Look What the Wind Blew In (34 page)

* * *

“Do you mind if I take a few photos in here?” Quint asked Juan as he followed him through a maze of corridors and shoulder-scraping passageways in the Dawn Temple.

After two weeks, he should be acclimated to the heat by now, but oh no, his blood was being stubborn about thinning. He swiped away a stream of sweat dripping from his chin.

“Not at all,” Juan said, “But you might want to wait until we reach the sub chamber. There’s some rubble up ahead from the ceiling falling apart that’s dangerous if you aren’t paying attention to where you’re walking.”

Quint groaned. “Great. I love walking through tunnels where the roof is partly on the floor. Makes a guy feel all warm and fuzzy inside.”

Juan chuckled and continued forward. Several minutes later, he stooped under a very crooked beam. “Ah, here we are,” Juan whispered in the gloom.

Quint tiptoed in after him, frowning when he saw the thirty-degree slant of the rock slab making up most of the chamber’s ceiling. “Are you sure it’s safe to bring visitors into this room?”

“Well, I wouldn’t bet my retirement account on it, but sure, it’s mostly safe.” Juan turned on his lantern and tossed the flashlight he’d been using to Quint. “The ceiling doesn’t move unless you hit the wall with something hard.” He picked up a bat-sized piece of timber. “Something like this.”

Juan swung the piece of wood at the wall.

“No!” Quint reached for the mad man.

Stopping the makeshift bat just short of the wall, Juan looked back at Quint, his eyes crinkled with laughter. “Gotcha.” He dropped the wood and pulled a tape measure out of his front pants pocket.

Quint stumbled backward into the wall, holding his stampeding heart. “Pedro is right. You’re insane.”

“And you’re gullible. But not as gullible as Pedro. He won’t even come in this temple with me anymore.”

He couldn’t blame Pedro. Quint was surprised he hadn’t pissed himself when Juan had swung.

“This room is relatively stable considering the looks of it,” Juan mumbled around the pencil in his mouth. “It hasn’t shifted since I got to this dig site.”

Taking in the funhouse-like look of the room, Quint didn’t feel comforted even a little by Juan’s words.

“Go ahead and take some pictures.” Juan pulled his glasses from his pocket. “If you can capture the tilt of the walls and ceiling, this place will look great in the magazine.”

Quint moved silently around the room, snapping shots of the walls and ceiling, cracks and fallen rocks, and Juan as he took his measurements. The slide of the tape measure, the whispering of numbers, and the digital snapshot click were the only sounds as the two of them worked.

Shining the flashlight on a lower section of the wall furthest from the door, Quint moved closer and tried to make out the figures he could see on the pitted and worn fresco. He aimed his camera and snapped a picture, then paused as something below one of the figures caught his eye. He directed the beam on the picture, recognizing it with an inward gasp.

“Hey, would you look at this,” he said, touching it.

He heard footfalls behind him. “What?”

“This.” Quint pointed at the image. “It’s a head variant for the Sun god.”

Juan patted him on the shoulder. “Yes,
Kinich Ahau
, the Sun god—very good. Where did you learn that?”

“Angélica told me when I showed her the drawing from the back of Dr. Hughes’ journal. This head variant is on the back page.”

“Oh, that’s right. I’d forgotten about that.” Juan sounded surprised.

Quint looked at the other images surrounding it, not recognizing any of them. “Interesting that it’s here,” he said more to himself than Juan as he walked away.

“Not really.”

Quint turned, watching as Juan measured the width of the entryway. “It’s not?”

“No. You can find some type of representation of the Sun god in several chambers in this temple. Same with
Kan ek’
, Venus as a morning star.”

“Are they ever together?”

Juan nodded and shoved his pencil behind his ear. “Of course. Together they often signify
dawn
, as in sunrise. That’s why I named this place the Dawn Temple.”

Quint stared blankly at the head variant. Was Dr. Hughes referring to this temple with that drawing? Or was there something more to it? Was he giving a clue of some sort, or did he just like to doodle head variants?

He opened his mouth to ask Juan if he knew why Dr. Hughes would have drawn those head variants in his journal but stopped before uttering a word. He needed to think about this for a while. He wasn’t sure if actually questioning Juan or Angélica about it was wise.

“If you’re finished with your pictures, we can head down to the next chamber.” Juan said, bringing Quint back to the present.

“Yeah, sure.” He moved toward the entrance. He’d keep his eyes open for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe he could figure out what the drawing meant, if anything, on his own.

Juan waited for him in the hall, then led him deeper into hell, aka the Dawn Temple. Quint locked his focus on Juan’s back to keep from grinding his molars down to nubs with every visible crack and crevice.

“While we’re on the subject of Angélica,” Juan said over his shoulder, “I have a question for you.”

When had they been on the subject of Angélica? Oh, right, she’d explained the head variants. “Sure. Shoot.”

“How old are you?”

What did that have to do with Juan’s daughter? He ducked under another low beam, grimacing at the splintered crack running the length of the beam. “I’ll be thirty-nine in a few months. Why?”

“Are there any little Quint Parker juniors running around back home or in past ports of lading?”

That question surprised Quint into standing upright, which resulted in smacking his head into the ceiling. “Ouch.” He rubbed his head.

“I told you to wear that hard hat.” Juan knocked on his own. “It only took me about two dozen hits to the old noggin’ for me to learn my lesson. You okay?”

Quint nodded. “To answer your question, no, I have no offspring out there.”

Juan led him into another sub chamber, shining the light over the patch of rubble on the floor, then up to the fractured-looking ceiling. “How do you feel about children?”

Rubbing his throbbing bump, Quint frowned at Juan. What in the hell did children have to do with any of this? Maybe he was making small talk or trying to distract him from the fact that they were bumping around in this death trap.

