Tears of the Jaguar (16 page)

She was on the same level as the tunnel now, directly across from it, and she could see clean through to the tomb. The passage
narrowed her view, but she could see enough, though for a moment, she could make no sense of it. There was the light, still turned away from her, but bright as lightning in the darkness, and there was the movement of a person in a strange, shapeless robe. The figure turned, and she gasped as the face revolved into view, because it wasn’t a real face at all, but a horror of wild, staring eyes and a gaping mouth full of daggerlike teeth: a mask, oversized and garish like that worn by some ancient Mayan priest. And then the figure moved and the light illumined the chamber proper, and Deborah felt a new rising sense of dread. The tomb was there as they had left it, but the color was all wrong. She could see right through to the back wall of the tomb and it was a red far brighter than the colored stucco she remembered. It was a deep, glistening crimson like new paint.

But it wasn’t paint. Even from here, without being able to touch or smell it, she knew it wasn’t paint.

She had to get out, get back to the tower and call the police. This went far beyond old bones, theft, and a blow to her career.

How do you paint a room with blood? Why would you?

She pushed the thoughts away and concentrated on climbing back up. To do so meant turning her back on the tomb, and though a part of her was glad to do so, the act itself filled her with terror. She was blind again in the darkness with whatever was going on in that tomb behind her.

She focused on the climb. There was a notch in the rock that would take one foot, but there was little to hold on to above it but roots. She reached, grabbed, and tugged tentatively. When the roots held, she launched herself up, hauling as she tried to find purchase with her other foot. For a second she hung, reaching with one leg for something that might not be there, then she found something hard in the
cenote
wall—a jutting root perhaps—and set her weight on it.

She heard movement, surprisingly, not from the passageway behind her but from above. It wasn’t the masked figure in the tomb. Someone else was there standing out near the rim of the
cenote
. Was it possible she was surrounded? She scrabbled for the vines, trying to move upward quickly.

Too quickly.

Her newly positioned foot lost its hold and she dropped two feet, twisting on the vine-like roots and snapping hard when there was no more slack. The impact seemed to tear the plant above her. There was another scattering of dirt and debris from above, and then the roots were fastened to nothing at all, and she was falling.

She turned in the air but it was too dark to see if she would hit rock or water, and she knew nothing till the cold splash, which sent roosting birds soaring out overhead. The shock of the fall had barely allowed her to close her mouth in time, but she hit nothing but water, and surfaced feeling lucky.

A flashlight from above the edge of the
cenote
found her almost immediately, but she could see nothing beyond the glare of the lamp and the deep-blue water where the black catfish swam. She almost cried out for help. But when the first gunshot rang out, she dove.

The volleyball coach back at Brookline High School had begged Deborah to try out, but, suspecting that height alone wouldn’t compensate for her physical awkwardness or aversion to team activities, Deborah—then fourteen—had declined. For the perceived sleight she had been packed off to the Tappan Street pool and told to complete her PE requirements there, plowing up and down the lanes two mornings a week. She had been a good swimmer, long and powerful, maybe even competition material, but though she had enjoyed the silent focus of the thing, the isolation of it, she had never seen the value in devoting all her time to shaving half a second off her hundred-meter freestyle. When old Joe Winters, the swim coach, had told her that she could be great if she’d put in the work, she had said, genuinely confused, “Define great.”

“All-state,” he said. “Maybe more. Who knows, with work, you might get an Olympic tryout.”

Deborah, who already spent her free time immersed in books, just shook her head. All that work just to be a little faster than other people in the pool, working every hour like her sister did on the ice? Never. She didn’t get it.

She remembered all that in the moment that the second bullet hit the water. She tucked her stomach, pivoted at the waist and slid down through the black water headfirst, pulling with her arms till she felt her feet follow her under. The bright, chlorinated lanes of Tappan Street couldn’t be further from this deep darkness, the water scented with leaves and decay, teeming with fish and who knew what else. She kicked and pulled her way farther down, knowing she hadn’t taken enough air to stay under much longer.

She turned and opened her eyes, looking up to the surface, where she saw first nothing, then the swift pass of a flashlight. Someone was looking for her, ready to shoot as she broke the surface. For a second she felt only horror at the strange escalation from theft through the blood-stained tomb to this. She was being hunted, and all—presumably—because there was a case of mistaken identity.

Who did the shooter think she was? Who was that shooter and who was currently standing in the blood-spattered tomb robed from head to foot like a Mayan priest?

Her air was almost gone and her body was instinctively starting to surface. She tried to get her bearings so she could swim for the
cenote
wall. Perhaps she could find a crevice where she could breathe unseen. She pushed away from where she had entered the pool, making for the rock wall, and when she felt the long, trailing roots in her fingers, she tried to slide in among them. With excruciating slowness, she allowed herself to drift up, feeling the
air on her face as she broke the surface. As quietly as she could, she released the breath and drew in another, looking up through the root strands to the passageway.

