Excavated Read online

  Excavated

  Noelle Adams

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Noelle Adams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks referenced in this work of fiction: Manolo Blahnik, Indiana Jones, Skype, and Google.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Seducing the Enemy

  About the Author

  One

  Lucy’s second fiancé was being an ass.

  She’d been married once and engaged three times over the last ten years. Maybe she should expect at least one of her former relationships to be an ass at any given time, but her interactions with her exes were usually civil.

  Only recently had Mark become obnoxious. Now that her web series had become so popular and lucrative, Mark was threatening to sue her, claiming Arthur, her Bichon Frise, belonged to him as much as her. They’d been engaged five years ago when she’d bought the dog, and now Arthur was an essential cast member on Girl Meets Ghost.

  Mark was a lawyer. Lucy would think twice about dating a lawyer again.

  “You should be fine,” Dana said, checking the spiral-bound notebook she always carried. “I looked at your files when Mark started hemming and hawing about all this, and Arthur’s papers are in your name, not his. I checked your bank records this morning, and there’s a record of your payment to the breeder. I think he’s just blowing hot air. He doesn’t have a case.”

  Dana was a freckled redhead in her early twenties whose drawling Southern accent belied her efficiency. Lucy had hired her as an assistant two years ago, when the paperwork and research for Girl Meets Ghost became simply too much for her to keep up with. Now, Lucy couldn’t function without her.

  “I hope not. I’m not giving up Arthur, and I don’t want to throw money at Mark just for being an ass.” A biting wind whipped Lucy’s hair into her face as she leaned down to peer into Arthur’s carrier at her feet. A rustic ferry between two of the Orkney Islands was hardly an ideal location for a legal discussion, but she and her small staff had learned to work wherever they happened to be.

  Arthur gave her a pitiful look through the mesh window, as if to say he didn’t appreciate being hauled along on this particular expedition. The dog had never liked boats.

  Girl Meets Ghost, Lucy’s web series, featured a new mysterious location from around the world every month, investigating stories of hauntings or other supernatural phenomena. She, Dana, and her camera man, Sawyer, were constantly traveling, often to remote places.

  An uninhabited island in Scotland’s Orkney Islands was their current destination.

  “Just say the word,” Sawyer said, looking up from the comic book he was reading, impervious to the wind and waves buffeting the small ferry, “and I’ll go beat him up for you.”

  Lucy and Dana both snickered. Sawyer was a twenty-four-year-old beanpole and hadn’t worked out a day in his life.

  “I’ll hire someone to beat him up,” Sawyer amended.

  “I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m sure we can handle this without resorting to physical violence.” Lucy turned to Dana. “I assume Russell or someone else at the firm is taking care of it?”

  Dana affirmed that Lucy’s lawyer was indeed on the case and that she needn’t worry.

  Ever since Girl Meets Ghost had become a runaway hit, Lucy had been surrounded on every side with people looking for a piece of the action. She never would have dreamed of being in a position to deal with such things when she’d started a blog as a class project in an introductory anthropology course in college twelve years ago.

  She’d taken the course to meet a general education requirement, and the major project was to blog for the semester about something related to anthropology. Lucy had chosen the caves near her school in Tennessee that were supposed to have significance to a Native America tribe in the area. As her blog picked up a surprisingly large audience, she started to include video segments with her written posts and photographs, and she’d enjoyed it so much she’d kept it up throughout college and then after she graduated.

  The first several years had been a very low budget affair, but her popularity kept growing until she was something of an internet phenomenon. Four years ago, she’d been able to quit her job at a marketing firm and work on Girl Meets Ghost full time.

  Which was how Lucy ended up on an Orkney Island ferry on a cool, sunny day in July, making her way to another mysterious site.

  The legal update concluded, Dana moved on to other items from the list in her notebook. “Now, for this trip, I assume you want Neal Sanders and Maxine Reynolds on call for possible interviews. They’re the leading authorities in Neolithic hauntings, aren't they?”

  “Yeah,” Lucy agreed. “Definitely Neal. Maxine is a nut, but people love her, so I guess we should use her too. And see if you can touch base with Michael McPherson. I worked with him when I did the episode on Brodgar a couple years back. He knows all about Orkney legends. He lives on Mainland, so he could even zip over here for an interview, if we can convince him to show his face on camera.”

  Dana was busily taking notes, but she nodded to indicate she was up to date.

  “You arranged for the lead archaeologist to make time for us, didn’t you? I don’t want to be fobbed off on a grad student like on Easter Island.”

  “Absolutely. It’s all arranged with the lead guy,” Dana said, flipping pages in her notebook, “I guess he’s a big hotshot in his field. His name is—“

  Lucy gestured for Dana to silence when the ferry pilot called something out from his perch behind the steering wheel. Despite careful attention on their part, they couldn’t understand the individual words, so heavy was his accent. Lucy figured, however, that he was alerting them to the nearness of their destination when she saw they were heading into an inlet of the approaching island.

