CHAPTER 3
Madison Mystery

Maud hurriedly swallowed a mouthful of pizza and washed it down with a long swig of iced tea. She drew a big breath. "OK, here goes: Buckle your seat belts, it's kind of a crazy ride. First the background, so the story will make sense, at least a little.

"My Mom works in the Archaeology Department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, as a lab assistant to Dr. Louise Petrie there. I guess Dr. Leong called up Dr. Petrie after the mug thing turned out to be so old.

"Well, it seems that some years back a farmer had plowed up a similar thing in his corn field. He'd been finding Indian artifacts off and on for years; it was well known that native villages had been in that part of Wisconsin long before the Europeans came. The mug didn't look like any of the other stuff he'd found, though, but it was too interesting to throw away. So he brought it home and displayed in on his mantel with a growing collection of arrowheads and spear points and such.

"Eventually his wife persuaded him to have an expert come and examine the collection. Dr. Petrie herself drove out, and convinced him to donate a stone blade and a clay pipe to the museum. But she agreed the mug was definitely not any Indian style she knew of, and most likely some modern-day art piece.

"But now, several years later, after seeing a photo of the Michigan artifact, she immediately remembered the one the farmer had shown her. She had forgotten his name or how to contact him, but recalled the museum donations. The museum had the pipe and blade on display in a glass case with one of those little tags reading `From the collection of' with his name, which was enough to track him down.

"Luckily, he had kept the mug as a curiosity. She managed to finagle it away from him, somehow — maybe visions of fame and glory. Back at the lab, she had Mom go to work on it. Mom tried some basic non-destructive tests, with no luck. But she had been dating a guy from the physics department, who was working on a government project where they had access to lots of fancy equipment — like Dr. Stevens, I guess. So with Dr. Petrie's blessing Mom had him take it in to be tested.

"That's when things started to get weird. Whenever Mom would ask Jim how it was going, he wouldn't give any details, just things like `Need to run another test' or `Working up the data now'. After a month or two, he finally told her he wasn't able to `divulge' any findings, that some kind of higher-level government investigation was going on, they were holding onto the artifact, and it was completely out of his hands. They had moved it to a separate lab outside of town, where there was high security.

"Mom and Dr. Petrie were having fits, but they couldn't make any headway against the government guys. Finally someone at the new lab evidently needed more archaeological advice than their physics types could supply. Dr. Petrie and Mom were drafted to `assist' with their own project! They were sworn to secrecy, and started going into the government lab at odd hours.

"One night about ten Dr. Petrie came to our apartment, kind of excited. She apologized for dropping in so late, but there was `something big' going on. She and Mom were needed at the lab right away, and she would drive. Mom grabbed her purse and lab coat and badge, and out they went. I went to bed.

"Next morning, Mom wasn't there. I assumed things just ran later than expected, and she was too busy to call, or didn't want to wake me. Then at breakfast I turned on the news. The announcer was saying something about `dazed firefighters' not finding `any remains at all in the zone of the blast', no bodies, no furniture, no equipment, nothing. Not even obvious explosion damage to the structure. They had video from a news copter showing the side of the government lab building with a huge gaping hole, maybe twelve feet across, but it didn't look like a bomb blast. More like in the old Terminator movies where someone comes through from the future and everything around them is just vaporized in a neat sphere.

"I was freaking out. I called the Archaeology office at the U, and the secretary said they had no information yet; she had already tried calling the government lab but nobody was answering the phones. Around noon, a couple of very polite Madison cops came to our place to ask about Mom, like when I had last seen her. Nobody knew who was in the building at the time of the accident, but her purse had been found in her locker. They said no bodies had been found; they didn't want to give out false hope, but there was always the possibility that people had enough warning to get away before the blast. Hospitals were being checked.

"Then a couple of hours later two guys in suits showed up and said they were `insurance investigators' named Grashof and Prandtl. They looked more like football players, or those guys who guard the President; you know, wide shoulders and thick necks. They asked the same questions as the cops, and gave me a business card and asked me to call if I could think of anything else — just like in the movies.

"By the time the evening news came on, the story was being played down. None of the stations had footage like in the morning, or any comments about the nature or cause or even the size of the blast. Just stuff like `authorities are investigating an early morning fire at a local research facility', like it was an ordinary electrical fire or something.

"That was about six weeks ago, just after school let out for the summer. Then two weeks ago Grashof and Prandtl showed up again, asking if Mom had been in touch with anyone at the University of Michigan before the `fire'. I told them she might have, since she worked for Dr. Petrie and Dr. Petrie knew everybody in her field. They left, but didn't seem satisfied.

"Then a couple of days ago they were back, really insistent, asking about specific people at Michigan. They seemed pissed that I didn't know any more than before, kinda threatening, and said they'd be back. Since they looked like Terminator clones, I had visions of them crashing their black SUV through the living room window.

"After they left I wrote down as many of the names I could remember them asking about; I thought people should be warned. I went online and found Dr. Leong's office number, but the secretary said she was out at the dig site and they couldn't give out cell phone numbers. I finally found her home number online. Luckily, Sparrow was there, instead of at the site, trying to find some clue as to where Dr. Leong had gone. I read off the other names on my list, and she thought Dr. Stevens was the best bet to try.

"Since I really didn't want to be around when the Arnold clones came back, I asked Sparrow to wait for me. I jumped in Mom's car and hit the road, and got in at nine last night."