The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(934)
“Does that mean he was a priest?” Kristen asked, when I showed her the passage.
“I don’t think so, not a Catholic priest, anyway. Then he’d have been Father Ernesto. No, I think this is the old, pagan religion. There are still pockets today and, of course, a good deal was grafted onto Catholicism.”
“The reason he might have known about interesting ruins,” Kristen suggested.
I nodded. “All records agree, though, that a young boy guided them in at last.”
“Ernesto might have been elderly,” Kristen said, “or handicapped in some way.” She spoke quickly as if I might be offended. I wasn’t; I scarcely thought of my limp.
“Are there any pictures of such a person?”
“We haven’t found anything yet, but not all the natives approved of photography.”
I had known, but not considered, that, remembering as I did, the striking photograph of the handsome man I now knew was Jose Antonio. A priest, a believer in the old ways, would more than likely have been suspicious of modern devices—and archeological digs as well. Yet Ernesto consistently encouraged Petrus in what a good many people, both locally and back in New England, considered a delusion and an obsession.
Theirs was a curious relationship, but questions about Ernesto were soon lost in the greater mystery. On the morning of November 9th, the diary notes that Jose Antonio had not appeared for work—atypical behavior from the records Kristen was examining—and then, apparently that evening, Alice was discovered missing. Petrus wrote, A terrible thing has happened. A single line; no details. I can’t say how odd and disquieting I found his brevity.
The next day, Ernesto was consulted, and they formed a search party. The diary records the various distances and directions of their searches, which even included a short trip downriver, all without success. A week later, Petrus journeyed to the nearest telegraph post to send the sad news back to Alice’s family.
The diary gives this account in a terse and straightforward style, as if Petrus had lost his emotional nuance and grasp of colorful detail along with his wife. Indeed, the diaries, and his literary style, never quite recover. There is only one entry that I feel speaks from the heart, and that comes much later, long after the great breakthrough discovery: There are devils here and I have made my bargain with them. God, how I regret this hellish business.
Coming as it did from a man who had hitherto regarded the jungle, despite all its discomforts and dangers, as the outskirts of paradise, this gave me a bad feeling. By then, however, we were deeply involved with the exhibition. Constrained by the terms of our grant, we were all run off our feet, and when Matt came to me with news of an anomalous skeleton, I only went down for a quick and distracted look.
I saw four dusty skeletons inside the large wooden crate, three of them curled up as if they had died in their sleep. They had been shipped north with their modest grave goods—archeologists of that era having few scruples about tomb robbing—and I guessed the corpses had been workers in the great city.
“There’s a photo,” said Matt. I’m sure these three are the same grouping.
As far as I could determine, he was right, except for the presence of a fourth body, lying supine, with a damaged breastbone and some broken ribs.
“Jonken or one of the shippers could have made a mistake,” I said.
Matt shrugged. The crate was numbered, the photo corresponded. To tell the truth, both of us felt there was something not quite right about the skeleton, slightly lighter in color, and both longer and narrower than typical of people who live at altitude. But Amos had been after us for burial material and here it was. Knowing only too well how carelessly the Jonken Bequest had been treated and how downright chaotic some of the storage rooms were, I made a command decision.