Chapter Six #3
Theo furrowed his brow. “Of course, you have. Right here,” he said, pulling the chain around his neck from under his shirt and showing her the pendant. There, etched into the gold, was the same μ and eye symbol.
Oh, so that’s why it had looked familiar when she’d first seen it at the museum. She hadn’t noticed last night when they were in the pool.
“What does it mean?” she asked.
“What do you mean, ‘What does it mean’? It was my papou’s. Something he’d had since he was in his early twenties, that’s all. I don’t think it means anything.”
“Do you know where he got it?”
“I have no idea. He left it to me in his will, but it didn’t say why.”
“Well, I saw this symbol in the museum yesterday. In a painting on a clay pot of a man holding the Minotaur’s head. He had this on a medallion around his neck.”
Theo ticked his head to the side and blinked a few times.
Okay. Now they were getting somewhere. “What if this symbol has something to do with it?” she asked.
“A symbol…on a bottle of olive oil?”
So that’s what it was. Olive oil.
She twisted her mouth. Of course, now that Theo was saying it out loud, she had to admit—it sounded a little ridiculous.
“And on your necklace!” she proclaimed, hoping that counted for something. “Don’t you think that’s an odd coincidence?”
“A coincidence? So that’s what you’re calling it now? Because a second ago you were only relying on a piece of paper you ‘found’ in the bathroom,” he said, using air quotes.
“Didn’t you hear what I said? Theo, the symbol that’s on your necklace was on a vase from the second century BC. How can you be so easily dismissing this?” She couldn’t conceal the exasperation in her voice. This was so unlike him.
He tossed back his head and groaned, dragging his hands over his face. “Yes, it’s an intriguing coincidence, but we’re focusing on the wrong thing at the moment. Jeez, Juicy. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t stick with the plan,” he said, clearly frustrated and exhausted.
“Oh, I’m sorry that I didn’t want to leave you here to actually die. Sorry that I thought you needed help.”
“Help? How is this helping me? Now we’re both in trouble.”
“Yeah, no thanks to you.”
“Me?” he said, pointing at his chest with the sale paper still in his hand.
“Yeah, you. If you hadn’t gone and told them I was your fiancée—”
“Well, if you hadn’t been snooping around Knossos—”
“And if you hadn’t abandoned us in Michigan—”
“Abandoned you? Oh that’s rich, coming from you,” he said, laughing as if he found her comment doubtful.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” She folded her arms and glowered at him.
Now Theo was the one rolling his eyes. “Please.”
Dani opened her mouth to protest, when Maurice yelled out to them, “Hurry up!”
“Come on,” Theo said, turning to head toward Maurice and Louis.
“We’re not done, here,” Dani said, jogging to catch up to him and his unfairly long legs.
“Yes, we are. And if we don’t come up with something more tangible than a label on a bottle of olive oil, we’ll really be done, so please no more going rogue.”
For supposedly being engaged, their body language certainly wasn’t acting like it. Theo followed Maurice and Louis in a huff, keeping himself far from Dani. And her crossed arms weren’t exactly screaming I can’t wait to marry you. Luckily, neither man seemed to notice.
“Where are we going?” Dani asked once they got in a black SUV and started driving away from the harbor.
“To the farm,” Maurice said.
The farm? Dani furrowed her brow and looked at Theo for answers.
“It’s where we’ve been living,” he told her.
“And then what?” she asked.
“Then Louis will go pick up your belongings at the hotel while we wait until closing time, and then we’ll go back to Knossos,” Maurice said.
“And do what?”
“Search for the eye,” Louis said, though he might as well have said Duh.
“But it’s not there,” she said with matching duh-energy.
Maurice glared at her from the rearview mirror, and Louis spun around to look at her.
“What do you mean, it’s not there?” Louis said.
“Tell them,” she said to Theo. But he stayed silent. Verbally, that is. His wide eyes and subtle shake of the head told her plenty. So she answered for him. “The place you were searching at Knossos was a diversion. There’s nothing there.”
Theo closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose above his glasses as he let out a long breath.
Maurice slammed on the brakes and pulled the car over. “Were you sending us on wild-goose chases?” he demanded of Theo.
Theo opened his eyes and glanced at Dani. “What did I say about going rogue?”
In her defense, he should have known better than to try to impose rules on her. Dani may have been a librarian, but stuffy rules were never her forte.
“We have five days, Theo. Sorry that I don’t want to waste one of them poking around a bunch of rubble.”
“Do you have any better ideas? Because maybe this will come as a shock to you, Juicy, but the grocery store isn’t going to help us find an artifact that’s been missing for thousands of years, and neither is this necklace.”
“Grocery store? What are you talking about?” Maurice said.
“It’s nothing,” Theo spat back, looking away from Dani. “Just some silly idea she had.”
“Silly?!” she guffawed. The nerve he had right now. Dani didn’t care what Theo thought. At least she could make a correlation between her wild idea and the Minotaur, as outlandish as it may have seemed. It was better than his schemes.
“Yes, silly,” he said, pointedly looking at her. “I mean, what, do you think an olive tree sprouted from the rotting corpse of the Minotaur? Or, I don’t know, maybe the labyrinth is buried under an olive grove or something?”
The minute the words came out of his mouth, their bickering stopped. Like a light bulb went off in his head. In both of their heads. What if?
“You don’t think?” she asked, turning in her seat, excitedly.
He shrugged. “It’s not the most far-fetched thing I’ve ever heard in this job. I’ve certainly seen stranger things be true.”
“Stranger than a giant Minotaur with glowing red eyes?”
“Glowing red eyes?” he asked, quirking his lips. It was the first time she’d seen him smile all day. A glimpse of the Theo she knew.
She loved that smile. Even on the coldest of cold Michigan winter days, that spark from Theo would warm her up. Raise her spirits. Make her believe anything was possible.
Except for a Minotaur with fiery eyes, that was.
“I didn’t make it up,” she said, pointing at her chest with a matching grin. “Cosmo did.”
“Who’s Cosmo?”
“The tour guide. Oh my God, you should have heard him spinning a yarn to the group.” She laughed.
“Spinning a yarn like Ariadne did to help Theseus escape the labyrinth?” Theo joked.
“Enough!” Maurice called out, instantly silencing them. Theo playfully grimaced, like the teacher had caught them passing notes. “You need to explain and tell me where we’re going.”
“To the grocery store?” Theo asked, looking at Dani.
“To the grocery store.”