The Dig (2 page)

He frowned as he looked at the piece from the box, turning it over in his hands. It was a three-inch section of smooth, dark-stained wood, decoratively beveled on three sides. A squiggly line of dry, cracked glue marked the only unstained side. Two holes indicated where the piece had previously been screwed into something.

Unable to recall if he had locked the front door, Matt set the wood on the desktop and debated whether to go through the house to make sure everything was secure before proceeding. Caution won and he did his rounds.
Note to self:
get security system activated.
He flopped back in his chair and opened his desk drawer, pulled out his armband timer, and slid it up to his forearm. He turned it on and pressed the batt button to check the charge—plenty of juice. He rolled the chair under the desk and fidgeted until he was comfortable.

He inhaled deeply and said aloud, “Okay… ready for you.”

With the timer set for one minute, he pressed start. He stretched his hands out before him, flat and steady, approaching the wooden piece as if about to give it a back massage.

Contact.

The usual rushing sound filled his ears as he felt his body roll forward into someone else’s. Sometimes it felt as if he were surging forward, sometimes backward—he had never understood what determined the direction. His eyes focused, adjusting to the other person’s as he went through his well-practiced routine.

I’m male. I’m forty-seven. My name is Jakob Herz, and I was born in Dortmund, Germany, in 1892. The year is 1939. I live in Kalisz, Poland. I am frightened. They are in the neighbors’ house already. I open my grandmother’s writing table to remove the jewelry. I will hide it in the chimney.

Goddamn it! He sent me some Nazi crap again and didn’t even warn me! That’s it, Georgie—you’re done.

Through Jakob Herz’s eyes, Matt found himself digging through this ornate desk, hearing shouts and gunshots outside and in other homes nearby. He has a pistol upstairs.… Should he retrieve the pistol? Matt says,
Hell yes! Shoot the first son of a bitch that comes through the door!
But he knows he has no control over the experience. Jakob is apparently more interested in hiding these items in hopes that his family will be able to retrieve them when they return from the lake tomorrow. Matt and Jakob both panic because the soldiers will not be gone by the time the family returns, unaware of… Five loud wooden taps on the front door, and Matt wondered if the imprint would fade out or if the sixty seconds would elapse in time to save him. He was not in the mood to feel a bullet rip through their body.

Rewind.

I open my grandmother’s desk to remove…

Again… more.

I open my grandmother, Hilde Weiss’s, desk to remove…

That’ll do it, thank you. Wow, new speed record!

Matt’s hands drew back reflexively as the timer began buzzing in his head. He struck the stop button on his arm, glanced around the room, and took down some notes. A quick look at his phone revealed that George had called again while he was reading the piece.
Oh, don’t worry, George. We’re going to have a nice little chat shortly. Now, let’s see if we can’t meet granny Hilde
. Resetting his timer for five minutes, he reached for the wooden piece again.

The ear-sucking, familiar disorientation, and he found himself with Jakob in the same panicked state.
Fast-forward…
Jakob again
—
penning a letter.
Must have been an emotional letter.
Nope, earlier… c’mon, hurry up to the next imprint
. Matt waited through the letter. He had never been able to fast-forward past an unread imprint. Some kind of stupid limitation set by those that handed out psychic powers.

Jakob picked up the letter to review it and a few seconds later, dark space took over the scene. Matt thought about the car awaiting him just ten little miles away. A candlelit room coalesced out of the mist before him.

I am Hilde Weiss. I’m female. I’m thirty-four years old. I was born in Paris, in 1832. The year is 1866. I live in Dortmund, Germany. I am happy that my husband, Samuel, has given me this wonderful gift. “Where did you get it, love?” she asks him as she runs her fingers over its smooth, dark-stained surface.

There’s Samuel. She looks at his eyes… loves those eyes… more so at this moment, apparently, than normally.

“It was Danke Stern’s,” he says. Hilde looks back at the desk and strokes it again. “It’s eighty years old.”

Seventeen eighty-six—Yahtzee!

