A Serpent In Turquoise
A history prof, she’d bet, afflicted with a lingering case of his boyhood bone-fever. Probably he’d taken a vacation to Mexico City, toured the temple at nearby Teotihuacan and been thunderstruck with the daring and originality of his own theory, which he now desperately needed to share with a kindred soul. She resumed reading, If you have any useful thoughts on this, I’d sure like to hear ’em, he’d written in closing. I collect my mail at the address below, whenever I come to town.
“Magdalena’s Cantina in Mipopo?” The bar’s address placed it in the northwest of mainland Mexico, somewhere in the state of Chihuahua. Raine chose an atlas from one of a dozen that were wedged into the nearest overcrowded bookshelf. It took her magnifying glass to find the dot that was Mipopo. A speck of a town along a rim of the—“Barrancas del Cobre” Raine murmured aloud, savoring the words like music on the tongue. So the professor was poking around the Copper Canyons, one of the last truly wild regions in North America.
Looking for Triceratops. Or possibly for Aztecs. Which, come to think of it, must be just about as extinct as dodos and dinosaurs. Raine laughed softly and closed the atlas. She’d always had a weakness for academic eccentrics.
They ate out on the narrow balcony that overlooked the backyard gardens and balconies of the adjoining block. While they talked idly of family and friends, a candle burned on the table between them. “So what now?” Jaye asked when there was nothing left but the wine.
“I’m not sure. With Ethiopia on hold, my calendar’s empty.” Not good. She and her siblings were close, but the way their father and uncle had structured Ashaway All, the top earner in any year got first claim on operational funds in the following year to finance his or her next expedition. The others had to trim their sails and their projects accordingly. It was a tough but fair system that kept them all hustling. Unfortunately Ethiopia had been all out-go, with no resulting income. Raine sighed.
“You could help me and my guys while you’re figuring it out.” Jaye was excavating for prehistoric amber in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. Most of her field crew were interns from Princeton. “Fastest way to forget about Kincade is to surround yourself with a pack of flirtatious, adorable, Ivy League hotties. Beefcake and brains is a treat to behold.”
Raine snorted. “You’re not poaching in the playpen, are you?”
“No, just waving back at ’em through the bars. That’s thrill enough. And I do have a couple of grad students old enough to grow beards. Plus their professors cruise through whenever they get the urge to take off their ties and muck in the dirt.”
“Sounds like you’ve got plenty of company already.” Raine yawned, stretched, stared up at the night sky. Not a star to be seen; the city lights had banished every one. She was restless already. And this was no time to sit and brood. Miles and motion were what she needed right now.
That and something exciting—something wonderful—to chase. If by any miracle Professor McCord wasn’t entirely a crackpot…If he’d seen some old bones, or heard of some… “I appreciate the offer, Jaye. But I’m thinking maybe I’ll fly down for a few days and check out the Copper Canyons.”
Chapter 2
M ipopo didn’t qualify as a town, in Raine’s estimation. It was a squalid little crossroads, set back a quarter mile from the canyon’s awesome rim, as if its original founders had feared it might grow dizzy and tip over. Its main street had a general store with a battered gas pump out front, perhaps a dozen ancient adobes still standing. The only inhabitants in sight were several discouraged dogs and a flock of optimistic chickens pecking the rutted road.
And if there was a bar in town, they were hiding it pretty well. Maybe the professor had made it all up? “When in doubt, ask,” she muttered, swerving in to stop alongside the gas pump.
The ancient proprietor limped out to fill the tank on her topless Jeep, then wash her bug-splattered windshield. But when it came to directions, he was a man of few words. Make that one. “Que?”
“La Cantina de Magdalena,” Raine repeated in careful Spanish. “Could you tell me where it is?”
“Que?” Raising his voice, he smiled wide enough to show her his steel eye-tooth.
“Magdalena’s bar?” Raine tried in English. Or maybe ‘what’ was all the Spanish he spoke, since that was the secondary language in these parts.
The Copper Canyons were home to the Tarahumara Indians, second largest tribe of native Americans in the northern hemisphere. According to the guidebook Raine had bought this morning in Creel, it took a linguist about twelve years to learn their language—if he had an exceptional ear. “What about a place to stay for the night?” she tried without much hope, as she settled behind the wheel of her Jeep.
