“What?” he asked, thinking he’d heard wrong.
She started to explain, then made a choked sound as he turned a blind corner and slammed on the brakes.
An old truck was approaching about fifty feet away. When the other driver saw the Bronco, he yanked the wheel and parked across the track, blocking it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THAT’S PHILIP,” LINA SAID. “BUT WHAT’S HE DOING HERE?”
“Stopping us,” Hunter said.
He eyed the growth on either side of the truck. Too thick and sturdy to muscle through. No other routes in sight, not even the faintest trace of a footpath.
“Wonder what kind of mood he’s in,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Philip can go from jovial to surly in a heartbeat.” She reached for the door handle. “Better get it over with. Waiting won’t improve whatever mood he’s in.”
She opened the door and got out with all the eagerness of someone heading for a root canal without anesthesia.
Hunter was one second behind her, then he was beside her. His glance swept the jungle before focusing on the man waiting in the truck. He was thick through the shoulders and tall enough that his head was close to the Rover’s roof.
“Who the hell is this?” Philip demanded through the open window. “What’s he doing on my land?”
“His land?” Hunter murmured. Who made him king of the Yucatan?
Lina gripped Hunter’s hand and shook her head. “Let me handle him. You’ll just make him more upset. And don’t take it personally. He’s rude to everyone.”
“So I’ve heard.”
She made the introductions through the open window. Other than a flat look from gray eyes, Philip ignored Hunter.
“You aren’t supposed to be out here,” Philip said to Lina. “Go back to the house right now.”
She blinked. “I was just—”
“I told you there was nothing out here worth looking at,” Philip said over her. “You have no business here.”
“But—”
“You heard me!” Philip shouted.
Hunter decided that he and Philip were never going to be buddies, so there was no point in playing nice. Begin as you mean to continue and all that.
“Lina is the Reyes Balam heir,” Hunter said calmly. “She’s also fully adult. She comes and goes as she pleases.”
She looked at him. “It’s okay.”
“Actually, it isn’t,” Hunter said.
Philip began yelling, telling Hunter to get the hell off his land before he shot him, then repeating it again and again with emphasis, as if he shouted loud enough, long enough, Hunter would get it.
“Philip,” Lina said, her voice sharp. “Hunter is my guest. Because of him, we made an astonishing discovery. Site number nine isn’t a tomb, it’s a temple. It’s beautifully decorated with polychrome art of a fineness that has to be seen to be believed. I don’t expect you to be grateful, but you can at least be—”
“You went inside?” Philip demanded.
“Yes, we—”
“You had no right. I have first excavation—”
“We didn’t excavate anything,” Hunter cut in. “And we’re not the only people who know about it. The passages and main room were clean. Candles were lit. There’s a shrine with fresh petals inside.”
Philip’s weathered skin flushed red, making his eyes appear almost white. “That’s my temple. Every scale on Kukulcán is mine.”
At that instant Lina realized that not only did Philip already know about the temple, he had studied it.
“You promised you wouldn’t explore it without me,” she said.
“Don’t be childish,” Philip said, dismissing her with a look. “We’ll discuss your behavior at the house. And don’t think I won’t check your car for stolen artifacts.”
With that, Philip threw the Rover in reverse and began the tedious process of turning the vehicle on the narrow track.
Hunter and Lina went back to the Bronco.
“So that’s Philip,” Hunter said as they both got in.
Flags of anger burned high on her cheekbones. “He’s in rare form.”
“That’s really special. Are we going back to talk with him?”
“Maybe he’ll have cooled off by the time we get there.”
Or maybe I’ll shove him in a cold shower, Hunter thought. But he didn’t say it aloud.
“I suppose I should apologize for not letting you handle it,” he said. His tone said he wasn’t going to. “Gotta say, you deserve better than him.”
“If life was fair, we wouldn’t invent so many religions.”
He gave her a sideways look and a gentle stroke along her tense jawline. “I’ll remember that.”
They drove in silence for a time. Then she smacked her palm against the dashboard.
“I can’t believe he dug without me,” she said. “Oh, wait. I can believe. It just makes me want to take a shovel to that limestone block he calls his head. And now I sound like Celia.”
“You sound like a woman who has been treated like a six-year-old.”
“I should be used to it by now. But…”
“But?” Hunter asked when she remained silent.
“It seems that every time I come back he’s worse. Well, not worse, just more like himself than I remember.”
“That would be worse.”
“Yeah.”
More silence and rough road.
“I keep hoping he’ll change,” Lina said finally.
Hunter didn’t say anything.
“Bad to worse is a change, right?” she asked.
“Not one I’d be happy about.”
He maneuvered around a washout just before the main road. Philip’s vehicle was nowhere in sight. Air flowed through the open windows, rich with the living breath of the jungle.
“Tomorrow morning we’re gone,” Lina said. “I’d leave now, but I promised Abuelita I’d be here for her birthday celebration. Unlike some people, I keep my promises.”
“It’s one of the things I really like about you.”
She looked at him. “Same goes. I’m sorry you had to see him like that.”
Hunter shrugged. “It’s not your fault. If anything, it’s mine.”
