Valley of Decision (8 page)

“Did you notice the trowel marks in the cement?” He swung one of his long legs over the lip. “Excellent craftsmanship.”

“Papa, this isn't an archaeological expedition.” This trip Lisbeth had thought to bring the appropriate clothing. She handed him Aisa's tunic. “Try to stay focused.”

“Sorry. You're right.”

They took turns standing guard while the other slipped behind the well and did a quick change. When Lisbeth emerged clad in her tunic, Papa was standing at the edge of the street staring into the distance like a Bedouin sheepherder come to town for the first time.

“The reconstructed Phoenician metropolis is even more breathtaking than I imagined.” Awe radiated from his expression. “Not a fragment of a faded fresco. Not an artist rendition based on estimated measurements, but real brick and mortar.” He ran his fingers lightly over the stones of the tenement building. “Being here”—he turned to her, tears in his eyes—“puts flesh upon what I have only known as bones.”

He hesitated and then said, “Your mother will want to see me, right?”

She kissed his leathery cheek. “More than anything.”

They wove through the alleys that led toward the wealthier part of the city. Streets that once bustled with life were somber as a tomb and just as noxious. Corpses were stacked two and three high at every intersection. Lisbeth clutched the bag of medical supplies slung over her shoulder and kept focused on reaching her goal. These people and their medical needs were not her problem.
According to history, the plagues eventually flamed out. Eradicating measles and typhoid sooner would require that she put herself out there again, invest in changing the past. She'd tried that. Twice. And both times the past had resolutely refused to budge from its destructive course. She couldn't go through the pain of thinking she could save Cyprian and the church again. This trip was her last. She intended to get in, gather her family, and get out before she lost another piece of her heart.

Pale streaks of light showed Byrsa Hill. Papa halted, his eyes wide. “Look, over there. Something's happened.” Papa started toward the scores of scarecrow-thin pedestrians, hunched and shuffling en masse along the broad avenue leading to the Forum. Each person had a cloth tied over his or her nose.

“Wait,” she called after him.

He ignored her and kept going. “Someone may have seen Maggie.”

“So much for keeping our heads down.” Lisbeth hurried across the street and caught up with him. “Let me do the talking.” She stopped the first person, an old woman with fresh scabs on her face. “What's going on?” Her rusty Latin must have frightened the woman because she backed away. Lisbeth turned to summon her father, but he was right behind her.

Papa stepped in and rephrased the question. The woman nodded in the direction of the proconsul's palace high atop the Acropolis and mumbled something Papa translated. “She says Aspasius is dead.”

“What? When?”

“Yesterday.”

“That can't be.” Was her timing off? The sickening possibility she'd overshot their desired entry time slammed Lisbeth's gut. “Let's check it out, Papa.”

“I thought we weren't sightseeing.”

“This is one sight I'm not going to miss.”

Arm in arm, they approached the line that snaked around the palace grounds. Lisbeth strained to make out the circulating whispers.

“Murdered,” Papa whispered. “They're saying the proconsul was murdered.”

“By whom?” Lisbeth's pulse quickened. “When?” Did the person who killed the proconsul kill her mother? Had Cyprian already been executed? Was she too late? Where was Maggie? Lisbeth's gaze raced over the crowd.
God, help me find my strong-willed runaway.

“They're saying Aspasius died at the hand of his personal healer,” Papa said.

“Mama?” She and Papa exchanged terrified looks. “That's impossible.”

“Well, impossible or not, he's dead.” Papa pointed to the cypress branch hanging over the open doors of the palace and the group of women throwing themselves upon the ground and wailing in a mournful rhythm. “I don't think we want to be here. This is the line to view his body.” He tried to pull her away, but Lisbeth strained in the direction of the body. “Wait, where are we going?”

“To spit upon the face of the tyrant who tortured my mother.” Lisbeth dragged Papa to the end of a long procession of men, women, and children filing past the pale body laid out in the atrium. Different accounts of how the proconsul died reached Lisbeth's ears. One version stopped her heart.

“When he refused to marry his lover, she sawed off his leg and kept it as a memento.”

