That moment back on the highway had been kind of spooky. They’d been cruising south on Route 90 along the Dead Sea shore when Carrie had suddenly clutched his arm and pointed to a rubble-strewn path, little more than a goat trail, breaking through the roadside brush and winding up into the hills.
“There! Follow that!”
So Dan had followed.
“Which way does it seem we should go now?” he said and knew right away from her expression that it hadn’t come out the way he’d meant it.
Her eyes flashed. “Look, Dan. I know you think I’ve gone off the deep end on this, but it’s important to me. And if—”
“What’s important to me is you, Carrie. That’s all. Just you. And I’m worried about you getting hurt. You’ve pumped your expectations so high...”
Her eyes softened as she challenged the sun with that smile. “You don’t have to worry about me, Dan, because she is up here. And we’re going to find her.”
“Carrie...”
“And now that I think about it, it seems we should take the south fork.” She swung back into her seat and closed her door. “Come on, Driver Dan. Let’s go! Time’s a-wastin’!”
Dan sighed. Nothing to do but humor her. And it wasn’t so bad, really. At least they were together.
‡
Almost four o’clock. Dan was thinking about calling it a day and heading back to the highway while there was still plenty of light left. Wouldn’t be easy finding his way back down in the light. No way in the dark. He was just about to suggest it when Carrie suddenly lurched forward in her seat.
“Oh, my God!” she cried, her eyes darting between the windshield and the sheet of paper in her lap. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, could that be it?”
Dan skidded to a halt and craned his neck over the steering wheel for a look. As before, the trailing dust cloud caught up to them and he could see nothing while they were engulfed. But as it cleared...
“I’ll be damned,” he muttered.
No, he thought. It’s got to be a mistake. The sun is directly ahead, it’s glancing off the dirt on the windshield. A trick of the light. Got to be.
Hoping, praying that his eyes were suffering from too much glare, Dan opened the door and stepped out for a better look. He shielded his eyes against the sun peeking over the flat ledge atop a huge outcropping of stone ahead of them, and blinked into the light. He still couldn’t tell if it—
And then the sun dipped below the ledge, silhouetting the outcropping in brilliant light. Suddenly Dan could see that the ledge ran rightward to merge with the wall of the mountain of which the outcropping was a part, and leftward to a rocky lip that overhung a sheer precipice bellying gently outward about halfway down its fall.
Damned if it didn’t look just like a...tav.
“Do you see it, Dan?”
He glanced right. Carrie was out of the cab, holding the yellow sheet of paper at arms length before her and jumping up and down like a pre-schooler who’d just spotted Barney.
He hesitated, unsure of what to say. As much as he wanted to avoid reinforcing her fantasies, he could not deny the resemblance of the cliff face to the Hebrew letter he’d drawn for her.
“Well, I see something that might remotely—”
“Remotely, shlemotely! That cliff looks exactly like what you drew here, which is exactly the way it was described in the scroll!”
“The forged scroll, Carrie. Don’t forget that the source of all these factoids is a confirmed hoax.”
“How could I possibly forget when you keep reminding me every ten minutes?”
He hated to sound like a broken record, but he felt he had to keep the facts before her. The scroll and everything in it was bogus. And truthfully, right now he needed a little reminder himself. Because finding the tav rock had shaken him up more than he wished to admit.
“Sorry, Carrie. I just...”
“I know. But you’ve got to believe, Dan. There’s truth in that scroll.” She pointed at the tav rock looming before them. “Look. We’re not imagining that. It’s there.”
Dan wanted to say, Yes, but if you want to perpetrate a hoax, you salt the lies with neutral truths, and the most easily verifiable neutral truths are simple geological formations. But he held his tongue. This was Carrie’s show.
“What are we waiting for?” she said
Dan shrugged and got back in behind the wheel. The incline ahead was extra steep so he shifted into super low.
“Can you believe it?” Carrie said, bubbling with excitement as they started the final climb. “We’re traveling the same route as Saint James and the members of the Jerusalem Church when they carried Mary’s body here.”
“No, Carrie,” he said softly. “I can’t believe it. I want to believe it. I’d give almost anything to have it be true. But I can’t believe it.”
She smiled that smile. “You will, Danny, me boy-o. Before the day is out, you will.”
‡
The closer they got to the rock, the less and less it resembled a tav...and the more formidable it looked. Fifty feet high at the very least, with sheer walls that would have challenged an experienced rock climber even if they went straight up; but the outward bulge and the sharp overhang at the crest made ascent all but impossible.
As they rounded the outcropping, Dan realized they’d entered the mouth of a canyon. The deep passage narrowed and curved off to the left about a quarter of a mile north. He stopped the Explorer in the middle of the dry wadi running along the eastern wall. Cooler here. The canyon floor had been resting in the shadow of its western wall for a while. To his left he spotted a cluster of stunted trees.
“Aren’t those fig trees?” Carrie said.
“Not sure. Could be. Whatever they are, they don’t look too healthy.”
“They look old. Old fig trees... didn’t the scroll writer said he was subsisting on locusts, honey, and wild figs?”
“Yeah, but those trees don’t look wild. Looks like somebody planted them there.”
“Exactly!” Carrie said, grinning.
Dan had to admit—to himself only—that she had a point. It looked as if someone had moved a bunch of wild fig trees to this spot and started a makeshift grove...out here...in the middle of nowhere.
But that only meant the forger of the scroll had to have been here in order to describe it; it didn’t mean St. James had been here, or that the Virgin Mary was hidden away atop the tav rock.
But a big question still remained: Who had planted those fig trees?
He turned to Carrie but her seat was empty. She was walking across the wadi toward the tav rock. Dan turned off the motor and ran around to catch up to her.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Looking for a way up.” She was studying the cliff face as she walked. “The scroll says there’s a path.”
Dan scanned the steep wall looming before them.
“Good luck.”
“Well, this isn’t nearly as smooth as the far side. There could be a way up. There must be. We simply have to find it.”
Dan saw countless jagged cracks and mini-ledges protruding randomly from the surface, but nothing that even vaguely resembled a path. This looked hopeless, but the scroll had been accurate on so many other points already, there just might be a path to the top.
He veered off to the left.
“Giving up so soon?” Carrie said.
“If there is a path,” he said, “you won’t spot it from straight on. It’ll only be visible from a sharp angle. You didn’t spot one as we rounded the front of the cliff, so let’s see what things look like from the back end.”
She nodded, smiling. “Smart. I knew I loved you for some reason.”
Dan figured he’d done enough nay-saying. The only way to get this over with was to find a path to the top—if one existed—and convince Carrie once and for all that there was no cave up there and that the Virgin Mary was not lying on a bier inside waiting to be discovered. Then maybe they could get their lives back to normal—that is, as normal as life could be for a priest and a nun who were lovers.