“Thank goodness,” Lucy said, her thoughts going to Hank, so sweetly asleep. She couldn’t risk endangering him. Not for anything, anybody.
“Don’t worry about Hank,” Eileen said, voicing Lucy’s thoughts. “We won’t let anything happen to him.”
“I know,” Lucy said. But she didn’t know. As they finished stacking the dishes and turning off lights, Lucy realized she was very worried, indeed.
“So sneak down the hall,” Lucy said sensibly, looking in Eileen’s doorway. Lucy was washed and brushed and in her cotton pajamas. She closed the door and came to sit down on Eileen’s bed. Eileen wore a satiny peach-colored shirt that came down to mid-thigh.
“I like your pajamas,” Eileen said, her face scrubbed pink and her hair held back by a flowered band. She looked no more than sixteen.
“I like yours,” Lucy said. “Kind of sexy.”
“Joe likes satin,” Eileen said. “So I’ve changed my sleeping clothes. I used to wear big T-shirts to bed. This was my compromise, a satiny shirt thing.”
“It’s great,” Lucy said. “So why won’t you sneak down the hall? You’re going to be married, you know.”
“I know,” Eileen said. She shrugged, and smiled ruefully at Lucy. “It would be cheating. I can’t cheat on my mom and dad. Dad, mostly. My mom certainly knows that I’m having sex with Joe. She asked me, when we first got engaged.”
“She did?” Lucy asked, fascinated. “What did she say?”
“Just that I should make sure we were compatible in bed, if we hadn’t already figured it out. She told me this hilarious story about a virgin bride who married the son of the richest man in town. And the richest man was—”
“A doctor. A lawyer. The veterinarian? The mayor?”
“The undertaker,” Eileen said, poker-faced. Lucy started to laugh and put both her hands to her mouth. “So there they are on their wedding night and her groom asks her to sit in a bath full of ice for fifteen minutes, then lie real still on the bed.”
Lucy grabbed one of Eileen’s pillows and pressed it over her face. She leaned into the quilt and howled.
“Okay,” she said finally, brushing tears of laughter from her eyes.
“So I confessed to mom that yes, we were excellently compatible in bed, and she was very happy but she told me to make sure I never told my dad. So I just can’t, no matter how much I need to hold Joe right now.”
“I understand,” Lucy said. “And I’m glad. I don’t know if I could resist my bad side.”
“There’s always a blanket and a picnic lunch, tomorrow,” Eileen said with a wicked little grin. “That doesn’t count, does it?”
“No, indeed,” Lucy said. “I have to confess I’ve never actually done it outdoors. I’ve always wanted to, like in the romance novels, but I just never had the opportunity and space.”
“Wyoming has lots of space,” Eileen said. “I didn’t do it indoors until I was halfway through college. It just seemed more private to be all by ourselves.”
Lucy blinked at Eileen. “If I wasn’t in Wyoming right now I’d think you had a screw loose,” she said. “But now I know exactly what you mean.”
“Hey,” Eileen said, her face suddenly thoughtful. “I just had an idea. How about you bring Ted out here? This is getting messy, you have to admit. If Ted’s here you can split the time with Hank, there’ll be two people to look after him. Plus, you can take a blanket and a lunch one day and I’ll look after Hank. Fulfill a fantasy, what do you think?”
“I can’t,” Lucy said slowly, and shrugged her shoulders at Eileen’s crestfallen expression.
“Why not?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s too embarrassing,” Lucy said. Eileen reached across the little bed and took Lucy’s shoulders in her hands.
“You can tell me anything,” she said. “We’re friends, right?”
“Okay,” Lucy said, but she didn’t look at Eileen. She looked at her cotton pajamas and the little winged pigs that floated among puffy white clouds. “It’s money. We can’t afford a round-trip ticket for Ted. I’m on part-time status at the Agency and Ted, he’s a teacher you know. Not exactly big bucks.”
“Oh,” Eileen said.
“We could afford me coming out here, and we can afford to come out in September for your wedding, but that’s it. I don’t want to go into credit card debt, I hate credit cards.”
“I let you pay for gasoline, and you paid for lunch in Wheatland,” Eileen said. She looked angry. “I let you pay. You let me let you.”