She folded her hands, prayer-fashion, pressed them to one ear and cocked her head. Closing her eyes, she sighed blissfully, as if snuggling down into a comfy pillow.
“Oh, si! El doctor.”
“Clearly we don’t have a meeting of minds here. But muchas gracias, señor, all the same.”
As she eased the Jeep past a swaggering rooster and onto the road, Raine figured she had two hours before the sun dipped below the craggy peaks beyond the canyon to her west. If she couldn’t find a place to bed down in Mipopo, she supposed she could return to the motel where she’d stayed in Creel last night. Some eighty miles of butt-bruising road to the north, the little logging and tourist town boasted the main stop on the railway that skirted the canyon rim. It was the last place even pretending to civilization for a hundred miles in any direction.
On the other hand, she could press on regardless, heading south into the hinterlands. According to her map, a dotted line swerved off the rim road about ten miles past Mipopo. This track appeared to switch back down the canyon wall, dropping from bench to bench. If she made it down to the river before dark, she’d surely find a place to pitch a camp.
“Darn,” she muttered aloud. She’d pictured herself finding the professor tonight. Professor McCord had started out as the longest of longshots, barely more than an excuse for this escapade. But after her discovery yesterday in the Creel gift shop, her urge to consult him had grown more urgent. “So how do I find you?” she murmured, then glanced to her right at the building she was passing—and stepped on the brakes.
It was one of the few two-story buildings in Mipopo, and there were three battered cars and an overloaded lumber truck parked in the vacant lot beside it. Farmacia, proclaimed the rusty sign that swung above its torn screen door and sagging boardwalk, though the blinking red, chili pepper Christmas tree lights that framed each window were sort of festive for a drugstore. Plus they were either too early or way too late, this being only the first week in October. Still, if there was a pharmacist lurking within, surely he’d speak Spanish? The screen door banged shut behind her and Raine stood, half-blind in the dusky light.
“Dame una tequila!” demanded someone at her ear in a metallic monotone. She spun to find herself eyeball to beady black eyeball with a mynah bird, perched on a plastic coat hanger suspended from the ceiling.
A hand-lettered sign hung from the bird’s trapeze. “Magdalena,” Raine read aloud. “You’re Magdalena? Then this must be—”
“¡Una tequila o tu vida!” A tequila or your life! Feathers brushed her ear as the bird swooped away.
Turning to follow its flight, Raine saw the bird flutter down behind a long marble counter, fronted by a row of red-topped stools. Back in some distant and glorious past, this must have been the town’s ice cream parlor and drugstore. The round white wrought-iron tables remained, but nowadays they didn’t accommodate miners’ wives and children, sipping ice cream sodas and limonada. Half a dozen men slouched here and there, with their beers frozen halfway to their open mouths and their dark eyes drilling into Raine.
“Buenas tardes,” she said to the room in general.
Nobody smiled back or even twitched.
Wonderful. Raine walked between the tables and up to the bar.
Somewhere overhead, a woman burst into wild laughter. A bed creaked, then kept on creaking, settling into an age-old, familiar rhythm. “Great taste in post offices, Professor,” Raine muttered under her breath. From upstairs she heard two distinctly different guttural groans of masculine bliss added to the woman’s rolling giggles. So there was a trio up there.
“How d’you get a drink around here?” she asked the bird, now perched on a beer tap, as raptly attentive as the rest of Raine’s audience. Choosing one of the tattered vinyl stools, she turned her back on the tables.
As a girl brushed through the beaded curtain that hung over the doorway behind the bar, Raine greeted her. “¡Hola!” The kid teetered on the low edge of her teens, with big black eyes and long black pigtails. “Una cerveza, por favor.”
The girl reached for a heavy glass stein. She whisked the mynah off its perch; with an indignant squawk, it hopped down to strut along the countertop.
“Yo busco—I’m looking for—un norteamericano,” Raine said as the amber liquid rose inside the glass. “Se llama Professor McCord.”
The girl paused in the act of serving Raine the drink. Her eyes narrowed to slits.
“You know him?” Clearly she’d heard of him.
The kid shrugged, rummaged under the counter, drew out a second stein. This one had a smear of red lipstick along its rim. Deliberately she poured the beer from the clean glass into the dirty one, and then thumped it down before Raine.
