well, that’s a first,” Cassie murmured as the team filed out of the hotel and back into Oluoma’s car.
In less than ten minutes, they were out of the traffic in Calabar and moving quickly down a blacktop country road. At least in the United States, it would have been called a country road. In Nigeria, it was a major highway.
Cassie sat up front with Oluoma while the men occupied the back seat. Since the trip to the little village of Alok would take a while, Cassie decided to pass the time by learning more about Oluoma’s work. Turning to face their guide, she asked, “So, what’s your special assignment in Nigeria about?”
Oluoma shrugged briefly at the question. “It’s very much like the general mission of the Arkana—recovering the lost record of civilization before the rise of the overlords—but this continent presents a special challenge. The history of sub-Saharan Africa has been sadly neglected. Everybody knows what happened in Egypt because so much has been written about it. But what about the rest of the continent? There are gaping holes in our knowledge of overlord infiltration of the interior. It is my task, and that of my associates, to fill in the blanks. Africa, in its original state, was wholly matristic. You have only to look at the way the San live today to see what the entire continent was like thousands of years ago, but something happened to change that way of life.”
“Don’t tell me,” Cassie said archly. “It was the Kurgans, right?”
“Actually, it wasn’t,” Griffin piped up from the back seat. “They weren’t the only purveyors of overlord ideology.”
“They weren’t?” Cassie swiveled around to stare at him.
“No. In the case of Africa, the overlords would have been Semitic.”
“You’re kidding!” The pythia was aghast. “You mean Jewish people came to Africa and oppressed the natives?”
“Semitic doesn’t only mean Jewish, toots.” Erik joined the conversation. “It’s a term that covers the language of a whole bunch of different groups. Everybody who used to live in the Middle and Near East would be considered Semitic. Arabs, Hebrews, people from southeastern Turkey, Assyrians, and lots of extinct tribes.”
“But why would they travel all the way to Africa to bother the people here?” the pythia asked. “Why not start by harassing their neighbors?”
“Because of desiccation,” Griffin said.
“Oh, that,” Cassie commented knowingly. “You mean the landscape dried out just like what happened to the Russian steppes around five thousand years ago.”
The scrivener nodded. “Precisely the same as the Russian steppes and at approximately the same time
