Read Online Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 02 - The Man on the Istanbul Train by Maria Hudgins - Free Book Online Page B

something.
    Paul held up a sherd and waved Lacy over. “Found another one!”
    Lacy took the small piece of pottery in her hand. One surface of the cream-colored clay had been burnished by rubbing, and a streak of brown-red pigment swept across one side. “Red ochre,” she said. If this was all Paul was finding, she was wasting her time here.
    “You better put that hat on your head, sweetheart,” came a deep voice from behind her. “It won’t do you any good hanging down your back.”
    Lacy turned to locate the source of that advice. It was the photographer, still toting his camcorder in one hand.
    “Todd Majewski.” With a rather somber tip of his head, he extended his free hand to Lacy. Todd was a true redhead. His face was a bright pink and his hands and arms were covered with freckles. He looked more like a Viking or a Scot than a Majewski. “If you’re a real blonde, and I’ll bet you are because hair that color doesn’t come from a bottle, you can’t take chances with the sun out here. It’ll fool you. A couple of weeks ago they almost had to send me to the hospital with sun poisoning. I had blisters, I was throwing up, chills and fever, and I’m still not a pretty sight.” He lifted his cap and showed her the patches of unpigmented skin on his forehead.
    Paul said, “Thanks for sharing, Todd. Fortunately, we’ve already had our lunch.” Then turned to Lacy and added his own warning. “Seriously, Lacy. He’s right. We usually have a nice breeze out here so it can fool you. You may not feel like you’re getting too much sun but you are.”
    “Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.” At the moment sunstroke was the least of her concerns.
    * * *
    Paul gave Lacy a trowel and set her to work on a wall in his section of the dig. He showed her how to use the trowel and how to watch for changes in soil. Lacy felt nervous about scraping into virgin ground and making decisions about what to remove and what to leave. She had no problem seeing more color variations than even Paul could see, but her eyes were not yet trained to see what was important and what wasn’t. As the afternoon wore on, she found herself drinking more water than usual, probably because of the sun plus a drying breeze. She felt relief when the sun sank low and the shadow of a clump of almond trees stretched across her workspace. She had removed several buckets of dirt, but had yet to lay bare even the tiniest bit of pottery or anything else possibly created by the hand of man. In spite of the sun block, she felt a glow on her exposed skin.
    One by one, workers dropped by and introduced themselves, sitting on their haunches at the edge of the hole she was slowly enlarging. Lacy invariably steered the conversation around to two questions: How well did you know Max Sebring, and did you hear or see anything odd last night? A couple of the workers had heard noises, like someone walking around outside the tents. One put the time at about two a.m. Several had heard animals, probably dogs, yip or howl or clunk around in the kitchen area, possibly turning over a pot, but none had been curious enough to get up and look out of their own tent. They had all been here long enough to get used to the night noises. Even the sound of someone walking past their tent wasn’t considered a cause for alarm, according to the little mop-top, Madison, because people often got up in the night to go to the latrine which, Lacy heard, consisted of a port-a-potty well away from the dig and the tents, but it was permissible to simply slip off over the hill, an option that appealed particularly to the men.
    The light began to fade and the dinner gong rang. Lacy followed the others as they stashed their equipment in a small shed and gravitated toward the main tent drawn as if by an invisible magnet. They washed up at one of two large earthenware crocks outside the entrance. This tent was several times the size of any other and held enough tables and chairs