“And welcome to Mipopo.” Raine contemplated the spillage while somebody snickered behind her. The girl moved down the bar, to pick up a rag and scrub an invisible stain.
From her shoulder bag, Raine fished out her prize souvenir of the trip so far. Wrapped in a red bandanna to protect it, it was a mug made of low-fired local clay. She’d found it in Creel, in a gallery near the train station. After she’d spotted it, she’d realized that this trip might not be entirely a fool’s errand. That she really ought to find Professor McCord and pump him for information.
Against a creamy background, the design was glazed in irregular squares of mottled greenish blue. Glaring out from the side of the mug, the critter’s beaky face looked precisely like the professor’s photo of the carvings on the temple of the Feathered Serpent at Teotihuacan—except for one added feature: The hornless Triceratops appeared to be covered with a turquoise mosaic.
Raine leaned across the bar to fill her blue dino-mug from the tap. With a toast to the outraged child, she took a long cool swallow. “Delicioso!” she assured the girl. Then she skated the dirty stein down the counter.
The kid caught it before it flew off the end. “Una bebida para la pájara,” Raine directed. A drink for the bird. “Or give her a tequila, if she prefers. Con gusano.” The premier tequila always came with a pickled worm in its bottle.
Behind her, one of the men gave a snorting guffaw and then instantly hushed. The screen door banged, as somebody walked into the cantina.
Just for a change, could it be someone sociable? Raine petitioned, staring straight before her as she drank.
Whoever the newcomer was, he smelled of peppermint and cigars. He was big enough to make the stool creak as he settled in, leaving only one seat between them. Not a local, judging from the well-cut shirt sleeve and crisp khaki trousers Raine could see from the corner of her eye. Neither was he an American professor, she concluded, stealing a glance while the stranger ordered a beer in halting Spanish. This guy was German or Swiss, if you added his sandy mustache and ruddy coloring to his syntax.
The kid gave him a come-hither smile, and he responded with courtly boredom, his gaze locked on the glass she held hostage.
Raine drew a notepad from her bag and penned a quick note:
Professor McCord,
Got your letter regarding the temple at Teotihuacan and your question’s intriguing. I happen to be in the area for a week or two, so could I buy you a drink? I’ll check back here at Magdalena’s whenever I can these next few days. Set a date and a place at your convenience and I’ll be happy to meet you.
Yours sincerely,
Raine Ashaway
She folded the page in thirds, then sealed the message with a strip of tape from her bag. She addressed it to the professor, then set it to one side with a five-dollar peace offering laid on top.
“A most handsome cup,” observed the stranger, swinging on his stool to face her. “Might I please examine it?” His suntanned fingers were already extended.
Pushy, but she supposed he meant well, and for an icebreaker, it beat the weather. Raine handed the cup over with a smile. “Like it? I understand the artist is local.”
The German inspected it gravely. “It is really quite…charming.” His blue eyes lifted to include her in the compliment. “Might I introduce myself?”
He might. His name was Johann Grunwald, and he insisted on standing Raine to a second beer while they moved casually from names, to observations about Mexican pottery, to their reasons for being there.
Not that Raine told the truth. You never knew when you were going to bump into the competition these days. Even if Grunwald had no interest in paleontology, he might talk, and news spread fast where there was little to gossip about. “I’m just a wandering travel writer. I’ve heard about the Copper Canyons for years. Deeper than the Grand Canyon, with almost three times its area. Thought they might be worth an article.”
That launched Grunwald into an oration on the most spectacular of the canyons; the trails offering the finest panoramas or the best swimming holes. He’d be delighted to show her his favorite spots, since it was so very easy to get lost down there. Beyond the point where the roads played out, the canyon system branched like a gigantic labyrinth. The footpaths vanished or changed with each flash flood or rockslide. The maps were imprecise, GPS reception was abysmal and the natives were hardly helpful.
“But after six months of surveying the terrain, I assure you I know my way around. My men and I study the geological structures and the hydrographics in anticipation that my company—” beaming with pride, he named one of the biggest contractors in the world “—will soon build a dam hereabouts. A most magnificent and enormous dam.”
In that case, the kid could have him. Raine didn’t believe in drowning natural wonders for the convenience of mankind. Even if she had, she’d noticed in her travels that building dams might be a lucrative pastime for politicos and engineers, but it rarely improved the lot of the natives.
