Effigy (21 page)

She nudged Dr. Peet in a half-hearted tease. “All right, so we’re both a couple of basket cases.”

The professor’s attempted chuckle quickly faded into an airy sigh. Lori glanced across the lab tables. A good majority of the artifacts were back where they belonged, though there were still more to sort. She spotted the effigy’s empty aluminum container sitting on top of the microscope counter.

“I’m sure the cops are doing everything they can,” she said, trying to sound optimistic.

Dr. Peet’s expression fell again as he woefully shook his head. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Sure they are. They wouldn’t let something like this just slide.”

“They would if they didn’t know anything about it.”

Lori snorted. “You don’t have to know anything about the effigy to realize how important it is. All they have to do is look at the newspapers.”

He shook his head again. “That’s not what I meant,” he said, turning back to his hands folded in his lap. “They don’t know anything about the theft, Lori. I never reported it to them.”

* * * *

Peet felt her astonished stare as he focused on his hands. How could he tell Lori that although he’d driven as far as the police station yesterday, he’d only managed to sit like a lump in his car, fearing the suspicion that was sure to arise from his delay. Surely the police would want to know why he hadn’t called them immediately after the theft, and he had yet to find a convincing answer. They wouldn’t believe he thought he could capture the thieves by deciphering a Mayan hieroglyph printed on a torn piece of stationary. He hardly believed that himself anymore.

Peet realized he was compounding the problem the longer he delayed. After a long night of struggling for a solution, he decided he’d think clearer while he was working. The only problem was, as he began to restore the artifacts to their storage units, his mind escaped the tangled situation he was in and locked in on each individual artifact he picked up. Two nights had come and gone and he still hadn’t contacted the police, and now he and Lori had effectively picked up the crime scene.

He dared to glance at Lori. Her wide, blue-green eyes were burning with questions but to her credit, she didn’t say a word. Perhaps she understood his inability to take action. Or, perhaps she saw her promising future utterly eroding into a pile of futile study and unresolved tuition fees.

As he struggled for an explanation he became aware of the echo of footsteps approaching from the hallway outside. The idea that someone was in the building during summer break, on this day, at this moment, didn’t register with him until Lori turned her head to listen. And in that moment, a sense of urgency sprang into both of them.

Together they leaped to their feet amid the squeal and clatter of lab stools tumbling to the floor. They scrambled around each end of the table behind them and bolted for the storage room. Peet reached it just ahead of Lori’s bad ankle and slammed the door shut just as the lab door swung open.

John Friedman stepped inside.

“Hey,” Peet greeted uneasily, halting mid-stride in a vain attempt to reach the nearest lab table.

John didn’t answer right away. He paused to take in the scene like a detective having just crossed a police tape, complete in a soggy wool-blend top coat. Peet hadn’t realized it was raining again.

John’s eyes shifted from Peet to the tables, across to Lori, and then back again.

“Hello, Anthony,” he said in his space-consuming baritone. He slowly pulled at his leather gloves, one fingertip at a time. He didn’t bother stepping any further into the room.

“I…I didn’t expect to see you here,” Peet said, failing to take a light tone.

”I wish I could say likewise,” John said, “but somehow I knew…” The elderly man’s eyes swept critically across the crowded tables again. “May I ask what’s going on in here?”

Peet felt his heart racing. “Just tidying up a little,” he said with a botched grin. It was a lame excuse, but about as reasonable as could be expected. And he hoped Lori would play along. “How’d you get in?”

John tucked his gloves into the slash pocket of his coat and withdrew a small key ring. “There are a few perks that come with being an emeritus professor,” he said.

Peet stiffened. His voice nearly trembled. “So you’ve come to work on the effigy, then?” He cast Lori a frantic look. “I think it’s stored in the museum.”

John frowned as he stuffed the keys back into his pocket. “I’m not here to study the effigy,” he said as he reached inside his coat.

Peet tensed at the stiff expression on John’s face. For the moment he half expected him to withdraw a gun from his coat, gangster style, with little regard for the actions he intended to take with it.

Time slowed to the pace of Peet’s breath sucking between his lips. It was funny that he would note such a thing as he remained transfixed upon John’s arm diving for an inside pocket of his coat. But in that very moment, all motion clambered down to a painstaking crawl.

John found what he was reaching for and eased it out of his coat. His eyes remained trained on Peet. There was a rustle of the coat’s inner lining. John’s wrist was the first to peek out.

Peet considered diving under the Civil War table when a flash of white slipped from John’s coat. Another rustle, and then it was out in the open—a handful of computer paper which John promptly slapped down upon the empty lab table in front of him. Peet exhaled with sweet relief, instantly feeling foolish for his rash reaction.

“What’s this?” he asked, hesitantly approaching the stack that had shifted and left a six-inch trail of paperwork slipped across the tabletop.

John crossed his arms.

“It’s exactly what you came to see me about.”

