Nothing would turn her from the quest. Dan had argued with her, pleaded with her, tried to reason with her that she was falling victim to an elaborate hoax. He threatened to make her go alone, even threatened to expose to Mother Superior the true reason for the leave of absence she’d requested this summer.
Carrie had only smiled. “I’m going, Dan. With you or without you, whether Mother Superior knows or not, I’m going to Israel this summer.”
For a while he’d hoped that money, or rather the lack of it, would keep her home. Neither of them had any savings—their vows of poverty saw to that—and this pipe-dream trip of Carrie’s was going to be costly. But money turned out to be no problem at all. Her brother Brad had seen to that years ago when he’d presented her with an American Express card in her name but drawn on his account. Keep it handy in case of an emergency, he’d told her. Or use it to buy whatever you need whenever you need it.
Carrie had filed it away, literally forgetting about it until she decided that she needed two tickets to Israel. She said Brad wouldn’t mind. He had deep pockets and was always trying to buy her things...trying to assuage his guilt, she’d said, although she wouldn’t say what kind of guilt he was assuaging.
And so it came to pass that a certain Ms. Carolyn Ferris and a male companion arrived in Tel Aviv at the height of the summer, hopped a tour bus to Jerusalem where they spent two nights in the Hilton, toured the Old Town for a day, then rented a four-wheel-drive, off-road vehicle, stocked it with a couple of flashlights, a cooler filled with sandwiches and soft drinks, and headed south.
And now here they were, trekking through the Judean Wilderness—the Midbar Yehuda of yore—in a Ford Explorer on a wild goose chase. Carrie’s wild goose chase. And that was why Dan was along.
Weren’t you supposed to protect the one you loved from harm, from the pain of dashed hopes at the end of wild goose chases?
Well, even though Dan knew this quest of hers was a hoax, the trip wasn’t a total loss. They’d seen the Holy Land. During their day in Jerusalem they’d walked the Via Dolorosa—the original Stations of the Cross—and visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Garden of Gesthemane, and the Pater Noster Church on the Mount of Olives.
Through it all, Carrie had been so excited, like a child on her first trip to Disney World. “We’re really here!” she’d kept saying. “I can’t believe we’re really here!”
And all along the Via Dolorosa: “Can you believe it, Dan? We’re actually walking in Jesus’s footsteps!”
That look on her face was worth anything. Anything except...
He glanced over at her, sitting in the passenger seat, scanning the cliffs ahead as the Explorer bounced up the dry drainage channel. A yellow sheet of paper sat in her lap. Dan had drawn a large tav on it—the Hebrew equivalent of the letter T, or Th. Carrie was hunting for a cliff or butte in the shape of that tav. Dan doubted very much they’d find one, but even if they did, there’d be no Virgin Mary hidden in a cave there.
And that worried him. He didn’t want to see Carrie hurt. She’d invested so much of herself in this quest, allowed it to consume her for months to the point where there was no telling what the painful truth might do to her. Let them spend their entire time here driving in endless circles, finding nothing, then heading home disappointed and frustrated that the desert had kept its secret, but leaving still alive the hope that somewhere in this seared nothingness there remained the find of the millennium, guarded by time and place, perhaps even by God Himself. Better that than to see her crushed by the realization that she’d been duped.
Ahead of him, the wadi forked into two narrower channels, one running northwest, the other southwest. The trailing cloud of dust swirled around them as Dan braked to a halt. He coughed as some of it billowed through the open windows.
“Where to now?”
“I’m not sure,” Carrie said.
Without waiting for the dust to settle, she stepped out and stared at the cliffs rising ahead of them. Dan got out, too, as much to stretch his legs as to look around. A breeze drifted by, taking some of his perspiration with it.
“You know,” he said, “I do believe it’s gotten cooler.”
“We’re finally above sea level,” Carrie said, still staring ahead as if expecting to find a road sign to the tav cliff. The light blue short-sleeve shirt she wore had dark rings of perspiration around her armpits and across her shoulder blades where they’d rested against the seat back. Her loose, lightweight slacks fluttered around her legs. She stood defiantly in the sun, unbowed by the heat.
Dan looked back the way they’d come. Rolling hills, dry, sandy brown, almost yellow, falling away to the Dead Sea, the lowest spot on earth—the world’s navel, someone had called it. The hazy air had been unbearably thick down there, chokingly laden with moisture from the evaporating sea; leaden air, too heavy to escape the fifty-mile trench in which it was trapped. Maybe it wasn’t cooler up here, but it was drier. He could breathe.
Above, the sky was a flawless turquoise. The land ahead was as dry and yellow-brown and barren as behind, but steeper here, angling up sharply toward a phalanx of cliffs. Looked like a dead end up there.
He plucked a rag from the floor by the front seat and began wiping the dust from the windshield.
“When’s the next rain?” he said.
“November, most likely.”
Dan had to smile. Carrie had done her homework. She’d spent months preparing for this trip, studying the scroll translation and correlating its scant geographical details with present day topographical maps of the area. He bet she knew more about the region than most Israelis, but that probably wasn’t saying much. They hadn’t seen another soul since turning off the highway. They were completely alone up here. The realization gave Dan a twinge of uneasiness. They hadn’t thought to rent a phone—not that there’d be a cell out here anyway—and if they broke down, they’d have to start walking. And if they got lost...
“We’re not lost, are we?” Dan said.
“I don’t think so. I’m sure he came this way.”
How could she be certain? Sure, she’d put a lot of research into this trip, but there hadn’t been much to go on to begin with. All they knew was that the fictional author of the scroll—”fictional” was an adjective Dan used privately when referring to the author; never within Carrie’s hearing—had turned west from his southward trek and left the shore of what he called the Sea of Lot to journey into the wilderness.
But where had he turned?
“I don’t know, Carrie...”
“This has to be the way. “She seemed utterly convinced. Didn’t she have even a shade of a doubt? “Look: He mentioned being driven out of Qumran—that’s at the northern end of the sea. He says he headed south toward Masada and Zohar but he never mentions getting there. He doesn’t even mention passing En Gedi which was a major Oasis even then. So he must have turned into the wilderness somewhere between Qumran and En Gedi.”
“No argument there. But that stretch is more than thirty miles long. There were hundreds of places we could have turned off the road. Why did you pick that particular spot back there?”
Carrie looked at him and her clear blue eyes clouded momentarily. For the first time since their arrival she seemed unsure of herself.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “It just seemed like the right place to turn. I’ve read the translation so many times I feel as if I know him. I could almost see him wandering south, alone, depressed, suddenly feeling it was no use trying to find other people to take him in, that he was unfit for human company, and turning and heading into the hills.”
Dan was struck by the thought that she might be describing her own feelings as a fourteen-year old entering the Convent of the Blessed Virgin.