They look back at Samuel. He’s ready for his thank-you kiss, and likely a more demonstrative kind of thank-you as well.

Matt waited impatiently for the timer to shock him out of it. He’d been the woman in these situations enough times already.
Come on, let’s go. Job done.
“I love you, Samuel! How did you get it from her?” A reasonable question, it seemed. It looked as though these folks weren’t exactly living the high life in this one-room hovel.

But before Samuel answered, Matt slapped the stop button on his timer and wrote more notes on his legal pad. Then, pulling his gloves back on, he shoved the piece deep into the box of popcorn. Where had he put all the tape guns? He quickly pulled a strip off one of his own boxes, sealed the top, and stuck the return label over the old label. He breathed his first sigh of relief as he dropped the package onto his doorstep and walked back inside. The house was clean again.

“New York Metropolitan Mus—” George answered.

“Hi, Georgie,” Matt said with a menacingly pleasant tone.

“Oh… hey, Matt! I got cut off. Tried to call you back, but—”

“Yeah, right. To answer your question, yes, I did finish with it. I’ll admit, I was pretty shocked to discover what it is you sent me.”

George’s gulp was clearly audible.

“Look, Doctor Meier made me!” George said with quaking voice. “See, this Jewish family with living descendants—”

“That was it, okay?” Matt interrupted. “The last read. I’ll e-mail you my notes later.”

He hung up the phone with George suspended in mid apology. Leaning back in his chair, he put his feet on the stack of boxes beside his desk. Everyone always had such noble motivations, but none of them ever actually understood Matt’s objections—not at nine years old and, apparently, not now at twenty-five.

The soldiers had already entered the house. They probably shot that guy on sight. Matt shook out his face and tried to clear his head.

The Porsche!

Leaping up from the chair, he went to the master bedroom and flipped through the stack of long-sleeved shirts draped over a box labeled “Bathroom” in purple marker. He selected a black turtleneck and swapped it for the paint-stained T-shirt. He ran his fingers over the paint on his jeans and decided to keep them on—it had already dried. Socks on, shoes on, he stopped at the mirrored closet door. He looked at himself up and down and decided he would buy a weight set—his arms were way too thin. People would continue to wonder about him, he decided, until he appeared more like a man and less like a teenager. He raised his chin and rubbed the recalcitrant goatee that had refused to grow in over the past week.

He grabbed a knit cap and a pair of black gloves from the closet shelf and headed out. As the front door to his new house shut behind him, the cell phone on his desk began to buzz, followed by that annoying ring tone.

“Beautiful vehicle you’ve just bought, Mr. Turner,” the sales manager smarmed.

Matt turned the key a single click and checked that the odometer read zero.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll be sure to put it to good use.” He looked at the manager through his sunglasses, admired the sheen of the silver slacks and jacket. “You mind me asking what kind of suit that is?”

“Uh, sure, it’s Zegna. Would you like one? My brother-in-law manages the Saks near RTP.”

“Hmmm… maybe. It’s very nice. I’ll give you a call if I ever have occasion to wear one.”

Matt took a deep breath and removed his gloves. His bare hands glided over the steering wheel and then felt about him—seats, dash, headliner… He breathed in the smell of the leather, reveling in the
newness
. He stepped out and ran his hand over the shining black body. All new.

“Well, if there’s nothing else, Mister Turner,” the manager said, extending his hand. Matt faked a smile and tilted his head to the side to examine the man’s fingers. Nothing on the right hand, wedding ring visible on the left. Was this the kind of guy who did the two-handed “I genuinely like you” clutch? Matt determined he probably was, and quickly slipped his gloves back on. He put out his hand, and the manager gave a single, not-too-tight squeeze—quick shake, just the one hand. Matt slid back into his car, feeling ensconced in the intoxicating cloud of newness. He watched the manager return to the showroom to greet another customer, this time with a double-handed shake. Ah, but he didn’t have their money yet.

