by Ann Charles
“You have cell service here?” He hadn’t noticed any cell towers on their flight to the site, but then again he’d been a little distracted after takeoff.
“It’s a satellite phone. I fly to some very remote places.” He pointed toward the center of the plaza. “If I stand over there, I can usually get a decent signal in the morning.”
Quint looked down at the phone’s screen and tried to read the words. He frowned and handed it back. “My Spanish isn’t that fluent yet. What’s it say?”
Pedro translated for him. “ ‘It was no accident. The pitch control rod break was smooth. It appeared to have been cut. I told my supervisor it was sabotaged, but for some reason my findings were never mentioned in the official report.’ “
“Is that from your friend?’
“Yes. I’d written to him yesterday while waiting for your plane to land. He must have emailed back after I’d finished charging the phone and shut it off for the night.”
A generator had been one of the higher-end commodities INAH had granted Angélica, which Pedro had flown in with some of their other supplies. According to Juan, they fired it up each evening for a couple of hours to light the mess tent for supper and charge batteries—cell phones, laptops, and whatever else was needed.
“Is everything okay?” Juan’s voice from behind Quint made him cringe. He didn’t want Juan to know about the message, but they were too late to hide the phone. Juan didn’t miss much. Behind those mirth-filled eyes of his was a sharp and crafty brain. He’d been too observant for Quint’s own good at the last dig site.
“Sure,” Quint answered, turning to face Angélica’s dad with an easy grin. When Juan lowered his gaze to the cell phone in Pedro’s hand, Quint added, “We were just checking our email on Pedro’s satellite phone.” That was no lie, they were looking at an email.
Juan didn’t look convinced. “Did you receive any news on your next job?”
“No, just the usual spam. You’re stuck with me for a while.”
“Excellent. I need your help, and my daughter could use the diversion. She’s obsessed again. Finding that stela is all she’s thought about until you arrived.”
“And pissed her off,” Quint finished.
“Better you than me,” Pedro said. “Last time she got mad at me she tore me a new leg.”
“Not to mention what she did to his hind end,” Juan added, his eyes gleaming again. He patted Quint on the shoulder. “Go finish your breakfast. We have a lot of work to do yet clearing that cave-in and it’s only going to get hotter. I came up with an idea this morning of how we can shore up that inner chamber enough for one other crew member to work inside with us, making the job go faster.”
“You think that’s safe?” Yesterday, the whole entrance looked wobbly, the stones seemingly ready to cave in at any moment.
Juan scrunched up one side of his face. “Safe is a word I like to use loosely.”
“I remember.”
“I’m not going in there with you,” Pedro told Juan, his phone safely tucked away.
“I didn’t ask you to, you big baby.” Juan softened his insult with a wink. “That’s why I’m taking Quint. He whimpers less.”
“I do?”
Juan held up his index finger and thumb close together. “A pinch or so when we’re in the tight spots.” He turned back to Pedro. “Angélica needs you to help Gertrude and Jane this morning with excavating Mound D. She said your expertise with the shovel cannot be matched by mere mortals.”
Pedro puffed out his chest. “She’s right. I am incredible.”
Quint chuckled. “Where is the boss lady this morning?” he asked Juan.
“She and Teodoro are over at the Chakmo’ol Temple trying to figure out why there are so many snakes giving us problems at that end of the site.”
“What kind of snakes?”
“Rattlers.” Juan shuddered. “My least favorite.”
“I have no favorites,” Pedro said. “I hate them all.”
Quint could handle a snake if necessary, but venom-filled fangs tended to make his shoes want to burn rubber in the opposite direction.
“That’s why she didn’t ask you to go with her, buttercup,” Juan told Pedro.
Quint wondered why she hadn’t asked him to go along at least to carry her machete. Two-finger saluting the two men, he returned to the mess tent. Not wasting time with more questions, he gulped down his coffee and grabbed the last half of his burrito to take with him, saying his good-byes to Esteban and Maverick. He met Juan at their tent and followed him over to the temple they’d worked at yesterday.
“Another day of backbreaking labor in stifling heat and humidity,” he said, eyeing the rubble-filled entrance. “Come to paradise, the guidebook said. Play in the sunshine. Explore the ruins.”
Juan handed him a pry bar and a pair of leather gloves. “On the bright side, there don’t seem to be as many ticks around this temple. Over by the Chakmo’ol Temple, it’s like a buffet of vermin. Angélica is working almost as hard at keeping the pests away as she is at cleaning up the temple.”
“What does chakmo’ol mean?”
“Jaguar.”
“Why do you call it the Jaguar Temple?”
“That was the name given by the previous archaeologist. There are several glyphs and carvings of various jaguar gods along the outside, which I’m guessing contributed to its name.” Juan pointed at the wheelbarrow they’d left next to the temple. “Will you grab that?”
Quint wheeled it over.
“They should have named it the Snake Temple,” Juan continued.
“It’s that bad, huh?”
“I haven’t seen so many rattlesnakes in one area at a dig site before. It makes me wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
Juan stepped inside the newly shored-up temple entrance and stared at the debris still blocking their path. “If someone has been feeding them.”
“To what end?”
