Chapter Thirteen
“O Juliet, Juliet, wherefore art thou Juliet?”
At the sound of Quint’s voice, Angélica looked up from her notes. Notes that were sketchy at best. More like scribbles smudged by multiple eraser marks with several crossed-out sections on paper dotted by damp spots from drops of sweat.
“I’m in here, Romeo,” she called out, trying to be heard over the nightly rumbles and screeches from the jungle surrounding the field camp.
Ziiiiippp.
The canvas door flapped open. Quint stepped inside the communications tent with a towel draped over his shoulder. His hair was wet and spiky. Beneath his unbuttoned shirt, his chest glistened in the lamplight. Her gaze dipped southward.
“You forgot your pants,” she said, admiring his long muscled legs below his black boxer briefs. The hiking boots added a grin-coaxing final touch to his post-shower ensemble.
“It’s too hot for pants.” He turned and zipped the flap closed behind him.
He was right. The humidity tonight weighed extra heavy thanks to a light downpour before suppertime.
Instead of cooling off the land, the rain had the same effect as dumping water on steaming sauna rocks.
Great for the pores, but tough on paper and patience, both of which she was short at this site.
Hell, just sitting still had Angélica overheating. The small battery-operated fan Pedro had offered to try to keep her from dripping onto her pages while she worked felt more like a steady blast of hot breath on her face.
Working inside a somewhat sealed-up tent filled with portable solar-powered batteries, a couple of laptops, two satellite phones, and other electronics wasn’t helping matters.
The machines added even more heat to the sweltering night, fueling wishful daydreams about her climate-controlled lab back at INAH’s office in Cancun.
She was supposed to be coming up with educated observations and brilliant theories concerning today’s finds, dammit.
If only she could find a freezer and stick her head inside of it for a few minutes to stop her brain from liquefying any further.
“Jesus, it’s hotter than Hell’s armpit in here,” Quint said, hanging his towel on one of the tent pole hooks. “You should probably take off your pants, too.”
“I need them to soak up the sweat running down my back so I don’t create a puddle and short out the camp batteries.”
“Ohh, how swexy,” he said with a grin. “Get it? Sweaty and sexy? I need to tell your dad that word. Maybe he’ll give me another ten points in the game you say you’re not playing, yet I think under that tough boss lady exterior you are still in the game because you hate to lose.”
“I loathe losing.” Which was why she wanted to step outside at the moment and howl along with the damned monkeys. Instead, she tossed her pencil onto the table and pushed her notebook away in disgust.
“What’s wrong, Juliet?” Quint took the stool next to her, leaning back against the worktable, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “You want me to take your mind off the temperature with a sonnet about how pretty you’d look while making snow angels?”
“God, what I wouldn’t do for a dip in a cold pool.”
“I’d suggest we go skinny dipping in the aguada, but I prefer to keep my fishing rod and tackle nibble-free.”
She smirked. “Do you now?”
He winked at her. “Well, I make exceptions for beautiful mermaids and one particular sexy archaeologist.”
She sighed. “Now I’ll have to kill any mermaids I come across. I wonder if their tails taste like mahi-mahi. Hey, doesn’t drinking mermaid blood bring good luck?”
“Or was it a longer life?”
“I’d rather have the luck. Maybe then I could petition Lady Luck for a bigger brain so I could make sense of all this shit.”
His forehead pinched. “By ‘shit,’ do you mean the artifacts found at the site today, or that charcoal version of a Jackson Pollock abstract painting sitting in front of you?”
She pointed toward the curled-edged paper in front of her.
It was a stone rubbing of one of the blocks lining the stairwell next to Structure II.
Unfortunately, due to limited time because of the incoming storm, Esteban hadn’t been able to give the attention to detail he usually did when it came to charcoal rubbings.
Still, she’d hoped the papers, along with the photos Quint had taken of the conch-shell trumpets, would give her some ideas as to the purpose of this place.
Maybe even a hint of an answer to whether it was indeed a religious site or rather a prison, a notion that several of her crew were leaning toward—including the guy sitting next to her.
Quint picked up the charcoal rubbing, staring down at it for several seconds.
“Maybe if you cross your eyes and turn it sideways …” He did just that, making her smile.
“Nope, that doesn’t work. Am I looking at it upside down?
” He turned the paper again, closing one eye.
