The Copper Egg Read online

  Table of Contents

  Synopsis

  What Reviewers Say About Catherine Friend’s Work

  By the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  About the Author

  Books Available from Bold Strokes Books

  Synopsis

  The ancient Chimú believed their people came from three eggs: the rulers from a gold egg, their wives from a silver, and the workers from a copper egg.

  Archaeologist Claire Adams receives a mysterious package that lures her to Peru in search of a treasure-filled tomb. She must find the tomb before looters do. She’s helped in her quest by old friends and by a strange connection to an ancient copper egg. Claire’s ex, Sochi Castillo, has her own plans for the tomb. She has two jobs—one within the law, one considerably outside it. If Claire finds the treasure first, Sochi is going to steal it. As Claire and Sochi are drawn into a web of intrigue, betrayal, and greed, they discover that love complicates everything.

  What Reviewers Say About Catherine Friend’s Work

  The Spanish Pearl

  “A fresh new author…has penned an exciting story…told with the right amount of humor and romance. Friend has done a wonderful job…”—Lambda Book Review

  “The author does a terrific job with characterization, lush setting, action scenes, and droll commentary. This is one of those well-paced, exciting books that you just can’t quite put down. …This is one of the very best books I’ve read in many months, so I give it my highest recommendation! Don’t miss this one.”—Midwest Fiction Review

  The Crown of Valencia

  “Her storytelling talent is superb and her plot twists continually keep the reader in suspense…”—Just About Write

  Hit By a Farm

  “Hit By a Farm goes beyond funny, through poignant, sad and angry, to redemptive: all the things that make a farm—and a relationship—successful.”—Lavender Magazine

  “A sweet and funny book in the classic ‘Hardy Girls Go Farming’ genre, elegantly told, from the first two pages, which are particularly riveting for the male reader, through the astonishing revelation that chickens have belly-buttons and on to the end, which comes much too soon. It has dogs, sheep, a pickup truck, women’s underwear, electric fences, the works.”—Garrison Keillor

  Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planet

  “As provocative as her reflections are, it is Friend’s acerbic wit that keeps the reader turning pages. A perfect choice for book groups, this is a look at the road not taken with a guide who pokes as much fun at herself as she does at the world around her.”—Booklist

  “Friend details the challenges of balancing a writing career with sheep farming in southeastern Minnesota.…Her voice is wry and funny; she’s self-deprecating and thoughtful, and strikes a balance between teasing and kindness, whether her subject is pregnant sheep, yarn-loving ‘fiber freaks,’ or spirituality and nature.”—Publishers Weekly

  The Copper Egg

  Brought to you by

  eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com

  eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  Please respect the rights of the author and do not file share.

  The Copper Egg

  © 2016 By Catherine Friend. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-62639-614-2

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: May 2016

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Cindy Cresap

  Production Design: Susan Ramundo

  Cover Design By Jeanine Henning

  By the Author

  Bold Strokes Novels

  The Spanish Pearl

  The Crown of Valencia

  A Pirate’s Heart

  The Copper Egg

  Nonfiction

  Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planet

  The Compassionate Carnivore, Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat

  Hit By a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn

  Children’s

  Barn Boot Blues

  The Perfect Nest

  Eddie the Raccoon

  Silly Ruby

  Funny Ruby

  The Sawfin Stickleback

  My Head is Full of Colors

  Acknowledgments

  When we slip into a fictional world, we’d like everything in it to be real. It’s not, however, since authors enjoy making stuff up. We even mess with reality now and then. In The Copper Egg I messed with the heavens, so please don’t use my location of the Carina Nebula as a tool for finding your way in Peru!

  My beta readers Kathy Connelly, Carolyn Sampson, Ann Etter, Mary Casanova, and Irene Friend (my mom!) gave me valuable, thoughtful feedback. As always, my editor, Cindy Cresap, gently nudged me toward a stronger story. A special thanks to the late Sandra Moran for reading an early draft and sharing her thoughts on archaeology, Peru, and the Quechua language.

  The looting of Peruvian tombs continues to be an enormous problem, but there are many people working hard to stop it. I admire their continued perseverance in the face of such difficult odds.

  Dedication

  For Melissa, who still makes me laugh every day

  CHAPTER ONE

  Claire

  Wednesday, March 15

  Claire Adams had just poured herself a glass of Cabernet to celebrate surviving another Wednesday when the doorbell rang.

  It was the UPS guy. As Claire signed the screen, she said, “You’re working late today.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Delivering packages is my life.”

  She chuckled, then accepted the smallish package. “Hell of a life.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  Claire closed the door with a wave, then froze at the postmark on the box.