“I don’t know.” Juan frowned. “But one notion is to keep visitors away.”
“It doesn’t seem to be working with your daughter.”
“For some reason that is totally unfathomable to me, my daughter has very little fear of snakes. When she was a child, she’d go out searching for snakes amongst the cholla and ocotillo cacti, coming back with pink cheeks and heart-stopping tales of how many she’d found. Her mother always encouraged Angélica to get comfortable with her environment. I just worried she’d get hurt.”
Quint took a couple of sips of water from his canteen before sliding on gloves. “Is there anything Angélica is afraid of?”
Last month, he’d watched her leap blindly without a moment’s hesitation into a cenote in the middle of the night to help one of her crew members.
“Besides failure?” Juan shrugged. “You seem to make her nervous.”
Yet a rattlesnake didn’t cause her even a hiccup of heartburn. “That’s because she’s intimidated by my big brain,” he joked.
“Undoubtedly.” Juan tapped the pry bar with his cane and then pointed at the rocks blocking the inner chamber. “She gets that reckless courage from her mother. Marianne would charge into danger, her focus so bent on finding answers that she ignored warning signs.”
“Like a curse?”
Juan’s gaze narrowed. “Someone has loose lips along with a pilot’s license.”
“He’s worried about your daughter.”
“He’s not alone.”
Quint jammed the pry bar into the pile of rocks and wiggled it. The two rocks above it shifted slightly. “What happened to the archaeologist who was here before? The group that was working the site when Marianne visited?”
He wasn’t sure what was out of bounds with Juan when it came to his wife, so he decided to start slow and off the mark.
“INAH decided that his work didn’t show tangible progress, so they refused to renew his contract to work the site.”
“So, then what? The site just sat here empty for years?”
Juan nodded. “One thing we’ve learned in this field of science over the last several decades is that with time, technology evolves and improves. Often it’s better to let a site go fallow, if you will, for years rather than have an inexperienced or unqualified archaeologist come and damage the historical footprint left behind by a civilization.” He looked at Quint with a raised brow. “Have you ever wondered how many of Egypt’s treasures were destroyed by those who believed they were studying the past, when in actuality their more primitive methods of retrieval and rushed excitement to find mummies and museum trinkets actually did more harm than good for the history books?”
Quint had read about looters, but little about archaeologists inadvertently causing destruction. “No, but along those lines, I’ve read that LiDAR is being used these days, especially in heavily forested areas like down here. I imagine it’s much less intrusive when it comes to excavating a site.”
The article had been one of many Quint had read lately while trying to bone up on his knowledge about Angélica’s career. LiDAR had always interested him. The use of light to measure characteristics of the Earth’s surface from a set point above the ground could be used in many areas of science, which had given Quint ideas for articles to research and write.
“It’s a wonderful tool,” Juan confirmed, “helping us to uncover Maya roads and buildings, along with other features of civilization that we can’t see from the ground or the sky, since the trees block visibility from up there.” He took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. “There was a site in Belize where it was used extensively.”
“That was the one featured in the article.” Quint debated on digging deeper with Juan. He decided to give it a try. “So, has Angélica mentioned why she chose this site?”
Juan stared at him, his gaze measuring. “Why don’t you just come out with the real question you want to ask, son?”
“Am I that obvious?”
“Only to the trained eye.”
“Okay.” Here went nothing. “Is Angélica here because of her mother?”
“Yes.”
That was easy. “Is she looking for some kind of closure?”
“No.” Juan smirked. “She says she’s looking for a stela listed in her mother’s notes containing a block of glyphs with some kind of warning on them.”
Juan’s words jibed with what Pedro had told Quint on the flight to the site.
“However,” Juan continued, “I think she’s here looking for ghosts.”
“Ghosts? You mean Marianne’s ghost?”
“Yes, and those of the people who lived here, of course. Unfortunately, I have a gut feeling she’s going to get more than she’s bargaining for.”
“What do you mean?” Was he referring to this new curse Pedro had talked about?
“I suspect this site has been purposely neglected.”
“Why would you think that?”
“You see these marks here on the bridge stone that was at the apex of the entrance’s corbel vault?”
Quint looked at the scarring on the flat rock where Juan was indicating. “Yeah?”
“These are relatively fresh, as in the last few years, I’d guess.”
“How can you tell?”
“Lichens grow slowly. These scars are fresh, the lichen hasn’t recoated the rock.” He pulled out his tape measure and the notepad he used to keep track of his measurements as they worked. “Someone took a crowbar or a lever of some sort and removed the bridge stone that filled the final gap at the apex of the corbel vault. Without that stone, the effects of gravity made it easy to collapse each side of the entry’s archway inward.”
“Why would someone purposely cave in the entryway?” He had his own suspicions, but was curious to hear Juan’s.
“My guess is to keep someone out or trap someone in.”
Quint cringed. Getting trapped inside a temple was one of his worst claustrophobic nightmares. “Trap who?”
“Maybe it’s not a who. Maybe it’s a what.” Juan shrugged. “I suspect we’ll find out the answer soon enough.”
Chapter Five
Tzabcan: A Mayan word that translates as rattle (“tzab”) and snake (“can”)—aka rattlesnake.
