Virgin (17 page)

"No,"
Carrie said, shaking her head defiantly. "This is true."

"Carrie,"
he said, stroking her arm. "Somebody tried to pull a fast one on the
world."

"Why? Why
would someone want to do such a thing?"

"Maliciousness.
Like calling in a bomb scare to a concert and watching everybody scramble out.
Malicious mischief on an international scale. If the scroll had been released
to the world as authentic, someone would have come to the
same conclusion as we. The liberal and fundamentalist sects
of the Christian world would be up in arms, the Vatican would be releasing
encyclicals, the Judean Desert would be filled with expeditions in search of
the remains of the Mother of God. There'd be years of chaos. And all the while,
our forger would be sitting back, giggling, knowing he caused it all."

"But to
what end? I don't get it."

Dan looked at
her. No, Carrie wouldn't get it. This sort of maliciousness was beyond her
comprehension. That was why he loved her.

"A power
trip, Carrie. Pure ego. The Christian world is in chaos, all because of your
clever forgery. All 1 can say is it's a damn good thing the Rockefeller Museum
did a thorough testing job."

"I don't
care what the tests say," she said, tapping the sheets on her lap. 'This
is true."

"Carrie,
the ink--"

"I don't
care! I don't care if the ink's still
wet!
This man speaks the truth.
Can't you feel it? There's real pain here, Dan. Whoever wrote these words is
isolated--from his friends, from his family, from his God. The loneliness, the
anguish . . . it seeps through in every sentence."

"Then how
do you explain the carbon dating?"

"I can't.
And I'm not going to try. But I am going to prove the truth of these words. And
you're going to help."

Dan had a
sudden bad feeling about what was coming.

"I
am?"

"Yes,
dear. Somehow, some way, you and I are going to Israel and we're going to find
the earthly remains of the Virgin Mary."

Dan smiled,
humoring her. She was just a little crazy now. She'd get over it. Besides,
there was no way they'd be able to get away to Israel together.

P
art II

Journeys

Summer

12

The Judean Wilderness

"Let's
find a shady spot and take a break," Dan said, wiping his face on his
sleeve as they drove through the barren sandy hills.

"There is
no shade," Carrie said. "But I'll drive if you want."

Dan peered
through the Explorer's dusty windshield at the undulating landscape shimmering
before them. They'd been wandering through the desert mountains most of the
morning, following one wadi, then another, turning this way and that. .Still
Dan was unable get a handle on his surroundings. He'd never seen anything like
it. So barren, so desolate, so close to the sky, so
alone.
No wonder the
prophets went to the desert to find and talk to their God--this was a place
devoid of earthly distractions.

Except,
perhaps, survival.

"No.
Better if I drive and you navigate."

"Okay. But
we're going to find it soon. It's somewhere up ahead, I just know it."

"How can
you possibly know it?"

She looked at
him. Her face was flushed, just like it got in the shelter kitchen, but her
eyes were brighter and more exited than he could remember.

"I can
feel it. Can't you?"

Dan shrugged.
The only thing he felt was hot.

The air
conditioner had given out somewhere around
Enot
Qane and they'd been sweltering ever since. At least Dan had. Not Carrie. The
heat didn't seem to affect her. Or perhaps she was too excited to notice.

Carrie had
changed. She'd always been driven, and her boundless energies had been focused
keeping St. Joe's homeless kitchen operating at peak efficiency, doing as much
as possible for as many as possible. But her focus had shifted since that
evening when she discovered the translation of the forged scroll. She'd become
obsessed with finding this so-called Resting Place.

Nothing would
turn her from the quest. Dan had argued with her, pleaded with her, tried to
reason with her that she was falling victim to an elaborate hoax. He threatened
to make her go alone, even threatened to expose to Mother Superior the true
reason for the leave of absence she'd requested this summer.

Carrie had only
smiled. "I'm going, Dan. With you or without you, whether Mother Superior
knows or not, I'm going to Israel this summer."

For a while
he'd hoped that money, or rather the lack of it, would keep her home. Neither
of them had any savings-- their vows of poverty saw to that--and this pipe-dream
trip of Carrie's was going to be costly. But money turned out to be no problem
at all. Her brother Brad had seen to that years ago when he'd presented her
with an American Express card in her name but drawn on his account. Keep it
handy in case of an emergency, he'd told her. Or use it to buy whatever you
need whenever you need it.

Carrie had
filed it away, literally forgetting about it until she decided that she needed
two tickets to Israel. She said Brad wouldn't mind. He had deep pockets and was
always trying to buy her things . . . trying to assuage his guilt, she'd said,
although she wouldn't say what kind of guilt he was assuaging.

And so it came
to pass that a certain Ms. Carolyn Ferris and a male companion arrived in Tel
Aviv at the height of the summer, hopped a tour bus to Jerusalem where they
spent two nights in the Hilton, toured the Old Town for a
day, then rented a four-wheel-drive, off-road vehicle,
stocked it with a couple of flashlights, a cooler filled with sandwiches and
soft drinks, and headed south.

And now here
they were, trekking through the Judean Wilderness--the
Midbar Yehuda
of
yore--in a Ford Explorer on a wild-goose chase.

But it was
Carrie's wild-goose chase. And that was why Dan was along.

But weren't you
supposed to protect the one you loved from harm, from the pain of dashed hopes
at the end of wild-goose chases?

