“But I think I may be onto something!”
“No, I don’t want to hear it,” he said, rolling her off his hips, standing up, and waving his hands. “We already tried. It’s time to pack up and go. Cut our losses.”
“It’s at the Parthenon!” she blurted out and then quickly covered her mouth.
Her proclamation stopped Theo in his tracks.
Yes!When she’d been reading various books in the libraryand come up with her most recent theory as he’d slept beside her, she’d almost woken him up. Yet the very idea of sticking around Greece after everything he’d already gone through was absolutely ludicrous—but…then hearing him talk about proving himself to his parents gave her other ideas.
And based on his apparent interest in hearing her out, maybe he was having second thoughts, as well.
Slowly, he turned around. “Okay, I’m not saying I’m changing my mind,” he said, “but I want to know what led you to that conclusion.”
She knew he wouldn’t be able to ignore the intrigue.
“Remember what Papantonis said about the sun? ‘There, below where Helios rises in the east, I will put the eye to rest…Despite his quarrels, Poseidon himself could not have picked a better place for this beast to spend eternity’?” she recited.
“Yeah? The sun rises in the east.”
“Right, but where doesHeliosrise in the east?” She waited a beat before following up, “The east pediment of the Parthenon. Look,” she said, grabbing a large book from the coffee table in front of the couch.
Theo walked back to the sofa and sat beside her. She opened the book and flipped to a diagram of the Parthenon, showing two sets of statues on either side of the marble structure, each side containing twenty or so individual pieces. The pediments had been damaged over the years through a combination of skirmishes, fires, natural disasters, and weather. But through reconstructions and artist renderings, various experts had come up with an idea of what the original pediments once looked like.
The east pediment depicted the birth of Athena with other gods watching nearby: Zeus, Demeter, Dionysus, Artemis, Hephaestus, Hera.
And Helios rising with his chariot from the far end.
Theo studied the page as Dani chewed on her thumbnail, watching him impatiently. She hadn’t necessarily been trying to continue looking for the Minotaur. But when she was flipping through books as Theo slept, the mention of Helios caught her attention. Her research then led her to the Parthenon. But it wasn’t only that.
“I don’t know. This could simply be happenstance,” he said.
She knew he’d say that.
“Okay, but now what about this?” she said, turning to the page covering the west pediment.
And standing in the center fighting over the region with Athena was Poseidon.Despite his quarrels.
Theo pulled the book into his lap, flipping back and forth between the pages. Studying the diagrams. Reading the descriptive text. Finally, he set the book on the coffee table and leaned back on the couch, running his fingers through his hair before resting his hands behind his head. He blew out a long breath and then looked over at Dani.
“Well, if that’s not a clue, then that’s one hell of a coincidence,” he said. “But there’s no way it can be at the Parthenon. Someone would have found it already.”
“That’s what I was thinking, too. But then I remembered this clay pot I saw at the museum in Heraklion. A man wearing the eye medallion, holding the Minotaur’s head. He was emerging from a cave with some sort of temple atop a land mass. I’ve been searching through these books to see if I could find a picture, but what if that’s it? What if it’s not at the Parthenon itself, but instead in a cave below it at the Acropolis? On the east side where Helios rises? And look—”
She grabbed another book that, from what she could tell,talked about excavations at the Acropolis. And there was a photo of red soil.
“ ‘It is here that the eye will sleep and blend into the dirt itself,’ ” she recited.
“Wait,” Theo said, putting his hand on her forearm and pausing to think. “Come with me!”
He quickly gathered up his clothes, and then they bolted out of the room, running through the halls of the house and up the stairs back to their bedroom. He dove for his bag and pulled out that leather notebook, flipped to the page in the center where a piece of paper was neatly folded. He then brought the paper to the bed and unfolded it atop the bedspread.
It was a page from a book with a picture of the clay vessel Dani had seen at the museum.
“This is it! The clay pot I saw at the museum. Where did you get this?” she asked.
“From Andreas’s stuff. I tore it out of a book.”
“Why?”
