Tears of the Jaguar (23 page)

He was pale and athletic, and stayed out of the sun, sitting on the shaded patio with his book and his sunglasses. He was alone—no family, no girlfriend—but he was no beach bum either. He wore long-sleeved shirts and expensive-looking chinos, and always had a laptop with him. His hair was cropped crew-cut short, but he had a moustache and goatee that gave him a rugged look. She’d seen the skull tattoo on the back of his neck walking past his table at breakfast: its eyes seemed to follow her as the man’s real ones so carefully did not. She was intrigued by him, and not only because he didn’t stare at her tits like the others, but he made her uneasy all the same. He reminded her of a bad guy in a movie, but in a good way. It gave her a little thrill when she saw him out there this morning, because James had announced that he was going up to see the ruins.

James had obviously wanted her to go with him, though he wasn’t quite lame enough to beg her, and once he had gone on about how great they were supposed to be, he couldn’t abandon his plan just because she wasn’t interested. That would be too obvious even for him. So he gave her the puppy dog eyes and showed her pictures from some old guidebook that showed the stone buildings overlooking the ocean—as if she hadn’t seen enough damned ruins. Then, when she looked hard at him and told him to shut up about it because she wasn’t coming, he slipped away.

A little after ten o’clock the guy with the tattoo came sauntering along the sand, walking slowly but with no pretense of going anywhere but to her. Alice turned away to smirk, then returned her blank gaze to the Caribbean as if she hadn’t seen him.

To her surprise, he didn’t speak, but settled into the deck chair next to her as if they were already together. She turned to him, ready to offer some pretense at outrage, but he spoke first.

“Where’s your friend?” he said, not looking at her, staring out to where sky and water met.

“Went to the ruins,” she said. “He’ll be gone a while. Why?”

She didn’t bother to keep the amusement out of her voice. She hadn’t decided yet how far she would let this go. She smiled inwardly. She’d get a kick out of this, she could feel it. She’d been so bored and finally, here was something different.

“What’s he doing there?” said the man. He had an accent she couldn’t place, Eastern European, maybe.

“How should I know?” she shrugged. “Looking at rocks, I guess. What else do you do in ruins?”

“You might dig,” he said.

She looked at him then, and found his face hard and unsmiling. She shaded her eyes even though she was wearing sunglasses.

“Was there something you wanted?” she asked.

He took off his shades then and his eyes were ice blue. They slid over her body and his smile was cool, a smirk to match hers.

“Everyone wants something,” he said.

“I didn’t ask about everyone,” she came back, playing now. “I asked about you. What do you want?”

“Two things,” he said. “The second we can discuss later.”

“And the first?”

“Why don’t you come with me, and I’ll show you.”

She snorted with derisive laughter at the line, but she got up and followed him across the sand toward the cabanas nonetheless.

Deborah read the letter in the back of a taxi while the driver tapped at his navigation system in the hope of pulling up a hotel or bed-and-breakfast close to Malkin Tower Farm. She read it quickly, then again, more slowly, dwelling on its insinuations.

Being the seventh day of June, the year of our lord sixteen hundred and fifty

My honoured mother, for so I ever will think of you. By now you will have learned what I dearly wished to tell you myself: that I have left England at last, as I often said I would. It was a hard thing to go, not least in leaving you, though I pray you will understand. The court was too decorous for such as I. I know the labours you undertook on my behalf came from your desire to see me prosper, from a love for what the world finds unlovable, and you must not think that my leaving is a rejection of you or of your efforts. On the contrary, I take them with me. They
sustain me. They give me hope that I may yet find a place where men will not see in me the dark stars which reigned at my nativity.

Thou knowest—no one more than thou—how I have laboured to honour the trust you placed in me, the life and living you gave me when the world was sure to despise me as a thing sent forth marked by sin. If she—you know the she I mean—had never come to London, all might have been well, but God saw fit to bring her back into my life, and from that day forth the world which you and I had built could not endure. The King my sovereign did much to protect me but calumny will out. I am only sorry that my shame—her shame—erased all you had done for me.

In the hurly-burly of the great unrest, the war and its aftermath, I dared to hope that all might be well, but memories in government are long, and I fear my very shape prevents forgetting. Even with the death of the King’s cause and the most barbaric treatment of his royal Highness, I had hoped to retain some place in the commonwealth, but now I see that this cannot be. I will not drag the names of those women dearest to me through the mud, though one be dead. For you to remain unscarred I fear I must vacate these climes forever, leaving behind, I hope, the cruelty and ignorance I have borne for the past thirty years. I enter my self-imposed banishment with hope that in leaving, I may improve what years you have left to you, though my future is unknown to me and full of terror. Where I will alight, I cannot say, though I have a mind to explore something of the lands recounted by our infamous countryman, Thomas Gage.

I must aboard now, but I swear that—unless I perish on the journey—you will hear from me, howe’er infrequent, and unmatched to my love. Weep not for me. You have shed tears enough. For my part I—perhaps—am shedding my past like a snake its skin. Only those parts with you will I keep like the jewels I bear with me.

I remain forever a debtor to your love and compassion.

Edward
Dev
Clifford

The year 1650, thought Deborah. One year after the central event of the English Civil War—the hurly-burly the letter writer alluded to—the trial and execution of Charles I: one of the few dates from British history still lodged in her head. If the thirty years the writer referred to meant his life to date, then he was born in 1620. Somehow the boy had come into contact with the king’s court, had perhaps been a servant or junior counselor. He would, like Lady Anne Clifford, have fought for the royalist cause during the Civil War and, on their defeat and the execution of the king, had decided to leave the country forever. It made a kind of sense, though what those words about his shape and the mark of sin meant, she couldn’t imagine.

