“Well,” Alex said, getting up from his chair and giving Sana’s back a pat, “I want to thank you all for including me. It’s been a terrific morning.” His eyes happened to catch the three ancient scrolls as he started toward the gowning room to take off the protective gear. He stopped and looked back at Shawn. “I’ve been so engrossed with this skeleton, I forgot to ask about the scrolls. What’s the plan with them?”

“To read them,” Shawn said, with a touch of jealousy at the man’s apparent informality with his wife. “But first I have to unroll them, which is going to be a task. They are, excuse the pun, drier than a bone, and quite fragile.”

“Are they made of papyrus?” Alex asked. He bent over and looked at each closely. He didn’t dare touch them.

“They are papyrus, yes,” Shawn said.

“Will they be easy to unroll?”

“I wish,” Shawn said. “It is going to be a painstaking process that has to be done millimeter by millimeter. They could disintegrate into thousands of tiny pieces, and on top of that, we have to be careful.”

Everyone laughed, even Shawn.

“What a pleasant fellow,” Sana said after Alex left, then to herself she added, “in comparison to my husband.”

“Oh, you noticed,” Shawn said mockingly out loud, then to himself added, “I know exactly what you are doing, and I am going to ignore it—I’m not going to get jealous. It’s not worth getting riled up, and I won’t give you the satisfaction.”

“All right, people!” Jack said suddenly, clapping his hands loudly to get everyone’s attention. “Let’s get to work! Let’s crank out what has to be done so you two can get under way. I’m going nuts about whether you’re going to make a positive identification of these bones. But let me warn you, if you continue to quarrel with each other, I’m out of here, and I’m off your dinner list, and if I’m off, then I believe James is off, meaning party over!”

For a moment Shawn and Sana glared at each other. After several minutes, Sana put her head back and laughed. “God, what a couple of children we are.”

“Speak for yourself!” Shawn snapped. He didn’t like the new Sana.

“I am. I think we are beginning to become too similar, like a dog and its master.”

Now it was Shawn’s turn to laugh. “So, which one is the dog?”

“That’s easy to tell, the way you’ve been barking lately,” Sana teased, still smiling. She turned to Jack. “He knows better than to invite people to dinner without discussing it with me first. If we’ve talked about it once, we’ve talked about it a dozen times.”

“You always have to have the last word,” Shawn snapped.