Deborah wasn’t sure who he meant by “everyone” and doubted he cared one way or the other.
“In the village, yes,” she said. “I spoke to Porfiro. All the students were inside eating breakfast when the storm came in, so they’re fine.”
Bowerdale nodded noncommittally and looked away. Deborah, irritated, turned and found herself looking at his students. She didn’t particularly like either of them. The girl, Alice, was pale and tattooed with small, hard, dark eyes and a perpetual sneer on her lips. The boy was named James. He wore Clark Kent glasses, and his spindly arm was thrown protectively around Alice’s narrow shoulders.
“You guys all right?” she said.
Alice looked defiantly fine. “It rained,” she said, unwinding herself from the boy’s half embrace. “No big.”
The boy looked disappointed, but rallied.
“Hell of a storm,” he said, and grinned nervously. He looked sweaty and a little nauseated, like he’d just got off a mean roller coaster.
They were standing in the center of the site. Deborah’s eyes roamed across the view before them, searching for anything that needed repair. She could see Structure 2, the one with the phone tower she had just descended. And there was “Las Gemelas”—the Twins—which earned its name from its unusual parallel chambers. The ball court looked intact too. To her eye, none of the structures seemed obviously damaged.
Bowerdale spoke like a general whose authority was beyond question.
“Leave the gear here,” he said. “Spread out and do a quick walk through the site. The ground was already saturated; the storm could have caused some serious erosion. Don’t assume anything is stable. Back here in twenty minutes,” he said, checking his watch. “And note anything that looks different. Anything at all, no matter how small. Our job just changed.”
He strode off. The kids glanced at each other, surly but resigned, and loped after him. Deborah stood there feeling redundant and outranked, knowing there was nothing for her to do except watch, maybe take notes. Assessing structural damage was way out of her wheelhouse, while Bowerdale’s expertise in such things was so well known that he’d occasionally been hired into the far-better-paying realm of government contract work. A topographical survey of the White Sands missile range in New Mexico was at the top of his résumé—in the place where someone like her might put membership on an editorial board. She had to respect his qualifications. Still, Bowerdale’s self-assurance rankled. He was just too slick. It seemed like he was always hearing a commentary in his head: What would Bowerdale do in a situation like this? How would a suave, rugged, confident archaeologist handle this precise moment? Then, when he had found the answer, she thought, he acted. She wondered how far he would go to bolster his image as the big man on campus.
And you certainly aren’t bitter because he knows what he’s doing while you’re standing around waiting for instructions.
OK. That too.
Deborah squatted and touched the grass. There were muddy pools here and there, but it was amazing how quickly the rain had been absorbed. The Yucatan was a limestone shelf, and therefore porous. It was also flat, and there were no significant bodies of water aboveground. The rain soaked through the rock and collected in underground lakes and rives that honeycombed the area. In places the erosion opened the rock above, revealing the underground water in sinkholes or wells called cenotes. These had been the ancient Mayans’ water sources, and when they flowed deep and cool, the people had prospered. When the rains stopped and the subterranean rivers dried up, they had moved away or died. It was hardly surprising that so many of the Mayan ruins were adorned with the grotesquely ornate face of the rain god, Chaak, which featured an elephant nose, staring, bulbous eyes, and fearsome teeth.
Bowerdale was climbing the acropolis—Structure 1—the biggest, most imposing monument on the site. It housed Ek Balam’s most famous find, the tomb known as Zac Na, resting place of a famous king who died in 840 AD: Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’. The door to the tomb lay at the center of a facade shaped like a great, monstrous, tooth-lined mouth. The carved stucco was adorned with elaborate sculpted winged figures, geometric patterns with glyphs and masks of threatening gods. Zac Na, or White House, as it was also called, had no equal anywhere in the world.
When it was uncovered in the 1990s, the tomb had been there for twelve hundred years, and it was a good part of what made Ek Balam special. Its riches, which included offerings of pearls, seashells, alabaster, and jade, were considerable. What made it truly unique, however, was the way it had been meticulously buried: the great pyramid’s fragile stucco relief had been carefully packed with dirt and rubble so it was perfectly preserved. When the archaeological team found it, they had had to do little more than carefully remove the surrounding fill. The stucco itself had needed no restoration.
Recent work had erected a thatched lean-to around the Zac Na entrance to protect it from the elements, but the thatch would certainly need to be replaced. Deborah hoped to God there was no damage to the structure itself. She felt annoyed that Bowerdale had gotten up there first. She didn’t want to hear bad news from him. After all, that magical “no restoration” tag was Ek Balam’s claim to tourist fame. It would be tragic if the stucco relief had survived over a thousand years underground only to be damaged after its discovery. She watched Bowerdale as he continued to climb the steep, narrow steps of the acropolis, her eyes shaded. Then she marched to the foot of the structure and yelled in his direction.
“Is it OK?”
He shouted back something she couldn’t hear, so she started to climb the stairs of the acropolis. They quickly narrowed to a single vertical flight, about twenty-five feet wide, and rising up almost a hundred feet. As with the steps of most Mayan pyramids, they were high and narrow, sloping slightly downward so that the water ran off them. Deborah’s instinct was to use her hands like she was on a ladder, but she caught Bowerdale watching her from above and decided to walk—carefully—instead. He descended the stairs and met her halfway.