“What?” Lucy said, smiling.
“You know what I mean,” Eileen said. “Lucy. Your trip this fall is paid for, no questions asked. And you know I’m not going to make you pay for the hideous bridesmaid’s dress we picked out.”
“It’s a beautiful dress,” Lucy protested. “And I’m not going to let you—”
“Shut up,” Eileen said. “You saved my life. Twice.”
“So far,” Lucy said, and she did start to cry, she couldn’t help it. She reached out for Eileen and they hugged. First they were laughing and now they were crying together. Ridiculous. Eileen reached out and got them tissues from the bedside table. The pretty rocker that sat by the bed was festooned with Eileen’s collection of holsters and guns and ammunition. Lucy felt better, looking at them. They were anything but girly.
“Time to get to our lonely beds,” Eileen said, blowing her nose with an enormous honk.
“But not for long,” Lucy said. “I can’t wait to call Ted. I’ll call him as soon as we’re up.”
The Reed Ranch, Wyoming
“Okay, Eileen, we’re both here now.” Alan Baxter’s voice rose tinnily from the speakerphone in Paul Reed’s tiny office. “Sorry it took so long.”
“No problem,” Eileen said. It was afternoon, and she’d been waiting for his return call since nine in the morning. The longest day on record, and catching Joe alone in the kitchen and kissing him until they were both panting didn’t improve her temper. With no way of knowing when Alan would call back, they couldn’t slip out into the woods. The day was again cloudless and hot, a heat wave that felt as endless as the blue sky overhead.
Lucy sat on the floor in the hallway, playing with Hank and listening in. Tracy Reed had kept Eileen’s childhood collection of toy cars and dug them out that morning for Hank. Hank was in heaven, rolling the little cars up and down the hallway with Zilla as a fascinated audience.
Joe came in and sat on the edge of Paul’s desk. Tracy followed, wiping her hands on her apron and then wiping a lock of gray hair off her forehead. She already looked tired. Paul and the hunters had long gone, off to another promising ridge that might hold elk and deer. They were on horseback, despite Nolan’s half-hearted protest, and wouldn’t be back before dark.
“Do you have the camera set up?”
“We’ve got it, and we have the skull, too,” Eileen said. Joe positioned the digital camera on top of Paul’s computer. “Ready?”
“We’re ready,” Marcia Fowler’s voice came out of the speakerphone. “We’ve got a camera here too, so we’ll aim it us.”
“We’ll aim it at us, too, before we introduce you to our new friend,” Joe said. He aimed the camera behind Paul’s seat and gestured for Lucy and Tracy to move into the picture. Lucy picked up Hank and they crowded behind the desk. Joe pressed a few keys on the computer and two sharp pictures sprang up on the screen.
In one were Eileen, Joe, Lucy, Hank and Tracy, crowded together. Hank waved at his picture on the screen and then smiled as his image waved back at him.
In the other, Eileen could see her birth father, Alan Baxter. For a moment she could look at no one else. He looked so much like her. Or actually, she looked so much like him. They were still finding out about each other. Her mother had kidnapped her as a baby and tried to kill herself and her baby daughter on a highway outside Rapid City, South Dakota. She’d only succeeded in killing herself. Paul and Tracy Reed, who later adopted Eileen, had rescued the little girl from th
e car wreck. Eileen, who never knew her last name, had found her father only a year ago, and she still felt a surprising jolt every time she saw him. My father.
“Hi, Eileen,” Alan said, with his beautiful slow smile.
“Hi, Dad,” Eileen said.
“Hello, Mrs. Reed. Joe, and is that Lucy?”
“This is Lucy,” Lucy said, and waved. Hank waved with her. “I’ll be listening in but I have to go play some Matchbox cars with Hank.”
“Hi, Lucy,” Marcia Fowler said. She was sitting with Alan Baxter and looked radiant. Eileen thought suspiciously that she looked like a woman who’d just done what she wanted to drag Joe out to the woods and do.
“Hi, Miss Fowler,” Lucy said. Hank wiggled impatiently and she waved again. “Gotta go.”
“You’ve told her the story?” Eileen asked Alan.
“Everything you told me,” Alan said.