“That's not true,” Lisbeth whispered to Papa. “Mama loves you. Not that coward who hid in his bedroom with his gangrenous foot and weasel-eyed scribe.”

What she didn't go on to say was that she'd begged her mother
not to nurse the man who'd abused her for nearly a quarter of a century. She'd pleaded with Mama to come with her. To come back to Papa. Lisbeth didn't say it, because she didn't want her father to misconstrue the truth. Mama had chosen to remain in the past. Not because of Aspasius but because of his son.

Lisbeth inched forward. She wouldn't believe the man who'd exiled her husband and made her mother's life miserable was dead until she saw his body. She shifted from foot to foot, trying to see around the tall oil merchant blocking her view. When the man in front of her had finally seen enough and moved on in a greasy swirl, Lisbeth gasped.

The bloated corpse of Aspasius lay in repose upon a marble table. The slight tilt of his head had permanently pressed his lips into that wicked, twisted grin he'd given her right before she'd administered the mandrake that put him under for surgery.

In life, the proconsul of Carthage had seemed invincible. His massive girth had filled a room with fear. People cowered when his mercurial red sandals clicked upon the marble tiles of the governing hall. They quivered in the wake of his purple-trimmed cloak and that ridiculous golden wreath he wore to conceal his baldness.

In death, diabetic-induced weight loss and a raging infection had reduced Aspasius Paternus to mere mortal status. His decaying body was no safer from the ravaging effects of a deadly disease than those of the plebeians struggling to survive in the crowded tenements.

Lisbeth averted her gaze, unwilling to allow this man a permanent place in her thoughts. His decades of evil had destroyed the lives of so many good people. People she loved. He'd killed her friend Caecilianus. He'd exiled her husband. He'd inflicted atrocities upon her mother. And quite possibly he'd have removed her husband's head before some postoperative complication had removed him. Dwelling upon her hatred of the former ruler of Carthage
would destroy her, and as long as her child was alive, she couldn't let that happen.

“Let's get out of here.” Lisbeth clasped Papa's arm and spun out of line.

“Where are we going?”

“The only place Maggie would know to look for her father.” Lisbeth set a brisk pace toward Cyprian's villa. When they reached the magnificent structures of the rich, she rushed ahead. “This is it.” She burst through the doors. “Cyprian! Maggie!” Her feet went out from under her and she fell hard in a pool of blood. Drying her hands on her tunic, she scrambled to get her legs under her again.

Tossed mats, spilled water gourds, and tumped oil lamps littered the beautiful mosaic floor. “Cyprian!”

“Whoa!” Papa surveyed the mess. “What happened here?”

“When I left, soldiers were destroying the hospital. I can still hear the screams from that day.” She couldn't bring herself to say that Cyprian may have sent her down the well and returned to the point of a sword. “The bodies are gone—maybe that means Cyprian is alive.” She found a lamp. “It's still warm. Someone may be hiding and too frightened to come out.” For better or worse, she had to know. “If it's the family I told you about, maybe they can tell us if Maggie showed up.” She started down the typhoid hall.

Something sharp pierced the sole of Lisbeth's sandal and punctured the tender flesh of her heel. Her cry echoed in the empty hall.

“Are you all right?” Papa helped her limp to Diona's deserted recovery bed.

Lisbeth dug sterile gauze from her bag and then pulled a piece of broken pottery from her foot. “I don't think I need stitches.” Pressure did little to slow her hemorrhaging emotions. “Maybe everyone's in the cottage out back.”

“Or maybe—”

“Don't say it.” Lisbeth quickly wrapped her foot. “I'll check the estate grounds. You check the other halls.” She then tested her weight. Painful. “I think I can still walk.” When her father didn't answer, she noticed he hadn't left the atrium. “Papa?” He stood before a statue of a woman, his eyes fixed on her face. “Papa! What's wrong?”

He struggled to get the words out. “It's one of the Women of Victory.”

“Cyprian has lots of art.”

