Olmec Obituary

by L. J. M. Owen

  Flicking back and forth between the image in her mind and the one she drew on the page, Elizabeth sketched an exact copy of the three columns of glyphs she had seen in the photos from the site files.

  She scanned and emailed it to Henry with her report. He would want to talk to her this Sunday evening, she was sure.

  — —

  He did. At Sunday breakfast, eager for the evening to come, Elizabeth was distracted.

  ‘Elizabeth! Can you please pass me the toast?’ Sam repeated her request.

  ‘Oh, sorry, here.’ Elizabeth didn’t extend her arm quite far enough before letting go. The toast hit the table.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Sam. ‘So now you’re too good to even pass the toast properly? How lazy can you get?’

  What? ‘Me?’

  ‘Now, girls,’ Taid said. ‘That’s enough.’

  Sam ignored him. ‘You don’t do anything around the house. We do all your cooking, your cleaning, wash your clothes. You’re too good for housework now, apparently.’

  Elizabeth couldn’t contain her disbelief. ‘I beg your pardon! If anyone’s lazy around here, it’s you. Grandmère and Nainai do all the housework. I work all week to pay for the house. What do you do apart from suck down everyone else’s time and money?’

  ‘Stop it, stop it!’ Matty yelled, rising onto his crutches and leaving the table.

  ‘Now see what you’ve done? You’ve upset Matty!’ Sam screeched at Elizabeth.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Taid thundered. ‘You. Will. Stop.’

  Elizabeth was shocked by her loss of control. How did Sam manage to get under her skin like that?

  ‘I have had enough,’ Taid continued. ‘Grow up!’

  Elizabeth couldn’t make eye contact with anyone. Silently, she packed her breakfast plate in the dishwasher and went up to Matty’s bedroom. The door was locked. She knocked.

  ‘Matty, I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to upset you. Can I come in?’

  ‘No.’ Was he crying?

  ‘Matty, please.’

  ‘No, Lizbet, please go away. I don’t want to talk to anyone.’

  Yes, he was definitely crying. What had they done?

  ‘Matty, I’m so sorry. Sam and I will try not to fight any more, I promise.’

  As she went back to her own room, Elizabeth tried to work out what had happened. Why had Matty reacted like that? Had she and Sam been upsetting him all this time, and he’d never said anything? She would have to be even more careful not to snap when Sam riled her.

  Two hours later she went back to Matty’s room to try again.

  ‘Matty, can we talk now?’

  ‘Sure, it’s open.’

  Elizabeth opened the door to find Matty and Grandmère Maddie sitting companionably at his desk, scrolling through recipes on the internet. They were looking at a plate of very orange food.

  ‘Wow, that looks delicious. Are you going to cook that for us soon?’

  ‘Yes,’ Matty smiled. Thank goodness! ‘It’s Ethiopian. It’s got lots of ingredients, but it’s not too hard to make.’

  ‘How about for dinner next Saturday?’ Grandmère suggested.

  ‘Sounds good,’ Elizabeth encouraged.

  She pulled up a chair up to join them, and drooled over exotic recipes with them for an hour or two, glad Matty was at least talking to her again.

  — —

  After dinner, Elizabeth logged on to her computer. She had barely clicked to call Henry’s Skype when he answered.

  ‘Elizabeth, hi, how’re you?’

  ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘Thanks for your report, and the writing. It’s awesome.’

  ‘My report?’

  ‘That too. But the writing is fascinating. Why didn’t Dr Schmidt publish this to begin with? He’d be set for life!’

  ‘I can’t explain what Carl is doing, but do you really think so? It looks like all the other Mesoamerican writing I’ve seen.’

  ‘Exactly! It’s exactly what you’d expect to precede the scripts that came before the Mayan, the Isthmian and epi-Olmec scripts. I mean, no-one is sure if the Cascajal Block is authentic, but this sure must be.’

