Chapter One #2
Unfortunately, it was hard to tell a ridge from a slope in this thick jungle. The damned trees kept standing in the way, reminding her of that idiom Can’t see the forest for the trees.
“I’m with Juan,” Quint said in between slashes. “This doesn’t look very path-like to me.”
“That’s another point for your loverboy,” Juan declared.
She squinted at her dad over the map. “You can’t give points for simply agreeing with you.”
“I made up the rules, gatita. I give the points as I please.”
“I’m really starting to like this game.” Quint swung again. “What do I get if I win?”
“I’ll leave that up to the loser,” her father said.
“Well, boss lady, what will it be?”
“I’m not going to lose, Parker.”
“But if you do …” he pressed, pausing to wipe the sweat from his forehead with his shirt.
“I’ll give you a night you won’t forget.” Angélica stared at the map and then focused up toward the ridge they were trekking along.
Quint howled, which prompted a cacophony of whinnies from the spider monkeys hanging around up in the peanut gallery. “That’s my kind of prize,” he said when the noisy jungle paused to take a breath.
“I don’t know about that, son,” her father said. “Look at the way her forehead is pinched, especially above the bridge of her nose. I’ve seen that look before on her. She could be talking about filling your hammock with biting ants while you sleep.” He brushed off his pant leg again.
“She wouldn’t do that to the man who stole her heart.”
Angélica spared the charming thief a squint. “She might, especially if he doesn’t let her win this silly game.”
He laughed and returned to hacking his way forward.
“According to the map, we’re still on track,” she decided aloud. “Mostly, anyway … I think.”
“I’m taking away a point for the ‘mostly’ part,” Juan said.
Quint paused. “Jesus, would you look at the spines on this young ceiba tree.”
“Way to go, Parker. You remembered the name of the tree.” Angélica shot a glare at her dad. “Don’t you dare give him a point for that.”
“I also remember that the ceiba tree is thought of as the sacred ‘first tree,’ which the ancient Maya believed stood at the center of the Earth.” Quint wiped the sweat from his brow. “And the bigger, older ceiba trees supposedly connect this world to the spirit world.”
Her heart warmed at Quint’s efforts to learn about the culture she’d spent most of her life studying.
“See, Dad, I told you there was more to Parker than just big looks and good muscles.”
Quint chuckled at her play on words. “What can I say, I have a very fine teacher.”
“You’re an apt pupil, that’s for sure,” Juan said. “But I wouldn’t touch it if I were you.”
“You mean the pretty teacher or the culturally significant tree?”
Juan took the map back from Angélica. “Well, one of them is pokey and dangerous to handle; and the other is believed to keep the Earth steady within the chaotic energy of the universe.”
Quint swatted at the air. “Duly noted.” He tapped his machete against Angélica’s again. “Do you want to keep up this game of find the missing Maya site, Dr. García, or give up and practice our sword fighting?”
She bumped his machete aside. “The site isn’t ‘missing.’ It’s just hard to find, thanks to the jungle blanketing everything.”
“What we need, boss lady, is about ten more of you and your machete.” Quint frowned at the bramble in their way.
“I don’t think so, son,” her father said, stretching his neck one way and then the other as he stared down at the map. “Trust me, one gatita is all we can handle. As I said before, she’s too much like her mother for her own good.”
“Hey, I resemble that remark,” she said.
Quint slashed through another blockage of fronds and thorn-covered shrubbery. “I thought you said the small work crew you hired already cut a path to the camp for us.”
She took back the map in spite of her father’s initial reluctance to let it go. “They did.”
But with all the lush greenery, it was hard to see more than a few feet around them. She turned the map sideways and then back upright, checking her compass again. She could swear they were on the same trek as the three-man crew that had been hired to slash their way into the site first.
Thud! Quint grunted when his machete landed on a thick branch. “Christ,” he muttered, taking a moment to shake the tension out of his right hand. “Apparently, their idea of a path and mine are very different.”
She blew a winged termite off the map. “Yeah, this jungle doesn’t waste time at camouflaging any evidence of intrusion.”
Her father stepped up next to her, reaching for the map again. “There’s no path here, gatita. You sure we’re not lost?”
She growled under her breath, but let him take the map. “We’re close to the path.” She pointed out a palm leaf that appeared to have been slashed somewhat recently. “There’s the evidence.”
