Mary Clark - The Lost Years

“He’s driving a different car!” Alvirah exclaimed.

Careful to keep several vehicles between them and the black sedan, they followed him down to lower Manhattan, then across town to the South Street area near the Williamsburg Bridge. Greg made a turn onto a shabby street with a row of boarded-up warehouses. “Be careful. Don’t get too close to him,” Richard warned Willy.

Willy stopped the car. “He can’t be going much further,” he said. “This is a dead-end street. I know this area. When I was in high school I used to work part-time stacking cartons onto trucks. There was a loading area for all of those warehouses.”

They watched as the black sedan traveled to the end of the street and then made a right turn. “He has to be going into one of those buildings,” Willy said. “But it looks as if they’re all shut down.” He waited until Greg’s car was out of sight, then followed him, stopping before they would become visible in the open area behind the buildings.

Richard got out of the car and looked around the corner to see where Greg was going. Then he raced back into the car, shouting, “Follow him, Willy. He’s opening that large garage door. Don’t let him lock us out.”

Willy stepped on the gas. The car skidded as he made the sharp turn, then closed in on the sedan and tried to follow it into the garage.

The forty-foot-wide garage door was coming down. Alvirah shrieked as it hit the roof of their car and continued to grind lower. The doors flew open and they all managed to scramble out, just before they would have been trapped inside the mangled frame.

Three feet from the ground, the garage door was finally stopped by the body of the crushed automobile. For a moment they stood in shocked silence. Then they heard the sound of feet pounding across the macadam. “Police!” someone yelled. “Stop!”

Richard was already on the ground, crawling into the warehouse through the space held open by the car.

“Stay back,” one of the detectives warned Alvirah and Willy as they rushed to follow Richard. “I’m ordering you. Stay back.”

82

He was upstairs, with the lift raised back up, again flush with the ceiling of the lower level, before they were able to stop him. How long would it take before they found the switch to bring the lift down again? Not long, he thought. I know it won’t be long.

That detective was sharp enough to make me think that I was safe.

But I’m not safe. I’m doomed. It is the end. I fell for their trap.

Furious, Greg flung aside the bag of sandwiches. He had only a dim light on in his private empire. He flipped on the overhead lights and looked around. Beautiful. Magnificent. Spectacular. Art. Antiquity. All worthy of the finest museums in the world. And he had gathered it here himself.

When he was nineteen, the lonely nerd, he had accomplished with a computer what Antonio Stradivari had accomplished with a violin. He had masterminded programming through unimaginable flights of fantasy. By the time he was twenty-five, he had quietly become a multimillionaire.

Six years ago, on a whim, I went on that dig and discovered the world that I belonged in, he thought. I listened and learned from Jonathan and Charles and Albert, and in the end I surpassed all of them with my expertise. I began to manipulate and divert shipments of priceless antiques without a single trace of where they had gone.

It was glorious when I touched that sacred parchment. When I told Jonathan about the extraordinary computer program that I had developed to authenticate antiquities, he let me examine it. The parchment is authentic. It’s been handled by many people over the centuries, but there is a single DNA sample on it that is extraordinary. This unique DNA carries chromosomes with only the traits of a mother, who has to be the Virgin Mary. He had no human father.

This letter was written by the Christ. He wrote it to a friend, and two thousand years later I had to kill a man whom I loved as a friend because I had to have it.

Greg walked into the room that was full of his treasures. For once he did not pause and savor their beauty but looked first at Lillian. She was lying near the sofa, with its golden brocade and intricate carvings, where he always chose to sit.

Since Wednesday morning, when he had first brought her here and then decided to wait before he killed her, he had enjoyed his brief visits, sitting on this sofa with her feet on his lap and talking to her. He had relished explaining to her the history of one after another of his treasures. “I bought this artifact from a dealer in Cairo recently,” he’d said about one artifact. “Their museum was looted during a civilian uprising.”

Now he stood over Lillian. Her wide brown eyes were frantic with fear. “The police are surrounding me!” he shouted. “They’re downstairs. They’ll find a way to get up here.”

“You’re so greedy, Lily. If you had only given the parchment back to Mariah, you would have a clear conscience. But you didn’t do that.”

“Please… don’t… no… no…”

As Greg slid a silken cord around Lillian’s neck, he was sobbing. “I offered Mariah the love I never thought I would be capable of feeling for any human being. I worshipped the ground she walked on. And what did I get in return? She couldn’t wait the other night to finish dinner and get rid of me. Now I’m going to get rid of her and rid of you.”

83

This place is empty, but he can’t have vanished into thin air,” one of the New York detectives snapped. “This is the ground floor. There’s got to be a way to get upstairs. I heard something, but I don’t see anything.” He flipped on the radio attached to his belt and called for backup cars to respond.

The second detective began thumping on the walls, hoping to hear a hollow sound from within.

Ignoring the orders of the police, Alvirah and Willy crawled past the wreckage of their car and into the garage. They had heard the detective bark his call for backup into the radio. It may be too late, Alvirah thought frantically. Greg has to know that he’s trapped. Even if Mariah is still alive, we may not be able to get to her in time.

A minute passed… two minutes… three minutes. It was an eternity.

In desperation, Richard ran to the light switch and jiggled it. For a moment the room plunged into total darkness, then the lights came back on. “There’s got to be a switch somewhere that will open something,” he said bitterly. Alvirah hurried over to thump the area around the light switch herself. Then she looked down. “Richard, Richard!” She was pointing to the cover of an electrical socket just above the floor. “See… it’s not embedded in the wall.”

Richard dropped to the floor and tugged at the outlet. It snapped open. He pressed the button behind it. They heard a loud rumbling sound and as they watched, a huge portion of the ceiling at the far end of the room began to descend.

“That’s the lift to get upstairs!” one of the detectives yelled as he raced over to it.

84

In the agonizing forty minutes since she had awakened, Mariah had summoned every ounce of her remaining strength to try to survive. She had managed to wiggle to her feet by leaning her back against the marble table where Greg had laid the silver chest containing the parchment. Inch by painful inch she had pushed her body upward, slipping and sliding back to the floor over and over again until she finally succeeded in standing on her feet. Her light jacket was shredded from being rubbed up and down against the ornate leg of the table, and her back was scraped and raw.