Invisible City

by M. G. Harris

  “God, that is so patronizing!” I shout.

  She just stares blankly at me. “I’m getting tired of this, Josh. When’s this going to stop?”

  “Why won’t you even talk about it?”

  Mom explodes. “Because it’s preposterous! People don’t get abducted by aliens! UFO sightings … they’re just some trendy zeitgeist thing. It’s a mythology, a modern mythology!”

  Then she sighs, sinks down onto the bed, runs one hand through her hair, exhausted and desperate.

  “Please, please listen to me, Josh. We both know what happened to your father, and as ghastly, as unforgettably horrible as that was, we have to learn to live with it!”

  “What about the fact that his plane was in northern Campeche … in Mexico? Dad was supposed to be in central Guatemala, the place where they found the murdered Maya king. That’s hundreds of miles away!”

  “Josh, he makes these trips all the time,” she says wearily. “He doesn’t give me every single detail. That’s why he always goes out to Tuxtla first and rents his cousin’s Cessna. Otherwise it takes forever, driving all over the place, or else it costs a fortune on commercial flights. That’s how it is with Mayan archaeology. All the new discoveries are in the middle of nowhere.”

  And she goes on to say more stuff, but I’ve stopped listening. Instead, I think about what she said just a few seconds earlier.

  “You said ‘makes these trips.’ ‘Rents his cousin’s Cessna.’ You’re talking like he’s still alive. Is that what you really think too, Mom?”

  Mom shakes her head very sadly. “No. But I can wish it, can’t I?”

  There’s a knock at the door. We’re not expecting anyone. I can sense it—something’s wrong. Mom feels it too. Nervously, I open the door.

  It’s a cop. He introduces himself as Detective Barratt of the Thames Valley Police.

  “It’s about Dr. Garcia,” he says, standing at our doorstep. “The Mexican police have been in touch. And I’m sorry to say it’s very bad news.”

  The head wasn’t burned like the rest of him. It had been sliced off before the fire, which started in the crashed plane.

  Barratt tells us, “The Mexican investigators think that wild animals must have taken the head. They found it miles away, decomposed beyond any recognition. According to the coroner, the dental X-rays are conclusive, a match with Dr. Garcia.”

  He goes on: There were something called hyaloid fractures—the hyaloid is a little bone deep in the throat that often breaks during strangulation. And petechial hemorrhages—tiny broken blood vessels in the eye, another classic sign of strangulation. Taken together, they point to one thing: murder.

  Listening to Detective Barratt, I feel like a lizard is slowly crawling along my spine. It’s the most horrible and yet the most thrilling thing I’ve ever heard. Now our pain isn’t just a twist of fate but something evil, something intended. There’s a prickling of the hairs on my skin. Even the air around us seems to be charged. I look across at Mom, and I can’t read her expressionless face. But her knuckles are white to the bone.

  Barratt lets that news sink in for a few minutes, then continues. As things turned out, Dad hadn’t been seen at Cancuén for four days before his death. On June 12, he’d flown out of Cancuén, told the other archaeologists he’d be flying back to Mexico. They’d assumed he meant Tuxtla, where he’d rented the plane. But the police had talked to the plane-rental guys. Dad hadn’t been there either. At first, no one knew where he’d gone for those missing four days.

  The Mexican detectives were certain that Dad was dead before the plane crashed, probably even before it took off—strangled to death, maybe by whoever flew the plane. The theory is that a second man was in the plane with Dad—he probably doused Dad’s dead body with lighter fluid, then parachuted out. Since no witnesses have come forward saying anything about the crash or any parachutist, it’s likely that the incident took place at night. They’re putting the date of death on June 16, based on the examination of the crash remains. It’s a theory that works with the facts.

  Then last week someone came forward. An anonymous tip. There’d been talk of a secret night landing in a small beachside town.

  “A place called Chetumal,” Barratt says. “Do you know it?”

  Mom shakes her head. “No. I mean, yes—I’ve heard of it. Never been.”