  They’d had to charter the ferry, since there was no airfield on the island and no regular ferry service. Erland, the island they now approached, was uninhabited except for two months in the summer when the archeologists worked the dig.

  Erland had an area of just under two square miles. Lucy could see as they approached that there were no trees at all, as she’d learned was typical of the islands the last time she’d been to the Orkneys to film at the Ring of Brodgar. The only notable landmarks visible were two trailers a short ways down the coast, some large standing stones farther inland, and a long hill near the stones which she assumed was the barrow.

  No one but archaeologists and ghost hunters visited the island now, but ancient peoples had evidently used it as a place of worship and burial. Lucy had filmed at most of the famous world sites—she’d looked for pagan spirits in Stonehenge, mummies at the Pyramids, and ghosts in the Parisian catacombs. But she preferred lesser known sites where it was more likely for something genuinely unexplainable to be going on. She’d been excited when a fan wrote into her, suggesting she visit Erland, virtually unknown to a popular audience but boasting a reputation for being haunted by the ghosts of Neolithic warriors.

  When the pilot secured the ferry at the makeshift dock, Sawyer scrambled off and reached over to help her and Dana off too before he hauled their luggage and supplies from the boat.

  Lucy always film
ed a short segment on her arrival at a new location, so she was dressed for filming in a pencil skirt, four-inch heels, and a flirty, feminine top—today a silk blouse with a ruffle down the front.

  She took Arthur out of his carrier and picked him up so the little white dog was tucked in the crook of her arm against her side.

  She couldn’t film Girl Meets Ghost without Arthur and her notoriously impractical outfits.

  The wind seemed even stronger once she stepped off the boat. It blew her hair out of her low chignon and, even in July, it chilled her. Despite her discomfort, she waited patiently until Sawyer got his camera ready, asked her to move to a different position where the lighting would be better, and debated with Dana about whether the ferry should be in the background of the shot.

  Finally, he told her to begin, and she gave a lively spiel about where she was and what she was expecting to find here. Neolithic standing stones, vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge. A millennia-old barrow full of the bones of ancient kings and warriors. And an experienced archaeological team to give her the background and history they needed to investigate the stories of the spirits of the dead still haunting the lonely grasslands.

  She could do introductions in her sleep, and Arthur yipped enthusiastically to the camera when she gave him the signal. After Sawyer called, “Cut,” she put the dog down and noticed Sawyer winking at Dana.

  Lucy was pretty sure the two were sleeping together, although neither of them had said a word to her about it.

  They were both young, attractive, and intelligent. There was no reason why they shouldn’t get together. Lucy was happy for them.

  And a little jealous.

  She was very happy with her life and thrilled with the success of her somewhat eccentric career, but she would still love to be in a relationship. Her dad had walked out on her and her mother when she was ten, and it still hurt her to think about it. She’d been very wary of men until she’d fallen hard during her freshman year of college, but then Philip had stomped all over her heart. It still hurt to think about that too. And it also hurt each time one of her endless attempts at a romantic relationship imploded.

  Stories about the success of Girl Meets Ghost sometimes called her a “runaway bride,” but that wasn’t really what she was. She just couldn’t find the right man, and she’d always called it quits before the wedding plans were made, except for the one time she’d been married for less than a year in her mid-twenties.

  She wanted to commit. She did. She just hadn’t met a man she could fully trust.

  Mark and his asshole-lawsuit was a case in point. She might be able to size up a worthwhile mystery to explore or a good potential sponsor in about two seconds flat, but Lucy clearly had bad judgment when it came to love interests.

  She hadn’t given up, though. She wasn’t dating anyone now, but that could always change.

  She was only thirty-one years old. She kept telling herself she had plenty of time.

  ***

  Philip Wentworth watched one of his graduate students brush the dirt away from a broken piece of pottery she’d just unearthed. He had to swallow over an automatic directive about how to perform the delicate process more efficiently.

  He liked having doctoral students at his digs—since they needed the experience and they could do most of the endless grunt work required at archaeological excavations—but that meant he had to loosen his controlling tendencies and let someone else do what he could do better.

  Most of the time, he could give corrections or instructions patiently enough that he hadn’t gotten the reputation of being impossible to work for. He knew he was called the Tyrant at the university, but he could live with that appellation. There was no shortage of grad students and junior faculty who competed to work with him. He didn’t have to be friendly or demonstrative—just basically polite.

  But he was in a bad mood today, and he would have snapped the student’s head off if he hadn’t restrained himself.

  It wasn’t the girl’s fault that he was going to have to put up with a nitwit ghost hunter and her crew for the next ten days.

