Deity (18 page)

Lori
suddenly became aware of an ache along her back and hips, the pressure of
having lain in one position too long. She needed to move but just as she tried
to reposition herself her head suddenly pounded and stars assaulted her vision.

“Whoa
there,” Tarah said, firmly pushing Lori’s shoulders back down. Tarah’s hands
were unexpectedly strong. Her movements seemed more disciplined toward control
than hospitality. Then again, Lori suspected her own perplexity was making her
overly sensitive. After all, the woman’s soothing voice did seem to round out
her hardened edges.

“There’s
no need to be moving so fast with that nasty bump on your head,” Tarah added.

Without
the strength to fight the woman’s commanding will, Lori laid her head back on
the pillow. Tarah lifted the sheet back over her and that’s when Lori realized,
to her embarrassment, that she was completely naked underneath.

Lori
licked her dry lips. “Where am I?”

Tarah reached for a bottle of water sitting on a plastic
crate next to the cot. “Currently you’re in a mobile hospital courtesy of the
Red Cross. We’re parked in the village
of Tunkuruchu. It isn’t
much to speak of, but it’s a far cry from where we found you.”

She
offered Lori a drink. Lori gulped the cool water as though it were her first
drink in years. She would have finished off the entire bottle had Tarah not
kept it to a measured flow.

“Do
you have a name?” Tarah asked.

“Lori.”

“That’s
a nice name.” She pulled the crate closer and sat down on it, much to Lori’s
dismay. At least with Tarah standing, her face was backed by the soothing
shadows of the trailer’s ceiling. Now, with her sitting, Tarah was backlit by
that piercing sunlight coming through the trailer’s door. Lori’s head pounded
each time she looked at her.

“So,
Lori, what were you doing in that cenote anyway?”

“I
was in a cenote?”

“Don’t
you remember? You’re lucky we found you. You could have drowned without your
air tank.”

Lori
tried to recall what the woman was telling her, but she couldn’t pull anything
from her sluggish memory. “I had an air tank?”

“You
were wearing a wetsuit so I’m assuming you had a tank too. In this climate
there’s no need for thermal diving gear if you’re only surface swimming. I
suppose the rock that fell on you must have knocked off your air tank. We never
did find it.”

Lori closed her eyes. She couldn’t recall a wetsuit or an
air tank let alone a cenote. Surreal images of the beach and a cruise liner
flashed through her mind like stills from an island movie.

“What
were you looking for, Lori?”

Lori
searched her memory again but the only thing she could pull from its sticky
void was her original purpose for coming to Mexico. She looked up at Tarah. “I’m
looking to disprove evidence of Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl’s landing in Yucatan. I don’t
remember diving in a cenote though.”

Tarah
winked, but there was something less friendly in her eyes. Lori hesitated. Was
that a measure of disappointment in her expression?

“That’s
understandable,” Tarah said, making a friendly recovery. She dampened a rag
from what remained of the bottled water and placed it over Lori’s forehead. The
damp cloth was refreshingly cool, a brief but welcome pain soother.

“You
suffered a mild concussion,” Tarah continued. “You’re lucky that’s all you had.
How that boulder didn’t land squarely on top of you I’ll never know.”

“But
you said I was in the water. How did I not drown?”

“Another miracle.
Somehow, the very rock
that nearly crushed you was concave enough to capture a pocket of air beneath
it. That’s where we found you. Under water but very much alive. Frightens me to
think of how close to death you were.”

Lori
considered her ordeal too, though to her, it all hid behind a black veil in her
memory. The last thing she remembered was standing on a beach. She recalled
slapping a pair of fins into a man’s chest.

Then
she remembered Chac. Chac had been there.
Dr. Peet too.

Dr.
Peet.

Oh God
!

“What
about Dr. Peet?”

“Who?”

“Dr.
Peet. I remember now. We were diving together. Did you find Dr. Peet?”

Tarah
shook her head solemnly. “We only found you, dear.”

“You
didn’t find Dr. Peet?”

“I’m
sorry. I don’t know who you are talking about.”

Lori’s
heart sank with the news. She could only assume the worst. Something had gone
seriously wrong with the dive. Lori may have survived whatever happened, but
Dr. Peet may not have been so fortunate. Had he escaped he would have surely
come looking for her.

Lori’s
head began to ache again. She draped an arm over her eyes but it wasn’t the
pain she was focused on. It was Dr. Peet.

Could
he be dead? It didn’t seem possible. Despite their recent difficulties, Lori
still admired her former professor. A relationship had developed over their
years of work and study. Lori didn’t know what it was exactly. They knew each
other—she knew things about him and he knew things about her that may not have
ever come to light were it not for the Effigy of Quetzalcoatl. If the
excavation hadn’t brought them close together, then surely recovering it from a
deranged thief six months ago had. Lori dared to say they were as close as a professor
and student could get.

Until Dr. Peet turned cold.

And
now he was dead. Lori would never know why he suddenly abandoned her research. She’d
never understand why he avoided her over the past semester. No matter his motivations,
he certainly didn’t deserve to be cheated out of life this way.

“Rest
now, Lori,” Tarah said. “You need to build your strength.”

Lori
was only partially listening. She didn’t bother to remove her arm from her
face. The thought of Dr. Peet lying somewhere in the
depths
of a cold, dark cenote was
too shocking to comprehend. There was too
much to absorb.

She
didn’t even hear Tarah leave the trailer.

Talking Cross

The
next time Lori awoke, she thought she’d felt a stiff nudge. A patient stillness
followed as she struggled to open her eyes. Evening was coming on given by the
soft light coming through the trailer door, beckoning her to succumb to her
sleep once more.

