“Oh, yeah,” Jack said, his face brightening. “Your birthday is coming up. In fact it’s tomorrow, the sixth of December, right?”

“He hasn’t given me a present since I don’t know when,” James said, ignoring Jack’s question. “Why I let myself believe he was going to give me one this year, I truly don’t know. But since Shawn is both a biblical scholar and archaeologist, I thought it might be some wonderful early Christian relic. Little did I know.”

“Is it?” Jack asked.

“Let me finish,” James said. “I want you to understand why I am in such a difficult situation.”

Jack nodded, his curiosity building. The crate probably did contain an antiquity. Something unusual, judging from James’s reaction.

“Sending this crate to me from the Vatican saying it contained my personal effects meant it wasn’t stopped by customs, either in Italy or here in New York. It came overnight by air freight, delivered here directly from JFK. Since I thought it was a birthday present, I had it placed in here with the rest of my personal items. As he promised, Shawn showed up yesterday right from JFK, shortly after the crate arrived. He was in a very strange mood, kind of tense with excitement. He was very impatient to open the box, as was I, to see if the contents had arrived safely. So we came down here and cut the metal strips and unscrewed the top of the wooden crate. Initially, all we saw was foam board, as the object had been extremely well packed. When the top piece of foam board was removed as I will do now, this is what I saw.” James insinuated his fingers between the rough wood and the packing material and lifted the latter.

Jack leaned forward. The light in the basement was not the best, but he could plainly see a tarnished, rectangular stone with a flat, scratch-covered surface. He wasn’t impressed. He’d expected something eye-catching like a gilded cup, or a statue, or maybe a heavy gold box. “What is it?” Jack asked.

“It’s an ossuary. Around the time of Christ, give or take a hundred years, Jewish burial practices in Palestine involved putting corpses in cavelike tombs for a year or longer to permit the body to decay. After that the family would return, collect the bones, and place them in a limestone box of varying size and decoration, depending how wealthy the family was. The box is called an ossuary.”

“Wasn’t there a controversy recently about an ossuary that supposedly had an inscription saying James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.”