Lisa stopped and exhaled loudly.
“Are you saying my mother and father’s deaths weren’t an accident?”
Dallas felt a chill race down her spine. They never had arrested anyone in connection with the car crash. It had been a hit-and-run driver. They had found empty beer bottles at the scene and had assumed the other driver had tossed them out of his or her vehicle and then fled the scene.
Lisa shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t answer that question.”
Dallas sat back, stunned. The possibility that her parents had been killed had never entered her mind.
“I’ll be right back.” Lisa pushed back her chair.
The heat of the day suddenly hit Dallas making her feel weary. The slight breeze had died and the birds had flown away. She sunk into her chair and tried to wrap her mind around what she’d just been told.
Lisa returned with a cardboard roll that would contain a poster. She handed it to me.
“This is what the professor sent her.”
“A poster?” Dallas felt her nose wrinkle.
She looked at the return address. It said the initials K.P. and had a P.O. Box.
Lisa shrugged. “I’ve never opened it. Your mother told me to put it somewhere safe and if something happened to her, you would come for it. But you never did. Until now. She said the professor had given it to her to hide so that some evil people didn’t get ahold of it.”
Evil people? Train? But how long had this been going on. Her mother had been dead for years.
Dallas took it from Lisa’s outstretched hand. It didn’t burn her fingers. It didn’t feel like anything. Just a rolled-up piece of cardboard. The ends were sealed with heavy clear tape.
“This? This is what is so dangerous? What might have caused someone to kill the professor? What might have made someone kill my parents?”
Lisa pressed her lips together and shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Dallas sat in silence for a few seconds. The sweat dripped down her temple. The shadows had grown long. In the distance, she could hear children laughing and splashing from a pool.
“I think I should go now,” Dallas said.
Lisa frowned. “Are you sure? Are you okay?”
Dallas stood and swallowed. Her legs were a little unsteady. She tucked the cylinder under her arm. “I’m fine, but if it’s okay with you, I’d rather open this in private.”
“Of course,” Lisa said.
She walked Dallas through the house to the front door.
As Dallas turned to leave, Lisa said, “I’d love to talk to you more about your mother. We were actually childhood friends. I’d love to share some stories with you. I tried to dig out some photos before you got here, but I think they are in storage at my summer home in the mountains. I’d like to give them to you. Please let’s keep in touch?”
Dallas smiled. “I would love that.”
Lisa reached out and grabbed Dallas’s wrist. “Dallas? Please be careful. I don’t know what that contains, but it scared your mother.”
Dallas nodded. She dared not speak.
The rolled cylinder sat on the passenger seat beside Dallas as she drove back into Phoenix where her hotel was. Every once in a while, she’d side-eye it. What was inside? Who was K.P.”
She wanted to wait to open it until she was safe in her hotel room with the door dead-bolted.
Once she was behind closed doors of her room, Dallas did something she normally didn’t do—poured herself a stiff drink from the mini bar. Sitting on her bed with the cylinder before her, she lifted her glass in a toast. “Here’s to you, mother.”
She took a sip and then another and finally downed the glass entirely.
Slamming it down on the nightstand, she pulled her shoulders back and tugged the cylinder toward her. She tugged off the tape and then popped open the plastic insert that sealed the end. She held the tube upright. Nothing slid out. But there was something inside.
Sticking her fingers and thumb in, she grasped the scrolled paper inside.
Immediately, Dallas knew she was touching parchment. Her breath caught in her throat. She tugged. After a slight resistance, she pulled out a scroll slightly smaller than the cylinder. It contained two layers—one was a thin protective scroll of blank paper. She could see the brilliant colors of the other parchment shining through.
It rolled back into a circle. She used her palm to smooth it out on the bed, placing a hand in opposing corners and then gasped.
It was a piece of parchment covered in brilliant hieroglyphics.
Quickly, Dallas realized that the danger her mother had warned of, lay in the tale the hieroglyphics told.
Although her knowledge of the ancient language was rudimentary, she knew immediately that this scroll told the story of the book of knowledge and the whereabouts of Cleopatra’s Tomb. A chill ran through her. She jumped off the bed and paced, raking at her hair.
Holy shit. No. It couldn’t be that easy. No. It just couldn’t. What the hell was going on?
Sitting back down, she studied the parchment again. She didn’t know enough to read it exactly, just the general idea.
It was clearly Cleopatra and Antony in the pictures. And there was a book. One with a cobra on the front. The Book of Life. And a picture of Cleopatra with only a towel on her, hiding her naked body, but on one part of it was a small portion of a map peeking out from the cloth. A man with a black mask was standing peeking around the corner of a wall trying to watch the naked queen and see the map. Further down the scroll, boys with loincloths carried the bodies of Cleopatra and Antony on open-air gilded palanquins. They were followed by men carrying palanquins dripping with jewelry and gold coins.
It was clearly showing the Queen of the Nile with the Book of Life, showing how the location of the book was tattooed as a map on her body, and then showing her body and Antony’s body being taken to