Until a voice startled the drowsiness out of
her.

“Hello,
Lori.”

Lori
snapped her head around, a punishing movement that sent her vision momentarily
swirling. When she settled again, she found Tarah smiling at the side of her
cot, holding a bowl of soup in her hands. “How’s the head?” she asked.

“Feels
like a lead weight,” Lori said as she groggily sat up, hugging the top sheet to
her breasts. The ratty length of her hair tumbled down her bare neck and
shoulders. Her body ached for more sleep and her mouth felt sticky and dry.

Tarah
set down the soup to help prop a spare pillow behind her. “You’ve been asleep
all day. We thought you might like something in your stomach.”

We?

Lori
shifted her gaze to the foot of her cot where the harsh facial lines of a man
quietly watched from the heavy shadows. Lori pulled the sheet tighter around
her. He took a step into the light towards Tarah, his countenance suddenly
softening. His eyes were calm, his smile warm, his skin a mild brown.

“Call
me Abe,” he said, his Arabic accent slightly heavier than the one that plagued
Tarah’s English.

“Abe
checked in on you a couple of hours ago,” Tarah said, packing in another
pillow.

A
chill swept over Lori’s skin. She didn’t like falling under the care of
complete strangers, especially not while she lay naked and unconscious beneath
a single sheet.

Tarah
must have sensed her animosity. “Don’t you remember him waking you up?” she
asked.

Lori
shook her head as she leaned back into the pillows. There wasn’t much of
anything she could recall, it seemed.

“That’s
to be expected,” Abe said, reassuringly. “We’ve checked in on you fairly
regular. It’s just a precautionary measure. We thought it best to wake you
every couple of hours. You can’t be too careful with head injuries.”

Lori
didn’t remember any of it. Her life, up to this point, felt wrapped up in a
heavy fog.

“I
suppose you’re anxious to get back home,” Tarah said, handing the soup over to
Lori. She settled herself on the edge of the cot. Lori noticed that Abe chose
to remain standing.

Lori
poked at her food. The strange corn concoction certainly didn’t appeal to her
appetite.

“I’m
not sure what to do,” she admitted.

“What
about that man you were asking about?” Tarah pressed. “That Doctor…”

A
flash of familiarity stirred Lori’s memory. “Dr. Peet,” she said, gently
agitating the soup with her spoon.

“Right.
It seems your Dr. Peet is still
missing.”

Lori
hesitated.
The swim.
The darkness.
The frescoes.
Patches of memory began to return.

“It
wasn’t a cenote,” she said, letting her spoon finally rest in the bowl. “I
remember now. It was an underground cavern. There were some early Mayan
frescoes inside, and a separate hieroglyph from a later time period.”

Tarah’s
eyes lit up. “That sounds fascinating.” She turned to Abe. “We must be in the
company of an archaeologist.”

“I’m
still a student at the University
of Utah,” Lori corrected.

“Utah?” Abe looked
surprised. “Say, you wouldn’t happen to know an archaeologist from BYU, goes by
the name of Matt Webb?”

This
time it was Lori’s turn to be surprised. “You know Dr. Webb?”

Abe’s
smile broadened.
“Matt’s the one who led us to Tunkuruchu.
He found the village while working in the area and recognized how impoverished
the land wars have made them. It’s the paramilitaries. The people of Tunkuruchu
are refugees in their own land.”

“Dr.
Webb originally found the hieroglyph in the cavern,” Lori explained. “I came
down here to take a look at it myself.”

Tarah
exchanged a glance with Abe. “What a small world we live in,” she muttered in
amazement.

“How
is Matt anyway?” Abe asked lightly. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“I
can’t say,” Lori admitted. “I’ve yet to meet him.”

“You
mean he wasn’t with you when you went to view this hieroglyph?” Tarah asked.

Lori
shook her head. “No. He seems to have left the area before I arrived.”

Tarah
sighed. “Thank goodness.” She quickly collected herself as she added, “I mean,
I was beginning to fear he’d become a victim of the cenote collapse.”

“That
doesn’t sound like Matt to leave without telling anyone,” Abe observed. “He was
even in the habit of keeping us updated on his whereabouts.”

“We
were hoping the hieroglyph might offer a clue,” Lori said.

“We?”

“Me
and my part…I
mean,
me and my professor, Dr. Peet.”

“So
were there any clues to where Matt may have gone?”

“Not
that I recall.”

“What
did his hieroglyph look like?” Tarah asked.

An
image of the vibrant anthropomorphic figure popped into Lori’s mind, though
whether she was remembering it from the inside of the cavern or from Dr.
Friedman’s e-mail, she wasn’t certain. “He called it a calendar deity,” she
said, but immediately frowned with uncertainty. “Or was it his Jesus deity?” Neither
one sounded completely correct.

“You
mean he found an image of Jesus in Mayan artwork?” Tarah pressed.

Lori
felt the heavy cloud of confusion swirling into her mind. “I’ll draw it for
you,” she said with a measure of distrust in her own memory. Perhaps if she
drew it out
she
could solidify the image in her mind.

Tarah
handed her a clipboard with the back side of a blank medical form clipped to
it. Lori took a pen from Abe and roughly sketched a stick figure with broad
shoulders and outstretched arms, holding something between its hands. The image
looked right, but Lori felt even less certain as she realized its similarity to
The Trader petroglyph in Utah.
Was she confusing the two?

There
was one difference that stuck in her mind.

“There
was a halo around the figure’s head,” she said as she traced it out. “And
within the halo there was a pegged
cross
.”