Timeline - Michael Crichton [7]
When somebody finally came to talk to them, it wasn’t the petite doctor, it was the cop. He was a young policeman in his twenties, in a neatly pressed uniform. He had long hair, and his nametag said JAMES WAUNEKA. Baker wondered what kind of a name that was. Hopi or Navajo, probably.
“Mr. and Mrs. Baker?” Wauneka was very polite, introduced himself. “I’ve just been with the doctor. She’s finished her examination, and the MRI results are back. There’s absolutely no evidence he was struck by a car. And I looked at your car myself. No sign of any impact. I think you may have hit a pothole and just thought you hit him. Road’s pretty bad out there.”
Baker glared at his wife, who refused to meet his eye. Liz said, “Is he going to be all right?”
“Looks like it, yes.”
“Then we can go?” Baker said.
“Honey,” Liz said, “don’t you want to give him that thing you found?”
“Oh, yes.” Baker brought out the little ceramic square. “I found this, near where he was.”
The cop turned the ceramic over in his hands. “ITC,” he said, reading the stamp on the side. “Where exactly did you find this?”
“About thirty yards from the road. I thought he might have been in a car that went off the road, so I checked. But there was no car.”
“Anything else?”
“No. That’s all.”
“Well, thanks,” Wauneka said, slipping the ceramic in his pocket. And then he paused. “Oh, I almost forgot.” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it carefully. “We found this in his clothing. I wondered if you had ever seen it.”
Baker glanced at the paper: a bunch of dots arranged in grids. “No,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“You didn’t give it to him?”
“No.”
“Any idea what it might be?”
“No,” Baker said. “No idea at all.”
“Well, I think I do,” his wife said.
“You do?” the cop said.
“Yes,” she said. “Do you mind if I, uh . . .” And she took the paper from the policeman.
Baker sighed. Now Liz was being the architect, squinting at the paper judiciously, turning it this way and that, looking at the dots upside down and sideways. Baker knew why. She was trying to distract attention from the fact that she had been wrong, that his car had hit a pothole, after all, and that they had wasted a whole day here. She was trying to justify a waste of time, to somehow give it importance.
“Yes,” she said finally, “I know what it is. It’s a church.”
Baker looked at the dots on the paper. He said, “That’s a church?”
“Well, the floor plan for one,” she said. “See? Here’s the long axis of the cross, the nave. . .. See? It’s definitely a church, Dan. And the rest of this image, the squares within squares, all rectilinear, it looks like . . . you know, this might be a monastery.”
The cop said, “A monastery?”
“I think so,” she said. “And what about the label at the bottom: ‘mon.ste.mere.’ Isn’t ‘mon’ an abbreviation for monastery? I bet it is. I’m telling you, I think this is a monastery.” She handed the picture back to the cop.
Pointedly, Baker looked at his watch. “We really should be going.”
“Of course,” Wauneka said, taking the hint. He shook hands with them. “Thanks for all your help. Sorry for the delay. Have a pleasant trip.”
Baker put his arm firmly around his wife’s waist and led her out into the afternoon sunlight. It was cooler now; hot-air balloons were rising to the east. Gallup was a center for hot-air ballooning. He went to the car. The fluttering tag on the windshield was for a sale of turquoise jewelry at a local store. He pulled it from behind the wiper, crumpled it, and got behind the wheel. His wife was sitting with her arms crossed over her chest, staring forward. He started the engine.
She said, “Okay. I’m sorry.” Her tone was grumpy, but Baker