Cradle Of Solitude. Alex Archer

been wearing leather cavalry boots rather than the usual leather brogans, but Annja wasn’t surprised by this, as Confederate footwear had been notoriously bad. The boots were in fairly good shape, but didn’t tell her anything new about their owner. The same was true for the regulation trousers that she examined next.

      The shirt was a bit more interesting, if only because it held the evidence of the gunshot that had ended Parker’s life. There was a bullet hole in the front of the shirt, just to the left of the sternum, but no corresponding hole on the back. This meant the bullet hadn’t passed completely through his body, as she might have expected at such close range, but had remained lodged somewhere inside his chest. It was a good reminder that modern weapons were far more powerful than those of a hundred years ago and she told herself to keep that in mind as she examined the evidence of Parker’s demise.

      Annja wished they had the bullet to examine, as it might have been able to tell them something about the gun that had been used. That could have narrowed their avenues of inquiry a bit, but she’d been unable to find it among Parker’s remains.

      It’s probably on the floor of the antechamber. Maybe I’ll go back and try to find it later, she thought.

      Annja was about to put the shirt aside when she noticed an odd double stitch along one of the seams. She ran her fingers over the cloth at that point and felt something there, just beneath the surface.

      It was small, no more than an inch long and less than a quarter-inch thick, and it hadn’t gotten there by accident. Whatever it was, someone had taken a bit of trouble to hide it inside the seam of the shirt.

      “I think I’ve got something,” Annja said, and when Bernard came back over to her station as he had done before, she showed him what she had found. They both agreed that it merited further investigation. They photographed the shirt from a variety of angles, wanting to preserve a record of its condition before they altered it in any way, and then they x-rayed it, as well. The latter was inconclusive, however; it showed the object and confirmed its rectangular shape, but it didn’t provide any information as to what it might be.

      They were going to have to take a look for themselves.

      Scalpel in hand, Annja carefully cut each of the threads that held the seam closed and then, using the flat of the blade, she lifted the edge of the cloth, revealing what was hidden inside—a folded piece of paper. Annja held the pocket of cloth open with the scalpel while Bernard used a pair of tweezers to tease the paper free of its hiding place and move it onto its own examination plate.

      With the aid of a low-power magnifying glass Annja could see that two edges of the paper were evenly cut, while the others were ragged, indicating it had been torn from a larger source.

      A few words had been written on the small slip of paper in a hurried scrawl. Using the magnifying glass, Annja read them aloud.

      “Berceau de solitude.”

      Annja didn’t need Bernard to translate. She knew the words were Cradle of Solitude, but she hoped he might have some insight on what it meant, because she didn’t have a clue.

      “Only place I know by that name is a monastery in the Pyrenees,” he told her.

      “A monastery? Can you think of any reason it might be connected to our mysterious friend here?” she asked.

      “Not particularly. If memory serves, it started out as a convent in the early 1500s, was abandoned about a hundred years later and then was bought by a sect of Benedictine monks just before the French Revolution. They’ve been running the place ever since.”

      Benedictine monks. She couldn’t think of any obvious connection between the religious order and the Confederacy, but it wasn’t her area of expertise. Still, there had to be a connection, for no one went through the kind of trouble Parker had to hide a piece of paper if it wasn’t important.

      The monastery was the key to this mystery.

      She was sure of it.

      “Is it far from here?”

      Bernard shrugged. “Four, maybe four and a half hours by car. There’s a train that runs in that direction, as well, but you’d have to find transportation up the mountain. Not much sense in going, though.”

      “And why’s that?”

      “It’s closed to the public. Outside visitors have to be approved in advance by the abbot and the process takes several months. I spent some time there a few years ago examining one of the books they have in their library and I remember the process being an absolute nightmare to get through.”

      “So you’ve met the abbot?”

      “The abbot, hmmm. Abbot Deschanel. Yes, I have. A charming man, actually.”

      “Would he remember you?”

      “I should think so,” Bernard told her. “We spent several evenings discussing a variety of topics over a glass of wine or two and I…” He paused, finally putting two and two together. “Oh, no.”

      Annja smiled at him sweetly. “What?”

      “You want me to call over there and try to get you in to see the abbott without going through the standard process.”

      “You’d do that for me?” she replied, letting her eyes go wide and feigning innocent surprise.

      Bernard laughed. “I’m supposed to believe that the idea never even occurred to you, right?”

      “You can believe what you want. But now that you’ve brought it up I think it’s an excellent idea.”

      “It’s been more than a hundred years, Annja. What do you expect to find?”

      She shrugged. “I don’t have any idea. But I’m sure something will occur to me once I’m there. There has to be a reason that Parker went through all the trouble of hiding the name of the monastery inside the seam of his shirt. That doesn’t just happen by accident.”

      Bernard considered that statement. “You think he knew he was going to run into trouble,” he said slowly, thinking it through, “and he took precautions in case he did?”

      “I do. And I think somewhere in that monastery is the answer to just what kind of trouble he was expecting. If we know that, we might be able to figure out just what he was doing here in France in the first place. Isn’t that the point of all this?”

      She knew she was stretching things a bit. The authorities hadn’t been all that clear on exactly what they wanted her and Bernard to do. Identify the body if at all possible, sure, but given the state of the skeleton they probably didn’t expect them to have all that much success. Turning the skeleton over to the museum had pretty much achieved what the police had most likely wanted to achieve, which was passing the buck on to someone else. Now that the skeleton wasn’t in the catacombs and potentially slowing down the construction of the Metro tunnel, the details really weren’t all that significant to the police.

      But they were to Annja. Now that she was involved, she was determined to find out all she could about Captain Parker’s fate, if indeed the skeleton really was his.

      She thought it was. Regardless of how outlandish the idea sounded when said aloud, at this point she was all but convinced that she was right. She wasn’t sure why she felt that way, as the evidence was scant at best, but something deep inside rang true at the thought. That meant tracking down what had actually happened to him might possibly lead them to the missing Confederate treasure, as well. And that was definitely a prize worth pursuing.

      In order to do that, she had to get inside the monastery.

      “So you’ll do it?” she asked.

      Bernard, however, wasn’t convinced. “I’ll give it some thought,” he said.

      Deciding she wasn’t going to get any more out of him at this juncture, Annja let the matter rest for the time being. She’d hit him up again before leaving that afternoon once he’d had a chance to think it over.