Free Death of an Aegean Queen by Maria Hudgins

turned back to his artifacts and I slipped outside, assuming it would be a few minutes before the lecture started. Did Girard realize how funny that little expression of his, “you dig?” sounded coming from an archaeologist?
    On the promenade outside the library door, I found Sophie Antonakos gazing out to sea with one espadrilled foot on the bottom rail. Déjà vu . Hadn’t I seen her at this same spot about three o’clock this morning? She held her chestnut hair back with one hand. A mass of corkscrew curls blew in the wind. I slipped up beside her.
    “Are you waiting for the lecture, too?” I asked.
    She jumped as if I had surprised her. “Oh! No, I was trying to get up the nerve to apologize. I bumped into Dr. Girard a while ago. It was an accident, but he was so nicely picking up my brush for me when I ruined it all by cracking my head against his.”
    “I’m sure he knew it was an accident.” I saw no need to tell her I’d witnessed the event.
    “You don’t think I should apologize?” Sophie glanced anxiously toward the library door, and I got the feeling she was looking for an excuse to talk to Luc Girard.
    “Are you free for a few minutes? Why don’t we go to the lecture together? If you can’t stay for the whole thing, you can duck out anytime you want.”
    “Oh.” Sophie bit her lower lip. “I am interested in archaeology, actually. Not that I know very much, but I’ve done a lot of reading. I haven’t been to college,” she said.
    Before Sophie could talk herself into more abject unworthiness, I took her by the elbow and ushered her through the library door. By this time, most of the seats were taken, but I spotted a step stool near the wall-mounted atlas stand and led Sophie to it. We managed to rest one-and-a-half butt cheeks each on the stool.
    Luc Girard began. “The islands we are now in are called the Cyclades, and it is here, in prehistoric times, that some of the finest art the world has yet seen was born.” His lecture had been billed as a comparison of Cycladic and Minoan civilizations, but after a few minutes in which he told us, rather than two separate civilizations, we should think of them as one civilization that evolved into the other, he detoured into a discussion of how to tell genuine antiquities from reproductions.
    I glanced at Sophie several times and what I saw on her face was pure adoration. Almost rapture. Was she that keen on archaeology or did she have a crush on the man? Or both? Luc Girard was a fine-looking man and, although I’m bad at estimating people’s ages, I’d have guessed he was a few years older than Sophie. Late thirties, probably.
    “Now that I’ve shown you how to tell the real from the fake, make certain, when you buy, you always buy the fake.”
    The audience tittered.
    “Because it’s illegal to take real antiquities out of the country,” he added. He picked up a reproduction red-figure vase, handed it to the woman nearest him, and told her to pass it around. He started a couple of other items around the room, then the white-ground lekythos. This made me nervous because it was the real McCoy. As they passed it along, everyone turned it upside down and looked at the black numbers, which pegged it as an authentic museum piece. The lekythos made the round of the room to the last man who sat near the door and about eight feet away from Sophie and me. He held it out toward Sophie, but the gap made it necessary for her to get up and lean over toward him. He passed it to her.
    She dropped it.
    If it had fallen straight to the carpet it might not have broken, but it fell onto a brass doorstop that had been pushed aside when they closed the door. Sophie cried out like a wounded kitten and ran from the room. By the time I got out to the deck, she was nowhere to be found. I returned to the library, not knowing what to say but knowing I had to say something. Girard was on his knees, slowly placing each piece of the broken lekythos on the seat of a