Dan looked at her.  No, Carrie wouldn’t get it.  This sort of maliciousness was beyond her comprehension.  That was why he loved her.

“A power trip, Carrie.  Pure ego.  The same loser personality that creates a computer virus.  The Christian world is in chaos, all because of some lame-o’s clever forgery.  All I can say is it’s a damn good thing the Rockefeller Museum did a thorough testing job.”

“I don’t care what the tests say,” she said, tapping the sheets on her lap.  “This is true.”

“Carrie, the ink—”

“I don’t care!  I don’t care if the ink’s still wet!  This man speaks the truth.  Can’t you feel it?  There’s real pain here, Dan.  Whoever wrote these words is isolated—from his friends, from his family, from his God.  The loneliness, the anguish...it seeps through in every sentence.”

“Then how do you explain the carbon dating?”

“I can’t.  And I’m not going to try.  But I am going to prove the truth of these words.  And you’re going to help.”

Dan had a sudden bad feeling about what was coming.

“I am?”

“Yes, dear.  Somehow, some way, you and I are going to Israel and we’re going to find the earthly remains of the Virgin Mary.”

Dan smiled, humoring her.  She was simply a little crazy now.  She’d get over it.  Besides, there was no way they’d be able to get away to Israel together.

ELEVEN

The Judean Wilderness

Dan wiped his face on his sleeve as they drove through the barren sandy hills.

“Let’s find a shady spot and take a break.”

“There is no shade,” Carrie said.  “But I’ll drive if you want.”

He peered through the Explorer’s dusty windshield at the undulating landscape shimmering before them.  They’d been wandering through the desert mountains most of the morning, following one wadi, then another, turning this way and that.  Still Dan was unable get a handle on his surroundings.  He’d never seen anything like it.  So barren, so desolate, so close to the sky, so alone.  No wonder the prophets went to the desert to find and talk to their God—this was a place devoid of earthly distractions.

Except, perhaps, survival.

“No.  Better if I drive and you navigate.”

“Okay.  But we’re going to find it soon.  It’s somewhere up ahead, I just know it.”

“How can you possibly know it?”

She looked at him.  Her face was flushed, just like it got in the shelter kitchen, but her eyes were brighter and more exited than he could remember.

“I can feel it.  Can’t you?”

Dan shrugged.  The only thing he felt was hot.

The air conditioner had given out somewhere around Enot Qane and they’d been sweltering ever since.  At least Dan had.  Not Carrie.  The heat didn’t seem to affect her.  Or perhaps she was too excited to notice.

Carrie had changed.  She’d always been driven, and her boundless energies had been focused on keeping St. Joe’s homeless kitchen operating at peak efficiency, doing as much as possible for as many as possible.  But her focus had shifted since that evening when she discovered the translation of the forged scroll.  She’d become obsessed with finding this so-called Resting Place.

Nothing would turn her from the quest.  Dan had argued with her, pleaded with her, tried to reason with her that she was falling victim to an elaborate hoax.  He threatened to make her go alone, even threatened to expose to Mother Superior the true reason for the leave of absence she’d requested this summer.

Carrie had only smiled.  “I’m going, Dan.  With you or without you, whether Mother Superior knows or not, I’m going to Israel this summer.”

For a while he’d hoped that money, or rather the lack of it, would keep her home.  Neither of them had any savings—their vows of poverty saw to that—and this pipe-dream trip of Carrie’s was going to be costly.  But money turned out to be no problem at all.  Her brother Brad had seen to that years ago when he’d presented her with an American Express card in her name but drawn on his account.  Keep it handy in case of an emergency, he’d told her.  Or use it to buy whatever you need whenever you need it.

Carrie had filed it away, literally forgetting about it until she decided that she needed two tickets to Israel.  She said Brad wouldn’t mind.  He had deep pockets and was always trying to buy her things...trying to assuage his guilt, she’d said, although she wouldn’t say what kind of guilt he was assuaging.

And so it came to pass that a certain Ms. Carolyn Ferris and a male companion arrived in Tel Aviv at the height of the summer, hopped a tour bus to Jerusalem where they spent two nights in the Hilton, toured the Old Town for a day, then rented a four-wheel-drive, off-road vehicle, stocked it with a couple of flashlights, a cooler filled with sandwiches and soft drinks, and headed south.

And now here they were, trekking through the Judean Wilderness—the Midbar Yehuda of yore—in a Ford Explorer on a wild goose chase.  Carrie’s wild goose chase.  And that was why Dan was along.

Weren’t you supposed to protect the one you loved from harm, from the pain of dashed hopes at the end of wild goose chases?

Well, even though Dan knew this quest of hers was a hoax, the trip wasn’t a total loss.  They’d seen the Holy Land.  During their day in Jerusalem they’d walked the Via Dolorosa—the original Stations of the Cross—and visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Garden of Gesthemane, and the Pater Noster Church on the Mount of Olives.

Through it all, Carrie had been so excited, like a child on her first trip to Disney World.  “We’re really here!” she’d kept saying.  “I can’t believe we’re really here!”

And all along the Via Dolorosa: “Can you believe it, Dan?  We’re actually walking in Jesus’s footsteps!”

That look on her face was worth anything.  Anything except...

He glanced over at her, sitting in the passenger seat, scanning the cliffs ahead as the Explorer bounced up the dry drainage channel.  A yellow sheet of paper sat in her lap.  Dan had drawn a large tav on it—the Hebrew equivalent of the letter T, or Th.  Carrie was hunting for a cliff or butte in the shape of that tav.  Dan doubted very much they’d find one, but even if they did, there’d be no Virgin Mary hidden in a cave there.

And that worried him.  He didn’t want to see Carrie hurt.  She’d invested so much of herself in this quest, allowed it to consume her for months to the point where there was no telling what the painful truth might do to her.  Let them spend their entire time here driving in endless circles, finding nothing, then heading home disappointed and frustrated that the desert had kept its secret, but leaving still alive the hope that somewhere in this seared nothingness there remained the find of the millennium, guarded by time and place, perhaps even by God Himself.  Better that than to see her crushed by the realization that she’d been duped.

Ahead of him, the wadi forked into two narrower channels, one running northwest, the other southwest.  The trailing cloud of dust swirled around them as Dan braked to a halt.  He coughed as some of it billowed through the open windows.

“Where to now?”

“I’m not sure,” Carrie said.

Without waiting for the dust to settle, she stepped out and stared at the cliffs rising ahead of them.  Dan got out, too, as much to stretch his legs as to look around.  A breeze drifted by, taking some of his perspiration with it.

“You know,” he said, “I do believe it’s gotten cooler.”

“We’re finally above sea level,” Carrie said, still staring ahead as if expecting to find a road sign to the tav cliff.  The light blue short-sleeve shirt she wore had dark rings of perspiration around her armpits and across her shoulder blades where they’d rested against the seat back.  Her loose, lightweight slacks fluttered around her legs.  She stood defiantly in the sun, unbowed by the heat.