  Elizabeth pulled up a reference to the Cascajal Block in her phrenic library. There was strenuous debate over its provenance, validity and date, making it an unreliable reference point when tracing the history of writing in the Americas.

  ‘That’s, well, that’s great,’ she said.

  ‘The glyphs in the first column definitely give a date around three thousand two hundred years ago, and some of the glyphs mean “noble” and “male” in epi-Olmec scripts. But there’s something much more interesting.’

  ‘Oh? What?’

  ‘Lots of glyphs in the second and third columns face both ways.’

  ‘Ahh, sorry?’

  ‘Till now, in all examples of Isthmian and Mayan scripts, the glyphs faced either forward or to the left. The writing here, though, has some glyphs facing right. It’s what you’d expect to happen at the beginning of a new writing system, before conventions such as glyphs only facing forward or left had developed. It’s really exciting!’

  Elizabeth was puzzled. The glyphs seemed familiar to her as they were, but perhaps that was because she was the one who drew them.

  A small body shot in front of the screen. Henry jerked back. ‘What was that?’

  An exuberant yowl filled the room. Elizabeth looked around, desperately trying to follow the whizzing streak of fur as it leapt from desk, to fireplace lintel, to bed, and then crouched.

  ‘That was Loki, attempting to become the centre of attention.’

  Henry panted. ‘Well, it worked. You have the Norse god of mischief in your house?’

  ‘Yes. And no. Let me see if I can turn the screen to show you.’

  As Elizabeth panned the camera to display the quivering feline in the middle of her bed, Loki bounded onto her bedhead, jumped for the top of her armoire, failed, and fell back onto the bed. She licked her front leg urgently, trying to cover her embarrassment at such inelegance.

  ‘Is there an appropriate Twain quote for a moment like this?’ Elizabeth asked.

  ‘Probably.’

  They stared at each other for a few seconds, then burst out laughing.

  — —

  Elizabeth awoke from her phrenic library in the middle of the night. Not again! She wasn’t meant to go there in her sleep.

  She had been staring at the corkboard again, trying to fathom the meaning behind all the images and the connections between them. This time, there was a picture of a small female donkey with a straw hat pinned to the board, upside down… It was joined by lines of vibrating red wool to the Archaeology 101 syllabus and the Mesoamerican book.

  Was she, Elizabeth, the donkey? A female donkey that was the wrong way around…Did that mean she was trying to move in the wrong direction in her investigation into Juluwik?

  Perturbed by the contents of her own mind, Elizabeth huffed. She stroked Thoth as she drifted back to sleep.

  — —

  On Wednesday afternoon, Elizabeth arrived home to two grandparents and an envelope.

  ‘It’s from the university,’ Taid said.

  Elizabeth held out her hand and took it from Taid.

  ‘What is it?’ Grandmère asked.

  Elizabeth’s fingers fumbled as she tried to tear open the envelope. ‘Hang on, hang on.’

  Finally, she unfolded the single sheet. ‘Dear Dr Pimms, et cetera, et cetera, wish to inform you…I got an interview!’ If she had an interview, Luke definitely would have, too. Yes!

  ‘Congratulations, cariad.’

  ‘Merveilleuse!’

  ‘When is it?’

  ‘Not next week, the week after.’

  ‘Excellent, plenty of time to prepare then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We were just heading out for a stroll. Would you like to walk and talk?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Elizabeth, grinning from ear to ear.<
br />
  Taid winked at her.

  As the three of them walked to the end of the road they saw a stray kangaroo from the nature reserve. That meant the mob was probably nearby. Yes, just a few steps into the reserve, Elizabeth spotted twenty-seven calmly grazing kangaroos. One lifted its head to check who was approaching and, recognising them, returned to eating.

  ‘So, how do you feel about the interview?’ Taid asked.

  ‘Very excited! But…’

  ‘But?’

  ‘I’m worried about running into Carl.’ A single black wallaby bounded across the path in front of them. ‘But there’s no reason to be, I guess. He might not be back in the country yet.’

