CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Valldemossa, Mallorca
December 12
Evan knocked softly on Omar Emberton's door. He opened it dressed in his usual work attire: khaki pants, a button-up shirt, and worn boots. He had his canvas jacket draped over his arm.
“Evan,” he greeted her. “I was just headed to the site. What brings you by?”
She beamed at him. “May I come in?”
“Of course, of course.” Emberton seemed to sense her excitement because he didn’t hesitate to pull the door wide and extend a hand to the small couch and pair of chairs in the cozy living area.
“We found something, Doctor E.” Evan perched at the edge of the sofa and pulled her messenger bag onto her lap.
Emberton took a seat, looking strangely out of place in the chintz slipper chair. “We?” Emberton squinted behind his glasses.
Evan quickly covered her misspeak. “I mean ‘we’ the team.”
Emberton nodded, pleased. “Continue.”
“I mapped the markers and realized they seemed to surround a small cave that had been sealed off. When I entered, I found a deteriorated mound.” She pulled the GoPro from her bag. “I recorded what I discovered.”
Her mentor leaned forward on his elbows and intertwined his fingers. “And what was that?”
She withdrew the items from the cave. She set the gold box and several coins on the coffee table. Then she sat back and waited.
Omar Emberton pulled a monogrammed linen handkerchief from the back pocket of his khaki pants and methodically cleaned his glasses. He replaced them on his nose and shifted his chair slightly to face the table fully. Donning a pair of thin cotton gloves—and managing to scold Evan for not doing so with merely a look—he made a cursory examination of the coins. He quickly moved on to the box, examining the exterior, running his fingers along the engravings with care.
Evan sat still as a statue. She knew this discovery was significant, but she had never seen her mentor rendered speechless. Then, from beneath his glasses, a tear slid down his cheek.
After a time, he commented absently, “My grandfather is from this village.” He indicated an inscription on the side of the box.
He opened the box and poked through the coins looking more like an old woman searching for a dime in a coin purse full of pennies than an archaeologist examining a find. He withdrew the medallion and thumbed the void. “This is wonderful, Evan. Was there anything else in the box?”
Evan was taken aback by Dr. Emberton's misdirected enthusiasm. She would have thought he would have been excited by what was in the box rather than what was not, or the box itself for that matter.
“No. Just the coins and the necklace,” she replied.
He set the box on the small table and ran a hand over it reverently. He spoke to Evan with his eyes on the box. “This is one of the great joys of this work, Evangeline. Finding something from the past that takes your work in an entirely different direction.” He looked at her then. “This box is Moorish, late Fifteenth Century, no doubt hidden when the Moors fled the Crusaders.”
“Yes, that was my estimation as well,” Evan agreed.
“You remember Joseph Nabeel from our dinner. He's not an archaeologist by trade, but he knows more about artifacts from this period than any colleague I’ve ever encountered. He would be very interested in examining this box and accompanying you to this secondary site. Your other work can wait.” Emberton gestured vaguely in the direction of their primary dig site with a flip of his hand as if it hardly mattered.
“Of course. I’ll map it out. I stumbled on it quite by accident.”
Emberton laughed. “Isn’t that always the way?” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “As a graduate student, I got lost driving to an excavation in Niger. I pulled to the side of the road and explained to a local woman, in the most rudimentary sign language and broken French, who I was and what I was looking for. She took me by the hand and pulled me to a field where her husband had been digging a well. He had unearthed a small statue, and they didn’t know what to do with it.”
“The Aterian Culture discovery?” Evan's jaw dropped.
Emberton winked. “Let's keep that our little secret.” He picked up the gold box with both hands and held it out. “This goes in the vault.” He gestured to the standing safe in the corner. “Let's photograph and catalog it and see that it's securely stored.”
Emberton spoke his instructions without ever taking his eyes off of the box. Evan thought he might have actually stroked it. When he did look up, he was all business.
“Your next task is cartography. Create a detailed map of the path you took, document markers and focal points, anything and everything of note.”
She nodded. Emberton's instructions, if overly enthusiastic, were standard for a new find.