The Lost Choice (19 page)

In due course, I retrieved the item and made my way home. I later asked Key about this strange encounter. He said only that the object struck him as “vastly familiar.” As for Cinque, I only encountered him on one other occasion and never came to understand his fervor for the object, nor how he even knew it was in my pocket.

In closing, I must once again apologize for the stirring of fact and fancy with which I have presented this item. It is now, however, in your keeping, for our nation, in the memory of my dear father.

I am most sincerely yours,

John Quincy Adams

Mark studied the signature briefly, then exhaled loudly as he lowered the page. He opened his mouth as if to say something, closing it almost as suddenly.“I'm having a hard time putting this together.”

“Isn't this the most exciting—,”Abby stammered.“Is this unbelievable?”

“Yeah, it's unbelievable,” Dylan said,“but I'm with Mark. The whole picture has not emerged for me yet. It's as confusing as it is exciting. And wait till you see the rest of this. Right now, you aren't confused at all!”

As always, Dorry was taking notes. She paused, flipped a few pages in her book, and said,“Here's some background I did this afternoon. John Adams was the second president. Quincy was number six. Quincy was the first president to be fathered by a president. By the way, of the first seven presidents, John Adams was the only one to have a male heir.” She looked up.“That doesn't really mean anything. I just thought it was interesting.

“Of the founding fathers—Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry—John Adams was one of the very few who never owned a slave. And his family never owned slaves. That's curious, isn't it? Considering the translation on the object.”

Dylan interrupted. “Hey! What do you make of them
knowing
what it said? They translated it!”

“Yeah,” Mark said.“And Francis Scott Key in the letter? He only wrote ‘The Star Spangled Banner.'And
Amistad
?” “Did you see
that
movie?”Abby asked Mark.

“Yes, and do you know who made that movie?”

“Spielberg!” they practically shouted at once.

“Holy moly,” Dylan said.“We have a picture of Schindler with one of these things. Now it's connected to the guy from the
Amistad.
You know, I have Spielberg's phone number. I think I'll call and ask if he knows what's going on!” “Guys.” Mark's serious tone cut through the teasing. “Dorry”—he motioned with his hand—“I need a piece of paper and the pen.” As she slid the items within his reach, Mark quickly divided the blank page in front of him into three columns and at the top, labeled them
Live, Fed,
and
Free
.“Have you noticed this?” he said, talking as he wrote.

“We thought it was coincidence . . . neat . . . strange, whatever, that George Washington Carver, who did so much with food . . . had the food stone.” In the
Fed
column, Mark wrote
Carver
.“Now, we have John Adams . . .”

“Oh, man, I see where you're going with this,” Dylan broke in.

“Hang on,” Mark said. “Slow down. Let's do this carefully. Let's put every piece of this puzzle on the table . . .”

“Oh, man man man!” Dylan rattled. “You don't even know what I have in the—”

“Dylan! Hang on, brother! We have to lay this out precisely.”

“You have to understand, Dylan,” Dorry interrupted. “It's the detective thing. Slooow . . . steeeady . . . there might be a fingerprint on that blade of grass two miles from the crime scene.”

Ignoring her, Mark continued, “In the
Free
column, we put Adams . . .Adams . . . Joan of Arc . . .”

“Francis Scott Key,”Abby said.

“Yeah,”Mark agreed, writing slowly. “Francis Scott Key . . .Who else?” Mark asked.

“The
Amistad
guy goes in that column too,” Dylan said. “And put Henry Wallace and Norman Borlaug in the
Fed
column.”

“Patterson,” Dorry said.“The president of Carver's college. Frederick Patterson. Put him down.”

“And in the
Live
column?” Mark asked the others.“This is just an assumption, of course, but an obvious one . . .”

“Schindler,” they answered.

“My gosh,”Abby continued to talk.“See how this is lining up? Perasi found some more matches too. And I have to tell you about the scopes.”

Mark shook his head.“This is so weird.”

Dylan pulled the last two pages from the box and laid them side by side.“For you, my friend,” he smiled. “It just got weirder.”

