Mystery in Mayan Mexico

by Marcia Wells

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  Disclaimer

  Dead Meat . . . Again

  Mr. Q

  Luck

  Lockdown

  Mi Casa, Su Casa

  Tossed

  Chaac

  Be On Guard

  Big Break

  Paco El Gato

  El Capitán

  Operation Cousin Juan

  Copy Cat

  Las Plumas

  Nest

  Countdown

  Nothing But Net

  Benched

  Letters

  Steps

  Crouching Ninjas, Hidden Vomit

  Adiós

  Jonah’s Top Five Mayan Gods*

  Acknowledgments

  Sample Chapter from EDDIE RED UNDERCOVER: MYSTERY ON MUSEUM MILE

  Buy the Book

  More Eddie Red

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2015 by Marcia Wells

  Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Marcos Calo

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Wells, Marcia.

  Mystery in Mayan Mexico / by Marcia Wells ; illustrated by Marcos Calo.

  p. cm.—(Eddie Red undercover)

  Summary: “On vacation in Mexico, Eddie Red and his best friend Jonah must once again rely on Eddie’s talent for drawing and his photographic memory to uncover clues to catch a crook when Eddie’s father is falsely accused of a crime.”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-544-30206-8

  [1. Drawing—Fiction. 2. Memory—Fiction. 3. Art thefts—Fiction. 4. Ghosts—Fiction. 5. Mayas—Antiquities—Fiction. 6. Indians of Mexico—Fiction. 7. Mexico—Fiction. 8. Mystery and detective stories.]

  I. Calo, Marcos, illustrator. II. Title.

  PZ7.W4663Mxm 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014016094

  eISBN 978-0-544-55692-8

  v1.0415

  To Riley and Allison,

  for teaching me the meaning of the word silly

  The town and island depicted in this book are fictitious.

  The Mayan gods and ancient treasure are not.

  Dead Meat . . . Again

  I’m back.

  Or should I say, He vuelto. Because I’m in Mexico. In prison. Next to a guy named Raúl with weird body hair and a bad habit of picking his teeth with a large knife.

  Okay the Raúl part’s a lie. But I am in a Mexican jail, or at least in a small holding cell in the police station. The cops handcuffed me and fingerprinted me, and now I’m waiting behind bars to call my parents. That spells J-A-I-L where I come from.

  And I do have a cellmate. Jonah “El Frijol” Schwartz (frijol means “bean,” as in “Mexican jumping bean,” as in “Jonah is a complete spaz”). He hit his head kind of hard and is currently asleep on a bench, snoring with a honk-honk-weee sound. A few minutes ago I shook him to make sure he wasn’t slipping into a coma—and to get him to cool it with the honk-honk-weee thing. He blinked at me and muttered something, so I guess he’s all right.

  Don’t get me wrong. Jonah’s my best friend, and of course I care if he’s hurt. But if you had just spent the past two weeks in Mexico with El Frijol, you’d be glad he’s unconscious too.

  I hear footsteps. A guard approaches, the same stocky older man who clomps by every ten minutes or so, refusing to acknowledge my existence. “¿Teléfono?” I ask for the hundredth time. He whistles a zippy tune and looks the other way.

  I have to call my parents. It’s almost midnight, and they must be seriously freaking out. I stand up to get the guard’s attention, and wince. Cuts cover every inch of my body. My clothes are stained with blood—mine and Jonah’s—along with a fair amount of Jonah’s barf. I smell awesome.

  “Oye, muchacho. Teléfono,” another guard grunts in a thick accent. He’s wearing a blue starched shirt with a star on each shoulder, and I think I heard the other guard call him Capitán, so I’m pretty sure he’s the man in charge. I’m also pretty sure he’s the guy who cuffed me back on top of the Mayan pyramid, but everything was a little blurry with the driving rain and wind in my eyes. It’s a miracle I didn’t lose my glasses.

  He slides the bars open, the metal rattling loudly in its frame. Jonah groans, rolls over, and bumps his forehead against the cement wall. The snoring starts up again.