  “Well,” Barratt begins solemnly. “There was a late-night meeting. So we’ve heard. The kind of small-town gossip police hear all the time. But this time it ties everything together.”

  “Do the police out there have any suspects?” Mom asks. Her voice seems unnaturally flat.

  Barratt coughs. “They do, Mrs. Garcia. I’m afraid so. They’ve already made an arrest. It’s going to be another shock for you. I’m very sorry.”

  We wait. The air is thick with our anxiety.

  “There was a woman out there. In this Chetumal place. The professor had been seen visiting her, you see. This past year. Many times. Plenty of witnesses. Incidents of affection, you understand. In a small town like that, there’s always gossip. But where there’s smoke … Rumors spread, the wrong people hear.”

  Mom’s face drains. Her voice cracks. “I see. Was she … a married woman?”

  “I’m afraid so. Her husband, you see …”

  And in a tiny voice, Mom says, “I understand.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Garcia.”

  I blurt, “Well, I don’t understand. Can someone explain?”

  Barratt turns sympathetic, watery eyes on me.

  “The woman’s husband. The jealous type. And a qualified pilot. No alibi. Motive. Opportunity. Far as they’re concerned in Mexico, they’ve got their man.”

  “So we’re supposed to just believe this—village gossip?”

  “I’m sorry. These things happen.”

  And I shout, “Not to my dad!”

  Mom pulls me close. Her cheeks are already wet with hot, silent tears. I bite my lip. It’s not easy to stay calm.

  BLOG ENTRY: FOUR MISSING DAYS AND A MURDER

  So, it’s official. My dad is dead. Not only dead, but murdered.

  I thought it was bad before. But after today I’m just sort of tired. There’s a weird kind of numbness. Like I’ve reached a limit.

  Comment (1) from TopShopPrincess

  Josh … omigod, I can hardly believe you aren’t making this up.

  Reply

  TopShopPrincess—I couldn’t. I’m living it and I can hardly believe it’s happening.

  Chapter 3

  It’s a bad night, one of the worst. I can hear Mom crying next door. She’ll get up every so often to throw up. She’s melting away, losing herself in tiny pieces.

  I phone the doctor, but they only put me through to his service.

  “Call the doctor in the morning. If there’s no difference tomorrow, she can prescribe something to calm your mother down. This will have been a terrible shock.”

  Mom doesn’t get up until late afternoon. We sit together at the kitchen table. I trace patterns in a pool of spilled cranberry juice. I’ve lost all sense of the future. What do people do after a thing like this? I have no idea where to start.

  Mom begins to shake. She asks for a small glass of brandy. A little later she stops shaking and begins, very softly, to cry. I don’t feel like crying anymore—just the opposite. I have an urge to run—anywhere. To get far away from this house of bad news.

  She gulps down one of the pills I picked up for her, wipes her face with a tissue, and blows her nose. I’ve never seen her look so bad. Not even the very first day.

  Finally I speak up. “Why do you believe it?”

  “Because it’s my worst fear.”

  “That Dad died?”

  “That he’d find another woman. Your dad is—was—a very attractive man, Josh. I’ve always known it. And these excavations, they go on forever.”

  I’m quiet for a long time. I had no idea. And I can’t think what to say. “You never said.”

&nbs
p; “Of course not.”

  “Did he know?”

  “Of course not, he hated jealousy.”

  I think about how my parents were together. Okay, no one likes to see their parents kiss and stuff. Obviously, it’s gross. But I sort of liked that Dad was always really affectionate with Mom. She is shy, reserved. Very British and all that. Not him, though. Always pleased to see her, big hugs and kisses when he came home. My whole life, they’d held hands, watched TV in each other’s arms. All that, had it been a lie?

  “But how?”

  She sighs. “Men … are that way, I suppose. Detective Barratt said the woman is in her late twenties. Late twenties! You probably think that sounds old. But to a man your father’s age …”

  She leaves that one unfinished, goes back to her brooding. I can sense waves of anger building inside her.

  I chip in, “Not Dad, though.”

