A River in the Sky

“He wants,” Reisner said in hollow tones. “He says…”

His voice faded out. Wordlessly he handed over the piece of paper.

As Ramses had expected, his father didn’t waste words. “Will arrive Sebaste shortly to take Ramses with me to assist my forthcoming excavations in Jerusalem. Regards, R. Emerson.”

“It can’t be true,” Ramses gasped. “What excavations, where? Are there any others letters from him?”

He began looking through his own accumulation. A few frenzied moments later they had managed to sort the letters into sequence. Finally Reisner let out a gusty sigh of relief. “This one from your mother seems to be the most recent. She says instead of coming here to collect you, they want you to meet them in Jaffa on…Good Lord, that’s less than a week away.”

“She’s written the same to me,” Ramses said. “At least she had the decency to apologize, and gave us more information than Father deigned to do. Have you ever heard of this fellow Morley?”

“No, but he wouldn’t be the first to follow some biblical will-o’-the-wisp and rip an archaeological site to shreds,” Reisner replied. “Your father will make certain that doesn’t happen, at any rate.”

He had resorted to his pipe early in the procedure, jaws clenched on the stem. Now he leaned back in his chair and gave Ramses a friendly grin. “You’d better start getting your gear together.”

Ramses finished reading Nefret’s latest-it wasn’t so much reproachful as threatening-and handed it to Fisher, who had been collecting them. “I won’t simply walk out on you, sir. They have no right to expect it.”

“That’s quite all right,” Reisner said, looking off into space.

“You mean you want me to go?”

“I don’t want you to go. But if you don’t…” Had he only imagined it, Ramses wondered, or had Reisner’s tanned countenance paled? “If you don’t, they’ll come here.”

GARGERY IS SECRETLY THRILLED at the prospect of “another of our criminal investigations,” as he deems them, but he feels it his duty as our butler to be offended by the presence of vulgar policemen in our home. (I would not like to imply that we frequently entertain police officers, vulgar or otherwise, but it has occurred on a number of occasions.) In this case his snobbishness was particularly obnoxious, since the police person in question turned out to be our local constable, George Goodbody. Gargery had left him standing in the hall, and one would never have supposed from Gargery’s frozen stare that he and George often enjoyed a convivial glass of ale in the bar of the White Boar. Observing poor George’s hurt expression, I put myself out to be agreeable.

“How nice to see you, Constable. I trust your family is well?”

George whipped off his helmet and clasped it to his large breast, like a mother cradling a baby. “Yes, ma’am, thank you. Them pills you gave Mariah for her catarrh worked just fine.”

“Good Gad,” Emerson burst out. “Have you been dosing the local population, Peabody? You might at least confine your dubious medical experiments to Egypt.”

“They worked just fine, sir,” George insisted. “Mariah said-”

“Never mind, never mind.” Emerson waved a dismissive hand. “What do you want, Goodbody?”

Emerson makes George very nervous. (He has that effect on most people.) The constable maintained a convulsive grip on his helmet, and began to stutter. “Well, sir, it’s a peculiar sort of thing, to tell the truth, and I am sorry, sir, indeed, to bother you, but I couldn’t see what else to do, since there was nothing on the body except your-”

“Body!” Emerson and Gargery cried in an unmelodious duet. Emerson’s tone was one of outrage, Gargery’s of delight.

“Stop it at once,” I said, observing that George was about to lose his grip on his helmet. “Let him speak. Or rather, let me direct the course of the discussion. Just answer my questions, Constable. Is it a dead body of which you speak? A corpse?”

“Well, as it turned out, ma’am-”

“Yes or no?”

“No. Uh…as it turned out. But we thought at first-”

It required considerable skill to extract the requisite information, so I will spare the reader Goodbody’s ramblings. To summarize: the unconscious body of an unknown individual had been found in a bedchamber of our local inn (the aforementioned White Boar). He had arrived the night before. When the chambermaid brought his morning tea, she found him stiff and stark (I quote Goodbody) on his bed. He was fully dressed except for his coat, which was hanging over a chair. Goodbody, summoned by the agitated owner, had sent for Dr. Membrane, our local medical man, who had examined the body and declared the individual was alive. He had applied a few obvious methods of resuscitation without result and had then taken himself off, remarking that the victim had probably suffered a seizure and that there was nothing he could do. (This diagnosis came after a hasty search of the unknown’s garments and luggage had failed to find any money except a few crumpled pound notes.) Nor was there any means of identification except…