Passage to Queen Mesentia (2 page)

True, she’d had a blast, first time country and western dancing, but really? Marriage on the third date with a proposal that had been ridiculous? Of course she had said no. She needed to be romanced a little more than that. However, a couple of days later, she did agree to move in with him. 

She shook her head, trying to release the tension that thinking about Wade always caused.

And enough waiting on this guy from the phone! She felt like she had given the guy plenty of time to show up. Besides, she’d surprised herself by showing up in the first place. She had let the curiosity of the situation win. She stood up and grabbed her purse off the back of the chair.

“Ms. Steward?”

Lilly swung around to face a very large chest. She had to take a step back to see his face.

“Lillian Steward?” he said, his voice strong with the unfamiliar accent from the phone. 

His appearance gave her a jolt. He was so beautiful and substantial, like one would picture Hercules or Aries. So not what she had been expecting… ever.

“I’m Ben.” He held out his hand. “I’m very grateful you agreed to meet me.”

“Of course,” she said as they shook hands. She had to blink her attention away from his dark eyes, only to find herself examining the rest of his face. His skin was porcelain fair, yet his features seemed exotically ethnic. His hair was a stunning contrast of shoulder length black waves.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she blurted. After she realized she hadn’t released his hand, she snapped it back quickly. Her face stung with her sudden embarrassment. Why was she acting like such a school girl?

He motioned with his head and hand for them to take a seat. After they were seated across from one another, he said, “I beg of you to excuse this intrusion so close after the death of your parents. If it was not of such true importance, I would have never troubled you.”

“You do have my curiosity stirred. You said they had something that belongs to you?”

He put his arm on the table and leaned in closer. “When I heard your parents had been murdered, I immediately felt responsible.”

“What do you mean?” She fidgeted with her wine glass, suddenly regretting her decision to meet him alone. What did she always tell her students? Never talk to...

“Whoever did this shameful thing to the Stewards sought the Pyramidion Statuette. I had to get it out of Cairo. They kindly smuggled it into the States for me.”

Lilly sat straight up as she grasped what he’d said. The very idea! “My parents wouldn’t smuggle! They were highly respected archaeologists, not mobsters.”

“My apologies,” he spoke one beat up from a whisper. “I am not trying to devalue their reputation. They were most honorable and true to their word. I am afraid that a vile man has stolen the statuette.” He shook his head. “That would be a catastrophe. All I want is to see if perhaps—hopefully—it is still among their possessions.”

She tried her best to stay annoyed, but then Ben touched her hand that held the wine glass. She glanced at their hands and then to him. He caught her eyes in his stare.

“Lillian, if you would be so good as to look, I would be forever grateful.”

Becoming slightly mindful of how giddy this man made her feel, she had to force herself to focus on the conversation. She quietly cleared her throat, gently moved her hand from his touch and placed it in her lap. “So you don’t think that they were killed because they interrupted a burglary?”

“This man will stop at nothing. If you find the statuette and return it to me, he will no longer be interested in you.”

“What do you mean... no longer?” She forgot all about the awkwardness of the meeting and tried to read his face. “Do you think someone is already ‘interested’ in me?”

His left eyebrow made a high arch. He reached inside his coat and pulled out a business card. Placing it on the table in front of her, he stood up and said, “I beg of you, call me if you find anything.” He turned, his black trench coat waving behind him, and then as fast as he had arrived, he disappeared.

Lilly sat there for a few minutes trying to gather her thoughts. What had just happened? While in his presence, her head had gone fuzzy. She had wanted to sit and stare at him. She could have sworn she had felt his aura, like it had been tangible. As she took one big gulp of her wine, finishing off the glass, she realized she had failed to ask what the statuette even looked like.

As she walked outside, she dug inside her purse for her keys. When she looked up, she saw a man coming out of the shadows. She immediately felt anxious because the man wore a cowboy hat; it was Wade.

“Hey, Lilly,” he said like they were supposed to meet or something.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, hanging the purse across her chest. “Are you following me?”