  ‘I agree. No need to borrow trouble, cariad. How about some practice before the big day?’

  ‘Yes, a mock interview would be great. I’ll practice with Luke too, of course.’

  ‘Just tell me when.’

  Elizabeth looked around at the local birdlife. Kookaburras, magpies, and rosellas of sky blue, venal red and sunflower yellow played among the gum trees. Elizabeth particularly loved the superb fairy-wrens flitting around the bottlebrushes.

  ‘And, if I may ask,’ Taid said, ‘how’s your Saturday Project progressing?’

  ‘I’ve finished the dental non-metric analysis I told you about. The skeletons in my population are highly related, and they sit inside the general population from Mesoamerica, so nothing unexpected there, except…’

  ‘Except?’

  ‘How similar they are, actually. I know something’s off, but I can’t figure out what. I’m a bit stuck, to tell the truth.’

  ‘Would it help if we went through what you already know again?’

  ‘Yes, Taid…If you don’t mind, Grandmère?’

  ‘No, chérie. I may not understand it all, but it is fascinating to watch your mind work, ma petite Miss Marple.’

  Elizabeth put her thoughts in order as they ambled up the next gentle slope. ‘Okay. Fact: Carl said the skeletons were royal, male, and form a cemetery.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Fact: the writing suggests it’s a royal, male cemetery.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Fact: the burials have the right grave goods for royal or noble, and male, but the skeletons don’t match.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I already told you.’

  ‘I know, but go over it again anyway.’

  ‘I know the four adults are female…Alice’s DNA tests might eventually show the children were male, but until then, I’ve got nothing to support the population being male.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘The women lived physically hard lives, so it’s unlikely they had privileged lifestyles. However, some of the children seem to have been better fed than the others, or at least more consistently, so it’s possible they were from a noble class.’

  ‘Or had a wealthy merchant father.’

  ‘Or one of many other explanations, so nothing concrete there.’

  ‘What next?’

  ‘The stratigraphy in the graves is highly similar, which indicates they were all buried at the same time. That, combined with how similar the skeletons are, suggests to me it’s some sort of mass burial of just one family…maybe.’

  ‘So what would explain all of that?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s what’s frustrating me. The skeletal remains aren’t what the writing says they are, or what the grave goods suggest, but they are the right age to match the writing, so I can’t figure out what went on.’

  ‘Have you ever seen something like this at another archaeological site? Where different aspects of the same site don’t match?’

  Elizabeth scanned the shelves in her phrenic library.

  ‘Yes, at quite a few sites. In Egypt, some monuments and tombs created under one pharaoh were reused thousands of years later by another.’

  ‘There you are.’

  ‘Khaenweset even altered sites for aesthetic reasons, censoring images in tombs of earlier pharaohs by painting clothes on naked musician girls.’

  Taid chuckled. ‘Khaenweset was prudish?’

  Elizabeth ignored Taid’s little dig. ‘Then along came the early European archaeologists, some with Victorian sensibilities. They didn’t always record what was on the tomb walls. If they thought something was too risqué, they left a blank section in their sketch of what was on the wall.’

  ‘Thankfully they didn’t paint over them, like your Khaenweset.’

  ‘Going back to the site at hand, Grandfather, it still doesn’t explain what’s at the Olmec site because the date in the writing and the age of the skeletons match.’

  ‘But has the site been altered in some other way? If the skeletal remains don’t match with the rest of the site, are they original?’

  ‘Well, they have to be, they’re the right age, so they couldn’t have been added afterwards.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Was it possible? ‘You’re thinking the skeletons could have been put in the cave? Well, obviously they were put in there at some point, but do you mean recently?’

  ‘I’m asking, is it possible? Would it explain what you’re seeing?’

  Elizabeth tried to answer the question from a purely logical point of view.

