“Can you make out any of the words?” Harper asked.
“I can pick out some letters.” He scrolled to another picture and propped his head up on his hand, then shook his head again. “But this isn’t truly Greek. Is there a way I can zoom in?”
“Yeah, sorry. Here.” She leaned over the desk and enlarged the picture for him. “Is that better?”
He nodded. “Yeah, see this…” He let out a deep breath through his teeth. “If I had to guess, I’d say this was possibly Phoenician or maybe Aramaic. That might be a kappa or an aleph”—he pointed to a jagged figure that looked like a cross between a “k” and an “x”—“but I can’t say that with any certainty.”
“So there’s nothing you can tell me?” Harper asked, trying not to sound deflated.
“Not without looking at it more.” He handed her back the phone. “There’s a good chance that it’s nothing. The reason I can’t decipher it is probably because it’s chicken scratch and a mixture of old languages thrown together to look ancient.”
“And what if it’s not?” Harper pressed. “What if it’s real?”
“If it’s real…” He sighed and took his glasses off, tossing them on his desk. “Again, I’d have to see it to be sure, but it’s incredibly old and amazingly well preserved. Where did you say you found it again?”
“Um, in the attic.”
“Do you have any idea where it came from before then? Or how it got there?” Pine asked.
“Not really. I think Mr. McAllister had some Greek relatives,” Harper lied.
He leaned back in his chair, thinking. “And you’re from a town called Capri?”
“Yes, Capri, Maryland.”
“You know, the real Capri is an island off the coast of Italy. But centuries ago, it was part of Magna Graecia—or Great Greece. Many Greeks still refer to it that way.” He swiveled a bit in his chair, so he had to look back over his shoulder to see Harper. “When was your town founded? Do you know?”
“June 14…” Harper furrowed her brow in thought. “I think like 1801? Or 1802? Something like that.”
He raised both his eyebrows in surprise. “That’s oddly precise.”
“We have a Founder’s Day Picnic every year on the fourteenth of June.” She shrugged.
“So Capri—your Capri—is a relatively young town, at least compared to the island off Italy, which was settled nearly two thousand years ago.” He paused as he stared out the window. “What are the odds of an ancient Greek scroll just happening to turn up in a fairly modern town named after an ancient Greek island?”
“I don’t know,” Harper said. “The town was founded by a man from Greece, and he named it after an island where he’d spent his childhood because it reminded him of Capri. Or at least that’s what they told me in grade school.”
“That’s the thing.” Pine leaned forward and rested his elbows on his desk. “According to the pictures you have on your phone, that scroll has some signs and hints at possibly being old, but that seems like too much of a happenstance, doesn’t it?”
“I’d never really thought about it,” Harper admitted.
And she hadn’t. In her research of Greek mythology, she had learned that sirens were from the island of Anthemusa, and by some texts, that was believed to be an earlier name for the island of Capri.
When Harper had read that, she hadn’t given it much thought. It never seemed all that relevant why the sirens had chosen her Capri. It seemed far more important to try to figure out how to get rid of them. At one point, Harper had just assumed that the sirens had stopped there because the name reminded them of home, and then they’d gotten caught up in turning Gemma.
But none of the sirens seemed to be particularly nostalgic, and on many occasions, both Penn and Lexi had talked about how much they hated it there and how they wanted to get out. Now, with Professor Pine pointing out the obvious correlation, Harper began to wonder what exactly had drawn the sirens to Capri in the first place.
“I just don’t trust things that are coincidental. But, you know, obviously, I don’t think you or your sister are trying to dupe anybody with this,” Pine went on. “I don’t think you made this or are attempting some kind of a hoax, although you might have one being perpetrated on you.”
“I don’t know about that.” Harper lowered her eyes and shook her head.
“And I would be more than happy to take a look at the real thing if you could bring it in,” Pine said. “In fact, you’d be doing me a favor. I’d really love to get my hands on it. Even if there’s only the slightest chance that the thing is legit.”
“My sister is pretty attached to it, but I’m going home this weekend. I’ll see if I can get her to part with it for a few days.”