“You saved my life,” said Adelita.
Deborah remembered saying the same thing to the girl after that fateful storm so long ago, and recalled the girl’s response. She waved the remark away and shrugged.
“Thank you,” said the girl’s mother, in English.
Deborah just nodded, then raised a hand in farewell.
The chopper had them at the airport in under an hour. Deborah had said little on the flight to Merida but looked down at the jungle trying to spot pyramids and other remains as they flew. She sensed the men watching her, and when, just before they boarded the plane, they approached her, she brushed them off.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“That’s a nasty cut,” said Kenneth Jones, eying the palm-to-elbow bandage.
“They’ve cleaned and dressed it,” she said. “There’s nothing else they can do and I need to get back to the States. There’s work I have to take care of.”
“Given what you’ve gone through, I’m not sure travel is wise.”
“You know, Kenneth,” said Deborah, taking a step closer to him, “last night you didn’t know what day it was, so I don’t think you’re in any position to say what is and isn’t going to be too taxing for me.”
The black man looked away, his brows knit, and for a second she thought he was angry, that he thought she was rubbing his nose in what she had done while he had been out of it, but then he grinned.
“And would I be right in thinking that this work of yours would take you to Chicago rather than Atlanta?” he said.
“You need me,” she said. “One last time.”
“She’s right,” said Nick Reese. “She’s the only one who holds all the pieces of the puzzle.”
Jones looked at the floor for a moment, then began to walk. “Why don’t you tell me about them once we’re airborne,” he said.
As well as Eustachio and James, Dimitri, Bowerdale, and Stroud were all dead. The doctors thought Chad Rylands would make a full recovery. The bullet had gone through his stomach, and he was in surgery now but was, they said, out of the woods. Porfiro Aguilar and Krista Rayburn, like the CIA men, seemed no worse for the drugs they had ingested, though the hospital staff weren’t ruling out occasional relapses as was possible with hallucinogens like LSD. They just didn’t know enough about the mixture Stroud had used, though their labs had plenty of sample to analyze from the cooler at the site. Nick had not drunk as much, and Deborah still less. Alice was under suicide watch at the hospital. She would never be the same, Deborah figured, but maybe that was true for all of them.
There were a lot of questions to be answered, and it wasn’t yet clear who would ask them and whose government they would work for. Nor was it clear if there would be charges against the survivors. There had been protocol violations, minor law infractions, and lots of bad judgment, but the only one who might face arrest was Alice, and Deborah doubted it would come to that. For Steve Powel, director of Cornerstone, the man who had sent her to Mexico in the first place, and then sat in his Chicago office, surrounded by pictures of his skater daughter, things would not go so easily. He had, it seemed, been in contact with Stroud throughout, had been the one to get her name in front of Deborah as soon as it was clear they needed new people on their team. Powel and Stroud might have been separated, but Deborah suspected they had always been bound by their daughter, and the accident had brought them back together, however quietly.
Deborah talked it all through on the plane, and even the professional agents, who she figured had heard it all, gaped and squinted in disbelief.
“And you think,” said Jones, “that Powel promoted the entire excavation to recover these jewels with a view to using them in some kind of black magic ritual designed to revive his daughter?”
“I don’t think he knew Edward Clifford had gone to Ek Balam, no,” said Deborah, “and I don’t think they saw it as black magic, but I do think Powel suspected what the Malkin Tower stone was after he bought it. He had to have known there was a link between the Pendle farm and the crown jewels through the Cliffords, so I’m pretty sure he knew Edward had gone to the Yucatan. Cornerstone had been involved in digs all over the Mayan world, and though I doubt he was actively searching for the missing crown jewels, they were clearly on his radar. Though they had been separated for sixteen years, he had been married to Marissa Stroud, who was one of the world’s authorities on royal regalia. She had been poking around in those records for years. I don’t know where it came from, but they both became fascinated by the occult, and when their daughter was hurt and left in a coma, they turned to legend and superstition. Desperation, I suppose. Nothing else had worked.”
“Crazy,” said Jones.
