But she didn’t.
The dream began, but this time, when the wall of darkness turned into the face of Amun Mopat, he was real, and he spoke to her again.
Even in her dream she paused to wonder how an ancient Egyptian spoke English so well. She didn’t understand that, but they communicated with ease.
“Stop them. There is no power. There is no curse, and there is no power. People kill for what they believe, not for what is real.”
As he spoke, the wall of water started coming toward her, closer and closer.
“We’ve found the man,” she said. “It’s over. A full-blown salvage effort will begin, and all the treasures will come up. No one man will claim them. They’ll eventually be returned to the Egyptian people.”
The water was still coming.
“I have tried. I have prayed,” he said. “My scepter was nothing but a way to keep the laws of a good man, perhaps harsh at times, in a different world.”
The water poured over them.
Kat heard screams, and realized she was the one screaming.
Will was at her side, holding her, shushing her, whispering that she needed to breathe.
As she felt his warmth and his strength, she looked into his dark, concerned eyes. “It’s not over, Will,” she told him. “It’s not over.”
“How do you know?” he asked gently.
“The mummy told me.”
14
The next morning, Will and Kat went out to the dive site with Sean and Tyler. They met Earl, Alan and Bernie at the dock, where they boarded Captain Bob’s boat.
The night Amanda was killed, Jon Hunt had been in such a state that he’d been sedated for the past few days. He didn’t ever want to go back to the wreck, he insisted. He didn’t know what would happen now, but he wasn’t going back down.
Bernie, too, seemed depressed. On the way out to the site he told Will, “I love Alan. He’s a great guy. He likes to film and preserve history. But all these people dying—I can’t take it. I think I need to go back to working on frivolous comedies, the kind full of silly fart jokes and sexual innuendoes.”
Will wasn’t sure what to say to him, so he just patted him on the shoulder.
At the site, they all went down together, including Jimmy Green. Will noted that Kat paused at the salon, but when she saw that he was waiting for her, she shook her head, eyes enormous behind her mask.
They dived deeper, and he joined Earl and Sean at the remote camera. Earl was maneuvering it, irritated as he showed Sean and Will the switch that had been jammed, freezing the image of fish swimming around the hold.
Will motioned to him to fix the switch and leave the camera there. Earl frowned, but then shrugged.
Will realized that Bernie had taken over with one of the underwater cameras while Earl worked on the remote.
It might all be worthy of a documentary, although not the one that had originally been planned. He had a feeling that the documentary was no longer going to focus on ancient treasure.
Instead, it would focus on the lust for power.
Kat was hovering in the hold, barely moving, and staring at one of the doors. He swam toward her, and she pointed, but he wasn’t sure what she saw.
They swam to the door. There, with the power of the water, the door had been solidly wedged shut. It seemed to fascinate Kat, however, so he worked at it. A moment later, Tyler and Sean came to help.
Between them, they shoved the door open against the force of the water and the rusted hinges. They could hear the creaking, even in the water, as it moved.
Tyler flashed his headlight into the hold room that was now open as Will gave a slight kick and eased himself in. At first, he saw nothing other than more crates, piled on top of each other.
Then he saw something that gleamed beneath the light.
He swam down to retrieve it. He turned the object over in his hands. It was no great artifact from the age of the pharaohs.
It was a dive knife, shiny and new.
They might have had difficulty with the door, but it had been opened before—and then closed, jammed tight against the hold. He gestured at Tyler, and they returned to the others just as Jimmy Green tapped his wrist, indicating that they’d run out of time.
They surfaced, using the same care they’d taken with their descent.
Back on the boat, Will produced the knife and they all studied it. Even Captain Bob came over to look. “Oh, that’s a local manufacturer,” he said. “It’s an Everstone.” Everyone stared at him. “Everstone Dive Accessories. They’re just off Lake Shore Drive, near the park,” he said. “They sell spear guns, compasses, suits, regulators—you name it. They manufacture for the entire lake region. See—there’s their little insignia on the back.”
“Well, I think we found out how Brady Laurie was ‘helped’ to drown,” Kat murmured.
“We’ll get over there as soon as we’re back,” Will said in an equally quiet voice.