Snakes alive! Angélica wiped the sweat from her face. “What the hell did we stumble into, Teodoro?”
“A big problem,” he replied in Mayan.
Since it was just the two of them, they kept bouncing back and forth between Teodoro’s native tongue and Spanish, in which they were both fluent. Angélica’s knowledge of Mayan had its limits.
“How many does that make?” she asked the shaman as he secured the top of the bag.
“Nine.”
“¡Dios mio!” Nine damned snakes they’d caught and bagged, and the suckers kept coming out of the underbrush. Worse, they were almost out of burlap bags.
“They must have a den somewhere nearby,” Teodoro said.
“I hope we don’t fall into it.”
She chopped away more of the laurel tree limbs blocking their path. Stepping carefully between the dwarf saw palmettos’ fan palms, she tested for soft terrain that might mean an underground den.
Upon arriving at the Chakmo’ol Temple, they’d caught one rattlesnake on the western side, making its way up the crumbling stone steps that led all of the way to the top. Using her four-foot-long makeshift hook, Angélica had lifted the snake while Teodoro bagged it so fast it barely had time to rattle, let alone strike.
They had walked the southern perimeter of the temple, not even making it twenty feet when they’d heard more rattling. This time, Teodoro worked his magic with his hook, snagging and bagging with a finesse that comes only with many years of experience. Two snakes had turned into four, which then turned into nine. That was nine too many, considering the temple was still in sight through the trees.
Shit. This was a more serious situation than she’d anticipated. It was a wonder nobody had been bitten yet. She hadn’t read anything in the previous archaeologist’s notes about snakes. Maybe the rattlers had moved in after the last crew left.
As Angélica stood searching the jungle floor for a hole or some other sign of a burrow, she saw movement in the leaves next to her right boot. With a flock of Yucatán jays chatting loudly in the trees above, she couldn’t hear the crackling of dry leaves as the snake slithered along in front of her. She kept frozen as the rattler paused with its forked tongue out, checking for danger. Then it started off again, gliding over the leaves and forest clutter toward the temple.
Before it could disappear among the undergrowth, she reached out with her hook and snagged it several inches below the head. Teodoro appeared from nowhere and slid their last bag over it, cinching it tight with hemp string.
“Make that ten,” he said, his round Maya face lined with a frown.
She blew out a tense breath. That was close. Too damned close. “This is crazy, Teodoro.”
“We’ll have to get rid of the snakes and come back.”
“Ten snakes? Where are you going to take them?”
He shrugged, pointing to the south. “Further away. Two kilometers should be good for now.”
“You could use the wheelbarrow, maybe make it in one trip.”
He nodded, scratching his neck. “I saw something a little ways over there you should see. You have time?”
“Of course.” If Teodoro saw something worth mentioning, she definitely needed to see it. The shaman was not one to cry wolf.
He led the way, heading southwest. They passed one snake along the way, his rattle barely audible above the cacophony of howler monkey barking going on in the treetops above them. The jungle seemed extra loud today, or maybe it was because she was trying so hard to hear danger before it struck and bit.
Up ahead, Teodoro halted, waiting for her. When she joined him, he scraped away a thin deposit of decaying leaves and grass with his snake hook, uncovering a layer of stone still partially whitewashed with limestone stucco.
“A sacbe?” Sh
e squatted, pushing debris aside to find the edge. Sure enough, under a camouflage of jungle litter was an old Maya road. She stood, looking back toward the temple. She could see it now, the straight flat line, although the trees and underbrush had done a great job of camouflaging it.
“Of course,” she said, wiping away more sweat. “That makes sense. This would have been the main road in from this direction.”
“Do you hear that?” he asked.
“All I can hear are those big-mouthed monkeys.” She searched in the opposite direction, seeing the underlying signs of the sacbe as it disappeared into the forest.
Where did the road go? Most of the old Maya roads were short, connecting groups of structures within ceremonial cities, like temples and ballcourts. However, a few roads were longer, stretching between cities. Some of them had been reused over the last century or two to transport raw chicle blocks for distribution worldwide.
Maybe there was another Maya site out there hidden by the jungle. She needed to check her map of the ancient civilization sites. Had she left that one back home?
“Dr. García,” Teodoro whispered loudly from her left. He’d moved several feet away. When she looked his way, he waved her over, warning her to keep quiet.
She tiptoed closer to where he stood at the base of a large sapodilla tree next to a small mound. He pointed at a hole in the ground big enough for her to squeeze into, not that she planned to. She pulled out her flashlight and directed the beam into the darkness. Inside, the floor and walls were alive and slithering.
She cursed in Spanish. “There must be at least thirty rattlesnakes in there,” she told Teodoro.
His grimace mirrored hers.
“This explains why we keep coming across snakes. They’re practically following the road into the site.” Bending again, she lit up the snake den. The writhing mass of snakes shifted. In the midst of their long, muscular bodies her light flickered past a gray stone resting near the back of the den.
Hold up! She moved the beam back to the stone. No, make that a stela, or at least a piece of one, judging from the jagged edges.
“There’s something in there with them. I need to take a closer look.”