But she’s a relative. She might still have Thompson’s Mayan stuff. That makes sense—why else would the NRO drag my father there?
“Has she lived there since Thompson died?”
“No,” he says, pausing. There’s a tiny shift in his attitude toward us. Maybe I’m imagining it, but it’s as though the cando, easygoing nature has suddenly vanished. And it’s replaced with an air of conspiracy.
“Who lived there after he died?”
“His widow. Then the house was empty for a while.”
“It didn’t sell?”
“It wasn’t on the market. Not with that history.”
“What history?”
The manager looks me calmly in the eye. “The history that any half-decent research would uncover. The stories from the time Thompson lived there.”
We stare blankly. “Like what?”
“Probably a lot of nonsense. As I say, I was too young to remember much. There were people who thought that it wasn’t only Egyptian archaeologists who came back with curses on them.”
Tyler says, “What, Mayas had pyramid curses too?”
“So it was believed, around here. Mostly just whispers. All because of that young assistant of Thompson’s, the one who disappeared. There were folks who wondered if it was covered up at a high level because it got a D-Notice, as it was called back then—one of them things the government slaps on a case to make it a national secret. You need someone high up to get a D-Notice. It didn’t make the national papers. And that young fella, they never found him.”
I gather up the costumes in a major hurry. I’ve got a hunch that Tyler’s next question is going to give the game away.
“We’d better get going,” I announce. “Going to be late.”
Minutes later, standing in the bus shelter, Tyler says breathlessly, “Wow … what do you think of that story? Could Thompson’s Mayan curse be linked to the Ix Codex? Didn’t those guys who e-mailed you say it was dangerous or cursed?”
He’s right, of course. And my mind can’t help going back to that story in the Lebanon newspaper about Madison. How many of these “cursed” artifacts are out there in the world?
“It is cursed,” I say, shortly. I’m so close to a possible answer—it’s time I told Tyler a bit more. “But the codex isn’t there anymore. Someone got there already, years ago. And my dad would have known that too. What I want to know is, why did he go to the trouble of coming back here? With those NRO men?”
Tyler stares at me. “What are you talking about? How do you know all that?”
“My grandfather found the Ix Codex,” I tell him. “And I think I know how—he must have found the stories about Eric Thompson’s assistant in the local newspapers. Something must have put him on to Thompson—I guess we’ll never know what. But once my grandfather realized that Thompson had some sort of cursed Mayan relic, he must have decided there was a chance it was the Ix Codex.”
That’s the thing about mysterious disappearances—curious people can’t resist them.
Tyler isn’t entirely satisfied with my answer, I can tell. But for some reason, he doesn’t push it further. He just leans against the shelter, like me. Thinking.
Half an hour later we’re back on the bus to Ashdon, clutching plastic bags with our costumes inside, wondering where we’re going to change.
“Too bad they got rid of most of those red phone booths,” remarks Tyler. “We could do a Superman.”
Of course, they didn’t completely get rid of them—not everywhere. I cross my fingers that Ashdon is considered cute and traditional enough to keep its original phone booth.
6
A single main road passes through the village of Ashdon. Our luck holds—they’ve kept their old-fashioned phone booths, and we can change into our Caped Crusader outfits. The house named “Yale” lies along a lane surrounded by fields, lined with trees. There are very few streetlights and the sky is layered with dense gray clouds. We have to walk a long way in the cold, foggy dark. It’s just as well that it’s hard to see us in the murky light, with us dressed as Batman and Robin.
Tyler hasn’t said much since I half-answered his question. Finally, he breaks his silence. “This Mayan codex … if it was here in Saffron Walden all along, why did no one find it before?”
“I guess no one knew to look for it here.”
“But this Thompson guy—he was a Mayan archaeologist, right? So he must have known what he had, yeah?”
I don’t answer, remembering how I dug up the codex at the shrine of those creepy little statues in the forest—the chaneques. And those two NRO agents … how they watched me dig, the horrible way they died when they touched it … My guess is that Thompson didn’t know what he had. Because once he’d seen what it could do to a person, he never would have let that weird volume be touched again.