The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK ™: 20 Modern and Classic Tales of Female Detectives

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

  Even then, a kind of delicacy, part professional and part personal, kept me aloof from these treasures. But as my interests began to converge on his most famous discovery, I was the logical choice when the university decided to mount a major exhibition of Petrus Jonken’s life and work.

  This was a massive project, because the great Jonken Bequest had never been fully catalogued. Successive generations of students and scholars had explored bits and pieces, producing monographs on the pots and textiles, and on the metal work and the fabulously detailed architectural drawings produced by his expeditions, but no one had tackled the whole, sprawling Edwardian treasure.

  Amos Brisco, the energetic museum director, young and recently hired like myself, had plans for a new approach to the material. “Life and work,” he told me, his dark features glowing. “We need to convey the passion and excitement of the man. And to make his work accessible.”

  The museum, I did not need to be told, relied a great deal on student groups.

  “Plus—and this may be difficult and why I pushed very hard for your involvement, as I know you’re sympathetic—we want to be inclusive. Though Jonken’s the very peak of American archeology, he didn’t do it all by himself. We want to get a feel for the contributions of the local people.”

  In my fascination with Uncle Petrus, I had not, to tell the truth, seen the natives as much more than local color, but I understood Amos’s point completely. Another scholarly possibility!

  “I’m betting Jonken had a number of native informants and collaborators who were more influential over time than the boy who first took him into the ruins,” Amos continued, “though he’s usually the only name mentioned.”

  “Jonken’s diaries may help out there. I was surprised to find they’ve hardly been touched.”

  “Who’s had the time until now? But the big NEH grant makes this project a priority, and we’ll be able to employ some grad students…”

  I nodded my head. We could both envision one or more fascinating dissertations based on the Jonken papers, and we soon found two promising students, Kristen Boisvert and Matthew Dinatale, for the transcriptions. The plan was that I would supervise their work and the cataloguing of the still quite chaotic bequest, while Amos arranged for the displays and explanatory documents and handled the grant money. I offered to begin examining the diaries, myself, to give him a head start, but it was really to satisfy my own curiosity that I found my way into the yellowing pages and copperplate script of Uncle Petrus’s records.

  These were kept in a high and grandly proportioned storage room constructed to the architectural taste of the last century. The long windows were equipped with yellowing blinds to protect the shelved volumes, while the even more perishable manuscripts and diaries were stored in massive flat files. I can still remember my emotions when I unlocked the first drawer.

  I’d come up alone to do the initial inventory, and as the drawer slid open, revealing an assortment of green and buff leather bound books and untidy bundles of photographs and letters, I was returned for a moment to my childhood dining room and the mysterious jungle with my princely relative. There in the Special Collections room, I recovered the sense of mystery and adventure I’d felt as a child whenever I looked at Uncle Petrus’s photograph.

  Jonken had left two different sets of diaries: the green bound work volumes, meticulous notations of every detail of each expedition’s discoveries, with—yes—records for every worker and, more to the point for Amos’s exhibition, notations about whoever turned up any significant artifact. One of the students could manage a roster, surely, and perhaps we could coordinate the names with some of the faces in the photographs. This was excellent news already.

  I put Kristen onto that, and only two days later, she had the first tentative ID—Hector, mentioned as uncovering an outstanding silver mask, turned up in one of the browning photographs holding just such an artifact. Amos was delighted and snatched the just catalogued photograph to have it enlarged for the exhibition. Very soon we had a growing list of Jonken’s local collaborators, and the work diaries were yielding other useful insights.

  As there was more than enough material in the green volumes to occupy both graduate students, I reserved the little personal diaries for myself. I was naturally anxious to learn about the man who had played such a large role in my life, and I wasn’t disappointed. Reading his accounts, admiring his vigorous and exact style, wondering at the omnipresent reports of fever, I knew I hadn’t been wrong to see him as one of the warriors of archeology.

  Nothing deterred him, not floods, not sickness, not disease-bearing insects, venomous snakes nor hunger; not difficulties with workers nor backbreaking labor. Through every hardship, he displayed an exuberance, a joy, in archeology, first, and then in all the flora and fauna of the jungle. Here was a man who had been born for discovery and adventure and who was alert to everything in his environment.

  Including his collaborators. I found especially enthusiastic references to Henry Devolt, one of his students, and, in affectionate tones that surprised me just a little, to Jose Antonio and Ernesto, two of his long time local contacts. The latter, especially, seemed to have been not just an employee, but a confidante, a friend. When I passed their names on to Kristen, she nodded her head.

  “Jose Antonio is mentioned dozens of times in the records. He seems to have had a gift for knowing what was important. It’s nice to know Jonken appreciated him.” Kristen took out the steadily growing folder of catalogued photographs. “We don’t know for certain,” she said, pointing to a slim figure posing beside a possible observatory building with slit windows, “but we are pretty sure this is him. There are references to his helping with the preliminary surveying of this site.”

