Just for the hell of it, she decided to stretch out her ascent by swimming in a counter-clockwise corkscrew around the edge of the cavern. The change in perspective helped alleviated the boredom, but the results were no different.
She was almost back to the surface when something caught her eye, or more precisely, the lack of something. Hidden behind a tangle of roots from a tree that had infiltrated down through the ceiling, was a dark spot, like a shadow, into which the beam of her light disappeared completely. There was a void there, something she had missed during her initial descent. She swam closer and began pulling at the roots that blocked the way.
Her original assessment was correct; there was a passage behind the roots, a hollow space in the limestone big enough for her to swim into if she could clear the obstruction at the opening. She drew her knife and began sawing at the roots. They were as tough as cables but after a few minutes of dragging the blade back and forth, she succeeded in removing one. Rather than waste more time cutting, she simply pushed the others out of the way and wriggled through the resulting gap.
She knew that the safe course, the course of wisdom, would have been to simply mark the location of the passage for a future dive. That was what her father would have counseled. But her instincts told her the passage would be just another dead end. It made more sense to spend her remaining air to get a definitive answer than to raise her father’s hopes only to have them dashed again.
Her instincts were wrong.
The passage meandered for about twenty yards before turning down and opening up into another spacious cavern.
Miranda’s heartbeat quickened again as her light fell upon something that was most definitely not a naturally occurring geological feature. A large block of stone stood at almost the exact center of the cavern. Four feet wide and almost as long, relief images that were recognizable even to her relatively untrained eye as Mayan hieroglyphs adorned its length. She swam in close, keeping her gaze on the object so that the GoPro would capture every detail. There were more carvings on the sides, each a square glyph about eight inches across, no doubt some kind of religious myth or perhaps a historical record; her father would know.
She came around to the far side of the object and caught another glimmer of gold, only this time, it wasn’t foil on an old beer bottle. It was the real thing.
The regulator fell from her mouth as she went slack-jawed.
Where the central glyph ought to have been, there was instead a recess in the stone, and inset within was a shiny yellow disk the size of a salad plate. The disk was adorned with a large central glyph of a four-legged creature — a dog, if Miranda was not mistaken — and several smaller images arrayed in a circle around the outside.
She replaced the mouthpiece then drew her knife again and carefully worked the point into the carved recess behind the disk. The golden artifact shifted and then popped free. Miranda brought her free hand around to catch it, but the water slowed her reflexes. The object sank to the bottom before she could grab ahold. It landed with a thud that she could feel vibrating through the water, and threw up a murky cloud of sediment that both marked and obscured the spot where it had hit.
Miranda breathed out an irritated curse, then kicked down into the cloud to retrieve the fallen disk. If it was solid gold, it would be a lot heavier than it looked, maybe too heavy for her to get all the way back to the surface, but she wasn’t about to leave without making the attempt. She cautiously extended a hand into the silt cloud until she made contact with something solid. She curled her fingers around the object and tried to lift it.
To her complete astonishment, it came up with hardly any effort, as the murky water below her cleared, she saw why. The thing she was holding was not the golden disk, but a human skull.
She dropped it like it was a snake about to strike, and kicked away with a silent scream. As she shot up to the roof of the cavern her light played across the floor and in its beam she saw more skulls, at least two dozen of them, staring up at her with empty eye sockets.
She yelped again, her heart hammering in her chest.
Get a grip, Miranda, she told herself, taking a deep drag on her air supply to calm herself. They’re just skeletons. They can’t hurt you. They’ve been dead for centuries.
Except she was wrong about that, too. Most of the skulls lay with their disarticulated skeletons, their flesh and any garments long since decayed to nothing, but some still had ragged bits of decomposing tissue and clothing clinging to them. At least one of the corpses appeared to be wearing blue jeans and a button-up work shirt.
Miranda took another breath and decided it was time to go. This wasn’t an archaeological site anymore — it was a crime scene.
But as she turned to look for the exit, she was confronted with not one, but several passages all evenly spaced around the circumference of the room. She couldn’t tell which one she had come in through. She was having trouble counting them. There were at least ten, maybe as many as fifteen, all radiating out like the spokes of a wheel.
I am so screwed, she thought, but then shook her head. No. You’ve got this Miranda. Think.
Miranda took another deep breath… or tried to. The air didn’t seem to want to come out of the tank. She grabbed the pressure gauge, but it only confirmed what she already knew. She was out of air.
Right the first time, she thought. Definitely screwed.
CHAPTER 2
As the old Toyota Land Cruiser rounded the bend, Maria Trujillo saw the old woman standing in the middle of the road and slammed on the brakes. The rutted track was slick from an earlier rain shower and the four-wheel drive vehicle slid forward several feet, but the old woman made no attempt to get out of the way.
The Toyota skidded to a halt and Maria pulled the emergency brake, left the vehicle to idle, and jumped out to make sure the woman was all right.
The old woman stared back at her with rheumy bloodshot eyes. She looked as if she was about to collapse from exhaustion or dehydration, or both, but she managed to summon up a grim, toothless smile. “Curandera,” she said. “You came.”
Maria was not in fact a curandera, a traditional healer, but a medical doctor, educated at the Medical College of Honduras and presently working for the Ministry of Health. Nevertheless, she had long since accepted that rural folk, particularly those of a certain age, were incapable of wrapping their heads around the idea that a woman could be a physician.
“Si, Dona.” She knew the woman’s face, had treated her on numerous occasions previously, but in her role as a rural health care provider for the Honduran government, she had treated thousands of people. Keeping track of names in her head was simply impossible. “But why are you out here on the road?”
“I was looking for you,” the woman replied, forlorn.
Maria sighed. “Well, I am here. Now, let’s get you back home.”
She took the woman’s hand, guiding her around to the passenger side of the Land Cruiser. The old woman complied but remained agitated.
“Diego brought a curse upon us,” she wailed.
Maria nodded patiently, helping the old woman up and into the seat. She had no idea who Diego was, or what sort of curse he might have brought upon his fellow villagers. The likeliest explanation was that Diego had gotten drunk and done something foolish. Slept with someone else’s wife, most likely. That kind of behavior often resulted in violence. In rural outposts like Opalaca, which wasn’t a proper town but just a small community of less than two hundred souls in a cluster of houses and huts built along the side of the mountain road, it was still common for disagreements between neighbors to be settled with machetes.