“I have this covered, Miss Miller,” he said. “There’s no need for both of us.”
She had introduced herself as “Deborah” but he always called her “Miss Miller,” a politeness that somehow made her less professional and certainly not his equal. He was, after all, Doctor Bowerdale. Deborah had a Master’s degree. She had risen from within the world of practical museum curating, not from the upper echelons of academia.
“I am ultimately responsible for the dig,” she said, gazing up the stairs to the thatched lean-to of the Zac Na and the great stucco mouth of the tomb door.
“And I am responsible for surveying the site,” he returned. “This falls under my job description, not yours, and given the crisis precipitated by the weather, I think you should rely on my expertise.”
Deborah didn’t like his use of the word “crisis.” It might become a justification for a complete usurpation of her authority. She opted not to press the issue and managed a smile, as if she hadn’t noticed his challenge.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said. “I thought I saw something down there that needed closer inspection anyway.”
“What?” he said. “Where?”
But she had already turned and was starting to make her cautious descent.
“I’ll let you know if you need to come and look,” she called back, feeling better.
It was a lie, of course, but she relished his hesitation before he turned back up the stairs toward the Zac Na. She knew he would be watching her when she reached the bottom. Going down the pyramid was actually worse than going up, the vast openness of the site swimming before her, and she turned sideways to take the wet steps, her left hand finding the edge to stabilize her as she descended. There were no handrails, no handicapped-accessible ramps, none of the warnings without which such a site would be a legal impossibility in the States. If she fell, she’d fall hard and long. She picked her way down, trying to decide where she would go when she reached the bottom.
In the end she went along the base of the acropolis, heading to its north side where no reconstruction had taken place: while meticulous steps had been built on the south side, from this angle the acropolis was just a mound of rubble. The path hung with the dense undergrowth of the jungle scrub that always threatened to reclaim the site.
Her miniscule triumph over Bowerdale faded, and Deborah found herself feeling lost and depressed as the old anxieties returned: Bowerdale was right. He had the real authority here. Hers was based on nothing more than a letter from Cornerstone and would have no weight if it hadn’t come with a check attached. Even the students suspected it, and she guessed Bowerdale had said as much to those he most wanted to impress. The girl, probably. Alice. Bowerdale had a reputation where his female students were concerned.
She stopped, trying to process what it was she was seeing. The jungle on the north side of the acropolis looked different. It looked wrong. She tried to remember what had been there, and it came back to her slowly: a deep depression in the earth, what the locals called a rejollada; a sinkhole, not unlike the one that had opened up under Oasis. It had looked like some giant had taken a great ice-cream scoop to the earth, though in time the area had become a tangle of matted vegetation and brush right up to the path at the base of the acropolis. The ground didn’t look like that now. In fact, Deborah realized, staring wildly, that the ground wasn’t there at all.
Chapter Five
Eustachio had spotted Bowerdale and the norteamericano students as soon as he entered the site. He had hoped that they would have chosen to come later, but they were here and this made things difficult. There was only the one van in the parking lot, so the rest of the students were probably still in Valladolid, and there was no sign of Deborah Miller’s rental car. Yet. He knew her well enough already to know she couldn’t stay away, and then he would quickly run out of choices.
Fidelia would have told him he worried too much. “First, see that there is a problem, then worry about solving it,” she would have said. He missed her, suddenly. She would have known what to do. And maybe she was right. It had rained, hard, but it had rained many times before, and life went on unchanged, or almost unchanged. But he had to look. He had to be sure. It was his duty.
But how did you search for something you had never seen?
He doubled back, hobbling west toward the second sacbe and the perimeter wall. It would take him longer to walk around the edge of the site but it would help him stay out of the gabachos’ way. He was pretty sure he would see them before they saw him. No one knew this place better than Eustachio. Yes, the gringos had the fancy contoured maps, but he knew the stones themselves, and the trees. He knew the motmot in the branches and the skink that watched from the grass.
He reached to touch the sticky bark of a chakaj tree and crossed himself, then began his swift, limping walk. Hopefully, there would be nothing to find. A few minutes in, he spotted one of Bowerdale’s students coming through the brush. She turned but didn’t see him. He watched her balefully. If he’d ever learned his grandmother’s spells, maybe he could have slowed her. She was getting too close. If his misgivings about the state of the site were correct, if what he had guarded for so long might at last be visible, she would have to be stopped.
Chapter Six
Alice wasn’t sure what she had signed up for, but it sure as shit wasn’t trekking around to see if a few rocks had shifted in the rain. She scowled to herself. Archaeology had seemed a hell of a lot more interesting before she’d actually started doing it. She remembered the lectures in her intro courses at Brandeis, all those beguiling photographs of statues and mummies. That had been cool, and she’d doodled little sketches of ancient coins and jewels in her notebook margins. Her first actual fieldwork had revealed that archeology was anything but exciting. Her team’s only “discovery” had been a few stones from an old foundation and a handful of potsherds that the dig leader had positively wet himself over. Three weeks of back-breaking digging and cataloguing for that: a footnote to some academic paper no one would ever read.