Dorry stood over Mark's shoulder with her coffee in hand as they studied the two images before them, recognizing neither.“Perasi does good work, doesn't he?” Dylan asked as he pushed a page forward.“Look at this one first.” It was a photograph of a bookish man in a white lab coat with which he wore a black tie. His receding hairline and thick, black-rimmed glasses gave the appearance of an older person, though his lack of wrinkles and the twinkle in his eye revealed the truth that he was, indeed, still a young man. He posed in the picture with a microscope, but to his right, sitting directly on top of a stack of three books, was a relic. “Know him?” Dylan asked. Mark and Dorry shook their heads.“Tell 'em,Ab.”

“Jonas Salk.”

“No way!” Dorry said, picking up the page to get a closer look. “He discovered the polio vaccine. There's the object, right there.”

“That's
Live,
” Mark said.

“What?”

“
Live.
Jonas Salk. The polio vaccine. That object has got to be ‘By your hand, the people shall live.' And”—Mark paused to look carefully at his wife—“if that is
Live,
and considering how these others are lining up, I have no doubt that it is, the relic Michael found in the creek.”

For a moment they just looked at each other, lost in questions their minds were having trouble formulating, never mind answering. Dorry broke the silence.“Ab, when was that picture taken?”

Abby glanced at her notes.“May 5, 1955. Perasi found this one in the
Time
magazine microfilm. Salk died in '95. He was seventy when he died, so . . . he's thirty in this picture.”

Addressing the image of the young doctor,Dorry asked, “Where did you get this? And who had it after you? Or did anybody?” She looked at Mark.“And how in the world did it end up in our backyard?”

“Check this guy out.” Dylan changed the subject by picking up the other page.“Scary boy, isn't he?”The image was of a painting, and though it was the second to be shown, it had been the first to catch the eye of both Mark and Dorry when Dylan had laid them on the table a few minutes before. As they had examined the photograph and talked about Jonas Salk, the Chandlers' attention had continued to drift toward this image.

It was a painting of a male face from the shoulders up. The only word to describe the man was “terrifying.” His black hair was wild with colored streaks of white and red. The skin on one side of his face was painted blue, the other bright yellow. He was screaming furiously as if he might lunge from the canvas. But the most incredible sight was the relic, front and center in the image, tied directly to the man's forehead. “Geez! Who is that?” Dorry asked.“I'll have nightmares!” “Date: 1304?” Dylan prompted.

Mark and Dorry shook their heads.

“‘William Wallace,'” Abby read. “‘Hero of Scotland. During a time in world history when the average male height was just over five feet,William Wallace stood six feet seven inches tall and possessed a physique to match. His sword'—which by the way, is on display today . . . where is that?” She turned the pages.“I have it on another sheet . . . okay, here. ‘The sword, sixty-six inches in length and weighing almost nine pounds, can be seen at the Patrons of Cowanes Hospital in Scotland.

“‘Wallace was obsessed by the idea of freedom for his people and'—get this—,”Abby interjected. She began to read slowly.“‘He often wore his “stone of destiny” into battle! He was captured and executed in 1305, an event regarded by many to have created an even greater clamor for freedom by the people of Scotland.'”Abby closed her notebook.

Dorry checked what she had written. “Wallace was 1305. Joan of Arc . . . 1431. The first date we have on an Adams is 1638 when the object came to America.” She paused, lost in thought. Suddenly, Dorry asked,“We
do
all agree, don't we, that this lineup—Wallace, Joan of Arc, Adams—this is all the same object, right?
Free?”

“Yes,” they concurred.

“Heck of a lineup,” Dorry murmured and looked again to her notes.“Abby,” Dylan said. “What about the radio scope?”

“Oh!” Abby shook her head as if waking up. “I almost forgot.” Opening her notebook again, Abby glanced at it, then began. “You know the scope works by light refraction. I can see inside—shapes, stresses. Long story short, the pieces
were
hollow in their original form, and the pressure closures on the ends were immediate. A catastrophic event. “I want to run the scope on the Adams piece coming in tomorrow, because the picture of it, well, the shape is somewhat different.”

“You said a catastrophic event,”Mark pointed out.“Any idea what the catalyst might have been?”

Abby frowned.“What do you mean?”

“In my line of work,”Mark explained,“the catalyst of a catastrophic event would be a gun, a knife, a bomb, a car bumper . . .”

“Okay, I gotcha. Well, rule out gun, bomb, and car bumper.” Mark smiled at Abby's remark. She continued. “But I guess ‘knife' is a possibility. It would have been a
big
knife . . . weight behind it, like a sword or an ax.