  Philip had asked Randall, the owner of Erland Island, not to burden him with such a senseless disruption to his work. When Randall still persisted, Philip had pleaded with the man—something he never did and definitely resented. It had taken Philip two years to convince Randall to let him dig on the island at all, but now the eccentric millionaire had decided he wanted to raise the profile of the ancient remains on his property, and so he’d insisted on Philip allowing the nitwit to visit and film as she wanted.

  Philip had then asked if he could just hand her off to a grad student while she was here, so he wouldn’t have to waste his time with her, but apparently the woman preferred to interview and be shown around by the leading expert on the location.

  Philip was the leading expert on the Erland henge and barrow. That mean he was stuck playing tour guide.

  He glanced over his shoulder toward the dock and saw the ferry had arrived. Suppressing the urge to make a face, he gave the grad student a final reminder of how to precisely catalog the pottery she’d found and then walked back toward the trailers that housed the field staff during the two months of the dig each year.

  As he passed the grad student trailer, he heard an uproar of loud laughter. Curious, he stuck his head in to see what they were doing.

  Three of them were gathered around a laptop computer, watching something on the screen.

  Noticing his presence, one of the guys—Kurt, although all the males looked the same to Philip—said to him, “You’ve got to see this. It’s the funniest thing ever. No wonder it’s so popular.”

  “What is?”

  “Girl Meets Ghost. She’s a riot!”

  Another of them, a tiny brunette named Kayla, added, “She managed to get a tour into areas of the Great Pyramid that almost no one ever sees, but she’s crawling through the passages in a tight skirt and Manolo Blahniks.”

  Philip sighed, preparing himself for two weeks of frustration. “So is the popularity from mocking her or ogling her?”

  “No, no. Neither. Well, maybe ogling her a little. She’s definitely hot. But she’s really smart,” Kurt explained.

  “It’s not just a mindless ghost hunting show like I thought,” Kayla added. “She goes into a lot of history and culture, and it’s more about the hunt than about any made-up paranormal crap. She definitely knows what she’s doing. And she’s got this hilarious little dog. You should have seen him attacking shadows in the Tower of London. I was rolling. I can’t believe we didn’t know about this before. I’m going to watch it all the time now.”

  Philip shook his head and was tempted to tell them to get back to work, but that was just because he was grumpy. They were allowed a dinner break. He stepped out of the trailer again, heading back toward the ferry. He could see from a distance that the nitwit appeared to be filming.

  Lucy Nelson was the nitwit’s name. She was little and blonde and dressed in the most idiotic outfit for a dig. He could see even from the distance.

  He strode over, taking off the hat he wore and rubbing his head. The sun didn’t set in the Orkney Islands in July, so he wore a hat almost constantly. There were a few hours of dim light in the middle of the night, but otherwise it was light all day long.

  When he reached the dock, the shooting had stopped, and the nitwit was bending over, feeding something to a fluffy dog.

  She did have a luscious ass, he couldn’t help but notice, no matter how ludicrous her skirt and heels.

  Philip’s career was all-consuming to him, and he’d pretty much given up on relationships. He’d been married twice, but both of them were humiliating failures. He was still interested in sex—very interested in sex—but fourteen or sixteen hours a day working in his office during the school year and trips to field sites at every single break didn't lend itself to a long-term relationship. And he’d concluded it just wasn’t worth the disaster that a romantic relationship would inevitably becom
e.

  He wasn’t opposed to the occasional one-night stand, but he’d given up on those a couple of years ago after a woman simply wouldn’t leave him alone afterwards. He’d had to call in university security, which had been rather embarrassing.

  Since then, he’d just gone without sex. There were simpler ways to take care of his physical urges. Some people weren’t cut out for romantic attachments. He’d always been one of those people.

  He had nothing against women. He’d known many intelligent and impressive women. He’d known women who could blow him out of the water intellectually.

  He did, however, have something against empty-headed bimbos who leveraged their bodies and the superstitions of the ignorant to gain money and temporary fame.

  Lucy Nelson, as far as he was concerned, was one of those women.

  ***

  Lucy stood up from giving Arthur a treat for performing well during filming with the unquestionable feeling of being watched.

  She understood why when she saw the archaeologist standing off to one side from the dock, watching her.

  She couldn’t see him very well because he was standing with his back to the lowering sun, but he wore khaki pants, hiking boots, and a beige Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His hat wasn’t really an Indiana Jones fedora, but it had a wide brim like the kind worn by every other archaeologist she’d ever met.

  He was definitely an archaeologist, and something about his stance made her think he wasn’t all that happy to see her.

  She was used to annoyance and frustration at her presence, particularly from academics who weren’t familiar with her show and assumed the worst. She put on her best smile and walked over to him.

  “Hi,” she began, “I’m Lucy Nels— Philip?” She froze, her hand half-outstretched, when she got close enough to see his face.

  Even with the hat covering his short, golden-brown hair, there was no mistaking his patrician features and too-intelligent blue eyes. Even after so many years, she would have recognized him anywhere.