“What? No, I come… here.”

“Right.” She walked toward her car.

Wade followed. “I need to talk you.”

“Not now, Wade. I’m not ready.”

“What are you doing here, anyway? At this bar? You sure look nice.”

Even though it was none of his business, she knew she’d better tell him what was going on before he arrived at all the wrong conclusions and got all bent out of shape. “It’s not what you think. I met a man here tonight.”

His footsteps stopped. “Well, that’s what I thinking.”  

She turned around, getting a little annoyed herself. “Would you listen to me?”

“I am listening. I’m listening.” He adjusted his cowboy hat. “And I don’t like what I’m hearing.”

She took a deep breath, not knowing if she could actually say the words.  “The man that I met here tonight had information about my parents. He told me… they were murdered because of some statue.”

“What?”

“Forget it,” she said, suddenly upset by the whole evening. She turned back around and started searching for the keys that she had absentmindedly dropped back inside her purse.

“Lilly... wait.”

After finding her keys again, she touched the button on her key ring to unlock the car door. As she took her seat behind the wheel, Wade opened the passenger side and sat down.

“Not now.” She was unable to hold back the tears any longer. “Can we talk later?”

“I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m not leaving you like this.”

Lilly wiped at her tears as she recalled the conversation about her parents. It had been a couple of weeks since she had found them, two horrible weeks of funeral arrangements, estate matters, the on-going police investigation, and of trying to stop crying. Now this… Maybe talking to Wade about it would help. She glanced his way, already feeling a little comforted by his presence. He waited patiently, quietly for her to compose herself. A moment later she said, “The guy I met with tonight said he was a friend of my parents.”

“What did he want?”

“Apparently they were supposed to meet with him to give him this statue that they had brought back from Egypt for him.”

“So what does this have to do with… what happened to them?”

“He said they were murdered because of the statue,” Lilly said. “He wants me to find it and to give it to him. He even said I may be in danger if I don’t give it to him.”

“We’re going to the cops—right now! What does he look like? When did he leave? I probably saw the son-of-a-bitch walk out.”

“He’s not the problem.”

“This guy threatened you! Yeah, I think he is the problem.”

“He didn’t threaten me. I think he was trying to warn me. But that doesn’t matter. This whole thing just has me thinking about my parents. That’s why I’m upset. Not because of him.”

“This is messed up. Let me handle this guy.”

“No, I can handle it myself.” She wiped hard at her tears, determined to make them stop. “Why do you always have to overreact?”

“I don’t like this one bit. This guy coming around here threatening you. I’m not letting you talk to him again. If he contacts you—”

“You’re not letting me?” Her hand shook as she turned on the ignition. Why did she think Wade could help her calm down? He had managed to somehow make her feel worse! “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but things have changed between us. Even when I
was
your girlfriend, when did you start controlling who I talked to? What is going on? Everything has changed. You know, I can’t take it anymore. It’s over. This, us… over.”

Wade’s long silence told her that her words had cut him. Even though she hadn’t meant to blurt it out, it needed to be said, so she couldn’t take it back.  She closed her eyes, trying to keep from bursting into tears again and waited for him to get out of the car.

It took him a moment to open the door, and before he got out he said, “I love you, Lilly, and that will never change.”

“Uhhh.” Lilly fought the urge to lie right down on the seat and cry all night. Why did he have to make it about him? Why couldn’t he give her a little room? Following her around, barking out orders…

She pulled out of the parking lot onto the road and drove with one hand and wiped tears with the other. Her conversation with the man became all tangled up with the conversation with Wade. Wade the caveman; “Must protect my woman.” She wasn’t his woman any longer.
Really
no longer. It hadn’t happened the way she had wanted it to happen, but it was over. She had just told him, and she was glad. Right? And how dare he pretend to be interested in who murdered her parents? He never liked them. Every time he got around them, he got all snappy, like that night… Lilly suddenly stopped her mental raving, becoming aware of her surroundings. She turned into her parent’s neighborhood. In her despair, she must have subconsciously chosen to drive there.