  Mom snaps, “Why not? He’s just another man, isn’t he? I should have been more suspicious. What a fool I’ve been! La casa grande y la casa chica! Not as though I haven’t seen plenty of Mexican men behave this way. It’s finally happened to me.”

  “‘La casa grande …’?”

  “The big house and the little house. A nice little euphemism for a married man’s family and his mistress’s. Haven’t you wondered where some of your uncles disappear to when they’re in their forties? To their younger women, that’s where. But the first wife, if she’s in the know, then she’s supposed to be quiet, dignified. She’s supposed to cover for him! ‘Where’s your husband?’ ‘Oh, away on business!’”

  I stare at Mom. I can’t believe how easily she believes it. She’s judging my dad without evidence, as if he were just any macho Latin husband. If she thinks that about him, is she going to start treating me like just another one of “them”?

  “No. It’s not fair to accept this without hearing Dad’s side. I don’t believe he’d do it.”

  She’s quiet for a long time. “I wish … I’d like to believe that.”

  “Well, why not?”

  She looks at me with a faint glimmer of hope.

  “Do you think we could? Just not believe it?”

  I take a deep breath. “I don’t believe it.”

  But she can’t meet my gaze. She looks down, begins to tremble. “I must be a terrible person,” she says, her voice quavering. “Because I think it must be true … Why else would they arrest someone?”

  Why else?

  I wonder about that all afternoon.

  BLOG ENTRY: THIS IS A LOW

  Mom spent today in bed again. It’s been over a week. Well, I feel like I’m grinding through it, going to school every day, which takes my mind off stuff for a few hours. But each day I come home to find that Mom hasn’t moved. When I came home today, I found her listening to “Waters of March.” She and Dad didn’t have one tune, but I’d guess that one was probably in their top five. She’d put it on a continuous loop and was lying flat on their bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  Since Dad’s death, jazz has been banned from our house. Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz, Tom Jobim, all those guys—that’s my dad’s music. Me, I’m not a fan, but you get used to it. Mom and me—we have this unwritten rule now. Hearing jazz is just too miserable—for us both.

  And yet there she was, wallowing in it.

  Well, I said nothing. Just closed the door quietly so that I didn’t have to listen.

  I’m trying to keep things going here. I even cook sick-person food for Mom. Tomato soup with soft white bread. Chicken broth and buttered crackers.

  But still she won’t eat. Finding out what really happened to my dad seems to have finished her off.

  What the heck am I supposed to do?

  Comment (1) from TopShopPrincess

  Jeez … Josh. You need to get some help, man. I’m out of my depth here. Call the doctor!

  Reply

  So … I did it. Called the doctor. Told her that Mom was hardly responding. Just staring. And that was it.

  They sent some paramedics around. Said Mom needed some time with specialists. I don’t know if Mom even understood what happened. I prepared a bag for her: makeup, toiletries, spare clothes. As she walked through the front door, she got this look in her eye.

  It made me crumble. I feel like a traitor.

  Comment (2) from TopShopPrincess

  Josh—you’ve done the right thing. You’re only thirteen. How can you look after your mom when she’s like this? She’ll be all right in a bit. You wait and see.

  Reply

  I know you’re just being nice. But I’m the one who feels guilty here. I have to come up with something quickly, something that will get Mom’s hopes up again. If only I can get some bit of proof that this affair is a lie. Or come up with another reason why someone might have killed Dad.

  Comment (3) from TopShopPrincess

  Well—yeah. You could try. But how?

  Chapter 4

  How am I going to prove that Dad wasn’t having an affair with that woman? It’s pretty tough to prove a negative.

  I think about those four missing days. The way I see things, the police have accounted for just two of them: Dad’s plane landing late at night in the town of Chetumal, Mexico, on June 12. And the plane crash on June 16—the night of the murder.

  What about all the days in between? Did the mystery woman hide Dad away somewhere? Where had his plane been? But the police aren’t asking those questions. They don’t believe a word the woman says. They think she’ll say anything to keep her husband out of jail. Meanwhile the husband pleads his innocence. “But he would say that,” insist the police. They have their man, and that’s that.