Well, even
though Dan knew this quest of hers was a hoax, the trip wasn't a total loss.
They'd seen the Holy Land. During their day in Jerusalem they'd walked the Via
Dolorosa--the original Stations of the Cross--and visited the Church of the Holy
Sepulcher, the Garden of Gesthemane, and the Pater Noster Church on the Mount
of Olives.

Through it all,
Carrie had been so excited, like a child on her first trip to Disney World.
"We're really here!" she'd kept saying. "I can't believe we're
really here!"

And all along
the Via Dolorosa: "Can you believe it, Dan? We're actually walking in
Jesus's footsteps!"

That look
on her face was worth anything. Anything except . . .

He glanced over at her, sitting in the passenger seat, scanning
the cliffs ahead as the Explorer bounced up the dry drainage channel. A yellow
sheet of paper sat in her lap. Dan had drawn a large t on it--a tow, the Hebrew
equivalent of the letter T, or Th. Carrie was hunting for a cliff or butte in
the shape of that
tav.
Dan doubted very much they'd find one, but even
if they did, there'd be no Virgin Mary hidden in a cave there.

And that
worried him. He didn't want to see Carrie hurt. She'd invested so much of
herself in this quest, allowed it to so consume her for months that there was
no telling what the painful truth might do to her. Let them spend their entire
time here driving in endless circles, finding nothing, then
heading home disappointed and frustrated that the desert
had kept its secret, but leaving still alive the hope that somewhere in this
seared nothingness there remained the find of the millennium, guarded by time
and place, and perhaps even God Himself. Better than that to see her crushed by
the realization that she'd been duped.

Ahead of him,
the wadi forked into two narrower channels, one running northwest, the other
southwest. The trailing cloud of dust swirled around them as Dan braked to a
halt. He coughed as some of it billowed through the open windows.

"Where to
now?"

"I'm not
sure," Carrie said.

Without waiting
for the dust to settle, she stepped out of the Explorer and stared at the
cliffs rising ahead of them. Dan got out, too, as much to stretch his legs as
to look around. A breeze drifted by, taking some of his perspiration with it.

"You
know," he said, "I do believe it's gotten cooler."

"We're
finally above sea level," Carrie said, still staring ahead as if expecting
to find a road sign to the
tav
cliff. The light blue short-sleeve shirt
she wore had dark rings of perspiration around her armpits and across her
shoulder blades where they'd rested against the seat back. Her loose,
lightweight slacks fluttered around her legs. She stood defiantly in the sun,
unbowed by the heat.

Dan looked back
the way they'd come. Rolling hills, dry, sandy brown, almost yellow, falling
away to the Dead Sea, the lowest spot on earth--the world's navel, someone had
called it. The hazy air had been unbearably thick down there, chokingly laden
with moisture from the evaporating sea; leaden air, too heavy to escape the
fifty-mile trench in which it was trapped.
Maybe it wasn't cooler up here, but
it was drier. He could breathe.

Above, the sky
was a flawless turquoise. The land ahead was as dry and yellow-brown and barren
as behind, but steeper here, angling up sharply toward a phalanx of steep
cliffs. Looked like a dead end up there.

He plucked a
rag from the floor by the front seat and began wiping the dust from the
windshield.

"When's
the next rain?" he said.

"November,
most likely."

Dan had to
smile. Carrie had done her homework. She'd spent months preparing for this
trip, studying the scroll translation and correlating its scant geographical
details with present day topographical maps of the area. He bet she knew more
about the region than most Israelis, but that probably wasn't saying much. They
hadn't seen another soul since turning off the highway. They were completely
alone up here. The realization gave Dan a twinge of uneasiness. They hadn't
thought to get a car phone--not that there'd be a cell out here anyway--and if
they broke down, they'd have to start walking. And if they got lost . . .

"We're not
lost, are we?" Dan said.

"I don't
think so. I'm sure he came this way."

How could she
be certain? Sure, she'd put a lot of research into this trip, but there hadn't
been much to go on to begin with. All they knew was that the fictional author
of the scroll--
fictional
was an adjective Dan used privately when
referring to the character who had supposedly written the scroll; never within
Carrie's hearing; she
believed
-- had turned west from his southward trek
and left the shore of what he called the Sea of Lot to journey into the
Wilderness.

But where had he turned?

"I don't
know, Carrie . . ."

"This has
to be the way," she said. She seemed utterly convinced. Didn't she have
even a shade of a doubt? "Look: He mentioned being driven out of
Qumran--that's at the northern end of the sea. He says he headed south toward
Masada and Zohar but he never mentions getting there. He doesn't even mention
passing En Gedi which was a major oasis even then. So he must have turned into
the wilderness somewhere between Qumran and En Gedi."

"No
argument there," Dan said. "But that stretch is more
than thirty miles long. There were hundreds of places we
could have turned off the road. Why did you pick that particular spot back
there?"

Carrie looked
at him and her clear blue eyes clouded momentarily. For the first time since
their arrival she seemed unsure of herself.

"I don't
know," she said slowly. "It just
seemed
like the right place
to turn. I've read the translation so many times I feel as if I know him. I
could almost see him wandering south, alone, depressed, suddenly feeling it was
no use trying to find other people to take him in, that he was unfit for human company,
and turning and heading into the hills."