  I follow the captain over to his desk, doing my best not to limp or get water on the floor and failing on both counts. He scowls at the puddle I leave behind. The Darth Vader costume I’m wearing—don’t ask—is dripping water like crazy.

  “¿Hotel?” he says.

  “El Hotel Cisneros,” I reply.

  He nods and dials, then hands me the phone.

  In shaky Spanish, I tell the receptionist my parents’ room number, then wait as the phone rings. And rings. My pulse pounds in my ears. What if they don’t answer? What if they’re out looking for us in this terrible hurricane? If anything happens to them, it will be all my fault.

  “Hello? Er . . . ¿Hola?” my father’s deep voice answers.

  “Hi, Dad.” I try to sound upbeat, but I’m barely holding it together because every inch of my body is throbbing and he’s going to kill me and I just want to go home.

  There’s a strange static sound, followed by muffled words and high-pitched noises like a small engine trying to turn over. I brace myself.

  “Edmund?” my mom says. “Are you there? Are you okay?”

  “Hi, Mom. I’m fine. I—”

  “Where are you?” she demands. “Is Jonah with you? He’d better be.”

  I swallow hard. “Yeah, he’s here. We’re with the police. As their guests. Kind of.”

  “The WHAT?!”

  I cringe and hold the phone away from my ear. I’m sure everyone on the island can hear her shriek. “We’re coming to get you,” she growls. “We’ll catch a cab and be there in ten minutes.”

  “Uh . . . no.” Here comes the bad part. “We’re on the island. You know, La Isla del Niño?” The Island of the Boy, but they really should rename it the Island of the Dead Boy, at least in my case. “So you need to take a boat.” I pick at the cast on my wrist, the wet plaster leaving chunks of white mush on the floor. Should I mention that I mangled the cast and need a new one?

  Silence.

  “Mom?” Oh, no, she’s keeled over in shock. Can moms have heart attacks at age forty-two? “Mom, are you there? We did it. We solved the case, and . . .” My voice dies in my throat. I should have learned my lesson back in New York. Parents do not like it when you call them from jail, even if you caught the bad guy.

  “We’ll be there as soon as we can.” Her tone could melt steel. I can practically smell the anger through the airwaves. Sort of a cross between burnt rubber and sulfur. “You’re in a lot of trouble,” she adds.

  “I know,” I whisper. “See you soon.” With a sigh, I hang up.

  “¿La mamá?” the captain asks.

  “Sí,” I reply. “La mamá.” La mamá is very mad-o. Edmund is dead meat-o. Not that I blame her for being upset. This is the second time in two months I’ve landed myself in police custody. Just wait until she sees that I’m covered in blood. Again.

  I try to stand, but the captain motions for me to stay put while he pulls out a few first-aid supplies, along with a Spanish-English dictionary. After putting on his reading g
lasses and flipping through the pages, he points to my wrist and says, “Break?”

  I nod. “Fractured,” I mumble. “Long story.”

  “Cuidado,” he replies. “We be . . . careful.” With gentle fingers, he rolls up the black polyester sleeves of the Darth costume to examine the various scrapes and cuts I have on my arm. He dumps a clear liquid on my wounds.

  “Ow!” I yelp as it bubbles and burns. The sharp smell of hydrogen peroxide slices the air. How about some nice soothing antibiotic cream? I want to say.

  When he tries to apply more of the liquid acid to my skin, I shake my head politely and pull my arm away. I don’t care if my cuts get infected. That’s the least of my worries at the moment.

  He shrugs and stands up, gesturing for me to return to the cell where El Frijol is now crumpled in a heap on the concrete floor. The captain hurries past me and kneels beside Jonah. He lifts Jonah’s eyelids and shines a penlight in his pupils. “Okay,” he says after a few seconds. I guess that ends the thorough medical examination.

  “Okay,” I agree, for lack of something else to say. I want to ask him if the evil Juan Guzmán is in jail or in the hospital, and if our friend Julia got the message that we’re safe, and if the gold we found truly was the stolen bank treasure. But I can’t. There’s no way we can get through that conversation without a translator. So instead I step over Jonah’s body and head for the now-empty bench. The cell door clanks shut behind me.

