Elaine Orr

Secrets of the Gap Elaine Orr

Carolyn Williams has come to the ancient Roman Baths in southwest England for a collegial international meeting, but what she finds is trouble. She has been drawn to these baths since childhood, and is here again as a professional archaeologist, along with beloved former professor, Dr. James Cochran (Scotty) and Greg Porter, whom she has not seen since they finished graduate work at the Archaeology Institute of New York a few years earlier. She did not expect to see Greg, and did not welcome the mix of attraction and fury he once again arouses. Greg's style of study and life were impatient ones that did not include the collegial sharing that are part of a professional meeting at the ancient site. Greg is in Bath because of the eerie feelings evoked when he saw the meeting brochure, with its pictures of the excavated baths. Unable to shake the thoughts, he has traveled from his dig in Egypt. He may not be the only one with strange feelings and eerie dreams. Carolyn's theories about the location of the long-buried Roman Temple come up against others who are looking for it, and for the long-missing torso of the statue of Sulis Minerva, whose head is in the Bath Museum. Celtic monks, a tolerant breed of early Christians, are the ones who sealed the temple. One of the clues Carolyn found was a symbol on a photograph in the British national archives. What she has deemed the 'Symbol of the Gap of the Gods' combines a Christian cross and a drawing of the steamy arch in the baths. Will the symbol be the clue to finding a way into the long-buried portions of the Roman Baths? Will the statue be there? And if Carolyn, Greg and Scotty manage to find the statue, will they live to reunite it with its head?