Chapter Eleven #2
Angélica coughed in surprise, stuck between laughing and recoiling. “Dad! No!”
Daisy hooted even harder at Angélica’s scolding.
“Sorry, gatita, but that was one of your mother’s sayings, bless her wonderfully foul mouth.” He chuckled. “I couldn’t resist, especially since we’re amongst family.” He patted Daisy on the arm. “And good friends.”
Daisy’s smile shined brighter. “Thank you for including me, Juan,” she said, blushing slightly.
“Why blue?” Pedro asked after wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes. He apparently hadn’t heard about the giant folk hero north of the U.S. border before.
“The reference to the big blue ox is from a tall tale back home about a lumberjack named Paul Bunyan,” Quint explained.
As the chatter and laughs continued around the table, Angélica glanced outside through the mesh tent flap.
Twilight under the jungle canopy looked about the same as straight-up night thanks to the thick, ever-present shadows.
The soundtrack had changed, however. The tweets and screeches from the birds had subsided, replaced by the incessant chirps and trills and high-pitched buzzing of a myriad of insects.
Some monkeys quieted, while others barked and howled long into the morning hours.
As her mother had often said, if she’d wanted a peaceful night’s sleep while on the job, she would have been an astronaut.
Where in the hell was Dr. Fernel? Angélica tapped her fingers on the table, wondering if he’d managed to get lost on his way back to the mess tent. Maybe she should have sent someone along with him.
Their small crew had been dismissed after supper to do whatever they pleased for the evening, except for Bronko, KuTu, and Raul, who were still doing watch shift rotations throughout the night. While they had more warm bodies now in camp, the dangers lurking under the canopy hadn’t changed.
Quint yawned next to her. “How much longer do you think Fernel will be?”
Once again, he seemed to be tuned into her thoughts. Or maybe he was getting good at reading her body language. He certainly had explored her from head to toe enough to know the lay of the land and had hands-on experience at pushing her buttons.
His gaze narrowed on her. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?” She feigned innocence while batting her eyelashes at him like a well-practiced Xtabay.
“Like my heart is on your radar again.”
Pedro swatted at a fly that had made its way into the tent. “What’s the rush with Dr. Fernel, Parker? You got a hot ox waiting for your big blue Bunyan?”
Quint chuckled, knocking Angélica’s leg with his again under the table. “I’m not sure if he just insulted you or complimented me.”
She held up her fist in Pedro’s direction. “He knows better than to insult me. I’ve made him cry before.”
“You fight dirty, hermana,” Pedro said, referring to their younger days of teasing and roughhousing during digs. “And you cheat.”
Pedro was the closest thing to a brother she had.
Her parents had stopped at just one child due to their archaeology careers taking them far from home too often.
When she was a kid, Angélica had often wished for playmates.
Then one summer, Pedro had come to work at her parents’ dig site, tall, thin, and gangly, overflowing with teenage boy energy.
They’d formed a fast friendship that had grown into a family type of bond.
He’d once told Angélica that him having four other sisters had made it easy for him to take on one more, even if the newest one was always covered with dirt and far bossier than the rest.
She wrinkled her nose at him. “I only cheated a little.”
“You pulled out mucho chest hairs.”
“Not mucho. Like ten. Or maybe twenty. But who was counting?”
“Me. I needed all the hairs to impress hot ladies.” Grinning, he shook his head. “Eres una mujercita malvada.”
“I am not,” she defended herself against his “evil little woman” allegation.
“What does malvada mean?” Quint asked.
“It means ‘sweet and loving,’ ” she lied, which earned a bark of laughter from Pedro.
Quint yawned again. “I don’t know about you all, but I’m ready to whisper sweet nothings to my pillow.” He thumbed toward Angélica. “Not to mention that the boss lady here promised to tell me a bedtime story that didn’t involve ancient kings, mythical gods, or ugly vultures.”
“What about scorpions?” Her father swirled his coffee before taking a drink. “Or snakes?”
“Of course I’ll include snakes,” said Angélica, playfully shoulder bumping Quint. “What’s a good story without a slithering surprise?”
“Evil woman,” Quint said, bumping her back.
“Ha!” Pedro’s grin widened. “Big brains like ours think the same.”
He’d almost nailed that idiom.
Juan looked toward the tent flap. “Maybe I should go find Dr. Fernel. He should have been back by now.”
Angélica hoped he hadn’t gotten lost in the dark somehow in spite of his tent being just two away from where they sat waiting.