“Here's something peculiar. You can't see this with the naked eye, but with scope magnification and resolution, there appears to be edge-to-edge closure, caused by the catastrophic event, on both sides of the
Live
object. It's as if a Ziploc bag had a Ziploc on each end of the bag . . . are you following me? Two edges?” Everyone nodded, concentrating deeply on Abby's words.

“The food stone, however, has edge-to-edge closure on only one side. On the side opposite the pressure closure on the food stone, it is obvious that the original casting created its own hollow curve. On that end, there exists a rough spot about the size of a dime. In my opinion, something was attached, at some point, to that location on the food stone.” Changing the subject, Abby asked Dorry, “Are you getting anything from your sources?”

Dorry shook her head disgustedly.“Zip. Nada.”

“Me neither,” Mark said.“A lot of people had their hands on these things, but it looks like nobody ever stole one!” They all chuckled.

“Okay, here's what I'm doing next,”Abby said.“The Adams piece comes in tomorrow. I'll scope it here, but here's some big news, I think. I checked around. I have a buddy I graduated with—undergrad—and after doing all his doctoral work, he went the extreme research route. That means University of Wisconsin–Madison. They are the big leagues.

“Among other things, they do chemical analysis of archaeological materials. They are among the only locations in the world with the instruments to tell us more. If everyone agrees, I have already given Perry a heads up and we can ship the three objects to him tomorrow afternoon. He has reserved time with a machine called an Inductively Coupled Plasma Atomic Emission Spectrometer.”

Mark's eyes widened.“O-kaaaay . . .”

Abby laughed.“It's a mouthful. But Perry will be able to send me the results I want on computer models by e-mail. I want him to do two specific things. I want to examine those edges more closely than I can here and . . . I want to regressively age the edges.”

Dorry looked at Mark.“That's what you do, right? With pictures of kids?”

He nodded. In work with missing persons, it was a common tactic to regress the picture of an adult in order to see if he or she is, in fact, the child that was lost years earlier.

“So, I want a regression of all three objects. I want a better idea of what these edges used to look like.”

For a moment everyone was still. Then Dylan said,“Tell 'em why,Ab.”

She hesitated, then lifted her chin. “I think they used to fit together,” she said. “I think they are all pieces of something else.”

Dorry leaned forward and put her face down on the table, cradled by her arms. Then, just as quickly, looked up. “I believe it,” she stated, acceptance on her face.“I'm kinda blown away by the idea, but I think that has been bothering me too. It's all just . . . just too connected . . . for this not to have been, well . . . connected.” She exhaled loudly and slumped back into her chair.

“Okay, then . . .” Mark spoke slowly. He was doodling with his pen on the piece of paper in front of him.“I have a question for you. If these pieces all fit . . .” He put down the pen and looked up.“Do we have all the pieces? Or are there more?”

THIRTEEN

NEW YORK CITY—MAY 1, 1915

AT TEN O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, THE TEMPERA-ture was still unseasonably cool. The low clouds and drizzling mist seemed more suited for December or January than the first day of May. Nigel Bailey waited patiently under the canopy of Baron's Pub on Sixth Avenue, smoking a cigarette. He had called in quite a few markers from friends—and friends of friends—to make this day happen. If the meeting went well, he would be a rich man.

Bailey was of average height and compact build with broad shoulders that hinted of an uncommon strength. His complexion was dark, as were his eyes, and he sported a bushy mustache that was longer than the hair on his head, which was concealed, in any case, by a tall, beaver-skin hat. Noticing his cigarette had burned almost to his fingertips, Nigel quickly rolled another one and lit it from the last flicker of the first. He was thirty-four years old and a world traveler, though this was his first trip to America. Having grown up in Australia, and on his own from the time he was fourteen, he had made his way as a stock herder in the outback until leaving the country for good at twenty-three. For a number of years, Nigel worked as a deckhand, mate, and finally purser on cargo and passenger vessels trading from Africa to European ports. It was on such a trip two years earlier that Nigel had first heard of the incredible discoveries being made in Egypt. The Valley of the Kings, as it was being called, was yielding its priceless treasures to one fool or another on almost a monthly basis. In Italy, the same thing was happening. Roman vaults and catacombs of long-buried dead were beginning to be found.