Later, as they were on their way to shore, they sat near the bow, where they had at least a little privacy.
“How did you know?” he asked her.
She gave him a lopsided grin. “Okay, even for us, this sounds crazy. Last night I told you about Amun Mopat being in my dream? Now, none of us is really sure we’ve hit the mark with Stewart Landry, and that kind of worry could cause a dream—or a nightmare. I know that. But today, when we were down there…I could swear I saw him again.”
“Him? Amun Mopat, you mean?”
“Yes. He’s not some ugly wizened creature with an evil look on his face, the way he was portrayed in the movies. He was relatively young when he died, or young for us—about forty. He has the face you see on his death mask. Intense dark eyes…” She paused. “A bit like yours, really, although he wears much more makeup.”
“Ouch. I don’t wear makeup at all!” he protested.
She smiled. “I know. You have a similar dark coloring—but don’t worry, I’m not seeing you as his reincarnation or anything. I’m seeing him, I think, because he wasn’t evil, he didn’t bring about death. He just found his place at the pharaoh’s side, and tried to serve him and their people. Anyway, he was trying to make me see the door. That’s why I knew there had to be something behind it.” She smiled again. “This is one thing that makes me crazy. You know how in movies about aliens they’re always familiar with English? Well, either that or they’ve come down to kill us all. The thing is, I understand him when he speaks.”
“Maybe language doesn’t matter when we’re dealing with the sixth sense.”
“I guess. But I feel that the real Amun Mopat has been hovering around my sixth sense from the beginning. Maybe I only saw him in nightmares because after our experience with the movie version of Amun Mopat, I thought he had to be purely evil.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I just feel he’s trying to tell me something.”
“Then he will do so,” Will told her, “when he’s ready.”
He rose; he was still in his swim trunks but he could hear his phone ringing from the helm, where he’d left it.
“Landry is out,” Logan told him, not bothering with a greeting.
“What? How?”
“Ms. Sherry Bertelli. She came into the office, tearful and swearing that he couldn’t have been out in his boat or using any kind of device yesterday morning. He was closeted with her, working on…work,” Logan said.
“Did anyone else verify that?”
“Well, Landry swore he’d been working.”
“Why didn’t he give Sherry as his alibi before?” Will asked.
“Maybe he thought his wife really didn’t know. Maybe Landry thought it was better to be held on murder charges than to admit to a very angry wife that he was having an affair,” Logan said. “Or…maybe he was waiting for Sherry.”
Will gritted his teeth. “She’s lying for him. She’s sleeping with the guy, and he’s probably paying her to lie for him. Logan, they found the mummy wrap in his car!”
“He swears it was planted there.”
“We’re on our way back,” he said. “See you soon.”
He hung up and told Kat the news.
“But they’re lying. They’re obviously lying.”
“Well, at the moment—despite the mummy wrap—everything we’re looking at is circumstantial evidence. Remember, a district attorney, or a federal attorney, has to prove the accused party’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. So far, it seems evident to us that Brady was drowned, and while we know that Amanda was poisoned, she could simply have eaten shellfish without being aware of it. And Austin Miller did die of heart failure. The only witness we have is going to sound crazy, because he says a mummy made him shoot himself, and he has Landry’s wide-eyed mistress to back him up on that because she believes she saw a mummy at the Sand Diggers’ maze. Which, of course, we believe, too—though we don’t think it was an actual mummy,” Will said.
“Where does that leave us?” Kat asked.
“Continuing to investigate.” Will hesitated. “And, probably, now that two of the center’s experts are dead and the third is an emotional wreck, the board of directors will have to hire new experts and arrange for serious equipment to move forward with the salvage. Unless they choose to give up their bid to work the site.”
“No one will do that,” Kat said with certainty.
“So, we keep looking,” Will said. “We just go back over all of it until we find out what we’re missing.”
“Or…we find the scepter.”
At the hotel, the divers showered. Logan and Kelsey were at the police station reviewing all the information that had been gathered, and Jane was at the hospital, keeping watch over their gravely injured eyewitness.
Dirk Manning was with Kelsey and Logan, refusing to be left alone. He sat in their borrowed office, calmly reading the paper.
