Interred with Their Bones

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  Mr. Jiménez rubbed his chin. “Santa Fe is very far, on the back of a horse. Farther, if you reckon that most of the land in between was unknown to white men, and filled with Indians who had every reason to hate Spaniards.”

  “Jem Granville found the remains of Shelton’s party,” I said. “He took a claim out on the place.”

  Mrs. Jiménez glanced at her husband and then she turned to me. “We have four of his claims right here on the ranch. My great-grandmother ran a br—” She fidgeted with the towel in her hands. “A boardinghouse over in Tombstone. Mr. Granville was one of her boarders. A prospector, but not like the others. From England, my mother said, as if that explained algún lustre—some shine or glory—about him. She smiled. I used to imagine him with a halo. Later I understood that my great-grandmother was French, and that she looked on another European as a fellow civilized soul trapped among rude Americans.”

  She smoothed out the towel. “She always said that her Englishman found a gold mine. One day he went into the hills—these hills—and never came back. That was a long time ago, during the Apache wars. Not uncommon, then, for people not to come back. After he disappeared, my great-grandmother inherited his things. Mostly books, and a few claims. Later, after the Indians were gone, she married someone else and came out to homestead this ranch. That’s how we come to have the Bible.”

  “Please—I just want to see it.” In the darkness, the whole world seemed to hunch closer. I dropped my voice. “I think he encoded into it the place where he found Shelton’s party.”

  “Why?” asked Mr. Jiménez.

  “Because of something Shelton had with him,” said Matthew. “Literary gold.”

  The Jiménezes looked at him blankly.

  “A book,” I explained. “A lost play by Shakespeare.”

  For a moment, no one said anything. Then Matthew spoke. “If we’re right—if it’s on your land—you stand to make a fortune. I don’t know what it might be worth. Millions certainly.”

  Mr. Jiménez snorted. “For a book?”

  “A manuscript—” I started, and then stopped. “Yes, for a book. But its value also makes it dangerous. Someone out there’s willing to kill for it. He killed Athenaide last night.”

  Mrs. Jiménez crossed herself. Beside her, Mr. Jiménez’s hand came to rest on his belt, and I became uncomfortably aware of his gun. “That’s not what you said this morning,” he said.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “You know who this killer is?”

  “His name is Ben Pearl. I don’t think he knows where we are, but I couldn’t swear to it.”

  “I don’t like it, Nola,” said Mr. Jiménez. “For all we know, these two killed Señora Preston themselves. All this over a book.” He shook his head. “But it’s your family history. It’s your Bible.”

  Mrs. Jiménez turned on her heel and went inside. Sweat sprang out along my spine. Was she leaving us to the whims of Mr. Jiménez? But a moment later, she came back. “I do not believe you are killers,” she said. “And there are many things we could do with a million dollars. Run a ranch like it ought to be run, for one.” Into my hands she set a Bible, its cover cracked and fading.

  With a deep breath, I opened it.

  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

  Matthew reached over and flipped back to the inside cover.

  At the top, someone had written a name in neat script: Jeremy Arthur Granville. Underneath it, in unsure, larger letters, was another: Marie Dumont Espinosa. Beneath that, in different inks and hands, were the records of births, marriages, and deaths, in different hands and inks, across a century.

  Matthew frowned. “If there was any kind of invisible cipher here, it’s been written over.”

  Shaking my head, I flipped quickly forward through the book.

  “But Ophelia said the signature page,” protested Matthew.

  “She was quoting Granville. Ps. In my Jacobean opus, I have ciphered the location—1623, the signature page. We all read P.s. for ‘Postscript.’ But Ps. is also the standard abbreviation for the Book of Psalms.” Near the middle, I came to the Psalms and stopped.

  “And you think he wrote his name on one of its pages?”

  “Not Granville.” I flipped a few pages farther and smoothed the book open.

  “There’s no signature here at all,” said Matthew. The Jiménezes leaned in to look.

  I pointed to a psalm at the bottom of the left-hand page. “Read.”

  With a frown, Matthew looked down. “Psalm Forty-six,” he began. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.…I don’t get it.”

