“You can’t be serious,” Joanne replied, looking totally shocked. “A weapon?”
“Aye,” Nina nodded, frowning at her friend's strange reaction. “You always need to carry a weapon, especially when you’re not familiar with the area you’re exploring. It's common sense.”
Joanne looked sobered and a little wary of her companion. “You’ve been hanging out with Sam Cleave too long, sweetheart.”
Nina stopped walking and stared at Joanne, lifting her shirt to reveal a Bowie knife, twelve inches long. “And if I did not carry a weapon at all times I would not be standing here having this conversation with you, believe me!”
“Well then, you can walk in front,” Joanne mentioned, “so you can kill the insurgents who jump out at us, okay?”
Nina chuckled sarcastically. “Oh, God, you are so funny.”
As they stalked along the pathway where Joanne had walked before with her class and colleagues, the woodland grew gradually more quiet with every second as the night drew closer. Although Nina was used to Scotland's cold weather, Canada had a different kind of chill that she was not used to. Soon she felt the urge to return to the comforts of the fire, but the need to uncover the origin of the one singular medallion of antiquity was too intriguing to neglect.
“Here, a few paces from this line. That is where we found her,” Joanne affirmed, visibly wary of approaching the site where the clothed skeleton had been found.
“What's wrong? Come on,” Nina whispered, but Joanne shook her head. Like an obstinate mule she stayed put, refusing to move.
“I–I can't,” she said with a static expression Nina construed as terror. “I can’t set foot there again. Besides, what if there are snakes? I hate snakes! I don't want to be creeped out.”
Nina sighed, placing one hand on her hip. “Earle-girl, you stuck your hands inside a skeleton's rib cage to retrieve a piece of gold. That is some intimate contact, I'd say. And now you won't even go to the patch where she was before? Bullshit. Come on.”
“I’m scared,” Joanne admitted. “It feels wrong. You know how long she must have been lying there? And now two strangers are desecrating her grave.”
“Joanne, we are no more desecrating her resting place than whoever put her to sleep there years ago, okay? Besides, our snooping hardly constitutes violating her corpse or anything. Nothing we do here could do her worse than what was done to her the moment she swallowed that coin,” Nina explained. Her companion winced at the thought, but she had to concede that Nina was right again.
Reluctantly she started forward. “We can't be too long. It will be getting dark soon.”
“I know,” Nina said as she came to the uprooted spot where the local police had worked when they removed the remains. “This is going to sound macabre, but, do you have any pictures of the corpse?”
“Why?” Joanne asked.
“Do you know how she died? If I could see the position she was in, or what she was wearing, for instance, I could maybe figure out more about her involvement in such an ancient treasure,” the historian clarified.
Joanne thought for a second. “I could not take pictures at the time, because by then that idiot Spence and the other kids had already come to see what the big deal was and it would have been in extremely bad taste if I had stood there snapping photo's, you know?”
“Aye, not even I would dare do that,” Nina giggled. Then she gave it some thought. “Maybe I would have. God, you're right. I have been hanging out with Sam too long.”
“Where is he? I am sure he would love to cover this story,” Joanne smiled proudly for connecting the great and renowned Sam Cleave with something she discovered.
Nina stared at her for a long while, displaying no indication of what she was thinking. It was a splendid idea, actually. Sam was in Kuala Lampur. Probably drinking too much and missing good times in hazardous situations. He would be ecstatic to cover a story like this. Groundbreaking and huge, it would once again shoot his reputation over the walls. She knew he was not about ego, but it would elevate his work, his achievements, right into the history books and that was too good to pass up.
“But Nina, then we keep all this hush-hush until we actually find where this trinket comes from, right?” Joanne ascertained, since she was not sure how the experts handled something this monumental.
“Absolutely,” Nina assured her. “Remember, we know what kind of vermin come out to play when word gets out about something like this. We will keep you posted on the developments as we go along, I promise.”
“Nina! I am coming with you, wherever this thing goes,” the teacher protested.
“No, you are not,” Nina countered. “Do you not trust me? Do you think I will take the credit for it, because I don't tick that way, honey.”
“That's not why, Nina. Jesus, how could you think that I make you out to be some sort of crook? I just… well, the reason…” Joanne hesitated, feeling stupid for what she had to confess.
“What? What then makes you want to track our every move?” Nina asked.
“I feel really childish and silly saying this,” Joanne presented her case, “but… all my life I have been sitting in classrooms, libraries, and exam rooms, talking about great explorations and excursions, teaching kids history about great discoveries. It’s been only from a room, from between four walls, that I’ve had the opportunity to look into the world of history, the excitement of finds and the rewards of hard work in finding these things. Now I have found something that could mean something and…”
“And you don't want to watch from a classroom,” Nina smiled, feeling Joanne's plight wrap around her heart.
“Yes,” Joanne sighed in relief that Nina understood. “I want to be the one on the computer monitor or the TV screen that other people watch and wish they were me, for a change.”
“I get it, honey,” Nina soothed with a hug. “I’m just scared for your safety, should something come of this and we run into trouble. I don't want you to end up dead or get arrested for snooping in places we aren't exactly carrying permits for, you know?”
“Fuck that! If it means I get to live a little and I get in trouble for my passion, then so be it, dammit!” Joanne smiled. Her face flushed and she seemed more confident all of a sudden. The dead emotion and the hopeless expressions were lost in favor of motivation and happiness. For once she felt the addictive thrall of something exciting on the horizon, instead of only having a new syllabus to look forward to in her miserable, anchored existence. “It’s weird, you know,” she told Nina. “You don't realize how pathetic your life is until something un-pathetic happens to you.”
Nina chuckled and nodded in agreement. She remembered when she was living only for tenure at the University a few years ago, taking all manner of shitty lecture positions and submitting theses all over the place just to get her papers published for a bit of recognition. She recalled with no fondness working under the insufferable Prof. Matlock, the misogynistic fuckwit who’d thwarted all of her chances of success and even took the credit for Ice Station Wolfenstein from her.
“Oh, I know all too well what it is like to bust your balls and nobody gives a shit, Earle-girl,” Nina said. “And once you discover what you are capable of, you cannot imagine having lived, no, waded through, such a shit life.”
“I see we are exactly on the same page, Dr. Gould,” Joanne laughed, patting Nina on the shoulder. “In fact, we are down to the letter of the sentence.”
The vicinity of where the dead woman had spent the past few decades was barren of anything not put there by nature. Much as the two women searched, no matter how impeccably, there was nothing else that resembled, or could belong to, the collection the medallion could have come from. For over an hour, braving the cold and the gaining darkness, they examined every square inch of the dark soil of the under story. Nina even resorted to digging a few inches into the loose dirt in the exact spot where the corpse had been found, just I case her body was but a marker for something precious that was never recovered by those who buried it there.