But why waste her breath arguing? Her companion wasn’t the type to be shaken in his convictions. Raine dried her cup with the bandanna, preparing to tuck it away.
“That really is a most delightful cup,” Grunwald observed. “I hope you will not be offended, but I have been seeking a gift for my, uh, sister, to send for her birthday. You would not, by any chance, consider selling to me this mug?”
He needed a gift for someone nearer and dearer than a sister, Raine suspected. He didn’t wear a ring; still she’d lay money that he had a wife back in Hamburg. “Sorry, but I’m quite attached to it. And I’m afraid I bought the last one in Creel. The gallery owner said its maker was a new artist, a young Tarahumara she’d never dealt with before. She took only a few of his designs on trial. But perhaps you could buy something from the artist directly,” Raine suggested at Grunwald’s look of chagrin. “The shop owner said that he’s built his kiln at a town called Lagarto.”
Boot heels shuffled on the plank floors and Raine glanced behind to find one of the men from the tables standing at her shoulder with an empty mug. She turned back to the engineer. “In fact, do you know where Lagarto is?” After she located Professor McCord, she meant to track down the artist, ask him where he’d gotten his idea for the turquoise creature.
While the kid drew a refill for her thirsty customer, then exchanged a few rapid words with him in a language that sure wasn’t Spanish, Grunwald explained that Lagarto was a ranchito some sixty miles south, on a branch of the Rio Verde. “It is not a town. Many of the names you will see on your map are ranchitos—just the little farm of some Indio family, no more than that. There will be no stores to buy food or drink, no one to rent you a bed. The Tarahumaras are shy and standoffish, not fond of strangers. You must carry your own supplies down in the canyons, and even so, without a knowledgeable and trustworthy guide…” He patted her fingers reassuringly where they rested on the cool marble.
“I see.” Raine smiled and drew back her hand. She should go. Grunwald was pleasant enough in small doses, but he was starting to lean too close and lick his fleshy lips too often. “I had one other question. Do you happen to know an American hereabouts—a Professor McCord?”
“Anson McCord, the archaeologist? Yes, I’ve run into him down in the canyons once or twice. We share an interest in caves.”
“Ah.” So the professor wasn’t a scholar of history, though she’d not been too far off the mark—ancient man instead of modern. “Do you know where I could—” But she paused at the clatter of several sets of feet on an unseen stairway, then the sound of a body slipping and crashing the rest of the way down.
A burst of drunken hilarity was followed by a man’s bitter cursing in Spanish. Two men staggered through the beaded curtain. The skinny one held a bleeding elbow as he swore, while his hulking companion laughed uproariously. Behind them stalked a dark-haired woman with the seething impatience of a caged panther. With her bed-tossed hair and her kiss-swollen lips, she was surely the giggler from upstairs, but she was amused no longer.
The kid ran to her, stood on tiptoe to hiss in her ear. The woman’s eyes swerved like black lasers to focus on Raine.
“Ah, Magdalena,” said Grunwald under his breath. “Cuidado! She’s in one of her moods.”
“I thought—” Raine glanced at the mynah bird, who’d discovered the rejected beer down the counter, and was dipping its beak.
“That’s Magdalenita, but this one is—How do you say it? The real thing.” Grunwald stood to make a gallant introduction, but Magdalena glared at Raine, ignoring the hand she’d offered across the bar.
“Mucho gusto,” Raine said pleasantly, though it wasn’t. “I was asking Señor Grunwald if he could direct me to el profesor McCord. Or I understand that he collects his mail here. Perhaps you might tell me where to find him?”
“We know of no such man around here!” snapped Magdalena.
“Er, ah, well—” objected Grunwald.
The barkeeper raised her black brows at him. “None of us know such a man, do we?”
The German shut his mouth and sat down.
Wimp. Raine shouldered her bag, then handed Magdalena the note she’d prepared along with the fiver. “Todo el mismo—all the same—should you encounter this man McCord, I’d be grateful if you give him this. I would pay another twenty dollars gladly if by any chance he receives it.” In all likelihood, Magdalena would toss her message, but what else could she do?
She turned to bid Grunwald an ironic farewell, but the German muttered something about using the facilities. He ducked around the bar, then through a door.
