Atlantis Found (Dirk Pitt 15)

"I admit the hope has never left my mind," said Perlmutter, "but I've brought Dirk for another reason."

He turned to Pitt. "Would you like to show Mrs. Mender-Husted what you have in the box?"

"Christine," she said. "My maiden and married names together are a mouthful."

"Have you always lived in Virginia?" asked Pitt, making conversation while opening the latches on the wooden box containing the skull from the Pandora Mine.

"I come from six generations of Californians, many of whom still live in and around San Francisco. I happened to have had the good fortune of marrying a man who came from Virginia and who served under three presidents as special adviser."

Pitt went silent, his eyes captivated by a black obsidian skull that was sitting on the mantel above the flickering fire. Then slowly, as if in a trance, he opened the crate. Then he removed his skull, walked over, reached up, and placed it beside its double on the mantel.

"Oh my!" Christine gasped. "I never dreamed there was another one."

"Neither did I," Pitt said, studying the two black skulls. "As far as I can tell by the naked eye, they're perfect duplicates, identical in form and composition. Even the dimensions appear to be the same. It's as if they came out of the same mold."

"Tell me, Christine," said Perlmutter, a cup of tea in one hand, "what ghostly tale did your great-grandfather pass down about the skull?"

She looked at him as if he had asked a dumb question. "You know as well as I do that it was found on a ship frozen in the ice called the Madras She was bound from Bombay to Liverpool with thirty-seven passengers, a crew of forty, and carrying a varied cargo of tea, silk, spices, and porcelain. My great-grandparents found the skull in a storeroom filled with other ancient artifacts."

"What I meant was, did they find any indication of how the artifacts came to be onboard the Madras."

"I know for a fact the skull and other oddities did not come on board the ship in Bombay. They were discovered by the crew and passengers when they stopped for water at a deserted island during the voyage. The details were in the logbook."

Pitt hesitated and, fearing the worst, repeated, "You say were in the log?"

"Captain Mender did not keep it. The dying wish of the Madras's captain was that it be forwarded to the owners of the ship. My great-grandfather dutifully sent it by courier to Liverpool."

Pitt felt as if he had run against a brick wall in a dead-end alley. "Do you know if the Madras's owners sent an expedition to find the derelict and backtrack its course to the artifacts?"

"The original ship's owners, as it turns out, sold the trading company before Captain Mender sent the log," explained Christine. "The new management sent out a two-ship expedition to find the Madras, but they vanished with all hands."

"Then all records are lost," Pitt said, discouraged.

Christine's eyes flashed. "I never said that."

He looked at the elderly lady, trying to read something in her eyes. "But--"

"My great-grandmother was a very sharp lady," she cut him off. "She made a handwritten copy of the Madras's log before her husband sent it off to England."

To Pitt, it was as if the sun had burst through black clouds. "May I please read it?"

Christine did not immediately answer. She walked over to an antique ship captain's desk and gazed up at a painting hanging on the oak-paneled wall. It depicted a man sitting in a chair with his arms and legs crossed. But for a great beard that covered his face, he might have been handsome. He was a big man, his body and shoulders filling the chair. The woman who stood behind him with one hand on his shoulder was small in stature and stared through intense brown eyes. Both were dressed in nineteenth-century clothing.

"Captain Bradford and Roxanna Mender," she said wistfully, seemingly lost in a past she had never lived. Then she turned and looked at Perlmutter. "St. Julien, I think the time has come. I've held on to their papers and letters out of sentiment for far too long. It's better they be remembered by others who can read and benefit from the history they lived. The collection is yours at the price you quoted."

Perlmutter came out of the chair as lightly as if he had the body of an athlete, and hugged Christine.

"Thank you, dear lady. I promise all will be properly preserved and stored in archives for future historians to study."

Christine came over and stood beside Pitt at the mantel. "And to you, Mr. Pitt, a gift. I place my obsidian skull in your trust. Now that you have a matching pair, what do you intend to do with them?"

"Before they go to a museum of ancient history, they'll be studied and analyzed in a laboratory to see if they can be dated and tied to a past civilization."

She looked at her skull for a long time before exhaling a long sigh. "I hate to see it go, but knowing it will be properly cared for makes it much easier. You know, people have always looked at it and thought it was a precursor of bad luck and tragic tunes. But from the minute Roxanna carried it over the melting ice pack to her husband's ship, it has brought nothing but good fortune and blessings to the Mender family."

On the trip back to Washington, Pitt read the entries from the log of the Madras as exactingly copied in a leather-bound notebook in Roxanna Mender's delicate and flowing hand. Despite the smooth ride of the Rolls, he had to look up from time to time and gaze into the distance to keep from getting carsick.

"Find anything interesting?" Perlmutter asked, as Mulholland drove over the George Mason Bridge, which spans the Potomac River.