  ‘Technically, yes. It would explain a lot.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Why Carl trusted Juan’s interpretation of the sex of the skeletal remains. If he had deliberately searched for male remains of the right age, around three thousand, two hundred years old, and found some that seemed to be the right age and had grave goods that looked both royal and male, he would both want and expect the skeletons to be male.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have been able to tell from images of the skeletons in the ground?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t work like that,’ said Elizabeth, becoming excited. ‘Carl could have used ground-penetrating radar to see what was in the ground, but it would only have shown the grave goods, not the actual skeletons. Bones don’t show up on the radar, but ceramics do. He would have guessed that there were skeletons with the grave goods, maybe dug up one or two to check what was in the graves, but preservation is usually so poor in Mexico that he probably didn’t think anyone could find him out from looking at the skeletons. He could have dug them out and moved them.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Well, it would explain a couple of odd things about the dating tests. It seemed strange that Carl didn’t test the dates of any of the grave goods. But maybe he did, when he first found the skeletons elsewhere, and those results were never added to the files for Juluwik, because they officially belong to another archaeological site somewhere.’

  ‘And…’

  ‘And that would explain the record in the files for dating tests carried out four years before Juluwik was supposedly discovered. I noticed it when I was going through the files, but I thought it was just a mistake.’

  ‘That would mean Carl discovered the cave six years ago?’

  ‘Yes! And has been working on his plan ever since.’

  ‘But how would he have found Juluwik? Specifically, the writing in the cave? He doesn’t just go out wandering in the jungle, looking for random lost cities, surely?’

  ‘No…but it would be possible for a local person to know about it, and then contact him or tell him in the hope of earning a reward.’

  ‘All right. So, he goes to the site, sees the writing in the cave, becomes very excited and…’

  ‘And he finds out enough about the site to work out its age, both from the date in the writing and by testing some artefacts from nearby…’

  ‘And they match, both giving him a date of three thousand, two hundred years ago, and…’

  ‘And he’s even more excited. So, he thinks, this would be even better if it had skeletons. He digs around a bit inside the cave – which would explain why the ground was so churned up in a few spots when the cave was first officially photo­graphed – and realises there aren’t any there
. But, he has access to many sites in Mexico, so he looks and looks, and after three or so years he finds a group of burials of the right age and moves them into the cave.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He has a huge workforce at his disposal in Mexico. He could easily pay some workers to move them and not say anything.’

  ‘Where does that get us?’

  ‘That takes us back to the beginning, and Juan mis­interpreting the gender of the skeletons. Juan told Carl the skeletons were male simply based on the writing on the wall, and Carl had no reason to question him, because that was exactly what he expected to find.’

  ‘That would be why Carl had no qualms about hiring someone else…you…because he genuinely had no idea you would discover they weren’t male,’ Taid said.

  ‘And that’s why he threatened me when I told him they were female, because it was the first crack in his deception! It’s also why he fired me for standing up to him about publishing made-up theories about the skeletal remains: he’s convinced himself that this site will give him a life-long career boost, and he’s not going to let anyone get in the way of that.’

  ‘There’s just one problem, Lizbet,’ Grandmère Maddie interjected. ‘You must complete la sainte trinité de polar.’

  ‘The…holy trinity of crime fiction,’ Elizabeth translated.

  ‘Oui. Motive, means and opportunity. You say how he did it, and why, but not when.’

  ‘You’re right…’ Elizabeth reviewed her conversations with Carl. ‘Two and a half years ago! Carl said he was in Córdoba for a few months, just before the site was allegedly discovered. Córdoba is right near Juluwik. I even commented to Carl that it was a coincidence that he was there at the time the site was discovered, only I bet it was all part of his plan.’

  ‘Oui. You have the answer for all three, chérie. But, what can you do with the information?’

  Elizabeth was stumped. Now that she had figured all this out, who could she tell?

  — —

  The front door of Beyond Q slammed shut, the bookshelves shuddering in response as always. Elizabeth and Alice sat at Y Barri, the little grey dragon, reviewing the DNA results from the Olmec remains.