  Peru.

  Claire and that count
ry had parted on less than friendly terms. She’d left three years ago, humiliated and professionally embarrassed.

  She peered closer at the box. Not just Peru, but Trujillo, Peru.

  Claire’s heart did some impressive acrobatics, ending up lodged halfway up her throat until she realized it wasn’t that woman’s handwriting. Relieved, Claire’s heart slid back down where it belonged.

  That woman. Sochi Castillo. The woman who’d earned Claire’s trust and captured her heart, then betrayed her to the whole world. Claire could weather lots of crap—she liked to think not much ruffled her thirty-two-year-old feathers—but Sochi’s actions had knocked Claire on her butt. Took her these three years to recover. And if pressed—which Claire’s mom sometimes enjoyed doing—Claire perhaps wasn’t yet entirely over the whole thing, since she’d gained ten pounds this year alone. Agitated, Claire pulled her long hair back in a ponytail.

  Sochi wouldn’t have sent this box. If not Sochi, then Hudson? For the four years Claire lived in Peru, she’d been the youngest ever subdirector of excavation at Chan Chan, the ruins of the largest adobe city in the world. Hudson had been her assistant. But the thread of their friendship wound all the way back to the doctorate program at Brown. When Claire left Peru in shame, Hudson had been given her job. He deserved it, and she was pleased he’d kept up the programs she’d started. She loved that job, spending her days working hard to preserve and explore an amazing adobe city that was over one thousand years old.

  Claire dug out her phone and thumbed a text to Hudson. Did you send me a package?

  Her phone chimed less than a minute later. No. Did I miss your birthday?

  No, just wondering.

  Even though it was the same time in Trujillo, Hudson would still be at work. She could easily imagine him sitting in his office, since the office had once been hers, only now its walls would be covered with Japanese woodcuts, Hudson’s Firefly T-shirt collection, and there’d probably be a few surfboards leaning in the far corner. The two windows would be open, and a ceiling fan would be circulating the dry air.

  She and Hudson had had some good times in that office. Since Hudson’s office looked out over the trash bins and was too full of junk to actually use, he often worked in Claire’s office for part of each day.

  When their boss, Silvio Flores, would praise Claire for her clean office, Hudson would lean back in the extra chair, hands laced behind his head, and say, “She gets it from me.” Claire would laugh so hard she’d snort.

  A pang of longing stabbed her, but she ignored it. Claire Adams didn’t do nostalgia.

  How are you? Haven’t heard from you in ages.

  She ignored Hudson’s jab. He could have texted her at any time as well, but it had been months since they’d connected. Fine. You?

  Just had another fight with Sochi over my backflap. She still won’t return it.

  The week after Claire left Peru, Hudson had accepted the subdirector job at Chan Chan. Two months later he’d been digging by himself—something archaeologists rarely did—in an area long believed to have been exhausted of all artifacts. But he’d uncovered a small treasure of flattened gold panels, high quality pots, and a solid gold backflap weighing almost two pounds. The backflap was a flat, ceremonial gold piece warriors hung from a waist cord at the small of the back.

  But she stole it, Claire keyed.

  Damn right.

  Claire knew the story by heart. Sochi had claimed the backflap in the name of the country’s antiquities organization, El Centro Nacional de Tesoros Peruano, or CNTP, and Hudson had been fighting ever since for its return to Chan Chan.

  Sorry, Hud. Wish I could help, but Sochi is ancient history for me.

  She is daily nightmare for me. Gotta go.

  Claire considered the box. She could never turn down a treasure hunt, no matter her age. Whether it was searching for Easter eggs when she was eight, or trying to get into Amanda Blakeley’s boxer shorts when she was eighteen, she could never resist searching for the hidden.

  Part of the joy of a treasure hunt was anticipation, when you imagined finding the X-marked spot on the sand under which some crazy pirate had buried his treasure. She sipped her wine, wondering what could be in a box sent from Peru without a return address.

  She savored the anticipation for a full twenty seconds, then cut open the box and removed a wad of packing paper. She peered inside. A nest?

  Claire carefully lifted out a bird’s nest made of slender twigs. Nestled into this fragile structure were three small eggs, each half the length of her thumb: one made of gold, one made of silver, and the last one copper. Each egg was banded around its middle with a deeply etched design.

  Etched seals circled the gold egg. The silver egg was adorned with etched birds. The copper egg seemed the heaviest of all, which made no sense because gold weighed two and a half times more than silver or copper. The gold egg should have been the heaviest, but it was the copper egg that sank deeply into her palm as if it’d come home.