  Behind him, the sky lightened to pink and melon and gold. “Psalm Forty-six,” I echoed. “Count forty-six words down from the top.”

  He frowned.

  “Just count.”

  He moved his finger across the page as he counted. “One, God. Two, is. Three, our….” his voice trailed away as he counted silently. “Forty-four, the. Forty-five, mountains. Forty-six, shake.”

  He glanced up.

  “Now count forty-six words up from the bottom.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Count.”

  “One, Selah.”

  “Not that word. It’s some kind of musical notation or exclamation in Hebrew—not really part of the Psalm. At any rate, you don’t count it.”

  “Fine.” He started again. “…Forty-four, sunder. Forty-five, in. Forty-six, spear.” He looked back up. “Shakespeare,” he whispered. “The signature page.”

  I nodded.

  “You mean Shakespeare wrote the Bible?” asked Mrs. Jiménez, her voice twisting in disbelief.

  “No,” said Matthew. “She’s saying that he translated it. Or helped to.”

  I held his gaze. “That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it? The King James Bible is said to have been finished in 1610, the year before the Bible was printed. Shakespeare was born in 1564. Which made him forty-six at the time.”

  “Thus Psalm Forty-six,” said Matthew. “How do you know this? Or no—all that research on occult Shakespeare.”

  I smiled grimly. “All that research that Roz once said was useless.”

  He began to protest, but Mr. Jiménez interrupted. “Somebody’s doodled on this page.”

  Someone, indeed, had run over select letters with black ink, putting them in boldface. It looked like the markings of an absentminded reader. But Jem Granville did not mark in his books. “Not doodled,” I said. “Ciphered. Mrs. Jiménez, do you have an Internet connection we can use?”

  She rose and motioned us to follow her inside. Going to a cluttered desk, she pulled up the Internet and stepped aside to let me sit down.

  I typed Bacon and cipher into Google, and up came Wikipedia’s entry on Bacon’s cipher. With a nice display of the code.

  Bacon’s cipher doesn’t require invisible ink or made-up messages; with it, you can insert a secret message into any piece of writing you choose. All you need are two different fonts or letter-styles: call one a, and the other b. The cipher uses these two fonts in different patterns of five letters each: Every five letters of the cover text work out to one letter in the secret text. So the sequence aaaaa means “a,” for example. And the sequence aaaab means “b.” It’s the way something is printed or written that matters, not what it actually says. So you avoid attracting attention with nonsense like “Aunt Mabel will eat a red chicken on Thursday, when she picnics at Oxford Beach,” which would make anyone looking for codes have bells go off in his head.

  With a piece of scrap paper, I wrote out the first phrase of the psalm, dividing the letters into groups of five, instead of into words. God is our refuge and strength:

  Godis / ourre / fugea / ndstr / ength

  Underneath, I translated the unmarked letters
to a and the doodled-over letters to b. That produced nonsense. So I reversed that, making the bold letters a and the unmarked letters b. From there it was fairly simple to decode the message, using the key that I’d pulled up on the Internet:

  God is = baaba = T

  our re = abaaa = I

  fuge a = ababb = M

  nd str = abbab = O

  Matthew and I both knew what the last letter must be, but we went through the exercise of decoding it, anyway:

  ength = abbaa = N

  “Timon of Athens,” said Matthew. “On the signature page of the Psalms. In Bacon’s 1623 cipher.”

  Timon is one of Shakespeare’s least-read plays, full of black bile and bitterness, about a man who goes from joyfully giving away all his money in order to make others happy, to despising all mankind for their greed. It was also the name of one of Granville’s claims.

  “One of our claims,” said Mrs. Jiménez quietly.

  Matthew laughed. Near the end of the play, he explained, the exiled and starving Timon goes grubbing in the earth for roots and finds gold.

  All that’s gold does not always glitter, Jem had written. “Can you take us?” I asked the Jiménezes.

  Mr. Jiménez looked at his wife. Something wordless passed between them, and then he scratched his chin, looking out at the sunrise. “It’s not far, a vuelo de pájaro—as the crow flies—but it’s not so easy to get to without wings. Can you ride?”