“Let’s see it,” Marcia said impatiently. She was a small woman in her sixties, with gray hair and large, dark eyes.
“Here we go,” Joe said. He walked behind the desk and tilted the little ball of the camera eye down. Sitting on a dark blue towel and grinning his cheerful grin, the skull appeared on the computer screen. He was wearing the crown of dirty gems and dull gold, exactly as Eileen had found him in the scrap of tarp.
The reaction couldn’t have been more satisfying. Alan opened his mouth in astonishment. Marcia nodded peacefully, as though greeting an old friend.
“That crown isn’t a crown,” she said.
“It isn’t?” Eileen asked.
“No, it’s a necklace.”
“What is it made of?” Alan asked. “The skull. It’s rock crystal, isn’t it?”
“We think so,” Eileen said. “We don’t know for sure. So what do you think about this thing?”
“I have a question, first,” Marcia said firmly. “I want to know how you feel around it. Just tell me how you feel.”
Eileen looked at Joe, who shrugged, and Tracy, who tugged at her ear and shrugged her shoulders as well. Lucy poked her head in from the hallway.
“I feel goofy,” she said loudly at the phone. “Goofy in a good way. Cheerful. Like he’s smiling at me.”
Eileen laughed. Lucy was so unabashed. And so perfectly right.
“She’s right,” Tracy said. “I feel kind of happy.”
“Me, too,” Joe said.
“Yeah, I have to agree,” Eileen said. “Weird.”
“What does that mean?” Joe asked. “The feeling goofy part. And how did you know we’d all feel good around it?”
Joe turned the camera so Eileen and Joe came back into camera range. Marcia nodded and smiled at him.
“Thanks, Joe,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I know. This is really out there sort of stuff, though.”
“We’re comfortable with that,” Joe said impatiently. “Marcia. This is us.”
“Okay, then,” Marcia said. “This has to do with the Aztec civilization, and before that, the Mayans. I’ll be as brief as I can. You know the Aztecs existed in Central Mexico for thousands of years. Their major city, Tenochtitlan, is now Mexico City. They had advanced knowledge of the solar system, of medicine including brain surgery, and some say of computers and space travel.”
“Space travel,” Tracy said flatly.
“Computers?” Joe asked.
“There was a capstone to a tomb, found in the lost Mayan city of Palenque in southern Mexico, in 1949. On it was a carving that clearly showed a man in a spacecraft pod. He has oxygen tanks and a helmet and the pod shows flames out the bottom.”
“Skulls, dear,” Alan Baxter said easily. “Aztecs, not Mayans.” Marcia blinked and nodded her head.
“Oops, don’t mean to get off track, there. You know the direction my brain always heads off into.” Eileen smiled and shook her head as Joe rolled his eyes. Marcia was a UFO believer, a member of the Mutual UFO Organization. She was also one of the most knowledgeable people Eileen had ever met. Marcia seemed to know something about everything, and when it came to odd knowledge she was astonishing.
“Okay, no more Mayan. They were gone before the rise of the Aztecs. The Aztecs also made lots of human sacrifices, as you’ve probably heard,” Marcia said, obviously trying to get back on track.
“The whole rip-the-heart-from-the-chest thing,” Eileen said, thinking uneasily of the wound in the center of Dr. McBride’s chest. Would the coroner find that McBride’s heart was missing? That would mean the killer had followed McBride all the way to the chicken coop at the ranch, perhaps followed his blood trail as they had done? Eileen saw an immediate image of a gasping, dying McBride with a shadowy Aztec priest standing over him, bloody heart in hand. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again, trying to erase the image.
“Exactly,” Marcia said. “They saved skulls. Who knows why, nobody knows. But they revered them. They practiced human sacrifice on an unimaginable scale, but otherwise they had a lawful, peaceful, advanced culture before Cortez and his band of merry men showed up in 1519. This is all fact. Now I’m going to delve into theory.”
“Ready,” Joe said.
“There is some indication they had some sort of advanced data storage system, a sort of computer that held the accumulated wisdom of their civilization. And the form that this information was stored in was…”
“A human skull,” Eileen breathed. “Of course!”