  I figure that something like this doesn’t come from nowhere. People meet, they communicate. E-mails, phone calls. Maybe even old-fashioned letters.

  Until I make some headway, school is off the agenda. At my school they don’t chase truants right away. I figure I have at least one day to get something done.

  I’ve been staying next door at Jackie’s while Mom’s in the hospital. After dinner, I go through Dad’s e-mails on the home computer. There are no suspicious e-mails from any Mexican-sounding ladies. So either he’s innocent or else he’s smart enough to set up a secret e-mail account.

  I check the history of his Web browser. No record of any other e-mail accounts. So either he’s innocent or else he’s smart enough to delete his history files.

  I go back to the e-mails and read through the last few he’s sent or received. That’s when I find something interesting about Dad’s plans for those missing days in June.

  And it has nothing to do with an affair.

  The day before he left Oxford, Dad e-mailed a Dr. Marius Martineau of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in the U.S. It was the last e-mail he sent.

  Dear Dr. Martineau,

  A manuscript that has come into my possession leads me to believe that there may be some truth in rumors of the existence of a fifth codex of the Maya. The manuscript appears to be a part of a letter from a Maya citizen of Cancuén to the Ruler of Calakmul. This “Calakmul letter” is dated 653 AD. It speaks quite clearly of a book named the Ix Codex, a book it describes as a kind of Mayan Book of Revelations—about the end of the world in 2012.

  I gather you have a formidable collection of rare inscriptions taken from stelae in the Rio Bec region. Have you come across any inscriptions from the city of Calakmul that might shed light on such a story?

  Perhaps we could meet between June 12–20? I plan to be in Mexico for several days following a trip to the ruins at Cancuén.

  Regards,

  Andres Garcia

  The reply from Martineau came in the same day.

  Dear Dr. Garcia,

  A “fifth” codex, prophecies about the “end of the world” on December 22, 2012 …? If I listened to every crackpot idea I heard in this field, I’d be too busy joining a cult to get any work done.

  You say the document is dated 653 AD? That sound
s suspicious. All surviving codices date from the fifteenth century.

  I think you’ve got a fake on your hands. They can be quite convincing—I’ve seen the Prague Codex and it might well have fooled me.

  I’m pretty busy at the minute. I’m sorry, but I don’t really have the time for something that looks this controversial. Maybe someone else can help out with authenticating it?

  Sincerely,

  Marius Martineau

  My pulse races as I read the dates in Dad’s e-mail: June 12–20. So he left Cancuén exactly as planned. Did he fly somewhere to meet with Martineau after all? Martineau’s e-mail seems pretty indifferent—which suggests that they didn’t meet. I move on and read the second-to-last e-mail Dad sent—two days before he left Oxford.

  Dear Dr. Montoyo,

  I wonder if you remember meeting me at Palenque Round Table last year? I have recently come across a fragment of a Mayan manuscript. It appears to be part of a letter written to the ruler of Calakmul. This “Calakmul letter” speaks of a Mayan book named the Ix Codex. The letter also mentions two Mayan cities—Chechan Naab and Ek Naab. I’ve never heard of these cities, nor have I been able to find any references to them in the literature. That in itself is pretty strange, don’t you agree?

  I remember that you told me you’d recently been leading a project to translate new inscriptions from Calakmul. Have you come across cities named Chechan Naab or Ek Naab? Or ever heard of the Ix Codex? If you can offer any help, I’d be more than happy to work together on this project. I’ll be in Mexico later this month, June 12–20. Perhaps we can meet?

  Regards,

  Andres Garcia

  When I look through the reply, my heart begins to pound. This is it. There is more to this Ix Codex than meets the eye.

  Dr. Garcia,

  Indeed, I do remember our meeting. I feel I must warn you that you are headed down a dangerous path. The existence of the I* Code* is a rumor that has persisted in some disreputable circles for many years. I speak of various dubious practitioners of the occult. I never thought to hear about the codex from a renowned archaeologist such as you. Those who have sought it have so far disappeared without a trace.