“I thought the same,” he said, shaking his head. “I thought the locations must be some kind of code or pattern, but there was nothing. I even played with the latitude and longitude for each city, looking for some kind of method to the seemingly random appearances.”
“So why did you send the postcards?”
“In the back of my mind, I thought that perhaps the cities would mean something to you. I thought that perhaps you would see something I wasn’t.”
He could feel her sigh as he stroked her back to try to ease the tension building in her muscles.
“No,” she finally whispered. “Those weren’t even places he talked about going. I mean, some of them were, but they were all fairly major cities, so there wasn’t anything that stood out.”
“Yes, after that first sighting in Iraklion, all the cities were major urban—”
“Where?”
“Iraklion or Heraklion. Crete. It was the first place I got any news of him. The director of the Archaeological Museum—”
“You didn’t send me a postcard from Iraklion.”
He blinked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think to start sending them to you until I’d left Crete, and by then—”
She bolted up, staring into the fire, and he heard her heart begin to race.
“Crete?”
He sat up next and placed a hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry I didn’t send one from Iraklion, but it’s hardly a major city. He didn’t even stay very long—”
“But it’s Crete!”
He frowned. “Beatrice, I don’t understand—”
“Knossos. Minos.” She turned to Giovanni with burning eyes. She clasped his face between her hands. “It’s Minos, Gio. The minotaur!”
“Beatrice, what are you trying to tell me?”
She began shaking her head and a desperate look came to her eye.
“Not breadcrumbs. Not breadcrumbs…it’s a labyrinth.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Cochamó Valley
March 2010
Beatrice’s heart raced.
“Daddy! Daddy, the string game, Daddy!”
She tore out of the bedroom, searching for the unassuming reference book she’d spotted on the bottom shelf in one of the living room bookcases years ago.
“Beatrice, slow down. You’re going to trip if you don’t—”
“I’m going to find the treasure!”
“You think you’re clever enough to solve the puzzle, Mariposa?”
She searched for the blue binding as Giovanni rushed out of the bedroom to join her. “Beatrice—”
“The string game. I called it the string game when I was little,” she muttered. The book wasn’t where she remembered. Her eyes raked over the shelves in the living room, searching for the familiar book as the memories poured over her.
“What?” Giovanni’s voice called from the edge of the room. “The string game?”
“Stephen, are you two playing that silly game again? I’m going to trip and break my neck one of these days!”
“Relax, Mom. But don’t go in the living room, okay?”
“Grandma, I’m in the maze right now!”
She finally spotted it on the bottom shelf in the bookcase closest to the front door; she rushed over. “It used to drive my grandmother nuts. She was always tripping over the strings that we put up.”
“Tesoro, what are you—”
“Theseus and the Minotaur. My dad read me the story…I don’t know how many times. It was my favorite.” Her hands pulled the book out and raced over to the large kitchen table, slamming it down.
“Beatrice, if you need an atlas, I have much better editions—”
“No, no, this is the one we had.” She waved her hand as she opened it. “We had this one in our house. It would be this one.”
“Look for the clues, Mariposa. I left you clues all over the house; find them and follow the string to the treasure.”
“Like Theseus. Follow the string out of the labyrinth!”
“When I was a child, my father would read me the Greek myths. I loved them. He read them to me over and over again, but my favorite was the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.”
“The minotaur in the labyrinth?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “Theseus goes to Crete, right? His father sends him to King Minos of Crete.”
“In Knossus, the ancient excavation site right outside of Iraklion.”
“Exactly. Theseus kills the Minotaur in the middle of the labyrinth, but then he has to find his way out of the maze again. Luckily, he was smart. He tied a string near the entrance and held onto it so he could find his way out again.”
She opened the atlas and flipped to the large map of Greece, pointing toward the island of Crete. “There’s no way my father picked that location at random. It was our game; he was telling me to play the string game.”
“What’s the first clue?”
“‘What goes up when the rain comes down?’”
“Solve the riddle, Beatrice.”
Giovanni was standing in a corner of the living room, his arms crossed as he stared at her like she was a crazy person. “Can you please explain from the beginning? What is the ‘string game?’”
She looked up at his beautiful, confused face and smiled. “I love mazes, always have, partly because of that story. Solving mazes, building mazes. I told my dad one time that I wanted to build a labyrinth at our house, but how do you make a maze in a little, tiny house, right?”