  I lie down on the hard wooden surface. It’s actually pretty comfortable. I squint at the bright fluorescent lights flickering overhead. I need to stay awake. I need to formulate a plan for surviving my parents’ wrath. I need to review every single detail of the past two weeks in my photographic memory, because there will be a lot of police reports to fill out tomorrow.

  It’s going to be a long night.

  Chapter 1

  Mr. Q

  TWO WEEKS AGO

  Arrival in San Pablo del Niño, Mexico

  “Ancient treasure,” Jonah says, staring at a glass display case in the middle of the hotel lobby. Inside the case rests a green jade mask inlaid with pieces of gold, c. 450 B.C. stamped on a plaque below it. “This place is beyond awesome,” he adds in a breathless voice.

  We just arrived after a long flight from New York. Jonah’s right. This hotel is über-awesome. Hot July sun spills in through the tall windows, the smells of pineapple and flowers float in the air, and an enormous pool complex shimmers just beyond the main doors, complete with water slides and a lazy river. It’s better than the pictures in the brochure. It’s . . . paradise.

  I smile, my first real smile in weeks. I’ve been grounded this summer, stuck inside my apartment in New York City. No TV, no Internet, no phone calls, no Jonah. Just hours of quiet time to “contemplate and reflect on my poor decisions.” Namely, ones that involved me, the police, a group of bad guys known as the Picasso Gang, and an alleyway shootout. And while I do this “reflecting,” I also need to prove that I’m responsible and trustworthy, so I clean and dust every surface in the apartment at least once a day. Oh, and I scrub toilets.

  It’s as fun as it sounds.

  But today I am a free man. Free for the next two weeks.

  Still smiling, I look around the lobby at the tourists. There’s an interesting mix of people. We’ve only been here five minutes and already I’ve heard Russian, German, Italian, and Spanish. Click. I take pictures of their faces in my photographic memory, good faces to draw when I’m bored and trapped at home after this trip is over. Click. A teenage girl with pink hair and six-inch silver hoop earrings. Click. A sunburned man in a Red Sox cap, jabbering on his cell phone in Russian.

  “Do you think it’s real gold?” Jonah whispers. He’s still staring at the display case, keeping his voice low, as if he’s worried the mask is going to come to life if he speaks too loudly. The mask is sort of creepy with its sneering mouth and two empty eyeholes.

  “Probably,” I say. I shift to the left to get a closer look, when a man with a mustache and an ugly red Hawaiian shirt bumps into me. He’s mesmerized by the display, pressing his nose to the glass and leaving streaks, practically shoving me aside with his elbow to get a better view. And I thought New York had pushy tourists.

  Squawk! A birdcall echoes across the lobby. Two exotic blue birds are perched in a huge silver cage in the corner. One is cleaning its iridescent feathers with a curved yellow beak, while the other flaps its wings and complains.

  “Let’s go get changed.” I pull Jonah toward the front desk, where my parents are checking us in. I’m hot and sticky from traveling and need to swim immediately.

  “You’re in room 407,” Mom says when I come up beside her. She holds out two keycards. “We’re in room 413. I wanted adjoining rooms, but they insist there are none available. You both better be on your best behavior.” She glares at us like we’ve already set a wastebasket on fire (which happened once in fourth grade and NEVER again). “I know you’re independent city kids, but you’re only eleven, and—”

  “I’m twelve, Mrs. L,” Jonah says while looping an arm around my neck and pulling me in for a noogie. “I’ll handle this young whippersnapper.”

  I shove him off and hiss, “Not helping our case, Jonah.”

  Mom presses her lips into a tight line. Jonah was definitely not her first choice for this trip. Five days ago she got a call from her boss, Larry, asking her to attend a real estate convention in Mexico. Larry was supposed to come with his family, but an emergency came up. So he asked Mom to take his place and gave her a free trip for four to reward her for all her hard work. We’re only a family of three and wasting money makes Mom break out in a nervous rash, so she called everyone in her address book to fill the fourth spot, from my uncle Jay to the secretary in her office to our batty old neighbor Rita, who smells like cabbage. Rita, Mom? But it was the same answer every time: no one could leave on such short notice. No one but Jonah, that is.