  Jose Antonio looked familiar, somehow, the jaunty angle of his sombrero, the elegance of his serape, something distinctive about his sandals. As soon as we finished our meeting, I went into my office and consulted the walnut framed photograph that I had transported from our old dining room. There was Petrus Jonken, the Prince of the Wilderness, and the man on the other side of the stone work was Jose Antonio. I took out a magnifying glass. He was a mestizo, whose sharp features were at once exotic and familiar to one who had studied the artifacts of his ancestors.

  Knowing his name changed the balance of the image, and I began to read the diaries with a greater alertness for the other personalities. I had seen my famous relative as alone, virtually, in the wilderness. Now I saw him as the leader of a small community, a little masculine fraternity, that worked through sweltering days and relaxed at night around campfires, swapping stories and information—and, in his case, dreaming always of the discoveries which might move him closer to his goal, the location of the great city he was convinced was lost in the jungle.

  Jonken returned, thin and ill, from the first expedition, but no sooner had he recovered than the jungle exerted its fascination. It was painful to read some of his New England entries, where despite a prestigious post and an affectionate family, he was restless and almost desperate to return south. The second expedition, the one that came tantalizingly close to his goal, ended only when he had to return to raise money for continuing the work.

  Jonken’s financial struggles were clearly of historic importance, but I thought those might be left to Amos with his keen appreciation of the rigors of fund raising. The third expedition was my real interest, the one when Jonken returned with the young wife who vanished in a dangerous paradise and darkened his life.

  I must confess I approached the records of the third expedition with some unscholarly preconceptions. Uncle Petrus’s romance had been the story of my childhood, and I expected the diaries to follow the script: a young couple, much in love and enthralled by the romance of a lost civilization, enjoy a idyllic adventure cut short by her tragic disappearance.

  Except for Alice’s loss, nothing in the diaries was quite a
s I’d expected. Of course, the bride was prominent during the trip down from New York. Petrus records “tutoring” her in the basics of archeology and drilling her on Spanish verbs and the essential vocabulary of the aboriginal language—not my idea of a honeymoon. I began to suspect that for all his courage and charm my famous relative had been a pedant.

  Once they reached the jungle, Alice dwindled into invisibility, with the diary again dominated by references to the sites and artifacts and his native informants. More than half way through the records of the fatal expedition, I couldn’t help contrasting the amount of ink devoted to Ernesto with the few references to Alice—and not very tender ones, at that. She suffered a fever, she complained of illness, she disliked the heat, while the sounds of the jungle night, which Petrus had missed so passionately up north, grated on her nerves.

  Alice was clearly not a wilderness person, and I couldn’t help wondering if I would have shared her reactions. Twice Petrus records sending her with Jose Antonio back to the nearest city for supplies, trips, arduous in themselves, which reassured her that she was not entirely stranded.

  Meanwhile, Ernesto remained prominent, though I could not determine his official role. He did not turn up in the daily work records that Kristen was compiling, nor did he make any discoveries or find any artifacts that might account for his substantial weekly stipend. His only function appeared to be to encourage Petrus’s conviction that they were near some great ceremonial center. Only late in the third diary, when I discovered a reference to his absence, an absence which apparently upset Petrus, did I learn Ernesto’s profession. He was away, Petrus wrote, to conduct a highly important religious ceremonial.

  “Does that mean he was a priest?” Kristen asked, when I showed her the passage.

  “I don’t think so, not a Catholic priest, anyway. Then he’d have been Father Ernesto. No, I think this is the old, pagan religion. There are still pockets today and, of course, a good deal was grafted onto Catholicism.”

  “The reason he might have known about interesting ruins,” Kristen suggested.

  I nodded. “All records agree, though, that a young boy guided them in at last.”

  “Ernesto might have been elderly,” Kristen said, “or handicapped in some way.” She spoke quickly as if I might be offended. I wasn’t; I scarcely thought of my limp.

  “Are there any pictures of such a person?”

  “We haven’t found anything yet, but not all the natives approved of photography.”

  I had known, but not considered, that, remembering as I did, the striking photograph of the handsome man I now knew was Jose Antonio. A priest, a believer in the old ways, would more than likely have been suspicious of modern devices—and archeological digs as well. Yet Ernesto consistently encouraged Petrus in what a good many people, both locally and back in New England, considered a delusion and an obsession.

  Theirs was a curious relationship, but questions about Ernesto were soon lost in the greater mystery. On the morning of November 9th, the diary notes that Jose Antonio had not appeared for work—atypical behavior from the records Kristen was examining—and then, apparently that evening, Alice was discovered missing. Petrus wrote, A terrible thing has happened. A single line; no details. I can’t say how odd and disquieting I found his brevity.

  The next day, Ernesto was consulted, and they formed a search party. The diary records the various distances and directions of their searches, which even included a short trip downriver, all without success. A week later, Petrus journeyed to the nearest telegraph post to send the sad news back to Alice’s family.