“Exactly,” Marcia said. “The skull is where the brain resides, and the Aztecs worshipped the skull. These computers were used as oracles. I’ve never seen one until today, but I hear—”
“Until today,” Tracy interrupted. “You mean you think this skull is one of them?”
“It certainly matches the description,” Marcia said tartly.
“Go on,” Joe said. He put his hand on Eileen’s shoulder and the warmth of his hand felt very good. For some reason she was nearly shivering, even though the day was warm and her father’s study was stuffy and hot.
“Okay, the legend of the skulls is that they’re data storage devices, and that may or may not be true,” Marcia said, settling down into her chair again.
“Every modern computer stores information on a magnetic medium,” Joe said. “But I’ve read there are some experimental companies that are attempting storage in laboratory grown crystal. It’s not so far fetched.”
“Whether or not they had advanced computer technology, they certainly used the skulls as oracles,” Marcia said. “The legend goes that the priests who cared for the skulls received a prophecy about the invasion of Cortez, the Spanish Conquistador that crushed the Aztec civilization. So before he landed—”
“How many skulls were there?” Lucy interrupted, speaking at knee level from the hallway. Behind her Hank crawled down the hallway making a sports car sound.
“Thirteen,” Marcia said. “Twelve in a circle and the thirteenth in the center. One of the skulls, called the Mitchell-Hedges skull, was the first to be found and I’ve seen pictures. It’s glorious, and smaller than yours. Supposedly the twelve in the circle were female skulls and the thirteenth was a male.”
As one, everyone in the room turned to look at the skull on the chair. He grinned up at them, unmistakably male. Eileen would have bet her pension on it. Their skull was a man’s.
“The thirteenth skull,” someone whispered. Eileen didn’t know who spoke. Joe turned the camera eye back to the skull. Eileen saw Marcia and Alan staring at their computer screen. They, too, were looking at the skull.
“Go on,” Eileen said. She had a feeling she knew what was coming, and from the look on Joe’s face he knew as well.
“The priests seemed to know Cortez was coming and that he’d destroy their civilization. Montezuma, the leader at the time, was a weakling. The priests knew that. So their prophecy, or their visions, or whatever, told them to scatter the skulls to the different North American civilizations. Then someday they would be brought back together again.”
“The Lakota Sioux,” Eileen
said, and blew a deep and trembling breath. “Incredible.”
“That’s the legend,” Marcia said. “The ancient Mayan city of Luaantan in Belize had one, and that was the Mitchell-Hedges skull. It was found in a pyramid that some say is Mayan but others believe might be an extremely ancient Incan. The Navajos are supposed to have a crystal skull secretly hidden under a mountain on the reservation somewhere in New Mexico. There was supposedly one found along the banks of a river in Texas. Who knows where that was supposed to go?”
“Who knows what happened to the warrior who carried it?” Lucy said quietly from the hallway floor.
“And then there’s ours,” Joe said. “Our guy almost made it, can you imagine? He’d found his way all the way to the Lakota Sioux.”
“And then he’s buried under about a million buffalo,” Tracy said, shaking her head. “That’s incredible.”
“We have to tell Beryl and Jorie,” Eileen said. “They have to know this.”
On the computer screen, Marcia looked at Alan and shifted uneasily in her chair.
“Uh,” she said, and then stopped. “Are those the archeologists? Or are they anthropologists?”
“There’s one of each,” Eileen said. “What’s up?”
“Okay, well, there’s something else I need to tell you.”
Lucy stuck her head in the doorway and Eileen, Tracy and Joe all leaned closer to the screen. Joe turned the little ball of the camera again so that Marcia could see them.
“Ready,” Joe said. “It can’t get any wilder than this.”
“Oh yes, it can,” Marcia said uncomfortably. “Ahem. I edited the legend somewhat. The legend that talks about the crystal skull computers is from a whole series of legends about, well, hmmm.”
“What is it, Marcia?” Eileen nearly shouted. Marcia believed in little gray aliens who abducted humans and shoved probes up their butts. She was convinced that the government was in cahoots with three-fingered gray guys and she was hesitating? Eileen wanted to reach through the computer screen and shake the little schoolteacher.
The Thirteenth Skull Page 12