“Oh, I see it now. It’s an alligator with an iguana on its back floating in an aguada. ”
She chuckled, taking the paper from him to look at it again. Same as him, she closed one eye. “Yep, now I see it, too. I should have consulted the camp’s mermaid-loving photojournalist sooner.”
“Damned right, boss lady. You can pay me for my expertise with kisses. Lots of them. I’m easy.”
“Yes, you are, and I really like that about you.” She dropped the paper back on the table. “Now, if you could just read what the glyphs say on those conch-shell trumpets, we can call it a night and maybe sneak some of those kisses in while my dad’s snoring away.”
“I would if I could, hot stuff.” He fanned himself. “What glyphs have you been able to decipher so far?”
“Only one.”
His brow lined. “Seriously?”
She nodded. “And I’m not even sure about that one.”
“Why not?”
“Remember how I told you there are currently over 800 known glyphs in the Mayan language that can represent either syllables or whole words?”
“Yeah, and they’re usually written in paired columns from left to right.”
“Correct-a-mundo.” She tapped on her laptop’s spacebar to bring it back to life, and then shifted the computer so Quint could see the screen, careful to keep it plugged in and charging.
“What a great photo,” he said, staring at the picture of the shell he’d taken in what her father had decided to call “Structure III” on Fernel’s LIDAR map after letting it be known that he wasn’t happy with the risks they’d taken to get to the shells.
“Whoever was behind the camera knew what he was doing.”
She chuckled. “I’m quite partial to his handiwork.”
“Oh yeah? Tell me more.”
“I’d rather show you, Romeo.”
He fanned himself with both hands. “If you keep looking at me with those flirty peepers, pretty lady, I just might melt.” He nodded toward the screen. “Why can’t you decipher those glyphs? They look like the others I’ve seen around dig sites and on ancient vessels in museums.”
“You’re right, they do look like them, but after searching through my notes, my mom’s notes, and a few of INAH’s private sites online, I can’t find any matching glyphs.”
“So, it’s the equivalent of me looking at long Russian words with the weird symbols mixed in them.”
“Yep.” She enlarged the image and pointed at a glyph near the mouth part of the conch shell. “You see that?”
He leaned closer to the screen. “The one that looks like a big-nosed guy with a snake for an ear and feathers sticking out of his eye?”
“Yeah, that one. It looks sort of like a head glyph for a vulture, but with the round eye, it also reminds me of several owl glyphs I’ve seen.
” She sat back, shaking her head. “But that’s the only one I can make out.
All of these others …” She pointed at the rest in the column going down the length of the shell.
“They don’t look familiar.” She crossed her arms and rested them on the table.
“My mom was so much better at reading glyphs than me. Maybe if we got Daisy in here and had her down some of Teodoro’s ceremonial wine, she could channel my mother’s ghost and ask her to read these for us? ”
Quint raised one eyebrow. “Wow, that’s out there for you.”
She scoffed. “I’m kidding.”
His other eyebrow joined the first. “Are you, though?”
She stared into his hazel eyes for a couple of blinks and then shrugged. “I’m running out of options … and time. I need some checkmarks under the ‘win’ column soon. Something to give INAH so they don’t pull the plug on us.”
“I thought allowing Fernel to come here gave you some financial cushioning.”
“It did, but INAH likes results—as in artifacts to put under glass in a museum.”
“What about the weapons from the caches?” he asked.
“Those are all good and fun on the surface level, but without a story behind them explaining why they might be at Site 5, we’ll lose interest in this place quickly.
A loss of funding will follow.” She wiped away a trickle of sweat running down her cheek.
“That in turn becomes a strike against me. Too many strikes and INAH will find another archaeologist to scout for future tourism sites.”
She’d put in a lot of sweating and bruising and digging to land this job. The idea of going back to teaching archaeology at colleges in between basically begging for grant money to cover dig site costs made her stomach turn.
“If only it wasn’t so damned hot,” she muttered.
“Hey, that’s usually my line.” Quint pointed at the image on the screen. “Why would none of these glyphs be recognizable to you?”
She huffed. “Because I’m shit at reading them.”
He caught her hand and pulled her around to face him. “Sweetheart, stop beating yourself up and use that big brain of yours.”
“Quint,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t just …”
He leaned closer and framed her face in his palms. His hazel eyes bored into hers. “Angélica, you may not be able to read glyphs as well as your mom, but you are smart and wily in ways she wasn’t. Now stop focusing on what she could do that you can’t and start thinking outside of the box.”