Lilly hadn’t been able to bring herself to go inside since their deaths, but she did drive past their house every day after work on her way home. Was she really considering going inside to search for the statuette for that man? Was she really up to going through her parent’s things, tonight? Maybe this was what she needed; a little push to get her over the hump, over the threshold, and into the house. She was afraid that if she went home and slept on it, she would never do it.

She drove up the drive-way, turned off the motor, and stepped out of the car, staring at the dark house she hadn’t called home in many years. Memories began to overshadow the fear as she remembered her childhood and how difficult it had been being so introverted but having parents who were so adventurous. They had pushed her, like they thought her courageous genes would come out of hiding. Yet, the more they pressed, the more Lilly withdrew inside herself. That is, until she met Wade. She was pretty sure the decision not to marry Grant had been the first decision she had ever made by herself.

With shaky hands, she opened the front door to the strong scent of bleach and ammonia. She stood there, actually proud of herself for getting that far, and tried to block the horrible heavy feelings. “Stop it,” she told herself and gritted her teeth as she walked inside. 

Lilly went through the downstairs and snapped on all the lights. She’d had it cleaned, but the memory of the mess seemed to pop in front of her eyes. She quickly searched the front area of the house. Even though she had failed to ask for a description, she knew a pyramidion was the top part of a pyramid, and he had called it a statuette, so it was going to be small. So she would look for a small pyramid.

She only glanced in the kitchen, the place where they had found Constance, her parents’ personal cook and family friend, dead on the floor, a burnt bird in the oven and her famous mashed potatoes on the stove. Unfortunately, Lilly knew where she really needed to go. If her parents had brought something back from Egypt, most likely it would still be with their things. And their things would be upstairs in the dark, in their room… where they had been.

Lilly made it up the stairs and into the master bedroom, but once the tears started flowing, they wouldn’t stop. She avoided the mattress-less bed, where her parents had been. She couldn’t actually recall them lying there, and didn’t try to remember—which she knew was best—but stayed at the surface of her mind. She only remembered what the police had said; her parents had been shot, execution style. She hadn’t even picked up a newspaper in the last couple of weeks in fear it would stir the memory. She desperately didn’t want to remember what they had looked like when she’d found them.

Forcing herself not to run out of the house screaming, she headed straight for the dresser and started going through it. She didn’t allow herself to see the contents of the drawers; instead, she searched mindlessly. She went through all four drawers and then moved over to the nightstand. She didn’t notice anything that didn’t belong, so she moved on to the walk-in closet. She looked in the pockets of her dad’s suit jackets, around notebooks, shoes, and inside boxes on the shelves. 

When she had about given up, she kicked a neatly folded quilt on the closet floor and felt something hard underneath it. She moved the blanket, and there sat the wooden buffalo mask she remembered from childhood. It had a long decorative nose and two outer ringlets that circled huge, dark dot eyes. Although the paint had faded, its original colors were still vivid in her mind. She had seen one exactly like it in action on her first trip with her parents to Africa where they had been digging near a small village in Burkina Faso. Dancers wore similar masks along with fluffy fur costumes depicting different animals. One at a time, they became the center of attention as drummers beat out the music. It had been captivating and memorable, especially since the mask hung in the dining room and put the images of that day in her head whenever she ate.

She picked it up. “Now how did you get way up here?”

Chapter 3

Wade watched from the road and then pulled into the Steward’s driveway after Lilly had gone inside the house. He parked behind her car and cut the motor to his truck. “What the hell does she think she’s doing?” He couldn’t believe she would go to her parents’ house—where they had been murdered— in the middle of the night.

He unbuckled his seatbelt and squeezed his hand into his jeans pocket, pulling out and opening his knife. He grabbed an apple from the bag of apples on the seat beside him and sliced a bite, grabbing it with his mouth and chewed his new cigarette.