“That’s old.” Her dad focused on the map again.
She glanced around, shrugging. “Well, we could be just slightly to the side of it.”
Quint glanced back at her. “Why couldn’t we helicopter in this time?”
“There wasn’t a clearing close enough to the site.” Juan looked from the map to the ridge and back. “Just outside of Calakmul was as close as we could get.”
“Last time, we had enough area free of flora for a helicopter to land,” she explained to Quint.
“It had been cleared years ago, back before Marianne flew in.” Juan turned the map sideways and then peered up to his left and then right. “The landing pad had been kept that way by the biosphere rangers in between archaeology team visits.”
Angélica rubbed her neck and then rolled her right shoulder a few times. Swinging a machete was for a younger woman who spent more time at the gym than at her desk analyzing dig site finds. “Where we’re going this time has barely been touched in centuries.”
Slash. Slash. Thud. Parker grunted. Slash. “Then how did your mom know about it?” Slash.
“Marianne kept extensive notes.” Juan glanced at Angélica, his smile melancholy.
She squeezed his shoulder.
“I can’t tell you how many times we’d be at a university event or a fancy dinner with grant donors,” he continued, “and Marianne would have her little notebook out making chicken scratches on the pages. When she wasn’t busy interrogating other Mesoamerican and pre-Columbian archaeologists, she’d do her best to eavesdrop on discussions, dragging me along so she could pretend to have a conversation with me. ”
Angélica’s chest twinged at the memories her father’s words brought to the surface.
Many evenings after Angélica would return home from grade school—when they were in Tucson and not living in a tent at a Maya site—she would join her mom in her office.
While Marianne was busy paging through her research books and scribbling notes, Angélica would play with some of her mother’s dig site tools or peruse the maps lying about the room.
Copies of the notebooks Marianne had been writing in during those happy moments were now safely hidden away back at Angélica’s house outside of Cancun.
After what she’d learned about the reason behind her mother’s death at the last site, she was even more cautious with what Marianne had theorized and written down.
As an extra measure of safety, Angélica had made additional copies of the original notebooks.
She’d tucked away one set in a safe deposit box.
There was no way she was taking any more chances of losing her mother’s work.
Part of another set was stored in a waterproof envelope inside the pack strapped on her back.
“As soon as we’d made it back home from one of those tedious events,” her father’s voice cut through her thoughts, “Marianne would pull out one of her notebooks, write down any new theories she’d concocted from the gleaned information, and then pore over her maps, adding more scribbles in the margins. ”
Angélica had brought along a copy of her mother’s marked-up map of this particular site, too, as well as a necklace laced with not only a protection charm made of glass and silver that Quint had given her, but also a locket that had belonged to her mom.
She touched the little gold heart nestled at her sternum inside her camp shirt. The locket still held the picture of a much younger version of herself from a time when she wasn’t so jaded and distrustful thanks to a failed marriage to a well-practiced liar.
For years, she’d thought her mother’s locket had been boxed up with the rest of her stuff back home in Tucson.
But then Daisy Walker, a field worker at Angélica’s last work site—the very dig site where Marianne had died—stumbled across it.
Shortly after Daisy found the locket, Angélica had experienced what she initially thought was a hallucination at a ceremony being held to ward off trouble.
In reality, it was more like a spiritual vision.
Or maybe it was more of a foretelling. Anyway, Marianne had appeared and told Angélica to keep the locket close to her, not really giving any sort of explanation why.
Quint also had seen Marianne that fateful night during his own elixir-inspired “vision.” His theory on the locket was that it somehow tied Angélica to her mom’s ghost, like an ectoplasmic magnet.
He also believed Marianne was haunting Daisy during the last dig, or maybe he’d said periodically possessing her.
Whatever the case, even in the light of day when Angélica wondered if her mom’s ghost somehow had been just a figment of both of their imaginations, she kept the locket close in hopes that Marianne was near.
“Mom wanted to know everything she could about the Maya,” Angélica told Quint, letting go of the locket to swat at a fly buzzing her ear.
“I can’t tell you how many bedtime stories she told me about the people who used to live throughout the Yucatán—the kings and nobles, the wise shamans, and the gods with their many myths.
These beings were alive in her mind, even though they were long dead. ”