Deborah nodded, but sadly. “I guess when people lose a child, or think they will...”
The sentence was left hanging in the air, fading into the steady background noise of the aircraft.
Is that how Ma feels, she wondered suddenly, that she has lost me, that I’ve slipped away from her over the years and she doesn’t know how to get me back? That without Dad, our bond is dissolving completely? The idea surprised and unsettled her even as she tried to dismiss it. Ma? Is it possible? Or was she just projecting, wanting to believe that her mother still needed to know they were connected, bound by invisible filaments of personal history, or fused at the level of the blood and bone of their so dissimilar bodies.
She thought of Lady Anne Clifford and the faceless, demonized pariah, Jennet Device.
Janet Davis, she corrected herself, the alternate name bringing the woman almost into the present so that Deborah felt that she could almost see her.
“So we know the gems aren’t magic,” said Nick Reese, breaking the silence. “No great surprise there. But what are they?”
“If you’re asking whether they are the solution to decades of research into solid state military lasers,” said Jones, “I’m betting they’re not, but we won’t know till they have been carefully analyzed. Bowerdale knew a little about the crystals used in laser technology, and he recognized some signatures in the initial chemical and physical analysis of the stones that piqued some people’s interest, but I don’t think they’ll turn out to have the value he or Dimitri thought they did.”
The irony sickened Deborah. All those lives lost.
“Like I said, we’ll see when the analysis is complete,” said Jones, seeming to read her look.
“So long as they aren’t damaged in the process,” said Reese, “and so long as Her Majesty’s government gets full access to all results.”
“I don’t think you get to set the terms of what happens next,” said Jones.
“I think I do,” Reese countered.
“And why would that be?”
“Because the gems concerned are property of the English Crown,” said Reese. “Literally, in this case.”
Jones gave Deborah a look. “You buy that?”
“The evidence is circumstantial right now,” she said, thoughtfully, “but it’s pretty compelling.”
“So you think we’ve found the lost crown jewels of England?” he said, daring her to say yes.
“Yes,” she said. “I think so. They may be incomplete, they may be damaged, and they may not be as impressive as the ones on display in the Tower, not as intrinsically valuable, but yes: the crown jewels of medieval and renaissance England going back to Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor, which makes them about as old as the pyramids of Uxmal and Ek Balam.”
“Which also makes them a British Natural Treasure,” said Nick Reese, “so no, you can’t chop ‘em up to see if they make your lasers better.”
“I said it before and I’ll say it again,” said Jones. “If there’s a choice between foreign cultural history and domestic national security, which way do you think the US government will go?”
It was a rhetorical question, and Deborah, depressed by it, looked out of the aircraft window to where the runways of O’Hare International Airport were just coming into view.
>
Chapter Eighty-Five
Steve Powel had been taken into custody before dawn and long before Deborah’s plane touched down in Chicago. He had gone quietly, she was told, and though he had not yet been charged he was making no demands for lawyers or release. His secretary, Mrs. Gloria Pickins, had also been taken in for questioning, but it might be weeks before a clear sense of what had happened emerged and the case could proceed to trial. Various occult objects had been found in Powel’s home and office, including some human bones, but it was believed they had been acquired from grave robbers and their agents, and there would be no serious charges against him that did not involve what had happened in Mexico and the UK. There was no sign of the Malkin Tower stone in any of his collections.
As they drove into the city, Deborah began to adjust her left arm and shift in her seat.
“You OK?” asked Nick.
“I think it may have reopened,” she said. “Maybe I should get it looked at again.”
“We have people on staff in the office,” said Jones.
“That’s OK,” she said. “Just drop me off and I’ll swing by the hospital. Excuse me,” she called to the driver. How close are we to East Fifty-Fifth Street?”
“Right now?” he said. “Not very. But I can get you there.”
“That would be great,” she said. “Corner of Ellis, please.”
“I didn’t know you knew the city so well,” said Nick, watching her carefully.
“I had to spend time here with Cornerstone,” she said, looking out the window. “What happens to Cornerstone now?” said Nick.
