Healer of Carthage Read Online Free

archaeologist like Papa instead of trying to fulfill his wish that she be more like Mama. Mummies didn’t circle the drain and die without warning.
    Lisbeth let her hand slip inside her pants pocket. She fingered the steel bell of the stethoscope engraved with the initial M . Mama was the real doctor. If Papa was slipping mentally, Mama should be here making the decisions. That’s what families do. They take care of each other, support each other, and make decisions together. They don’t disappear and never come back.
    “Seen enough?” Nigel shouted over the roar of the engine.
    She could never get enough of this exotic land she’d once called home, but she gave a reluctant nod. Nigel cranked the stick. Theplane abruptly circled back toward the scrappy mountain range that sliced this huge continent into two very different worlds.
    They cleared a series of barren peaks and a thin ribbon of grassland. Miles of sand stretched in every direction. Unlike the lesser deserts that dotted the globe, the Sahara had varying degrees of hell, each one more damnable than the last. Of course, her father would choose to make camp in the most condemned sector.
    Blinding sunlight warmed the tiny cockpit. Lisbeth fought claustrophobia by allowing the rising heat and steady engine hum to quickly sedate her. She slept, deep and hard, for the first time since Abra’s death.
    Several hours later, Nigel elbowed her awake. “Cave’s up ahead.”
    Lisbeth shifted and dug at her eyes. In the distance, the immense flat-topped shelf of Gilf Kebir rose from the desert floor. The plane skimmed a series of highland cliffs, then dropped over the edge into the Aqaba Pass, a dry river valley lined with huge white dunes.
    Twenty-three years ago her family had approached the cave from the ground, yet even from this totally new perspective, she immediately recognized the strange rock formation. The upside-down ice cream cone had haunted her dreams since she was five.
    In the shade of the giant conical granite, Lisbeth spotted tents. Fear, nerves, and excitement tangled in her throat.
    “Shall I buzz ’em?” Nigel teased.
    She shrugged. “Aisa will poison your supper.”
    “That dodgy fry cook’s been tryin’ to kill me for years. Might as well give him a reason.”
    “It’s your funeral.” Lisbeth’s stomach tightened over the memory of Queenie saying those exact same words right before Abra’s Code Blue.
    Nigel whizzed low over the makeshift settlement, tipping thewings at the series of white tarps stretched over PVC poles. A wiry little man, his head wrapped like a sheik, hopped around, shaking his fist at the sky.
    Lisbeth released a nervous laugh. “It’ll be camel chips for you tonight, Nigel.” A flash of metal on the bluff quickly sobered her. “What’s with the armed guard?”
    “The good professor’s sittin’ on a volcano about to blow. Government’s threatening to shut him down.”
    “After they just let him in?”
    “Bandits.”
    “Oh.” Maybe she shouldn’t have ignored the international travel warnings. She slid Craig’s engagement ring over her knuckle and slipped it into her pocket for safekeeping. “The skeleton of a twenty-first-century woman can’t be worth that much on the antiquities market.”
    “It’s the water they want.”
    “Well, who doesn’t in the desert?” Lisbeth remembered Papa’s insistence that a labyrinth of underground caverns, full of fresh water from rains that occurred over ten thousand years ago, existed thousands of feet beneath the Sahara’s sand. “Papa couldn’t possibly have tapped those subterranean aquifers.”
    He rubbed the back of his neck. “Hard tellin’ with the professor.”
    “How many guards?”
    Nigel looked over his shoulder, his eyes meeting hers. “Not enough,” he said. “Not nearly enough, lass.”
    The plane touched down with a jolt. Sand pelted the fuselage. Nigel held a steady course toward the cave. Two wheels sliced through the crusty riverbed,