  Fish swam around the copper egg. Verdigris had obviously been cleaned from it because there was green still embedded in the etching. The verdigris helped Claire see that in addition to the deep etchings, a few lighter scratches wandered randomly across the copper egg. She checked the other eggs, and they were scratched as well.

  Claire had never really appreciated how small her kitchen was until she started pacing it. Three eggs—gold, silver, and copper—could only mean one culture: the Chimú. They’d lived along the northern coast of Peru from about 900 to 1450 and were the ones who’d built Chan Chan, a city of towering twenty-foot adobe walls carved with gorgeous seals, birds, and fish.

  The Chimú had a charming origin myth. They believed that God laid three eggs for them. Out of the gold egg hatched members of the elite ruling class. Out of the silver egg hatched the women who married these rulers. Out of the copper egg hatched everyone else—artisans, farmers, laborers—the people who kept the “gold” and “silver” fed, clean, and safe. If these eggs were Chimú, they were extremely valuable.

  No way would Sochi have sent these, since she lived by only two rules. One, it was fine to betray the woman you loved, and two, Peruvian artifacts belonged only in Peru.

  If Hudson had found the eggs, he would have made sure the entire archaeological world knew about it. It couldn’t have been him.

  One more search of the box yielded a note in the bottom. The messy handwriting was the same as on the package. Dearest Claire Adams, Please accept my gift to you of these three Chimú eggs. They are from King Chacochutl’s tomb.

  Claire actually gasped. King Chacochutl’s tomb was the Holy Grail for which everyone searched but no one found. Most modern archaeologists now dismissed it as a legend. She’d never considered it to be real, even though she loved to fantasize just as much as the next scientist about that one incredible discovery, the one that would set you apart from all the others in your field. The person who found King Chaco’s tomb, if it actually existed, would become part of the history books.

  The note continued:

  Looters approach the King’s glorious tomb and will soon steal its wealth and history. The King wishes you to find him first. This way his treasures—and his story—will be preserved for all the world to know. You can hear the voices, so you’re the only one who can find the tomb…” She stopped.

  Crap. Not this again.

  The King calls out to you. Come listen. Sincerely, Your humble servant, a loyal subject of King Chaco…

  Claire fought the urge to do something destructive, but lost the battle and flung the box across the room. Whoever sent the eggs and the note knew why she’d left Peru. This person thought Claire could walk back into the country and lead everyone to King Chaco’s tomb.

  Forget it. Claire retrieved the box and replaced the nest and eggs, planning to send them straight back to Peru, to the CNTP. She opened another bottle of wine, then laughed, which felt like a weird thing to do when you’re alone. A chuckle, fine, but this was a deep
-throated belly laugh.

  King Chacochutl’s tomb? Seriously?

  She did a quick search on her phone to refresh her memory and found an excerpt from a book written by a Spanish missionary who’d accompanied Pizarro when he conquered the Incas in the early 1500s.

  Fifty years before that event, the Incas had conquered the Chimú people and marched them to Cuzco to be slaves. Once the Spaniards arrived, some of the surviving Chimú talked of King Chacochutl to the Spanish missionaries. Considered a god by some, the deceased Chaco was entombed in an underground chamber filled with gold and silver and copper, valuable gemstones, shells, and ceremonial gear like backflaps, masks, shields, and Tumi knives.

  Twenty women and twenty llamas were sacrificed to accompany Chaco on his journey to the next world. But when the missionaries eagerly asked these Chimú for the location of this treasure, none of them knew. Chaco had been buried two hundred years earlier, and the knowledge of the secret location had died not long after. Only the myth remained.

  Claire drank another glass of wine, forced to admit that this box had her a little agitated.

  Would she return to Peru to search for Chaco’s tomb? Return to the country that held the memory of being loved more deeply than she’d ever thought possible? Return to the memory of a betrayal so deep the scar would never heal?

  She emptied her glass.

  The answer was clear: No freaking way.

  But then, damn it, hunting for treasure was like mainlining a drug—once you’ve done it, your desire only grew. Her fingers itched to buy a plane ticket, since her “people”—geocachers, those treasure hunters who used GPS to find hidden caches—loved to be the first to find a new cache. FTF was the proud claim: First to Find.

  Part of her wanted to return to Peru and find King Chaco’s tomb. Then she could say to the media, “Yes, you made fun of me. Yes, you disparagingly called me the Tomb Whisperer, but now look what I’ve done for your country.” Claire stared at the box, knowing her thoughts were small-minded.

  “But a small mind’s all I have to work with these days,” she muttered. Maybe another glass of wine would help her decide.