“What do you mean?”
“You told me to let you handle him. I just really didn’t like how he was handling you.”
“I used to get mad about it,” she said. “Then I figured it was a waste of energy. Today…he was way out of line.”
“He ever hit you?” Hunter asked casually.
She looked startled. “Of course not.”
“No ‘of course’ about it, sweetheart. It’s a slippery slope from verbal abuse to physical. He wouldn’t be the first man—or woman—to slide down.”
“He’s just blustery and rude.”
Silently, Hunter thought someone should have taught Philip manners a long time ago. Or at least fear. But kids were stuck with the parents they had, and loved them despite everything.
“I’ll try to behave better than he does,” Hunter said. “What time are we leaving tomorrow?”
“Early,” she said flatly.
“I’m going to be in your room again tonight.”
Despite her anger and frustration with her father, she gave Hunter a slow smile. “I’m counting on it.”
What Hunter didn’t say was that he’d be there even if he was sleeping on the floor. He didn’t trust Philip. Her father wasn’t lock-him-up crazy, but he wasn’t a poster boy for rationality, either.
Silently they drove to the compound, parked, and walked down a crushed limestone path to Philip’s casita. The morning haze hadn’t thickened into afternoon rain, though thunder rumbled far away. The Casita Cenote guesthouse where Hunter was supposed to be sleeping was barely a pale shadow beyond the fairly mannerly tangle of greenery.
Philip’s residence was a single-story, whitewashed L, with weathered storm shutters and a faded red-tile roof. Despite its occupant, Hunter lik
ed the place a lot better than the mansion where Old World splendor reigned.
At least, he liked it until they knocked on the door and Philip opened it, looking like a wild man. Immediately he started cursing Lina for stealing his life’s work, his only entrée back into the closed world of scholars, and the most valuable Maya artifact ever found.
After about thirty seconds of abuse, Hunter shoved Philip back into the entrance far enough for all of them to come in. Then Hunter shut the door and waited for the old man to run out of breath. From the look of his face—sweaty and pale—it wouldn’t be long. When Lina started to walk closer to her father, Hunter held her back.
“Let him run down,” he said.
And he revised his opinion of Philip from eccentric to borderline nuts.
“Anything he’s saying make sense to you?” Hunter asked Lina when Philip paused for a breath.
“He thinks we stole an artifact from him.”
“I got that. But what?”
Lina bit her lip and shook her head. “That’s where it falls apart. He says we stole the Kawa’il codex.”
Philip erupted again at her words and grabbed her shoulders, shaking her hard. “You traitorous bitch, you think I don’t see through your lying—”
The flat of Hunter’s palm landed on Philip’s cheek. The blow wasn’t hard, but it was shocking. With another swift movement Hunter knocked Philip’s hands away from Lina. Then he got right into her father’s face.
“Settle down before I put you down,” Hunter said flatly.
Philip stared at him. “You—you—”
“You hearing me?” Hunter asked.
For a moment Philip’s eyes went vacant. Then he nodded and sat heavily on an old couch.
“It’s gone,” Philip said hoarsely. “Everything is gone.”
“What’s gone?” Hunter asked.
“Ask her. She—”
“—was with me every moment she wasn’t with her family,” Hunter cut in.
Philip looked at him, baffled, almost childlike. “But it’s gone.”
“We got that,” Hunter said calmly. “When did you miss it?”
“As soon I knew you had been to the temple, I came back here to check it.”
“What—” began Lina.
Hunter’s hand closed over her arm.
She looked at her father and understood he was only relating to Hunter right now. She bit her lip and looked away, tears stinging at the back of her eyes. Nothing new, really. Philip had ignored her all of her life.
“You came back here, checked, and it was gone,” Hunter said.
Philip nodded.
“Show us where you kept it,” Hunter said. His voice was like his eyes, patient. Relentless.
Her father tried to get up, wobbled, and started to go down. Hunter put him back on his feet with an easy strength Lina found as startling as the slap had been. The contrast between Hunter and her father rocked her. Even after she had begun to understand her father’s emotional limitations, she still had thought of him as physically strong, indomitable, ageless.
He wasn’t.
With Hunter’s encouragement, Philip pulled himself together enough to lead the way back to his study. Hunter noticed the heavy lock on the study door and knew without asking that no one went in without Philip being present. Certainly not the maids. The place was dusty, messy, piled with papers and artifacts in haphazard heaps.
Lina’s breath came in hard and stayed. The artifacts so carelessly stacked everywhere were extraordinary. The jade jaguar pendant she had found and he had kept was on a bookshelf, on top of a tilting pile of scholarly archaeology bulletins. Automatically she looked at every artifact in sight, searching.
Hunter watched her.
After a moment she shook her head. “Not at first glance. Excellent, wonderful, fascinating—but not what we’re looking for.”
Hunter nodded and centered his attention on Philip, who was still fumbling with the dial of an old-fashioned safe. Vault, really. It was at least seven feet high and five wide. Unlike the rest of the room, the lock looked well cared for, oiled, clean. Bookcases flanked the vault door on either side from floor to ceiling.
