Storm Front

waited a couple of minutes for Ellen to finish dressing, and then did a caravan over to Virgil’s house. Virgil lugged the stone inside and said, “If it stayed buried for three thousand years, and is still okay, I don’t think rinsing it off would hurt.”
    “That would be fine,” Yael said.
    They put it in the kitchen sink and sprayed it with warm water, until the dirt was gone and the water came clean. Virgil dried it with a dish towel, carried it into his study, put it on the desk, and pulled a reading light over.
    The Solomon stone was pretty much as advertised—not quite a cube, a little longer than it was thick. The top was broken off nearly square, but the bottom had a fist-sized hole in it, as if there’d been some kind of inclusion there that had remained with the stone that this chunk had been broken from.
    Under the raking light, they could clearly see the hieroglyphs, a lighter gray on a dark gray, densely covering two sides of the four-sided stele. The glyphs were small, about the height of a dime. The other two sides were covered with alphabetic forms. “Some of these could almost be modern—but some of them I don’t even know,” Yael said. “It’s Hebrew, though, and very, very old.”
    She gently touched the Hebrew lettering, as if for good luck, or as a prayer.
    “Can you read any of it?” Ellen asked.
    “No, not really. I can read some of the letters . . . but the words elude me. This will take a lot of study. I think this”—she touched a group of letters—“could be the name of Solomon.”
    “Pretty cool,” Virgil said.
    “More cool than you know,” Yael said. “Solomon, in the legend, was the last great king of the United Israel and Judah. Despite that, there is no contemporary mention of him. We have never found a stele, a coin, an inscription, anything, by anyone who lived around his time, who mentions him. Until now. This is the only thing, sitting here in Mankato, in the state of Minnesota.”
    “Amazing,” Virgil said. “I’ll tell you what: I’ll keep it here overnight, then move it up to St. Paul tomorrow. We’ll let the big shots turn it over to you, all official and so on.”
    “This would be very fine,” Yael said.
    “I wonder where the first Yael is?” Ellen asked.
    “This I am not curious about,” Yael said. “I hope she stays where she is, not in my sight.”
    “I’d like to know,” Virgil said. “Maybe she went home, like the Turks.”
    “If my father calls me again, I’m going to tell him that you’ve got the stone,” Ellen said. “Once everybody knows where the stone is, and that nobody’s going to make a profit from it, maybe they’ll all go home. And Dad can go back to the Mayo.”
    Virgil said, “He’s got a legal problem.”
    She nodded. “Of course. But his time is very short. We’ve been told that when the final decline sets in, he will progress from a lucid state to death in a matter of a few days. He’s already begun to lose bladder and bowel control, and that’s the end.”
    “Then maybe he should just stay out,” Virgil said. “If everybody agrees that this is the stone, it’s not a decoy or something . . . I won’t look for him at your house. Or at the Mayo, for that matter.”
    “Thank you,” she said. “My brother is coming next week, or sooner, if Dad goes. So . . . I appreciate that.”
    “I am very sorry for your family,” Yael said. “It comes to everybody, but is nevertheless a sad thing.”
    —
    T HEY TALKED for another five minutes, about the stone, and about where Jones might be, and then Ellen left, to go back to the Twin Cities and home. Virgil put the stone in the dishwasher, hidden behind a couple of plates, locked all the doors, then took Yael back to the Holiday Inn.
    “I’ll come for you at eight o’clock,” he told her.
    “I will stand here,” she said, pointing down at the curb.
    Back home, Virgil took the stone out of the dishwasher, made several high-res photos with his Nikon, and e-mailed a couple to his father, with a brief explanation. Then called Davenport.
    Davenport picked up and asked, “You got Jones?”
    “No, but I’ve got the stone.”
    “Good. If you’ve got the stone, you don’t need Jones,” Davenport said. “If everybody’s reading this right, he’ll be dead in a few days, and I suspect he’ll turn up then. What’re you doing with the stone?”
    “I thought I’d bring it up there tomorrow morning, stick it in an evidence locker, and then