  Beside me, Matthew nodded. He’d grown up with polo ponies.

  “Well enough,” I said.

  “Memo took Señora Preston up there once,” said Mrs. Jiménez. “Did she tell you that?”

  I shook my head.

  “She was a tough old bird,” said Mr. Jiménez. “Tougher than you’d think, to look at her. Insisted on seeing all the Granville claims. Looking for a mine shaft, she said, though she never did say why.” He shrugged. “Like I said, no mine shafts. Nothing to make any of those claims look like they’ve ever been worked. You still want to go?”

  I nodded.

  Mr. Jiménez clapped his hat back on his head. “Vámonos pues,” he said.

  42

  DOWN AT THE corral, we helped Mr. Jiménez saddle up three mules—they had more sense, he said, than horses do in high country. And more tolerance for thirst. After loading the mules into a trailer, we drove up into the mountains.

  We unloaded the mules in a sweet meadow and tightened their girths just as the sky was lightening. Riding into the shadow of the mountains, we plunged back into the gray predawn chill. Chased by the morning, we trotted on through silvery grass and dark stands of mesquite, winding through thickets of thin and gasping cactus. Walls of pale stone rose on either side of us, and soon we were moving up a narrow canyon, its bottom dry and sandy, tossed with large boulders. Within a mile, its walls were sheer cliffs broken here and there by ledges covered in scrubby growth.

  At last, Mr. Jiménez stopped in a wide, grassy bowl, its upper edge narrowed on the western side by a fall of immense boulders. “This is the Timon claim,” he said, dismounting. Just as he’d said, there was no sign of mining work. On the slopes, strange Dr. Seussian plants with whip-thin spiny branches grew like cones with their points stuck into the earth. Around them, the ground was dotted with small dark-green agaves, sharp as spears. Ocotillos and shindaggers. “Nobody’s home,” said Mr. Jiménez. “Nobody but the eagles and mountain lion up here, since they drove out the Apache.”

  A sharp yup-yup-yup echoed off the walls above us. Far above, an immense bird was soaring and spiraling on unseen currents. A golden eagle. The sky overhead was a brilliant blue, but down around us, the canyon still lay in the pale sleep of dawn. As we watched, morning poured down like liquid gold over the rim of the cliff.

  Up ahead, I heard a whittering and saw a flock of birds flying down the canyon toward us in an odd jerky flight. Then I heard a high-pitched squeaking. Just before us, they veered to the left, rising and swirling, and then they spiraled downward, sinking into the ground.

  Not birds, I realized. Bats. Bats disappearing directly into the ground. The spiral sped up. And then it was gone.

  I turned to Mr. Jiménez. “There are caves up here.”

  “No mine shafts,” said Mr. Jiménez softly. “But caves, yes. You can hear them sometimes, riding—the horses’ hooves sound hollow on the ground.”

  “Did Athenaide know that?”

  He shrugged. “She asked about mine shafts.”

  I walked forward to the place where the bats had disappeared. There was a depression in the ground, fringed with young mesquite and smaller brush. Pulling back the plants, I saw a hole no larger than my head. It was breathing, exhaling a humid, musty scent with a pungent edge to it.

  Bending over my shoulder, Matthew screwed up his nose. Beside him, Mr. Jiménez tipped back his hat and scratched his head. “Well, I’ll be…. Like I said, I knew there was caves up here. But I never seen an entrance before.”

  Neither had I. But I’d heard enough to know what I was looking at. “You’ve seen one now.”

  “Not much of an entrance,” said Matthew, “if you happen to be much bigger than a mouse with wings.”

  “Not yet.”

  Nodding, Mr. Jiménez went back to the mules and unstrapped a spade and a couple of crowbars from the saddle. At the first strike of the spade into the ground, we heard an angry buzzing, and Mr. Jiménez hauled me backward just as an old rattler struck the dirt where I’d been standing. A few moments later, the snake crawled out of the hole and slipped away into the brush.

  I watched with fascinated loathing. Cleopatra, I thought. Last night, Sir Henry had tried to turn me into Polonius; I had killed him instead. How fitting would it be, in penance, to get myself killed by accident, in the manner of a Shakespearean queen?

