Buried Secrets by Kristi Belcamino (best ebook reader for surface pro TXT) 📗

that some days she would watch Colton at the dig and marvel at how damn attractive he’d become to her. Every once in a while, he’d catch her looking and smile and she’d feel a little wobbly. But her attention always returned to the dig. Keeping track of the maps and special equipment was all encompassing. They had little time or energy for anything else. It was both exhilarating and exhausting. Each day brought some little find that reassured Dallas she was at the right temple.

For instance, a little bowl or tool or piece of jewelry here and there that could be traced back to Cleopatra’s time. The more artifacts from Cleopatra’s time, like the coins, that could be tied to the dig site, the more likely it was that the Queen of the Nile was buried there.

On the eighth day, the crew made an amazing discovery. Dallas had been surveying the site from the highest spot, the same spot she’d gone to the first day she’d visited Taposiris. While she was up there she noticed that there was something odd about the ground that lay between her and the actual beginning of the temple. It was lumpy and uneven land. There were sunken rectangles dotting the ground. The shapes of graves.

By the end of the day, every crew at the temple had relocated to the area and were digging. By sunset, the first mummified body had been unearthed. And it appeared there were dozens more. It was an entire cemetery. And if this mummy represented all of them, the bodies were posited toward the temple.

“Colton? Colton this is huge.”

“I know.”

The positioning of the mummies was like a big neon arrow pointing to the temple indicating that an important personage was buried there. Not important like a rich businessman. Important like a king. Or queen.

Just then one of the crew members shouted. Dallas and Colton ran over. Beside the mummy was a cloth bag full of coins.

Directing the crew, the bag was brought over to a tarp and carefully opened with Dallas’s gloved hands. Coins spilled out. Dallas smiled. They featured the same profile of Cleopatra that the other coins had, but they also had another face on the opposite side. Marc Antony.

O’Brien ran over.

“Mama mia!” he said, whipping off his hat and slapping his leg with it. “I’ve never seen the likes of this before. Coins with both of them?”

It was rare enough that Cleopatra had coins minted with her own profile, Dallas thought, but to have them made with Marc Antony’s as well, was astonishing.

Dallas leaned down. Underneath their images were the words Osiris and Isis, respectively.

“She really did believe they were the incarnation of gods, didn’t she?” Dallas said, her voice full of marvel.

Colton nodded.

“Another sign that you are on the right track, my dear,” O’Brien said.

“I just feel it in my bones,” Dallas said, standing and giving a long whistle. Her foreman, Eban, who was kneeling overseeing the excavation of the first mummy, looked up and gave a wave before heading over.

“What do you think of this?” Dallas asked Eban when he got to her side. The Egyptian man was tall and lanky and had black hair pulled back in a long ponytail. His face was dark from years working on dig sites. Eban was known to be the best excavation foreman in Egypt. Dallas trusted his judgment, after all he’d been working Egyptian digs for the past thirty years.

He was also the only one in the crew who didn’t act as if they were afraid of her. Dallas blamed it on the death of the worker last year. Secretly, she worried they blamed her for it.

This new crew did an elaborate ritual each morning before they began to work. It seemed both religious and superstitious at the same time. Dallas tried not to pay attention so the men would have privacy in whatever it was they were doing each morning. But she couldn’t help but notice that every once in a while, one of them would look her way. And seemed afraid.

Now, Eban knelt and examined the coins and then sat back on his haunches, wiping his brow. “It says Osiris and Isis, but it is the likeness of Cleopatra and Mark Antony.”

“Yes. That’s what I think, too,” Dallas said her voice rising with excitement.

O’Brien nodded. “We need to call the ministry. What with the mummies and these coins? I think this calls for an extension to our permit. It’s going to take at least a month to figure out exactly what we have here.”

Dallas’s chest filled with hope. This was what she’d needed. Some concrete proof that she was on the right track so the dig would be extended. Boom.

She looked up in triumph to meet Colton’s eyes. He smiled.

“Let’s do this, Jones.”

They spent the rest of the day making a plan about how to excavate the cemetery. But the entire time Dallas was thinking past that. If the mummies were pointing toward the temple, that’s where the tomb was.

Before they turned in for the day, she left the tent where the planning meeting was going on and climbed back to the elevated spot where she’d first spotted the sunken ground indicating the graves.

If she were the queen and wanted a religious spot where would she locate the tomb in the temple? Dead center, right?

However, Cleopatra also needed to keep her tomb a secret so that meant she would not locate it where everyone would expect it right? So where would she have it? What was most dear to Cleopatra? Egypt. Ruling her country. She sacrificed it all for her country. Gave her life for it and her children. And what represented Egypt to Cleopatra? Alexandria. She would be buried in the corner of the temple closest to Alexandria.

Dallas just knew it.

Everything Cleopatra did was symbolic and so especially when she was planning the most important and last act of her life—where she would be entombed. And now, based on what the Daughters of