Calendar Round

John couldn’t explain exactly why he bothered tracking Anthony Peet down to the laboratory, but then again, he’d never spent much time rationalizing his actions in any situation. He told himself that he wanted only to help Lori, but there was something more. He was curious—not necessarily about Lori’s project, but in Peet’s interest in Lori’s project.

There was something suspicious going on between the professor and his student that John didn’t care to get involved with, and yet he felt the need to verify his skepticism. Regrettably, he’d accepted a similar situation before. Now he’d just as soon stay clear of Peet’s affairs were it not for one thing: he needed confirmation that the rumors were true, that he’d been right after all these years.

Controversies aside, there was one more thing that ultimately drove John to the university campus. The computer disk. As hard as he tried, he hadn’t been able to ignore it. The very sight of the disk had infected John like a fever, the first symptoms settling in immediately after Peet and Lori left his house. Memories plagued him into the night until finally, long after Martha had fallen asleep, he gave in. He wrapped himself in his favorite terrycloth robe, shuffled his slippers down the hall and settled behind the computer crowning the Victorian walnut desk in the corner of his library.

The glow of the computer screen had filled the room with a ghostly gray light as he withdrew a CD from the back of the desk’s drawer. His fingers fumbled with the plastic case as he retrieved the disk and inserted it into the computer. The CD-ROM whirred out of dormancy.

Finding the Mayan calendar had been easy. Finding the second, incomplete calendar that Peet inquired about was easier still. John had completed both calendars years ago and saved them to a CD that had the storage capacity he needed to collaborate them to the Gregorian calendar. He printed out the most recent section of the calendar, a good one hundred and seventy-two pages of it, tracking each and every day over the past fifty-two years.

Now, with no other admittable reason than the fact that he had indeed printed the calendar, John found himself standing in the lab, waiting for Peet to get an eyeful of his work. Waiting for his verification, his redemption.

“Where did you get this?” Peet asked, quickly scanning the top two pages of the calendar.

John straightened. “You didn’t honestly believe that the only copy of this calendar was on
your
disk, did you?”

“What calendar?” Lori asked, leaning over Peet’s shoulder. Her eyes brightened. “There’s the symbol from the stationary!” she said, shoving in for a closer look.

Peet looked up. “So we were right. That is a date symbol.”

“How can that be?” Lori asked. “We looked through the entire Mayan calendar.”

“That’s your problem,” John explained. “You were looking at the
Mayan
calendar.”

Lori frowned as she picked up a page. “This sure looks the same. Thirteen numbers running alongside twenty date symbols.”

John slipped out of his coat and loosely folded it over a lab stool. “However, the date symbol on your little piece of scratch paper isn’t Mayan.”

“Then what is it?” Peet asked.

“The name of this date symbol is Ten Coatl. Coatl being the Nahuatl word for snake.”

“Nahuatl?” Lori asked. “The language recorded in the
Florentine Codex
.”

“The language spoken by the Aztecs,” Peet added.

John nodded. “The Aztecs,
and
the Toltecs.”

Lori’s brow creased. “Who are the Toltecs?”

“The Toltecs arrived in central
Mexico
roughly two centuries after the decline of
Teotihuacan
. They are credited for their two hundred sixty day calendar, which they called their Book of Days. The Mayans later adopted the calendar and renamed it, the ‘Tzolkin.’”

Lori looked confused. “What good is a two hundred sixty day calendar when a full year takes three hundred sixty-five days?”

“Three hundred sixty-five and one-quarter days, to be slightly more accurate,” John corrected.

He cleared his throat. Setting old grudges aside, his mood began to lighten. He was settling into a topic he knew like the back of his hand and it was comforting to teach it. That was the one thing he missed most about the classroom.

“Let’s look at why a civilization creates calendars in the first place. Imagine yourself living around the time of Christ. The earth can seem like a giant place, but it can feel like a hectic place. All things live and die to their own bio-rhythms, but there’s little consistency to it. Some die young, some die old, some die for reasons we don’t understand. There’s war and there’s peace. Rain comes in cycles, but sometimes it doesn’t come at all. The ground quakes and mountains fall. The tides appear steady in their own cycles, but even they can be disrupted by hurricanes and tsunamis.

“And amid this chaotic world are we humans trying to find order in it all. There is this natural desire to find patterns and consistency. So when we can’t find it on Earth, where do we look?”

“Heaven?”

“Precisely. The sky. When you look at all the calendars in the history of this world, you will find that there are astronomical bases to them. And why not? What is more steady than the sun rising and falling, or the recycling phases of the moon. And then there are the stars, consistent and steady. There is order in the heavens, and people have been trying to link themselves to that order ever since the dawn of man.”

Peet took a seat at the table, a page loosely held between his hands. “So the Toltecs designed this Book of Days Calendar as a way to connect with heaven.”

“In a manner of speaking. The Book of Days, or Tzolkin as the Mayans renamed it, was something of a holy calendar as well as a practical calendar. It had many uses, from predicting eclipses to calculating a woman’s gestation period, which runs approximately two hundred sixty days. Thus, human and astronomical cycles are entwined.