  “Are there more where that thing came from?” asked Matthew apprehensively.

  Mr. Jiménez spat. “Doubt it. Wrong time of year for denning. Besides, we annoyed him, and he came out. If any more had been with him, we’d have annoyed them too.”

  I should have expected that, I thought. If I meant to go into this cave, I’d have to be a hell of a lot more careful if I wanted to come back out alive.

  The ground around the opening proved fairly loose. Even so, it was hard work, prying away the rocks and soil. It took two hours to make the opening wide enough for Matthew to crawl into. Beyond yawned a crack or chute through solid rock. Matthew hunched in a ways and then wriggled back out. “It widens a little inside. Not much. But enough to squeeze through. We’ll need lights, though.”

  I leaned in. Light petered out quickly; beyond that the darkness was absolute. But the silence was not. Up ahead, I could hear the squeaking of the bats.

  “Either of you ever caved before?” asked Mr. Jiménez.

  “I have,” I said.

  He looked at me long and hard. “You sure you want to do this?”

  The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. The first few summers I’d spent at Aunt Helen’s place, I’d gone into some caves in the wake of some boys from a neighboring ranch. Not because I really wanted to, but because they’d dared me. I’d stuck with it just long enough to prove my mettle equal to theirs, and then I’d stopped. I’d learned a few basics of caving, but even there, I’d never been first in—and those caves, though technically still wild, had been the playground of daredevil teens across three counties for the last fifty years. I had no business leading the way into an unexplored cave.

  On the other hand, I couldn’t afford to wait. Ben most certainly would not.

  Slowly, I nodded.

  “If she’s going, I’m going,” said Matthew.

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  “You’re cracked if you think you’re going in there by yourself.”

  Maybe I should have protested more. But the first rule of caving is that you never go alone.

  Mr. Jiménez went back to his mule, and this time he produced two ol
d helmets, battered and scratched. The kind with lights. “Belonged to our boys,” he said. “Nola thought they might come in handy. Old things, but the batteries are new.”

  “There are only two,” I said.

  Mr. Jiménez began strapping the spade back onto the saddle. “I won’t be going with you. Not my idea of fun, burying myself in the earth. I’ll leave you a radio, though. When you come out, call me, and I’ll come and find you.”

  He showed me how to use the two-way radio, and we found a good place to leave it, wedged among some rocks. Then he mounted and rode off, taking the three mules with him.

  I drank in the feeling of sun and wind on every inch of my skin and clothing; it would be some time before I’d feel it again. Scanning the horizon, I saw nothing but wind moving in the pale grass, and far overhead, the spiraling eagle. “He’s out there, you know,” I said quietly. “Ben. He’s coming.”

  Roz changed her name, he had whispered in the library. Maybe we should also change yours. To Lavinia. Despite the sun, I shivered.

  “Hey.” Matthew put an arm around my shoulders and drew me to him. “He’ll have to go through me to get to you.”

  Beyond Matthew, the opening to the cave loomed like a hole ripped in the fabric of the morning. Lavinia’s lover had been killed in front of her eyes and left in such a pit in the wilderness. A dark, blood-drinking pit, Shakespeare had called it. And then she…I shook off that thought and gave Matthew a wan smile. “Thanks.”

  “Here’s to Shakespeare,” he said, leaning in to kiss me.

  Here’s to the truth, I thought, whatever it is.

  We shoved the helmets on our heads and switched on the lights. I tucked the brooch on its chain carefully inside my shirt. And then we crawled into the dark.

  43

  DARKNESS WAS UPONthe face of the deep.

  The tunnel was gravelly and sloped downward into the bowels of the earth. The walls closed tightly around us, so that we had to crawl on our stomachs; in places, it was so narrow I had to hold my breath and squeeze through the rock. The air was musty and humid. Up ahead, I could hear the squeaking of bats. The light on my helmet penetrated only a few feet ahead; beyond that, the dark was a palpable, malevolent thing, weighted with all the ancient sleeping anger of the mountains. We crawled on for an hour, maybe two, though we’d probably gone less than half a mile. Time made no sense here.