Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

by Janice Law

  As there was more than enough material in the green volumes to occupy both graduate students, I reserved the little personal diaries for myself. I was naturally anxious to learn about the man who had played such a large role in my life, and I wasn’t disappointed. Reading his accounts, admiring his vigorous and exact style, wondering at the omnipresent reports of fever, I knew I hadn’t been wrong to see him as one of the warriors of archeology.

  Nothing deterred him, not floods, not sickness, not disease-bearing insects, venomous snakes nor hunger; not difficulties with workers nor backbreaking labor. Through every hardship, he displayed an exuberance, a joy, in archeology, first, and then in all the flora and fauna of the jungle. Here was a man who had been born for discovery and adventure and who was alert to everything in his environment.

  Including his collaborators. I found especially enthusiastic references to Henry Devolt, one of his students, and, in affectionate tones that surprised me just a little, to Jose Antonio and Ernesto, two of his long time local contacts. The latter, especially, seemed to have been not just an employee, but a confidante, a friend. When I passed their names on to Kristen, she nodded her head.

  “Jose Antonio is mentioned dozens of times in the records. He seems to have had a gift for knowing what was important. It’s nice to know Jonken appreciated him.” Kristen took out the steadily growing folder of catalogued photographs. “We don’t know for certain,” she said, pointing to a slim figure posing beside a possible observatory building with slit windows, “but we are pretty sure this is him. There are references to his helping with the preliminary surveying of this site.”

  Jose Antonio looked familiar, somehow, the jaunty angle of his sombrero, the elegance of his serape, something distinctive about his sandals. As soon as we finished our meeting, I went into my office and consulted the walnut framed photograph that I had transported from our old dining room. There was Petrus Jonken, the Prince of the Wilderness, and the man on the other side of the stone work was Jose Antonio. I took out a magnifying glass. He was a mestizo, whose sharp features were at once exotic and familiar to one who had studied the artifacts of his ancestors.

  Knowing his name changed the balance of the image, and I began to read the diaries with a greater alertness for the other personalities. I had seen my famous relative as alone, virtually, in the wilderness. Now I saw him as the leader of a small community, a little masculine fraternity, that worked through sweltering days and relaxed at night around campfires, swapping stories and information— and, in his case, dreaming always of the discoveries which might move him closer to his goal, the location of the great city he was convinced was lost in the jungle.

  Jonken returned, thin and ill, from the first expedition, but no sooner had he recovered than the jungle exerted its fascination. It was painful to read some of his New England entries, where despite a prestigious post and an affectionate family, he was restless and almost desperate to return south. The second expedition, the one that came tantalizingly close to his goal, ended only when he had to return to raise money for continuing the work.

  Jonken’s financial struggles were clearly of historic importance, but I thought those might be left to Amos with his keen appreciation of the rigors of fund raising. The third expedition was my real interest, the one when Jonken returned with the young wife who vanished in a dangerous paradise and darkened his life.

  I must confess I approached the records of the third expedition with some unscholarly preconceptions. Uncle Petrus’s romance had been the story of my childhood, and I expected the diaries to follow the script: a young couple, much in love and enthralled by the romance of a lost civilization, enjoy a idyllic adventure cut short by her tragic disappearance.

  Except for Alice’s loss, nothing in the diaries was quite as I’d expected. Of course, the bride was prominent during the trip down from New York. Petrus records “tutoring” her in the basics of archeology and drilling her on Spanish verbs and the essential vocabulary of the aboriginal language— not my idea of a honeymoon. I began to suspect that for all his courage and charm my famous relative had been a pedant.

  Once they reached the jungle, Alice dwindled into invisibility, with the diary again dominated by references to the sites and artifacts and his native informants. More than half way through the records of the fatal expedition, I couldn’t help contrasting the amount of ink devoted to Ernesto with the few references to Alice— and not very tender ones, at that. She suffered a fever, she complained of illness, she disliked the heat, while the sounds of the jungle night, which Petrus had missed so passionately up north, grated on her nerves.