  “They’ll be fine,” Dad reassures her while shooting me a look. His mustache gives a Don’t make me regret this twitch.

  “Great, see you at dinner,” I say as I snatch the keycards from her, grab my suitcase, and shove Jonah along. A quick elevator ride up, a jog down a hallway, and we’re in.

  The room is small but nice—two beds, a TV built into a chest of drawers, and a round table with two chairs tucked in the corner, all the same white wood decorated with floral patterns as in the lobby. I yank back the curtains to reveal a postcard-perfect view of a white beach and rolling ocean waves. There’s a green island off in the distance.

  Grinning, Jonah and I high-five. “I call top drawer,” I say. I open my suitcase, dump the contents into the drawer, fish out my bathing suit, and slam the drawer shut. I scurry into the small bathroom to change, then grab my goggles and flippers. “Ready?”

  “No. Give me five minutes.” Jonah has opened his suitcase and removed two huge Ziplocs filled with bottles and tubes. I sigh and sit down on the bed. We’re going to be here at least a half hour.

  “Just so you know,” he says, “I will be posing as a Man of Culture on this trip.” He air-quotes the words. “There are mysteries everywhere in Mexico, and we’re going to solve one. Take a look at this.” He grabs his enormous backpack off the floor and drops it onto my lap.

  I gasp as two hundred pounds of bricks land on my thighs. “What do you have in here? You’re going to get scoliosis lugging this much weight around.” I sound like my grandmother. But I don’t want a lecture on whatever crazy plans he has right now. I want to go dive for stuff with my new snorkeling gear.

  “Keep yourself occupied,” he says. “You need to study up.”

  Study on vacation? I open the zipper and peek inside. Cautiously. You never know what you’re going to get with Jonah Schwartz. I expect to pull out some kind of weird Man of Culture disguise, complete with a fedora, a bushy mustache, and maybe some wire-rimmed glasses, but instead all I find are hardcover books from the library. Modern ghost mysteries, a hist
ory book called The Aztecs and Mayans: Ancient Civilizations of Mexico, and an especially enormous volume entitled The Aztec Gods and You: A Practical Application.

  “Planning some human sacrifices?” I ask. That is what the Aztecs are famous for, after all.

  “Page forty-one,” he says over his shoulder as he marches into the bathroom with an armload of toiletries. “Meet Quetzalcoatl, the god who’s going to help us.”

  I crack open the book. I might as well do something useful, since Jonah won’t leave until everything is in its place, each bottle and brush sitting exactly two inches from the edge of the shelf. Obsessive-compulsive disorder—it’s part of his charm.

  Page forty-one has a cool picture of a fanged creature wearing feathers and holding a twisting snake, the words Quetzalcoatl: Aztec God of Intelligence at the bottom of the page.

  I scratch my arm. A hot arm in desperate need of refreshing pool water. “Quetzal . . . how do you say this again?”

  He comes back into the room and starts to carefully fold his clothes and place them in the bottom drawer of the dresser. “I think it’s Ket-sal-co-at-el. I’m calling him Mr. Q for short. He’s going to help us on our quest.”

  “And what quest is that?” I ask, warily eyeballing the picture of the snake.

  Jonah never stops moving. He pulls out clothes and books and more clothes, arranges them in their proper spots, then pulls out more. Apparently he can fit a freaky amount of stuff in his suitcase. “I figure we solved a major police case back in New York,” he says. “So why not tackle Mexico? There are tons of unsolved crimes down here. They need our expertise.”

  He’s serious. He actually thinks we’re going to throw ourselves into another police investigation. “No way.” I slam the Aztec book shut. “I’m retired.”

  He folds his arms across his chest. “Look, you got to be Eddie Red, and all I got was a stupid sinus infection. I want in on the next adventure. All the way this time.”