The gunman was there still, though she couldn’t even see enough to be sure it was a man. She saw only the merest shadow and the brightness of the flashlight held out away from his—or her—body. It was moving over the surface of the water, slowly, meticulously, and she knew that the other hand had a weapon trained wherever the light went. The light in the tomb had gone out and there was no sign of movement there at all. She waited, breathing hard. How long did she have? Eventually, surely, she would be noticed.

The light was inching toward her. She took another breath, then, trying to brace her hands against the rock, she pushed herself under the water as carefully as possible. She held the position, her face only a couple of feet below the surface, and looked up, waiting for the light to move over her. It crept up from the left and immediately seemed to stall.

I’m not deep enough
, she thought
. He can see...something.

Suddenly, uncannily, it was like she could see herself from his position, floating mermaid-like amongst the weeds, the paleness of her face under the water. The light held another second and she knew the shot would come. She surged sideways, kicking off against the rock as the gun roared, loud even though she was deep underwater, and she felt the tremor in the water where the bullet passed her. She swum hard, desperate to keep moving, toward the center of the pool, snatched the longest breath she dared, then dived once more.

He fired again.

Deborah thrust herself down as far as she could, pulling hard with her arms, frog-kicking her legs. She had no idea how deep
the pool was, and there was no strategy to her actions now, just a desperate desire to go so deep he couldn’t possibly get her. What she would do when she ran out of air, she couldn’t think.

And then, quite suddenly, the water went cold and she felt it pushing against her body: a current. It was moving back to the wall she had come from and she arced into it, letting it move her. She swam two strokes before she realized that she had gathered speed. More alarmingly, she was sure the
cenote
wasn’t big enough to have let her go so far in one direction. She should have hit rock.

It came to her like a hand around her throat.
Cenot
es weren’t simply pools. They were cave-ins above underground rivers. She had gone too deep and was no longer in the
cenote
at all. She was in a channel that might wind miles before it opened to the air again. Deborah spread her arms, trying to find something against which to brace herself, to stop her momentum, but there was nothing. She tried to turn and swim back against the current—better face a gunman than drown in this airless rock passage—but it was too swift. It swept her on, and her head banged hard against stone so that she gasped, losing what little air she still had, and swallowing the tangy water. She opened her eyes wide. Frantic now, panicking. There was no way out and she knew the closest
cenote
was a kilometer or more away.

She was almost out of air. Her stomach contracted and she felt the nausea rise up in her throat. She swallowed it back, but it wouldn’t be long now. She reached up, vainly hoping to find a recess above her, a pocket where air might be trapped, perhaps a cavern, but the water went all the way to the smooth rock above her. The river suddenly tightened into a narrow tube, and she was picking up speed, bumping her elbows and knees against
the limestone as she hurtled through. She felt the disorientation of the twists and bends, but knew also that she was blacking out. The nausea surged back, and this time—fight it though she did—she opened her mouth and felt the cold water flooding in. It was almost a relief, that coolness, that stifling, black end. She could feel her eyelids fluttering and the muscles of her neck beginning to spasm. Then nothing.

Aguilar hung up the phone and cursed. There was no sign of Miller, and people were starting to freak out. One of the local Maya had speculated that she had been the one who had ransacked the tomb and had now made a run for it. The story was being circulated as something with real weight till the kid who brought the food and water for the laborers, Eustachio’s granddaughter, Adelita, got wind of it. Aguilar had never seen anything quite like that skinny twelve-year-old reading the riot act to village men two and three times her age. It was, he remarked to Krista Rayburn, something to behold, the men skulking like whipped dogs, some drifting away, others suddenly finding the sun-scorched grass just about the most fascinating thing they’d ever seen.

But the girl’s anger also showed concern. Miller had become a kind of mentor for the kid in the last week or so, showing her
around the dig, talking to her like a grown-up. The child, for her part, had obviously taken to her and Aguilar had caught the quiet, watchful look on Eustachio’s face when he saw them together, chatting. The old Mayan had been happy and sad at the same time, and you could guess why: Adelita saw in Deborah Miller something of what she might be if she ever escaped the village with its dirt roads, its wandering turkeys, and—more importantly—its punishing regimen of manual labor. The kid was smart, and underneath the bashfulness that was expected of girls her age in a place like this, she was a live wire, as the scolded men who had disparaged Miller had discovered. Aguilar felt a stab of disdain for the old Mayan. If Eustachio wasn’t so damned in love with the backward life he called his culture, he’d put the kid on the first bus out.