  Alice was clearly not a wilderness person, and I couldn’t help wondering if I would have shared her reactions. Twice Petrus records sending her with Jose Antonio back to the nearest city for supplies, trips, arduous in themselves, which reassured her that she was not entirely stranded.

  Meanwhile, Ernesto remained prominent, though I could not determine his official role. He did not turn up in the daily work records that Kristen was compiling, nor did he make any discoveries or find any artifacts that might account for his substantial weekly stipend. His only function appeared to be to encourage Petrus’s conviction that they were near some great ceremonial center. Only late in the third diary, when I discovered a reference to his absence, an absence which apparently upset Petrus, did I learn Ernesto’s profession. He was away, Petrus wrote, to conduct a highly important religious ceremonial.

  “Does that mean he was a priest?” Kristen asked, when I showed her the passage.

  “I don’t think so, not a Catholic priest, anyway. Then he’d have been Father Ernesto. No, I think this is the old, pagan religion. There are still pockets today and, of course, a good deal was grafted onto Catholicism.”

  “The reason he might have known about interesting ruins,” Kristen suggested.

  I nodded. “All records agree, though, that a young boy guided them in at last.”

  “Ernesto might have been elderly,” Kristen said, “or handicapped in some way.” She spoke quickly as if I might be offended. I wasn’t; I scarcely thought of my limp.

  “Are there any pictures of such a person?”

  “We haven’t found anything yet, but not all the natives approved of photography.”

  I had known, but not considered, that, remembering as I did, the striking photograph of the handsome man I now knew was Jose Antonio. A priest, a believer in the old ways, would more than likely have been suspicious of modern devices— and archeological digs as well. Yet Ernesto consistently encouraged Petrus in what a good many people, both locally and back in New England, considered a delusion and an obsession.

  Theirs was a curious relationship, but questions about Ernesto were soon lost in the greater mystery. On the morning of November 9th, the diary notes that Jose Antonio had not appeared for work— atypical behavior from the records Kristen was examining— and then, apparently that evening, Alice was discovered missing. Petrus wrote, “A terrible thing has happened.” A single line; no details. I can’t say how odd and disquieting I found his brevity.

  The next day, Ernesto was consulted, and they formed a search party. The diary records the various distances and directions of their searches, which even included a short trip downriver, all without success. A week later, Petrus journeyed to the nearest telegraph post to send the sad news back to Alice’s family.

  The diary gives this account in a terse and straightforward style, as if Petrus had lost his emotional nuance and grasp of colorful detail along with his wife. Indeed, the diaries, and his literary style, never quite recover. There is only one entry that I feel speaks from the heart, and that comes much later, long after the great breakthrough discovery: “There are devils here and I have made my bargain with them. God, how I regret this hellish business.”

  Coming as it did from a man who had hitherto regarded the jungle, despite all its discomforts and dangers, as the outskirts of paradise, this gave me a bad feeling. By then, however, we we
re deeply involved with the exhibition. Constrained by the terms of our grant, we were all run off our feet, and when Matt came to me with news of an anomalous skeleton, I only went down for a quick and distracted look.

  I saw four dusty skeletons inside the large wooden crate, three of them curled up as if they had died in their sleep. They had been shipped north with their modest grave goods— archeologists of that era having few scruples about tomb robbing— and I guessed the corpses had been workers in the great city.

  “There’s a photo,” said Matt. I’m sure these three are the same grouping.

  As far as I could determine, he was right, except for the presence of a fourth body, lying supine, with a damaged breastbone and some broken ribs.

  “Jonken or one of the shippers could have made a mistake,” I said.

  Matt shrugged. The crate was numbered, the photo corresponded. To tell the truth, both of us felt there was something not quite right about the skeleton, slightly lighter in color, and both longer and narrower than typical of people who live at altitude. But Amos had been after us for burial material and here it was. Knowing only too well how carelessly the Jonken Bequest had been treated and how downright chaotic some of the storage rooms were, I made a command decision.

