Tears of the Jaguar (4 page)

The kids, she thought, trying to picture the children but unable to see their faces. She wasn’t even sure how old they were now.

“Ma got married.”

Deborah felt her spine stiffen. One hand gripped the rail of the cell phone tower. There was a fractional pause.

“What?”

“It’s that Steve guy. Do you remember him?”

Deborah stared at the jungle below and the rain-ravaged site, and her sense of the absurdity of the situation turned to anger.

“Steve Greenfield?” said Deborah, trying to picture the face. “The guy who used to run the deli at Coolidge Corner? The guy who used to play tennis with Dad?”

“They’ve been living together—or as near as makes no difference—for six months, Debs. Last week, they took a trip to Vegas and came back with wedding rings. I thought you’d at least want to know. I thought maybe you’d want to call her and say congratulations. I think it’s a good thing. He’s a decent guy.”

Deborah snorted. “Please. I haven’t spoken to Mom in three years. Not since she started dating that guy Marty a month after Dad died.”

“Dad’s gone, Debs,” said Rachel, sounding suddenly quite tired.

There was a long silence.

“I’ve really got to go,” Deborah said. “There’s things I have to do.”

“One more thing, Debs.”

Deborah looked around her and took a breath.

“The house is for sale.”

“What?” Deborah felt tears spring into her eyes. She pictured her father’s favorite rocking chair, the dollhouse he built for her, all his paintings. Her father, who had always encouraged her, who had provided the only bright spot against her mother’s judgment and disapproval...

“She’s getting rid of all of it, Debs,” said Rachel, cautious now. “She’s going to move in with Steve, and his place is small.”

Deborah steadied herself and took a breath.

“Debs, you still there? I know how you feel about Dad’s stuff. I thought you might want to come and pick through his things.”

Deborah stared hard at the ancient pyramid, pushing down tears. “Rachel, I’ve got to go. But listen to me. If you and Mom throw everything of his away, I’ll never forgive either of you.”

Rachel sighed. “Duly noted,” she said. “Maybe you could call me when you’ve had time to calm down. Talk soon, OK?”

“Sure,” said Deborah, in a voice barely above a whisper. “Bye.”

She climbed down the slick wooden tower slowly, forcing her mind back to the tasks the storm had brought her and away from her infuriating mother.

There’s too much to do,
she reminded herself
, and you’re in charge.

She spotted a few fallen tree limbs and an unsettled stone or two, but the central square flanked by the pyramids and
ball court looked stable enough. Her big concern—though it wouldn’t be a part of the new dig—was the main pyramid, the acropolis, because it was there that Ek Balam set itself apart from other Mayan ruins. Damage there would be devastating.

Sell the house. Dad’s house. Come and pick through his things...

Deborah took a long, steadying breath, then spotted a tall figure emerging from behind a high stone wall, trailed by two others. Bowerdale, the leader of the survey team, was coming toward her, leading his graduate student assistants. She stifled a smile at the sight of him picking his way through the mud. With his trim six-foot-three frame, closely cut black hair, and precisely tailored clothes, he usually looked immaculate, but at the moment he was soaking wet. His fancy suit was wrinkled and plastered to his skin like tissue. “Everyone OK?” he said, considering his fingernails as if he thought he needed a manicure.

Deborah wasn’t sure who he meant by “everyone” and doubted he cared one way or the other.

“In the village, yes,” she said. “I spoke to Porfiro. All the students were inside eating breakfast when the storm came in, so they’re fine.”

Bowerdale nodded noncommittally and looked away. Deborah, irritated, turned and found herself looking at his students. She didn’t particularly like either of them. The girl, Alice, was pale and tattooed with small, hard, dark eyes and a perpetual sneer on her lips. The boy was named James. He wore Clark Kent glasses, and his spindly arm was thrown protectively around Alice’s narrow shoulders.

“You guys all right?” she said.

Alice looked defiantly fine. “It rained,” she said, unwinding herself from the boy’s half embrace. “No big.”

The boy looked disappointed, but rallied.

“Hell of a storm,” he said, and grinned nervously. He looked sweaty and a little nauseated, like he’d just got off a mean roller coaster.

They were standing in the center of the site. Deborah’s eyes roamed across the view before them, searching for anything that needed repair. She could see Structure 2, the one with the phone tower she had just descended. And there was “Las Gemelas”—the Twins—which earned its name from its unusual parallel chambers. The ball court looked intact too. To her eye, none of the structures seemed obviously damaged.

Bowerdale spoke like a general whose authority was beyond question.

“Leave the gear here,” he said. “Spread out and do a quick walk through the site. The ground was already saturated; the storm could have caused some serious erosion. Don’t assume anything is stable. Back here in twenty minutes,” he said, checking his watch. “And note anything that looks different. Anything at all, no matter how small. Our job just changed.”

He strode off. The kids glanced at each other, surly but resigned, and loped after him. Deborah stood there feeling redundant and outranked, knowing there was nothing for her to do except watch, maybe take notes. Assessing structural damage was way out of her wheelhouse, while Bowerdale’s expertise in such things was so well known that he’d occasionally been hired into the far-better-paying realm of government contract work. A topographical survey of the White Sands missile range in New Mexico was at the top of his résumé—in the place where someone like her might put membership on an editorial board. She had to respect his qualifications. Still, Bowerdale’s self-assurance rankled. He was just too slick. It
seemed like he was always hearing a commentary in his head:
What would Bowerdale do in a situation like this? How would a suave, rugged, confident archaeologist handle this precise moment?
Then, when he had found the answer, she thought, he acted. She wondered how far he would go to bolster his image as the big man on campus.

And you certainly aren’t bitter because he knows what he’s doing while you’re standing around waiting for instructions.

