Ysabel Read Online Free PDF

door that led back into the cathedral. There was no breeze here. It was a peaceful place.
    His hands, holding Kate’s red flashlight, were still trembling.
    He must have left Melanie’s brochure in the baptistry, he realized. They’d stayed just long enough to close the grate, dragging it back across the open space, scraping it on the stone floor. He hadn’t even wanted to do that, but something told him it needed to be done, covering over what lay below.
    “Tell me,” said Kate.
    She was biting her lip again. A habit, obviously. He drew a breath and, looking down at his hands and then at the sunlit tree, but not at the girl, told about the skull and the sculpted head. And the scar.
    “Oh, God,” she said.
    Which was just about right. Ned leaned back against the rough wall.
    “What do we do?” Kate asked. “Tell the . . . the archaeologists?”
    Ned shook his head. “This isn’t an ancient find. Think about it a second.”
    “What do you mean? You said . . .”
    “I said it looked old, but those things haven’t been there long. Can’t have been. Kate, people must have been down there dozens of times. More than that. That’s what archaeologists do . They’ll have gone looking at those . . . Roman street slabs, searching for the tomb, studying the well.”
    “The font,” she said. “That’s what it is. Not a well.”
    “Whatever. But, point is, that guy and me, we’re not the first people down there. People would have seen and recorded and . . . and done something with those things if they’d been there a long time. They’d be in a museum by now. There’d be stuff written about them. They’d be on that tourist thing on the wall, Kate.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “I’m pretty sure someone put them there just a little while ago.” He hesitated. “And carved out the spaces for them, too.”
    “Oh, God,” she said again.
    She looked at him. In the light he could see her eyes were light brown, like her hair. She had freckles across her nose and cheeks. “You think for . . . our guy to see?”
    Our guy. He didn’t smile, though he would have, another time. His hands had stopped shaking, he was pleased to see.
    He nodded. “The head was him, for sure. Bald, the scar. Yeah, it was there for him.”
    “Okay. Um, put there by who? I mean, whom?”
    He did smile a little this time. “You’re hopeless.”
    “I’m thinking out loud, boy detective. Got your cereal box badge?”
    “Left it behind.”
    “Yeah, you left this, too.” She fished his brochure out of her pack.
    He took it from her. “You gotta meet Melanie,” he said again.
    He looked at the guide. The picture on the cover had been taken this same time of year; the flowers on the tree were identical. He showed her.
    “Nice,” she said. “It’s a Judas tree. Who’s Melanie?”
    Figured, that she’d know the tree. “My dad’s assistant. He has three people with him, and someone from the publisher coming, and me.”
    “And what do you do?”
    He shrugged. “Hang out. Crawl into tunnels.” He looked around. “Anything here?”
    “Fresh air. I was getting sick inside.”
    “Me too, down there. I shouldn’t have gone.”
    “Probably not.”
    They were silent a moment. Then Kate said, in a bright, fake tour-guide voice, “The columns show Bible tales, mostly. David and Goliath is over there.”
    She pointed to their right. Ned got up and walked over. His legs seemed okay. His heart was still pretty fast, as if he’d finished a training run.
    He saw a linked pair of round columns supporting a heavy square one, which in turn held up the walkwayroof. On the top square were carved two intertwined figures: a smooth-faced man above the much larger head and twisted-over body of another one. David and Goliath?
    He looked back at Kate, who was still on the bench. “Jeez, how did you figure this out?”
    She grinned. “I didn’t. I’m cheating. There’s another guide thing on the wall farther down. I read it when I came