  “We’ll take this one out,” I said. “Someone must have stuck it in the box after the fact. I suspect it’s from a whole other collection.”

  If Matt had any reservations, he suppressed them. “This group will be ideal for the exhibition.”

  “Ideal,” I agreed, but just to salve my scholarly conscience, I had him box up the rogue remains and put them on the top shelf in my office. “When I get a minute, I’ll see if I can find where it belongs.”

  Meanwhile, I plowed on with the diaries, without uncovering the secret of Alice Jonken’s disappearance. By the time I’d skimmed the later books, I felt further than ever from understanding Petrus. But there was so much to do that I found little time for pondering my famous relative’s enigmatic personality. Our exhibit was ambitious, and the catalogue, extensive. If Matt and I felt a trifle guilty about our description of the burial exhibit, we put our doubts aside, and, on the whole, the exhibition turned out to be a model of its kind and modestly groundbreaking.

  Before the opening, I did make an attempt to locate some of Alice Jonken’s relatives, but the American branch had been recently extinguished with the death of a elderly second cousin. I saw no need to pursue the matter further. That left me, I believed, the only descendant of any exhibition notable.

  I was wrong. About a month after the opening, and two months after selected material had been put up on the museum’s website, a Dr. Fuentes stopped in at my office. A handsome, dark haired, sharp featured man perhaps a decade my senior, he had courtly, old fashioned manners. He had already visited Dr. Brisco, he said, to congratulate him on “this admirable exhibition” but he especially wanted to meet and congratulate me.

  As I thanked him, I noticed his eyes strayed to the framed picture behind my desk. To tell the truth, Uncle Petrus’s enigmatic personality had given me mixed feelings about the photograph, but it had been so long a part of my life that I felt as uneasy moving it as keeping it in place.

  “The source of the very handsome poster image,” Dr. Fuentes remarked.

  I took a rolled up copy from my desk drawer— the poster had been a popular souvenir. “You might like one,” I said. “The photo enlarged very well, thanks to the graphics department.”

  “Thank you. This is one of the best photographs of my grandfather as a young man.”

  “He was Jose Antonio? I thought there was something familiar about you. You know, this photo determined my profession. In a sense, I grew up with your grandfather and my great-uncle.”

  “Though you never met your Uncle Petrus, I do not think?”

  I shook my head. “But your grandfather. I am so glad he survived. His disappearance—”

  “Disappearance?”

  “From the expedition site. The same day, if I’m reading the diary right, that Alice Jonken vanished.”

  “Might we sit down?” Dr. Fuentes asked.

  “Oh, please. Would you like some coffee or tea?”

  He settled on coffee. The department secretary rustled up some cookies and brought in everything with matching cups on an elegant tray. I could scarcely conceal my surprise, but Connie has a keen sense of occasion and she wasn’t wrong about this one either.

  “I noticed the diaries were included in the exhibition. It was very gratifying to see so many of Jonken’s workers and informants recognized at last.”

  I told Fuentes that he must give Dr. Brisco most of the credit. “His ideas won us the grant.”

  “But the diaries?”

  “That was mostly me— and Kristen Boisvert. She plans to do her dissertation on Jonken and his collaborators. She will be thrilled to meet you.”

  “It will be my pleasure. Our department at the Universitidad is a direct result of my grandfather’s apprenticeship with your great-uncle. And now we two sit here with puzzles and questions, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said— and suddenly understood why he had come. In spite of years of archeological study and the cultivation of scholarly detachment, my heart stuttered. “Why did he leave so suddenly,” I asked, “when he was so gifted and so interested?”

  Fuentes had the answer for that. “And what happened to her, when she was so young and full of life?”