“That depends on the kid,” he answered. “I love hanging out with my sister’s twins. Whenever I’m back home, I spend as much time with them as possible.”

Juan turned the beam on Quint’s face, making him wince and shield his eyes. “You misunderstood my question. How do you feel about
having
children?”

Chapter Eighteen

Mentir: To tell an untruth; lie.

Quint had lied … sort of.

He’d told Juan that he hadn’t thought about having kids because he’d been too busy building his career. Truth was he’d considered having kids ever since his sister had given birth to her twins almost a decade ago, but with as much traveling as he did each year, even finding a long-term girlfriend was tough.

But he wasn’t comfortable telling the father of the woman he’d like to whisk away to some hidden bungalow and spend days and nights exploring every part of her body—and her mind—that he would like to have a kid or two someday. That might give Juan ideas about long-term commitment, and Quint knew from experience that women did not like being in a relationship with someone who was gone more than he was home.

After Quint’s answer, Juan hadn’t questioned him further about anything else domestic. Instead he’d wanted to hear about what being a photojournalist was like, the places Quint had traveled, the adventures he’d lived. The afternoon had passed quickly with plenty of laughs to distract Quint from the fact that he was sweating to death in a creepy tomb.

Now, after a shower to wash off the grit from the temple and a chicken-laden
panucho
filling his belly, Quint was having trouble keeping up with Juan’s supper conversation in the mess tent. More than anything, he wanted to escape back to his cot, read whatever it was Jeff had sent in that envelope, and drift off to dreamland. These long-ass days of work and sweat were for younger men. But he hated to leave Juan to finish up supper alone.

“I can’t find the damned thing.” Angélica’s voice jerked Quint out of his post-
panucho
daze.

Where’d she come from? He had listened outside of her tent before coming to eat and hadn’t heard a peep.

“Good evening,
gatita.
Why don’t you join us,” Juan patted the seat next to him, “and have something to eat.”

“I ate earlier.” She slid onto the bench next to her dad. “I can’t figure it out. All clues lead to the Temple of the Water Witch, but it’s not there.”

“Are you sure you’ve deciphered every glyph on that wall correctly? You know how the slightest variation can skew the meaning.”

“I’ve gone through the copies several times using Mom’s notes. I’m telling you, we’ve hit a dead end.”

“Maybe we need a fresh perspective.” He turned to Quint. “What do you think?”

Quint pointed at his chest. “Me?” At Juan’s nod, he threw out the first thing that came to mind. “Backtrack.”

“That will put us further behind—” Angélica started.

Juan held up his hand to hush her. “Backtrack how?”

“Well,” Quint continued, “maybe there’s something more to be found in the Dawn Temple.” After going through chamber after chamber with Juan, he had a better idea of the size of that ruin. “Something close to where you found the
stela
that might offer another clue.”

He needed to take his own advice about backtracking when it came to Dr. Hughes and the plane crash. But then, maybe whatever Jeff had sent would answer his …

He suddenly realized something that had escaped him until this moment. Why hadn’t Jeff ever said anything about the plane crash? Had Mrs. Hughes not told him about it when she had gotten the phone call? If she hadn’t told her son his father might have perished in a plane crash, why not? Why withhold something like that from Jeff even after he was an adult?

“… looked everywhere,” Angélica was saying when Quint tuned back in. “Besides, like I said, we don’t have the manpower to waste on this. We’re already running everyone ragged with the night watches.” Angélica grabbed her father’s cup and took a sip. “Jared told me he caught Benito sleeping on the job earlier and had a hard time waking the boy up.”

“What about that vase-like piece in your desk?” Quint asked, still backtracking. “The one with the broken neck. It has a king and a necklace on it. Where did you get that?”

Her eyes narrowed. She stared at him for a long, silent moment as she lowered the cup to the table. “How do you know about that vessel?”

“It was on your desk that night I brought you supper. You know, the first time I met Rover.”

She cocked her head to the side, still drilling him. “What else did you see on my desk that night?”

Damn! Instead of helping, he’d managed to get mired in some quicksand. “Let’s see, there was a magnifying glass, a dirty sock, a stained T-shirt, and a broken pencil.”

Juan snickered. “He passed that test.”

She lightly whacked her father on the shoulder and then turned back to Quint with a warning frown. “You’d better not be playing games with me again, Parker.”

Jesus, this lack of trust shit was getting old. Coming clean about his search for Dr. Hughes was probably going to make it worse. Part of him hoped that Dr. Hughes had died in that plane crash. Then he could do what she thought he was here to do—write a damned article and that was it.

In the meantime, he needed to deal with her suspicion. “Why would I sneak into your tent, Angélica? What would I gain from that?”

She searched his face, finding what he had no idea. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I guess I’m not thinking clearly.”

“If you’re done interrogating our guest,
gatita
,” Juan winked at Quint, “I’d like to get back to the task at hand. Where’s that shell?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Was there any other mention of
Ek Chuah
on the wall other than on the glyph with the curse?” he asked.

She shot Juan a frown. “Don’t make me say it.”

“Yeah, yeah, there’s no curse. Just answer the question.”

“There were several. According to the carvings, the king was buried in what they refer to as ‘his royal chamber.’”

“His body must be there, somewhere.”

“Then I’m blind.”

“You’re smart like your mother. You’ll figure it out.” Juan stood, dropping a kiss on her temple, and then nodded at Quint. “If you two will excuse me, this old man needs his beauty rest.”

Quint watched Juan leave. When he turned back, he slammed into Angélica’s squint.

“Why are you really here, Parker?”

It was the moment of truth.

Well, it could have been if telling her about Dr. Hughes wouldn’t result in her serving him his head on a copper Maya platter. As it was, with her in a distrusting mood already, he preferred to keep his head intact this evening.