“I have no idea,” she answered.
They dropped her at the junction she requested, and she said she’d call within the hour.
“Don’t leave town,” said Jones, half-seriously. “There’s still a lot we don’t know.”
She agreed and walked briskly away down to the hospital entrance, but once the car had pulled away, she paused, then moved away from the emergency room. She found an information desk, asked her questions, and five minutes later was standing outside a private room telling a nurse she was a family friend.
Angela Powel lay still, wired to monitors, IV drips running bags of fluid into her system. Her head was unbandaged and her pale gold hair spilled out onto the pillow. For a long moment, Deborah just looked at her, trying to imagine how it would be different if this had been her own daughter, but she couldn’t do it. She thought of Adelita and her parents and, feeling something real for the girl who had been her friend in Ek Balam, wondered what her loss would have been like.
Terrible, she thought. An absurd injustice that proved the arbitrariness of the universe.
Which was, she suspected, how Steve Powel and his estranged wife had felt about the ridiculous accident that had left their beautiful and accomplished daughter lying here. No wonder Marissa Stroud had wanted to believe in symmetry, in an order to the cosmos that she could somehow manipulate with the old surrogacy of Mayan ritual and sympathetic magic: the torturing of one human as a sacrifice to the gods, the offering of one child to save another. It was, she thought, a kind of love: selfish, desperate, and irrational, no doubt, but love just the same. w
It’s what any good father would do, Powel had said, when she asked him about the work and expense involved in his daughter’s skating. The phrase seemed loaded now, and Deborah wondered again, were all parents like this, ready to do anything, no matter how destructive, to protect their own?
You’ll never know, the voice in her head said.
The thought came fully formed, born entire in the moment, and she recoiled from its certainty with defiance that beat back the thrill of despair. She stared at the girl lying in this endless sleep, and wondered why the idea bothered her so much. She wasn’t even sure she wanted children, was certain she didn’t want any now. So why should the thought that she never would feel so upsetting?
“You about done?” said the nurse, reentering the room.
“I think so,” said Deborah.
“You can stay longer if you like.”
“I don’t think so. I have...things to do.”
“Well, it’s nice to have someone other than her father here,” said the nurse, checking the chart at the foot of the bed and monitoring the levels in the IV drips. “I don’t think she really gets to hear any voices other than mine, ain’t that right, girl?”
Deborah, realizing the nurse was talking to the patient, shifted uncomfortably.
“You think she can hear you?” she said.
“Maybe,” said the nurse. “Guess we won’t know till she wakes up. Stay awhile and chat if you like. Read her a magazine or something. Or not.”
She grinned and stepped out.
We won’t know till she wakes up.
If she wakes up.
Deborah sat down and put her head in her hands. She took a deep breath and then sat up.
“OK,” she said aloud. “You don’t know me, Angela, but I thought I’d stop by. I’m Deborah.” She hesitated, embarrassed, then pressed on. “I’m going to tell you a story about a dwarf magician and his witch mother...”
She talked for about twenty minutes, meandering, doubling back, trying to make sense of the tangled narrative, and each time she did so she apologized for her ineptitude as a storyteller. When she was done, she sat in silence for five more minutes, then she stood up and was about to take a step toward the door when she paused and, on impulse, moved back to the bed. With her right hand she brushed back the girl’s hair, then very gently touched the girl’s sparkling necklace with its single garnet-colored stone pendant.
The Malkin Tower gem. Like the others, it was the color of blood diluted with tears. Her lucky charm.
Deborah touched it with one finger, then reset the pillow and left the room, letting the door thud shut behind her as she walked through the hospital corridor.
Nick Reese was waiting for her outside.
“Is it there?” he said.
She nodded.
“Still?” he asked.
She nodded again, and they walked in silence. The air outside was hot and humid, touched with the scent of the traffic, but she didn’t mind it.
“You have any kids, Nick?” she asked suddenly.
“No, why?” he asked.
“I’m just...No reason,” she said. “Listen, can you give me a minute. I have to call my mother. You know. Family stuff.”