Suddenly the driver spoke up.

“Well there’s a turn-up,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d find anywhere to stay out there, but it turns out that Malkin Tower Farm
is
a hotel. You want to go? It’s nearly ten miles.”

“Yes,” she said. “But let’s stop in town first. I’ll need to get some warmer clothes. Can you meet me back in an hour?”

“One hour, right here,” he said. “I’ll wait five minutes.”

“Deal,” she said, unfolding herself out of the car.

There was a department store called Rackhams on the main street, so Deborah went there first. In the men’s department, she grabbed a pair of 501s—always a safely unisex bet—and moved off in search of shirts and sweaters. What she found was on the baggy side, but it would do. She crossed to the women’s side and added some underwear to her cart, and checked out. Back outside on the street, she found an outdoor supplies store called David Goldie, where she bought a pair of low-end walking shoes, some thick socks, and a light waterproof jacket.

Pleased with her haul and the efficiency with which she’d managed it, she met the taxi driver as planned. She realized as the cabbie drove out of town that she’d have to start watching her expenses so things didn’t get out of hand; Powel hadn’t exactly signed off on her little side trip.

The thought raised other questions about what she was trying to achieve, other than not being either in a Mexican jail or within earshot of her mother and her plans to demolish all the memories of Deborah’s father.

Come pick through Dad’s things...

Identifying what the jewels were, where they had come from, and how they had reached Mexico would not, after all, tell her where they were now, and if they were still in Mexico it could be a long time before she could even return to find them. In a sense it helped that Bowerdale was in prison, since that meant the police might not be looking widely for other suspects, but that was, she instantly knew, a cowardly and disloyal thought. She would be going back soon, she knew. She didn’t especially like Martin Bowerdale, but she didn’t believe him capable of what had been done to Eustachio, and she had a duty to try and earn his release.

As she waited for things in Mexico to cool down, she would learn what she could about what had been stolen from the tomb. She would spend the evening studying the video footage of the grave goods, but first she would call Steve Powel, her official link back to the site and whatever was going on there. She had never been able to set up the video conference call she had promised him. Maybe doing it now would mollify him a little.

The cabbie pulled up to Malkin Tower Farm holiday cottages, and she was pleasantly surprised to see a series of converted
stone farm buildings. In the distance, a dark, steep hill—almost a mountain—dominated the surrounding landscape. As they’d first driven west from Skipton, it had been picturesque, but as they got closer it seemed to loom, and Deborah felt its brooding presence whichever way she looked.

“That’s Pendle Hill,” said the driver.

He said it darkly, like the name should mean something to her, but offered no further explanation. Deborah was unaccountably relieved to find that when she stepped out of the cab, she couldn’t actually see Pendle from Malkin Tower Farm.

She paid the driver and took her belongings to what looked like the main cottage. Deborah took the smallest room, quaintly named “the piggery”—which it almost certainly had once been—because it was cheap, clean, comfortable, and, since it was a separate building from the rest of the cottages, private. The ceiling was low, but not so much that she might actually bang her head. She unpacked quickly. It was getting late, though the light still held, and she realized with a shock just how far north she really was. In the winter it probably got dark not much later than midafternoon, but in summer—albeit a cold and rainy summer—the light would hold till nine or ten.

She called Steve Powel, turning on her laptop’s built-in webcam. It was a strategy designed to make it harder for him to yell at her. People felt tougher when they couldn’t be seen. He answered quickly, agreed to the video conference with impatience, and then demanded to know where she was and what the hell she was doing. He looked distracted, sitting at his desk with the trophies and the pictures of his daughter on the shelves behind him.

“I can’t search for the missing grave goods in Mexico so I’m trying to figure out what they were and how they got there,” she said. “Maybe that will help.”

“Maybe,” he answered, looking skeptical. “Where exactly are you, Deborah? I want an address.”

She gave it to him, explaining the link to the pale ruby-like stone that had been found at the farm, but he looked impatient.

“I need you back in Mexico,” he said. “I need you looking for the stolen artifacts.”

“And as soon as it’s safe to go back, I will,” she told him. “A few days is all I want, if you can assure me that I’m not going to be thrown into prison the moment I get there.”

“I’m working on it,” he said. “But if you’re right about those grave goods being European, we need to prepare for an extradition battle. If they aren’t part of the indigenous culture, all bets are off and I want to be able to bring them back to the States.”

“If they’re European, there’ll be Europeans who want them returned,” said Deborah.

“That’s a lot grayer legally than taking Mayan goods from Mexico. Try to keep it out of the papers and we’ll have time to figure out what we have and how hard to fight for it. Maybe there’s a touring exhibit in it.”

Deborah told him she would do what she could. “I’m sorry, Steve,” she said. “I’ll make this work.”

“I hope so, Deborah. I really do.”

“How are things there?” she said, trying to soften the tone of the conversation.

“Hectic, Deborah. Stressful.”

“And Angela?” she persisted, determined to find something that would take the edge out of his voice.

He blinked and seemed to peer at his computer screen.

“She’s fine,” he said. “No change. Why?”

“Oh, I can see her pictures on the shelves behind you,” said Deborah, floundering. “No change?”

“I just mean, yes,” he said. “She’s fine.”

“Beautiful girl,” said Deborah, suddenly wishing she hadn’t set up the video connection after all. She knew she looked fake. She looked over Powel’s shoulder to the largest picture on the wall, a headshot of his daughter wearing the gold necklace she seemed to wear with all her costumes. A lucky charm, perhaps. Rachel’s had been pearl earrings their father had given her one Hanukkah before he died.