OK. That too.

Deborah squatted and touched the grass. There were muddy pools here and there, but it was amazing how quickly the rain had been absorbed. The Yucatan was a limestone shelf, and therefore porous. It was also flat, and there were no significant bodies of water aboveground. The rain soaked through the rock and collected in underground lakes and rives that honeycombed the area. In places the erosion opened the rock above, revealing the underground water in sinkholes or wells called
cenotes
. These had been the ancient Mayans’ water sources, and when they flowed deep and cool, the people had prospered. When the rains stopped and the subterranean rivers dried up, they had moved away or died. It was hardly surprising that so many of the Mayan ruins were adorned with the grotesquely ornate face of the rain god, Chaak, which featured an elephant nose, staring, bulbous eyes, and fearsome teeth.

Bowerdale was climbing the acropolis—Structure 1—the biggest, most imposing monument on the site. It housed Ek Balam’s most famous find, the tomb known as Zac Na, resting place of a famous king who died in 840 AD: Ukit Kan Le’k Tok’. The door to the tomb lay at the center of a facade shaped like a great, monstrous, tooth-lined mouth. The carved stucco was adorned with elaborate sculpted winged figures, geometric
patterns with glyphs and masks of threatening gods. Zac Na, or White House, as it was also called, had no equal anywhere in the world.

When it was uncovered in the 1990s, the tomb had been there for twelve hundred years, and it was a good part of what made Ek Balam special. Its riches, which included offerings of pearls, seashells, alabaster, and jade, were considerable. What made it truly unique, however, was the way it had been meticulously buried: the great pyramid’s fragile stucco relief had been carefully packed with dirt and rubble so it was perfectly preserved. When the archaeological team found it, they had had to do little more than carefully remove the surrounding fill. The stucco itself had needed no restoration.

Recent work had erected a thatched lean-to around the Zac Na entrance to protect it from the elements, but the thatch would certainly need to be replaced. Deborah hoped to God there was no damage to the structure itself. She felt annoyed that Bowerdale had gotten up there first. She didn’t want to hear bad news from him. After all, that magical “no restoration” tag was Ek Balam’s claim to tourist fame. It would be tragic if the stucco relief had survived over a thousand years underground only to be damaged after its discovery. She watched Bowerdale as he continued to climb the steep, narrow steps of the acropolis, her eyes shaded. Then she marched to the foot of the structure and yelled in his direction.

“Is it OK?”

He shouted back something she couldn’t hear, so she started to climb the stairs of the acropolis. They quickly narrowed to a single vertical flight, about twenty-five feet wide, and rising up almost a hundred feet. As with the steps of most Mayan pyramids,
they were high and narrow, sloping slightly downward so that the water ran off them. Deborah’s instinct was to use her hands like she was on a ladder, but she caught Bowerdale watching her from above and decided to walk—carefully—instead. He descended the stairs and met her halfway.

“I have this covered, Miss Miller,” he said. “There’s no need for both of us.”

She had introduced herself as “Deborah” but he always called her “Miss Miller,” a politeness that somehow made her less professional and certainly not his equal. He was, after all,
Doctor
Bowerdale. Deborah had a Master’s degree. She had risen from within the world of practical museum curating, not from the upper echelons of academia.

“I am ultimately responsible for the dig,” she said, gazing up the stairs to the thatched lean-to of the Zac Na and the great stucco mouth of the tomb door.

“And I am responsible for surveying the site,” he returned. “This falls under my job description, not yours, and given the crisis precipitated by the weather, I think you should rely on my expertise.”

Deborah didn’t like his use of the word “crisis.” It might become a justification for a complete usurpation of her authority. She opted not to press the issue and managed a smile, as if she hadn’t noticed his challenge.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said. “I thought I saw something down there that needed closer inspection anyway.”

“What?” he said. “Where?”

But she had already turned and was starting to make her cautious descent.

“I’ll let you know if you need to come and look,” she called back, feeling better.

It was a lie, of course, but she relished his hesitation before he turned back up the stairs toward the Zac Na. She knew he would be watching her when she reached the bottom. Going down the pyramid was actually worse than going up, the vast openness of the site swimming before her, and she turned sideways to take the wet steps, her left hand finding the edge to stabilize her as she descended. There were no handrails, no handicapped-accessible ramps, none of the warnings without which such a site would be a legal impossibility in the States. If she fell, she’d fall hard and long. She picked her way down, trying to decide where she would go when she reached the bottom.

In the end she went along the base of the acropolis, heading to its north side where no reconstruction had taken place: while meticulous steps had been built on the south side, from this angle the acropolis was just a mound of rubble. The path hung with the dense undergrowth of the jungle scrub that always threatened to reclaim the site.

Her miniscule triumph over Bowerdale faded, and Deborah found herself feeling lost and depressed as the old anxieties returned: Bowerdale was right. He had the real authority here. Hers was based on nothing more than a letter from Cornerstone and would have no weight if it hadn’t come with a check attached. Even the students suspected it, and she guessed Bowerdale had said as much to those he most wanted to impress. The girl, probably. Alice. Bowerdale had a reputation where his female students were concerned.

She stopped, trying to process what it was she was seeing. The jungle on the north side of the acropolis looked different. It looked wrong. She tried to remember what had been there, and it came back to her slowly: a deep depression in the earth, what
the locals called a
rejollada
; a sinkhole, not unlike the one that had opened up under Oasis. It had looked like some giant had taken a great ice-cream scoop to the earth, though in time the area had become a tangle of matted vegetation and brush right up to the path at the base of the acropolis. The ground didn’t look like that now. In fact, Deborah realized, staring wildly, that the ground wasn’t there at all.