“Sure. I’ll wait over there. Listen,” he added, earnest. “Back in Kabah by the Witch’s House, when I...”
“Tried to kiss me?”
“Right,” he said, looking abashed. “That was the drug. You know that, right?”
“I thought the drug made people paranoid,” she said, arch. “Made them see terrible, terrifying things.”
“Maybe it does different things to different people,” he ventured.
“That’s what we’re going with?” she asked, smirking now.
“For the moment,” he said, smiling back.
“I’ve got to make this call.”
“Right,” he said, taking a step away. “Then maybe we can get that drink?”
She considered him seriously for a moment, then nodded.
“That would be nice,” she said.
He smiled, hesitated, then took a couple of steps backward, turning into his stride still smiling. She watched him go, then took out her phone, took a breath, and still not sure what she was going to say, began to dial. As the phone rang at the other end, Deborah remembered that moment in Uxmal in the darkness of the ruins when the jaguar had gazed across at her and, for a moment, time and distance had fallen away and it was like she was seeing herself. In some ways, they were all alone, all strange and out of place, through the centuries: Edward Clifford. Janet Device. Stroud, certainly. Eustachio with his secret. Maybe even Dimitri.
And you, of course, always prowling the ruins of other people’s lives, peering in and slipping away when they got too close, never quite belonging, always alien as the ja
guar or the gemstones you found in the Ek Balam tomb.
She hesitated, unsure what to think of that, but then she heard her mother’s voice saying “Hello?” and the great cat slipped back into the ruins as she became herself again.
THE END
Thanks, Acknowledgments, and Some Details of the Hazy Line Between Fact and Fiction
As readers who are familiar with my work know, I rely on historical fact in my novels; though the story itself is strictly fictional, it seems reasonable to try to sketch where reality ends and my own flight of fancy begins. My core characters are, of course, invented, though some figures from the novel’s back story are real enough. The Lancashire witches were as I have described them, as was Lady Anne Clifford, though she had no adopted son Edward, who is my own creation. I was born and raised only a few miles from Pendle Hill and though I was far enough from it to be out of its literal shadow, I grew up surrounded by tales of the witches. Much of what I’ve set down here is derived from Thomas Potts’s (in)famous contemporary account, augmented by more recent scholarly takes on his version of events, but I owe a huge debt of gratitude to local historian John Clayton, who has endured all my questions and whose answers have helped shape the story. The Eye of God on the tower of Newchurch is real, as are the other details of the landscape, including the Malkin Tower cottages, from which visitors can visit Pendle and environs. I am grateful to the staff at Lancaster Castle for fielding questions.
George Withers and Henry Mildmay were real, as was the breaking up and selling off of the medieval and renaissance crown jewels. With the exception of the coronation spoon that Deborah notes, the present-day collection at the Tower, spectacular and storied though it is, dates from the 1660s and later. Though some pieces were recovered by the state during the Restoration, the ancient crown jewels of England remain lost.
Though the story evolved away from it, my first impulse was to make Thomas Gage a part of the novel. Gage was an Englishman who journeyed to Mexico as a Franciscan friar with Spanish missionaries in the 1620s and 1630s. In England in 1648 he published a problematic but informative book on his travels, immediately before my fictional Edward Clifford set out on a similar course. My primary consultant on Mayan archaeology has been the extraordinarily helpful and patient George Bey, one of Ek Balam’s foremost archaeologists. Without him, and his willingness to share his insight into Mayan culture and fieldwork, this book could not have been written. I’m also grateful to Sarah Werner and Pascale Aebischer; Kathy Reichs for details on bone analysis; Jim Born for firearm tips; Sarah Brew on skating; and to my colleagues at UNC Charlotte, particularly Jen Munroe on Lady Anne, to Carlos M. Coria-Sánchez and Michael Doyle for clarifying points of Mexican law and language, and to Deborah A. Strumsky, Scott Hippensteel, John Bender, and Lee Casperson for insight on crystals and their use in laser technology.
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