Just when Hunter thought he’d have to try his hand at drilling out the safe’s locking mechanism, Philip managed to get the combination right. When the door swung open, Hunter was glad that he hadn’t had to wear out steel drill bits and himself on the safe. It was at least four inches thick, way beyond what would be necessary to protect against burglary or fire.
Cool, dry air wafted out of the safe, reminding Hunter of the temple.
“No burning candles,” Lina said, telling him that she was thinking the same thing he was.
Not surprisingly, Philip ignored his daughter. Whatever emotion had driven his outburst had been spent. Now he was a leaky balloon, deflating a breath at a time.
She gave him a worried glance but made no move to intervene as he pointed a shaky finger at a small, climate-controlled glass museum box at the back of the vault.
“There. It was there. Now it’s gone,” Philip said.
Hunter walked forward to look at the box. He could have checked for fingerprints, but he didn’t have the right equipment—or temperament—right now.
A glance had told Lina that more than an empty climate-controlled box filled the vault. The walls were a mosaic of shelves and niches and cases. Boxes had been stacked waist-high, leaving very little floor space to move around. She realized that, unbelievably, the reason the jade pendant and other superb artifacts had been left in the study was that Philip had run out of room in the vault.
She turned and went to her father, who was leaning against the vault door. His hand hung limply on the handle. His expression was glazed.
“What was in the box?” Lina asked bluntly.
He shook his head as if her words were cold water instead of breath. “I…” His voice died. He swallowed. “A codex. Kawa’il’s, I believe.”
“How long have you had it?”
He looked confused, irritated. “Years, but what does it matter now? It’s gone!”
“Years,” she said, her expression a fluid mix of disbelief, anger, and disappointment. “You hid it for years.”
“I had to study it,” Philip said. “Without me, it’s just drawings on paper. I found it! Once I’ve finished translating it, I’ll publish and take my place with the foremost names in archaeology. But it’s hard, so hard…”
“What is?” Hunter asked.
“Translation, of course,” Philip snapped. “The glyphs are very intricate, very idiosyncratic, hard to understand. Almost cryptic.”
“You never were very good at translation,” Lina said, her voice neutral. “Yet you never asked me to help. Even Mercurio noticed it.”
“You were on her side,” Philip said. “She’s the one who ruined me with her greed for artifacts and money. Trust you? You must think I’m as stupid as Mercurio did.”
“What are you talking about?” Lina asked.
“You. Your mother.”
“Philip, I was eight years old when you and Celia separated. What on earth makes you believe I was on anyone’s side?”
“You’re a woman. Selfish. Like her. Just when you were finally old enough to become useful to me, you were mooning after Mercurio. Nobody cares what I want. But I outsmarted all of you.” Philip grinned without humor, more of a grimace. “I found the codex.”
“A work whose meaning you could barely decipher, much less truly appreciate,” Lina said. “So you hid it for years and picked away at something that was as far beyond your reach as the back side of the moon.”
“I made progress,” Philip said defensively. “Glyphs aren’t as impossible as people like you make them out to be. They just require more intelligence than most people have. Especially these glyphs. History as allegory, just like the Popol Vuh, worse than the Chilam Balam. All but useless to a real archaeologist.”
Hunter looked at Lina.
“I understand
,” she said to Philip. “This codex wasn’t a linear compilation of names and events. The glyphs required nuanced interpretation rather than measurement in situ. Shades of possibility and meaning, like poetry.”
“Rubbish, not science,” Philip agreed. “But there were solid facts. The Spaniards had already arrived. They were called ghost men, greedy and grasping, forever hungry. And the creator or creators of the codex scorned the phonetic alphabet the Spaniards introduced. This codex is true to the Maya.”
“So you have a translation?” she asked.
“It’s in my book,” Philip said.
Lina glanced around the study. “Which one?”
“The one I’m writing.”
“I remember when you started it almost ten years ago,” she said, her mouth tightening. “The first thing you took for your ‘scholarly study’ was the jade pendant that is presently gathering dust in your study. Where is your manuscript?”
“In my head. You think I’d trust it on paper or in a computer where anyone could steal it?”
“In your head,” she repeated. “What about your notes?”
“You must think I’m as stupid as you are.” He tapped his head. “It’s in here, all of it.”
She slumped back against Hunter’s chest and asked, “Is it ever going to come out?”
“Not until I have enough proof that no one can question it, or me,” Philip snapped. “I’ll never be made to look the fool again.”
“Really?” Lina gestured to the empty box in the open vault. “Looks like someone fooled you but good.”
The reminder bled the heat of indignation out of Philip, leaving him hollow and pale again.
“Who else knew about the codex?” Hunter asked.
“No one.”
“Pull your head out of your butt,” Hunter said impatiently. “Someone else had to know. The jungle only looks empty. Who helped you get into the temple? Who watched you leave with a codex? Who knew you brought the codex here? Where did you get the climate-controlled box? Who helped you learn about the glyphs that baffled you? Somebody else knew. Somebody talked. Somebody always does.”
“They wouldn’t have betrayed me,” Philip said, shaking his head. “I have too much information.”
“Who?” Hunter asked.
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