“Not like this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I unearthed this statue the summer you were born. I had promised your mother I would not go to England to dig but would find a project site near Tunis, one that would allow me to stay within driving distance of the hospital where she worked. So I joined a team excavating in what was believed to be the destroyed wealthy residential area of Old Carthage.”

“Destroyed? When?”

He gave a pained nod. “We could never pinpoint the date of destruction.”

Of course Cyprian's home hadn't lasted forever. She'd explored modern Carthage before she and Maggie returned to the States after Maggie's typhoid recovery in a Tunisian hospital. Cyprian's villa was not among the visible ruins. When had these walls that had sheltered so many tumbled in upon themselves?

Papa's trembling fingers skimmed to the statue's slender arms. “I had to move mounds of rubble before I found this headless woman and the other two statues buried with her. A coup that made me famous. After news of my discoveries hit archaeological circles, it was easy to raise the financing to do what I'd wanted to do since your mother dug that potshard from my backside: explore the Cave of the Swimmers.” He paused, as if whatever was
stuck deep inside him would rip him apart should he utter it. He turned to face Lisbeth. “Your mother didn't want me to go on such a dangerous dig.”

“Then why did you?”

“I was ambitious.”

“Why did she go with you and take me?”

“She wanted her family together as much as I wanted my picture on the cover of every archaeological journal. She insisted on accompanying me to the desert, and since she rarely let you out of her sight, you came along. I knew it wasn't a good idea, but I took the easy way out and agreed. I often wonder what would have happened had I never discovered the Women of Victory.” Papa's eyes were damp. “I guess you could say, in a horrible, morbid way, this hunk of stone is the reason your mother and I have been separated all these years.”

Lisbeth had never heard this part of their family's story, the dirty underbelly of her father's ambition and how it changed all of their lives. Knees rubbery, she asked, “Are you sure it's the same statue?”

“I brushed away every grain of sand from her stola. Memorized every stroke of the sculptor's hand. I imagined the shape of the statue's face, the line of her nose, even the look in her eyes. I was so obsessed with this particular Woman of Victory and what she could mean to my career that I had a large glass display case built and had her placed in the Carthage National Museum for safekeeping.”

Papa shook his head, but Lisbeth could tell the memory was burned so deeply into his soul he would never slough it off. “To see this statue, whole and intact, her face far different than I imagined . . . it is . . .” He swallowed and sadly looked Lisbeth square in the eyes. “A painful reminder that I took better care of an ancient artifact than I did of your beautiful mother.”

Lisbeth threaded her fingers through his and squeezed. For so many years she'd blamed herself for what had happened that cold desert night. She thought she was the reason her mother had left the safety of the camp and ventured into the Cave of the Swimmers and fell through the time portal. It wasn't until she found her mother that those distorted memories and wrong assumptions were cleared up. She wanted her father to have that same opportunity.

“We'll find her, Papa. I promise.” Lisbeth kissed his cheek, then stepped into the garden, as determined to reunite her parents as she was to find her daughter. “Maggie!” The wind whistled a lonely tune through the pillars of the colonnade. She limped to the gardener's cottage. Cold and dark. Where was everybody? Maybe she'd missed a clue in the house.

“Lisbeth,” Papa called from the doorway, his face pale. He held out the waterproof backpack Maggie had talked him into buying. “Her camera's still in the bag.”

Terror drove Lisbeth across the garden. “She would never leave her camera.” She pawed through the bag. “Or her phone.” She clicked on the cell and went to the camera roll. “A selfie in the well.” She stared at the girl with wet hair and a wide-eyed mixture of terror and determination in her face. “Oh, Maggie. What have you done?” Lisbeth scrolled to the next picture, hoping for a clue as to where she'd gone. A startled, handsome face stared back at her. “Thank God.”

“What is it?”

She thrust the phone at him. “Cyprian is still alive.”

M
AGGIE HURRIED UP THE
hill. “Dad, wait! I forgot my backpack!”

“Shhh.” He stopped at a massive gate. Looming above the fence was the upper story of a villa twice the size of her father's. “Your life is worth more than whatever was in that bag.” He made a fist and rapped out what sounded like some sort of secret code signal.