Two weeks after the museum visit by Daniel and Mara, Jonathan Reed had learned considerably more about languages and nothing useful about the writing hidden inside the pendant.
His desk had disappeared beneath reference books, photocopies and sheets of tracing paper. In the centre lay the copy he had made on the afternoon they opened the pendant. He had reproduced it twice since then, enlarging the characters and separating marks that might be punctuation from those that might belong to the writing itself.
He was no longer certain which was which.
The two men who had visited that evening had stayed less than twenty minutes. Jonathan could remember the older man’s questions almost word for word. What unsettled him was how little he remembered of his own answers. He had been careful, he thought. He had certainly meant to be careful.
Their identification had looked official. Afterwards, he realised neither man had actually named the department they represented.
He had told Daniel about the visit the next morning. Daniel wanted to know whether they had taken anything. They hadn’t. Somehow that had troubled Jonathan more.
Now he turned another page and compared a column of ancient characters with his drawing. There were similarities. A hook. A forked line. A circle interrupted on one side. He had spent the first week mistaking resemblance for evidence and the second correcting himself.
Someone knocked against the open door.
“Are you still here?”
Dr Helen Mercer stood in the doorway with a folder beneath her arm. She had worked at the museum long enough to regard the presence of a light after seven as either dedication or a plumbing problem.
“Apparently,” Jonathan said.
“I thought you’d gone home.”
“So did I, about an hour ago.”
She came in to leave the folder on his desk, but found no available space and put it on a chair instead.
“Those are the accession notes you wanted.” Her eyes moved across the books. “What are you doing?”
“Failing to identify a language.”
“That looks thorough.”
“I like to fail comprehensively.”
Helen smiled and leaned over the enlarged drawing. Jonathan watched her expression with the unreasonable hope he now felt whenever anybody new looked at it. Usually they suggested something he had already ruled out. Occasionally they suggested something he wished he had ruled out before spending an afternoon on it.
She pointed to a mark near the middle.
“I’ve seen something like that.”
Jonathan waited.
“Where?”
“In a photograph, I think.” She shifted the page towards the lamp. “Not writing. A marking on rock.”
“What sort of rock?”
Helen glanced at him. “The stationary sort, Jonathan. Give me a moment.”
He pushed his chair back to let her sit. She studied the curved stroke and the three short lines intersecting it, then shook her head.
“South Africa. Something in the material from Sterkfontein.”
The name meant caves, fossil discoveries, layers of human history. It did not mean an explanation for the strip sealed inside the pendant.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure I saw a photograph. I’m less sure why I remember it.” She looked up. “Don’t make that into more than it is.”
“Could we find it?”
Helen checked her watch.
“Tomorrow.”
He must have looked sufficiently disappointed, because she sighed.
“You can carry the boxes.”
By the time Daniel and Mara arrived the following afternoon, Jonathan had cleared enough of the desk to make the photograph look important.
“You said you’d found something,” Daniel said.
“I have.”
“You also said that last Thursday.”
“Last Thursday I found something it wasn’t. That counts.”
Mara took the chair nearest the desk. She had come straight from a shift at the hotel, and there was a tiredness around her eyes that Jonathan had noticed on their last visit too. Daniel remained standing beside her, looking from the photograph to the drawing.
Jonathan placed them together.
The photograph showed an uneven surface illuminated from one side. A scale had been positioned beneath a shallow marking. Its curved line was rougher than the one on the strip, and one of the smaller strokes was barely visible.
Mara leaned forward.
“That one.”
Jonathan looked at her.
“What?”
She touched the drawing rather than the photograph.
“That’s the one I recognised in the conservation room.”
Daniel pulled up another chair.
“Recognised how?” Jonathan asked.
“I don’t know. I still don’t know.”
There was frustration in her voice, but something else too. Jonathan had spent two weeks wanting an answer. He was beginning to understand that Mara might be afraid of getting one.
“Does the photograph mean anything to you?” he asked.
She looked at it for several seconds.
“No.” Then, more firmly: “Nothing.”
Jonathan nodded and resisted the urge to ask again.
Daniel bent closer. “Where was it taken?”
“Sterkfontein. South Africa. It’s in an old set of research photographs. Helen remembered seeing it while she was reviewing some material years ago.”
“What does the marking mean?”
“Nobody assigned it a meaning. The notes don’t even establish that it’s deliberate.”
Daniel looked at the two images again.
“You think it is.”
“I think it deserves a closer look. That’s different.”
Mara sat back. Since the museum, she had caught herself examining ordinary objects for seams and catches, waiting for another memory that refused to come. Once, on the subway, she had reached towards a stranger’s pendant before realising what she was doing. She had spent the rest of the journey with her hands folded tightly in her lap.
The photograph offered somewhere to put that restless attention. A place they could actually go.
“Can someone there look at it for us?” she asked.
“I’ve sent a copy to a colleague,” Jonathan said. “He’s checking the records. But this photograph is old, and the location notes aren’t particularly useful. We may need someone who knows the site to help us find it.”
“We?” Daniel asked.
Jonathan adjusted the papers.
“If you decide to go.”
“You’re coming.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Mara glanced at the open atlas beside his elbow.
“You’ve marked the page.”
Jonathan closed it.
“Research.”
For the first time that afternoon, she smiled.
Daniel looked back at the photograph. “What about those men?”
The question took some of the pleasure out of the room.
“They haven’t returned,” Jonathan said.
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“I don’t know who they were. I don’t know what they wanted beyond what they asked me.” He paused. “If this turns out to be a scratch on a cave wall, I’d rather find that out than keep wondering.”
Mara understood that. She wished she could be certain she wanted the same thing.
“Find out whether we can visit,” she said.
Daniel turned towards her, surprised by how quickly she had decided.
She kept her eyes on the photograph.
“Then we’ll decide what to do.”