  The diary gives this account in a terse and straightforward style, as if Petrus had lost his emotional nuance and grasp of colorful detail along with his wife. Indeed, the diaries, and his literary style, never quite recover. There is only one entry that I feel speaks from the heart, and that comes much later, long after the great breakthrough discovery: There are devils here and I have made my bargain with them. God, how I regret this hellish business.

  Coming as it did from a man who had hitherto regarded the jungle, despite all its discomforts and dangers, as the outskirts of paradise, this gave me a bad feeling. By then, however, we were deeply involved with the exhibition. Constrained by the terms of our grant, we were all run off our feet, and when Matt came to me with news of an anomalous skeleton, I only went down for a quick and distracted look.

  I saw four dusty skeletons inside the large wooden crate, three of them curled up as if they had died in their sleep. They had been shipped north with their modest grave goods—archeologists of that era having few scruples about tomb robbing—and I guessed the corpses had been workers in the great city.

  “There’s a photo,” said Matt. I’m sure these three are the same grouping.

  As far as I could determine, he was right, except for the presence of a fourth body, lying supine, with a damaged breastbone and some broken ribs.

  “Jonken or one of the shippers could have made a mistake,” I said.

  Matt shrugged. The crate was numbered, the photo corresponded. To tell the truth, both of us felt there was something not quite right about the skeleton, slightly lighter in color, and both longer and narrower than typical of people who live at altitude. But Amos had been after us for burial material and here it was. Knowing only too well how carelessly the Jonken Bequest had been treated and how downright chaotic some of the storage rooms were, I made a command decision.

  “We’ll take this one out,” I said. “Someone must have stuck it in the box after the fact. I suspect it’s from a whole other collection.”

  If Matt had any reservations, he suppressed them. “This group will be ideal for the exhibition.”

  “Ideal,” I agreed, but just to salve my scholarly conscience, I had him box up the rogue remains and put them on the top shelf in my office. “When I get a minute, I’ll see if I can find where it belongs.”

  Meanwhile, I plowed on with the diaries, without uncovering the secret of Alice Jonken’s disappearance. By the time I’d skimmed the later books, I felt further than ever from understanding Petrus. But there was so much to do that I found little time for pondering my famous relative’s enigmatic personality. Our exhibit was ambitious, and the catalogue, extensive. If Matt and I felt a trifle guilty about our description of the burial exhibit, we put our doubts aside, and, on the whole, the exhibition turned out to be a model of its kind and modestly groundbreaking.

  Before the opening, I did make an attempt to locate some of Alice Jonken’s relatives, but the American branch had been recently extinguished with the death of a elderly second cousin. I saw no need to pursue the matter further. That left me, I believed, the only descendant of any exhibition notable.

  I was wrong. About a month after the opening, and two months after selected material had been put up on the museum’s website, a Dr. Fuentes stopped in at my office. A handsome, dark haired, sharp featured man perhaps a decade my senior, he had courtly, old fashioned manners. He had already visited Dr. Brisco, he said, to congratulate him on “this admirable exhibition” but he especially wanted to meet and congratulate me.

  As I thanked him, I noticed his eyes strayed to the framed picture behind my desk. To tell the truth, Uncle Petrus’s enigmatic personality had given me mixed feelings about the photograph, but it had been so long a part of my life that I felt as uneasy moving it as keeping it in place.

  “The source of the very handsome poster image,” Dr. Fuentes remarked.

  I took a rolled up copy from my desk drawer—the poster had been a popular souvenir. “You might like one,” I said. “The photo enlarged very well, thanks to the graphics department.”

  “Thank you. This is one of the best photographs of my grandfather as a young man.”

  “He was Jose Antonio? I thought there was something familiar about you. You know, this photo determined my profess
ion. In a sense, I grew up with your grandfather and my great-uncle.”

  “Though you never met your Uncle Petrus, I do not think?”

  I shook my head. “But your grandfather. I am so glad he survived. His disappearance…”

  “Disappearance?”

  “From the expedition site. The same day, if I’m reading the diary right, that Alice Jonken vanished.”

  “Might we sit down?” Dr. Fuentes asked.

  “Oh, please. Would you like some coffee or tea?”

  He settled on coffee. The department secretary rustled up some cookies and brought in everything with matching cups on an elegant tray. I could scarcely conceal my surprise, but Connie has a keen sense of occasion and she wasn’t wrong about this one either.

  “I noticed the diaries were included in the exhibition. It was very gratifying to see so many of Jonken’s workers and informants recognized at last.”

  I told Fuentes that he must give Dr. Brisco most of the credit. “His ideas won us the grant.”

  “But the diaries?”

  “That was mostly me—and Kristen Boisvert. She plans to do her dissertation on Jonken and his collaborators. She will be thrilled to meet you.”

  “It will be my pleasure. Our department at the Universitidad is a direct result of my grandfather’s apprenticeship with your great-uncle. And now we two sit here with puzzles and questions, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said—and suddenly understood why he had come. In spite of years of archeological study and the cultivation of scholarly detachment, my heart stuttered. “Why did he leave so suddenly,” I asked, “when he was so gifted and so interested?”