Raine dropped bills on the counter, headed for the exit. But threading between the tables, she stopped as a pair of long legs stretched out to block her path. The hulking thug from upstairs smirked up at her, then shaped her a wet kiss.
His skinny pal scooted his chair back to extend the blockade. At the next table, the young man she’d crossed gazes with at the counter was dreamily contemplating the rear wall. No help would be coming from him.
“Perdóname,” Raine said, deadpan. Dogs generally didn’t bite till you showed fear.
“Hoy es mi cumpleaños,” confided Señor Double-wide, his smirk broadening to show teeth he ought to have hid.
“Happy birthday. You don’t look a day over twelve.”
His single ear-to-ear eyebrow bunched in confusion, then his smile turned mean. “So where’s my present, puta? How ’bout you gimme that pretty mug?”
Ah, a crafts lover of impeccable taste. “I don’t think so.” If she tried a detour, he’d just block her new path. Raine stepped over his legs—then spun back fiercely as he grabbed her wrist. “Don’t touch!” Her boot toe caught him square in his sweaty armpit.
As he squealed and doubled over, she chopped his elbow and jerked her wrist free. Kicked his chair out from under him. He crashed to the floor in a welter of clanging iron tables and smashing beer steins, and Raine walked out the door.
Chapter 3
A s Raine turned the corner of the building, cutting past the overloaded lumber truck toward her Jeep, a man stuck his head out a window. Grunwald.
“Pssst! Miss Ashaway! Raine! Over here!”
In spite of herself, she swerved to stand below him. “Gotta run, Johann. Thanks for the drink.”
“I must apologize for my manners. But this is the only place to find a cold beer or a home-cooked meal in fifty miles. If I offend Magdalena…”
“I understand. But about the professor. Can you tell me where to find him?”
“I can only say where I last encountered the man, about a month ago. He was conducting one of his digs along the Rio San Ignácio, east of its junction with the Batopilas. You cannot miss his camp.” He glanced nervously over his shoulder. “I think that perhaps I’d better—”
“Me, too,” she agreed as he withdrew like a gopher down its hole.
Raine started her Jeep, glanced toward the front of the cantina. No sign of pursuit yet. She spread her map out on the seat beside her. Back to Creel or onward?
“I said I’d give you twenty dólares Americano for the mug—not to make a fool of yourself,” Antonio said, squatting on his boot heels beside the fallen mestizo. The young man pulled the bill out of his pocket, waved it before the other’s flushed face. “Do you still want it? Then go after la rubia.” The blonde.
“I go stomp that bitch for free, but first, for my troubles—!”
The big man ripped the bill from the other’s fingers. Laughter clogged in his throat as the switchblade flicked into view.
“Ah, no,” Antonio said gently, touching the point to the fool’s lower eyelid. “You haven’t earned it yet.” He plucked his bill from slack fingers, tucked it away.
“I’ll—I’ll kill you for that,” blustered the big man, blinking frantically as a bead of blood oozed along the bright steel.
“You may try at your pleasure, but meanwhile, la rubia drives away, laughing. She’ll tell all her rich fancy lovers back in the city how she met a fool in Mipopo. ‘So easy,’ she’ll say. ‘One kick and I brought him to his knees. And he was a cobarde—a whimpering coward. He took my abuse and tucked his tail like a puppy!”’
“Oh, yeah?” bellowed the big man, as the knife snapped back into its handle and moved away. “If that’s what she thinks!” He staggered to a swaying stand. “Once I’ve done her I’ll be back with the mug—to break it over your lice-ridden head, you dirty indio!” He slammed out the screen door.
His skinny friend giggled and trotted after to watch the fun.
“Ah, Antonio, you were always a troublemaker,” Magdalena said fondly from behind her bar. “Now pick up my damn tables.”
Raine steered the Jeep across the bumpy lot toward the road. She stole a glance toward the cantina. Still no sign of trouble. Maybe Señor Double-wide had passed out from mortification? “Fine by me,” she muttered, easing her foot off the clutch.
With a blast of its horn, a pickup loomed up on her blind side. Storming out of the north, it cleared the winch on her front bumper by a foot.
Raine stomped on the brake, staring after the dwindling truck, and the herd of black-and-white goats that filled its rusty bed.