So she’d looked into doing site surveys. That seemed better. Less actual shouldering of pickaxes and more walking around taking pictures and sketching. She had a good eye and a better hand, and had even considered being an art major once. She thought she’d hit the jackpot when she was selected by Bowerdale. He was, after all, pretty much the god of the field, even if his tales of past adventurers and the bags of money paid to him by the military got old fast. It had taken him exactly two days—right after some pompous speech about how the old ways were the most reliable, and that there was no substitute for staring through a transit lens with a pencil behind your ear—to suggest he wouldn’t mind getting into her shorts.
She had considered it, even been flattered by his interest, and for a few days had sort of flirted with him in a noncommittal kind of way. At first he had seemed to enjoy it, and she thought she’d found an easy way to stay on his good side, but it soon became clear that he expected something more tangible. She might have done it too. It was, after all, no big deal. But then he tried to stick his tongue in her mouth without asking, and Alice—who liked to make the first move herself—had told him where he could shove it. That had been the end of that. Now he barely looked at her except to complain about the way she was doing something. She had a nagging feeling that the glowing reference letter she had hoped to get from him at the end of all this was dead in the water.
She scowled up at Structure 2.
“Looks like a pile of old rocks,” she muttered aloud. “Which is what it looked like yesterday, and the day before.”
She rubbed a sunburned shoulder where she had a tattoo of a rose twined with barbed wire, two fat drops of blood dripping from the thorns. They’d have been done if Bowerdale had let them use laser measures instead of all the antiquated crap he insisted was “field tested.” You could pick one up at Home Depot for like a hundred bucks but no, she had to use the leveling rod, as archaeologists have since time immemorial. As used by Morley, Thompson, John Lloyd Stephens, and all those other nineteenth-century geezers. She rolled her eyes and thought, As used by the fucking ancient Maya themselves.
Deborah Miller wasn’t much better than Bowerdale. True, she hadn’t shown up at Alice’s bedroom door with a bottle of tequila and an I’m-not-as-old-as-you-think speech, but she had his knack for ignoring her. The woman was clearly out of her depth. Even James said so, and he barely said anything negative about anybody. She was nice enough, Alice supposed, and she had a toughness that deserved some respect, but Miller didn’t like being questioned and that was what Alice did best. In other circumstances, Alice conceded, she might think Deborah Miller was OK, maybe even interesting if some of the stories were true. Like the one about working as an informant for the FBI during a case involving neo-Nazis and ancient Greek gold. But as her boss? Forget it.
She frowned and rubbed her arms, which were prickling as the morning’s relative coolness gave way to the ruthless heat of the sun. With her pale skin that never tanned, she had to wear long sleeves in spite of the soaring temperatures. Just as well, she thought. If she bared any more skin, poor James might lose his mind and Bowerdale might try his advances again. Alice snorted. She wasn’t a classic beauty queen, but with her slim figure, light blue eyes, and dark hair, most of the red-blooded men in her orbit seemed to think she was their best option. Lucky her.
“Goddamn Bowerdale,” she said, even though nobody was around to hear. “I wouldn’t mind taking him and throwing him right off the top of that—”
She heard something in the underbrush off to her left and stopped, peering, startled. She could see nothing but vine-strangled trees and an uncanny speckling of crimson flowers, but she was suddenly sure there was someone there.
“James?” she called. “That better not be you, asshole.”
There was no sound in response. She stood there, feeling the heat reflecting onto her from all sides and—behind it somehow—eyes.
She wa
s on the west side of Structure 2, completely cut off from the central court and the others. She was alone. Doubling back would take longer than going forward, so she began to walk quickly, trying to deny her own fear. She glanced involuntarily off into the jungle to her left, stumbling as she did so.
It could have been an animal, she thought, a little desperately, a wild boar maybe. Maybe even a jaguar, which would be scary but kind of cool, so long as it didn’t fucking eat her.
For the first time she felt completely alone in the site, as if James and the others were hundreds of miles away, not yards. It was as if she had wandered into this ancient place by herself, a place in which she did not belong, a place that did not want her. She quickened her pace till she was jogging. Somehow, over the noise of her footfalls and increasingly labored breathing, she sensed movement back there in the trees. She began to run flat-out.
Alice was not athletic. Exercise bored her, and though she had cut down, she still smoked half a pack a day. But now she sprinted ahead under the shadow of the great ruined structure as if she were a marathoner. Fear made her legs churn. She felt as if she was trespassing, as if she was the first person to step on this path in a thousand years. All around her in the changeless forest, she felt eyes in the leaves. Then, breathless, she rounded a corner and saw someone. A woman, tall and lanky...
Deborah Miller.
Alice called out, a joyous and unguarded shout of relief.
Chapter Seven
Deborah barely saw Alice come running around the corner because she was staring too intently at the space where the sinkhole had been. The girl looked rattled and seemed to have been running, but Deborah didn’t wait to hear explanations.
“Come here,” she called, and started pushing her way through the vegetation.
Tears of the Jaguar Page 3