We decide to phone Benicio right away, while the bus is still in the streets of Veracruz. Ixchel tells him that she’s abducting me to show me something of the “real” Mexico. When she passes her phone to me, I can hear the anxiety in his voice.
“Josh, I’m not kidding. Tell her you’re coming back with me. Montoyo will kill me.”
“Then don’t tell him. We’ll be back the day after tomorrow. Just tell him that everything’s fine, that we’re hanging out together.”
Benicio goes silent. “If anything happens to you guys, I’m toast. You understand? I’m finished as a pilot.”
Ixchel takes the phone. “Don’t be ridiculous, Benicio. You’re the best pilot we have. Just be calm. It’ll be fine.”
But Benicio doesn’t seem to agree and hangs up, cursing us both.
Ixchel giggles, embarrassed. “Gee. Now I feel really bad.”
“Don’t. We’re only going to find out what Madison is up to. Okay? When we find out, they’ll thank us.”
Ixchel glances at me and seems to mull something over.
I also use her phone to call Tyler. It turns out he hasn’t left Oxford after all.
“My mom drove me past Ollie’s,” Tyler tells me. “And her house has a ‘FOR RENT’ sign. I looked through the windows—it’s empty. The neighbors said she moved out yesterday. I called her on her cell phone—it was turned off.”
I ask him to check my house for any more of those postcards. He’s already been to the house and found another two. I ask him to read out the messages.
They are:
KINGDOM’S.LOSS.
QUESTIONABLE.JUDGMENT.
Ixchel copies this down, as well as the rest of the messages. All together, in date order, the message so far is:
WHAT.KEY.HOLDS.BLOOD.DEATH.UNDID.HARMONY. ZOMBIE.DOWNED.WHEN.FLYING.KINGDOM’S.LOSS. QUESTIONABLE.JUDGMENT.
She asks, “You know what this means?”
I glumly fix my eyes on the message. “Not the faintest idea.”
But the latest messages seem to tie in with my theory. Zombie downed when flying. Sounds like a nasty reference to my dad’s corpse being in the plane. Kingdom’s loss, questionable judgment. Could that be a reference to Ek Naab?
“Maybe you need the whole message to decipher the code,” suggests Ixchel.
“That’s not how deciphering works,” I tell her.
“Oh, so you’re a deciphering genius now, are you?”
“Hey, I figured out that the Ix Codex is written in English!” I say.
Oops.
“It’s in English … ? But how?”
“I’m kidding,” I say. “‘Course it’s not in English. As if!”
Ixchel says nothing more for a few seconds, instead looks at me closely. I try to look relaxed, but I can actually feel my cheeks burning. Time to change the subject.
I put the message aside and I tell Ixchel all about my adventure last summer, how I found the Ix Codex, and some of what’s happened in the past few weeks. Every time I come to a part about what I read in the pages from the Ix Codex, I have to stop.
“Gosh … sorry … I can’t tell you about that …”
Eventually she tells me to shut up about the Ix Codex. But of course she wants to know. And of course I want to talk about it. We can’t, so we change the subject again.
She tells me about how she left Becan by bus the morning after she saw me. She headed out to Playa del Carmen, where she spent a few weeks waitressing in bars on the beach. From Playa she went to Merida, from Merida to Veracruz.
“I wanted to see Mexico. And not just from a beach. I want to see the whole world too, one day. Might as well start here.”
I’m full of admiration, but I can’t really understand how she can stand to live that way. I think of my own comfortable life in Oxford. Not much would persuade me to abandon that.
We reach Villahermosa just in time to catch the overnight bus to Chetumal. I can’t help thinking sadly of poor Saul there without Camila. I wonder if he stayed. Without her, he’d only have the avocados and their beautiful house. Still—it beats being in jail.
These thoughts turn over and over in my head. I clench my jaw, trying not to let bad memories get to me. I turn to Ixchel to see if I can get her talking again. But she’s asleep, breathing quietly, leaning against the window. Outside it’s pitch-black. The interior lights of the bus are switched off, the video screen blinks into action, and a film begins to play. It’s one I’ve seen before—Memento. I plug into my dad’s iPod. It’s mostly classical music, jazz, and prog rock. Wondering if I’ll have the dream about my dad, I select Kind of Blue and try to sleep.