“He’s on his way,” Daisy said as if she had the geoarchaeologist on her internal radar. “I’m so excited to see the results of the work Dr. Fernel has done over the last couple of days. It’s hard to visualize what we’re looking at with the vegetation blocking our view.”
Truth be told, Angélica was excited too, especially about the sweat equity it would save. Just thinking about the amount of machete work in store for them without a clear path in sight made her shoulders ache.
“It may not be that much different than what he showed us when he first arrived,” she told Daisy, even though she had her fingers crossed that the topography was clearer.
The odd-shaped lumps on Dr. Fernel’s initial map made it hard to determine if she was looking at actual ruins buried under trees and vegetation or just accumulations of downed trees and cap rock ridges lining partially sunken limestone cavities and crevices.
“I wonder if the drone video will show anything more than leaves,” Quint said.
Pedro frowned. “I have a feeling that flying the helicopter low over the trees might help more, but I don’t like to scare the monkeys.”
“There are no monkeys inside the site,” Quint reminded him.
“Sí. And that gives me cold stomach knots.”
Before Angélica could decipher that mash-up of expressions, the mesh tent flap swayed and Dr. Fernel stumbled inside, his boot toe somehow catching on the flat ground.
He righted himself, tightening his grip on the laptop computer clutched under his arm.
He’d ditched his safari hat, leaving behind a circle imprint on his copper hair, which now had a couple of leaves sticking out of it.
His wire-rimmed glasses sat slightly askew on his thin freckled nose, and a thin bloody scratch ran in a diagonal line down his cheek.
“Thank you all for waiting,” he said, setting his computer on the table while somehow managing to knock over Quint’s empty water cup in the process.
“Are you okay?” Daisy asked. “That scratch looks fresh. We should see if Teodoro can put something on it.”
Dr. Fernel waved her off—there was another bloody scratch on his wrist. From the looks of it, he must have tangled with something covered in leaves and thorns on the short journey to the mess tent. “It can wait until morning.”
Quint grabbed his cup and stood, moving behind Angélica. He indicated to his vacant spot. “Have a seat. I can watch over Dr. García’s head.”
Dr. Fernel took the seat offered, banging his shin on one of the table legs in the process. His face pinched in pain for a moment.
“Oh!” Daisy said, sucking air through her teeth. She half stood, reaching toward him. “Are you—”
He held up his hand to stop her. “I’m fine. All good.”
She sat back down, her forehead still lined.
After blowing out a breath, Dr. Fernel opened his computer and typed in his password. “For starters, let me say that this site appears to be unlike most I’ve analyzed over the past couple of years.”
He sounded more nasal this evening. Maybe the allergies he’d complained about before were getting the best of him.
There were certainly plenty of different molds and decaying flotsam this deep into the trees.
Angélica would check with Teodoro later to see if he had some medication more locally based that might help Dr. Fernel with his sinus struggles.
“Because of the wall?” Pedro asked.
“Well, yes, partly. As Dr. García can tell you,” he paused, glancing toward Juan to show which García he meant. “Walls have been a part of Maya architecture since … well … for as long as we can tell.”
Her dad nodded. “Even El Mirador had a large wall along the northern, eastern, and southern portions of the city.”
“Where is El Mirador again?” Quint asked. “To the north or south of us?”
“It’s a Pre-Classic site to the south of us,” Daisy said, “where many scholars theorize the ancestors of Calakmul once lived.”
Pedro leaned forward to look around Juan at Daisy. “Was the wall as tall as the one here?”
“In some areas,” Juan answered for her. “But the wall here at Site 5 is definitely unique in the height on the inside.”
“Here we are,” Dr. Fernel said, turning the computer toward Angélica. “What do you see first?”
The first thing she saw was that he was sweating—a lot. As if he’d sprinted a mile before coming inside. The poor guy seemed to be having a hell of a time acclimating.
She leaned closer to the screen, resting her chin on her hand as she stared at the updated LIDAR imagery for several seconds.
From an overhead view, the previous blobs appeared more defined.
Several of what they’d thought might be buildings along each wall now had more squared corners.
She focused on the wall, following the line around the screen.
“The wall completely surrounds the site,” she said, glancing across at her father. “Reminds me of some of the defensive measures we’ve seen at other sites.”
If this were a sacred site as her mom had thought, maybe the locals had felt the need to defend it from outsiders.