Driving home, Matt decided to call his sister, Iris, to see if she wanted to stop by to see the new ride. Then he remembered that he’d left the cell phone on his desk. And then he remembered the reading on the piece of stained wood earlier, and his good mood faded for an instant. The 911 GT2 hugged an S-turn, and Matt smiled again. He knew that he couldn’t keep spending like this much longer, so he recommitted himself to ending the shopping spree…
after
fully furnishing the house, and one nice tropical vacation. Reminding himself how easy it was to make more money, he began listing what he would buy next should he hit the jackpot again.

Merging onto Highway 440, he pushed the turbo to 110 mph. He slowed a bit after the third car honked at him for weaving in and out of lanes. What was he supposed to do? At 95, it felt like the Jetta at 40, and begging to go faster.

In his absence, his cell phone had accumulated six missed calls and four new voice messages, vibrating itself off the desk and onto the floor. He found it and scrolled through the missed calls. 440205553836? Way too many numbers, he mused. Forty-four… wasn’t that UK? He listened to his first message. A woman with one of those oddly attractive English accents spoke.

“Hello, Mister Turner, this is Danielle Sloo from the Museum of—”

The call-waiting tone interrupted before Matt could finish rolling his eyes. Dr. Meier just wasn’t going to leave him alone, was he? He pulled the phone away from his ear to see the caller ID. A New York area code… his parents’ number.
Gotta get my contacts entered into this thing.

“Hey, Mom, what’s up?”

His mother’s ever-concerned voice replied, “Hello, dear, how
are
you doing?”

“I have to say I’m doing well, Mom. How about you?”

“Oh, you know, just work, work, work. I spoke with Iris this morning, you know. I hope you’re not just spending all that money, dear.”

“Oh, I’m not, Mom, don’t worry.” He pulled the window blinds to look lovingly out at the gleaming black Porsche in the driveway. “I’m making some pretty good investments.”

“Well, I know you’ll be responsible, honey. Anyway, so there’s someone here who would like to talk to you.”

Matt went rigid in his chair.

“Mom, it better not be Dad. You
know
—”

His father’s familiar gruff baritone interrupted. “Hey there, son.”

Matt covered the mic with his thumb and breathed a shaky sigh. Why the hell would she do this to him?

“Yes?” he replied, his fury evident.

“Now, son, let’s not start this off on the wrong tone, you hear me?”

“I could
end
this off with the
right
tone, Dad. How’d that be?”

“Well, that wouldn’t be appreciated much, Matthew.”

His father got a few more syllables off, but Matt had already hit end.

Standing up, he muttered aloud, “Why is everyone screwing with my head today?”

He decided to play some Xbox to zone out. The last thing he wanted to think about was his “detective” days with Dad. Working in homicide, his father had been unable to stop himself from taking advantage of his son’s talent during investigations. At age nine, it had been a flood of attention and approval from a usually absent parent. In the beginning, no one understood exactly what Matt experienced. When he held the evidence—a piece of clothing or a cigarette butt, or sometimes an actual weapon—he simply sat quietly for a few minutes until someone pulled it away from him. Of course, he would be pretty upset afterward, but the information he provided was a gold mine of leads for the department to follow. It wasn’t until he turned twelve that he told his father he wanted to stop. And he had been wheedled or coerced into working over a hundred more cases after that, his last at age fourteen.

“J
ON, THE TOUR WILL BE COMING
through here in just a few,” Tuni St. James announced through the partly open office door.

“Uh-huh,” Dr. Meier grunted as he squinted at the computer monitor.

She took a step into the room. “So I’ll just be showing them in then,” she persisted, and he glanced up at her over his bifocals.

“Yes, good,” he said, and couldn’t stop himself from a quick pan up those long legs. She turned and left, and he shook his head. He’d never found himself attracted to tall women in the past, but something about Tuni’s smooth, café au lait skin and elegant yet revealing wardrobe compelled his gaze to linger. Also, he had never been much for accents, but hers, a mix of London English with a drop of South African… ah, well, a quick twist of his ring and long look at the desktop photo of his wife, and his guilt would be relieved.