  “It was the same day, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded. “My grandfather was literate. Your doctoral candidate will discover his family was of modest means, not poor by the standards of the time. He had prospects.”

  “He has a certain elegance in the photograph, I’ve always thought.”

  “You are perceptive. Unlike the others, he was not in desperate need of the work. When his situation no longer pleased him, he was free to leave.”

  “Alice Jonken was a wealthy young woman. She did not enjoy the jungle and I do not think she was as entranced with archeology— and maybe with Petrus— as she’d expected to be.”

  Dr. Fuentes raised his eye brows.

  “The diaries, which are very lively and detailed— at least until her disappearance— mention her only infrequently.”

  We sat quietly for a moment, each thinking our own thoughts, and glancing, almost involuntarily, at the photograph over my desk. After a moment, Fuentes unrolled the poster I had given him. “I was struck,” he said, “by the shadows. Perhaps they have been distorted in retouching.”

  In the enlargement, it did seem that the shadow of the photographer was more prominent.

  “My thought,” he said, “is that while this was labeled as a picture of your great uncle with worker (until your fine exhibition, of course) the photographer, was actually looking at my grandfather. What do you think?”

  I compared the poster with the photograph. Once this detail had been pointed out, I had to agree. The shadow of the camera and the photographer indicated a subtle inclination toward Jose Antonio. “That might account for Jonken’s questioning expression,” I said. “Of course, we cannot be sure Alice took this particular photo— although she did take some.”

  We sat silent again for a moment. It was a painfully awkward situation, as each of us had suspicions it seemed impolite to raise.

  Finally Fuentes said, “My grandfather was supposed to take Alice downriver that day.”

  “He had taken her to the nearest city several times,” I said.

  My visitor looked surprised.

  “It’s in the diaries. I have the transcriptions if you would like to read—”

  “That actually strengthens his story. We thought perhaps a romantic interest, although he never said that. It was clear, however, that they were friends. On the day he waited for her, but she never showed up, and he left.”

  “But why didn’t he return to the campsite and help in the search?” I could not conceal an accusatory note.

  “He never intended to return. H
e was leaving for good. He said that he was frightened by Ernesto.”

  “Ernesto? A much older man, is that right?”

  “Yes. What the people called a brujo— a sorcerer. You rightly identified him as a priest of the old religion.”

  “Your grandfather believed in his powers?”

  “He believed in Ernesto’s power over Petrus Jonken. If there was trouble between the young Jonkens, you can be sure it was because of that man.”

  That was something I hadn’t consciously articulated, but I felt it was true. “He encouraged Petrus about the city— and he turned out to be right.”

  “My grandfather was sure Ernesto knew all along where the ruins were. He just wasn’t willing to tell.”

  “What changed his mind?”

  “I was hoping you knew that. I think he was waiting for something, perhaps something that would excuse, or exorcise, the guilt of bringing a foreigner to the sacred site.”

  “What would that something be?” My voice sounded small as if I’d lost the air under my diaphragm.

  “Some sacrifice,” Fuentes suggested. “As in the old days.”

  There was another long silence. I waited until I could no longer resist the idea which must first have insinuated itself on the day Matt called me downstairs. “Are you good on bones?” I asked, and when he said he was, I told him there was an anomaly in the collection.

  We took the box down to the laboratory. As we opened it, I smelled the dust and the faint earthy scent of old bone.

  “There,” I said, “you can see the length of the leg and arm bones.”

  The body was damaged, too, the breastbone, split, and the ribs, broken. Matt and I had believed— or pretended to believe— that was shipping damage, but in the clear white light of the lab, I was unconvinced.

  Fuentes pulled on gloves and began to examine the bones, handling them with care, even tenderness. On the way downstairs he told me that he’d done volunteer forensic work in both Guatemala and Bosnia. I did not want to imagine what he had seen or the immense catalogue of suffering he had amassed. I, personally, have a fearful imagination, which, doubtless, will keep me from doing anything of great significance.