Tears of the Jaguar Read Online Free PDF

solving it,” she would have said. He missed her, suddenly. She would have known what to do. And maybe she was right. It had rained, hard, but it had rained many times before, and life went on unchanged, or almost unchanged. But he had to look. He had to be sure. It was his duty.
    But how did you search for something you had never seen?
    He doubled back, hobbling west toward the second
sacbe
and the perimeter wall. It would take him longer to walk around the edge of the site but it would help him stay out of the
gabachos
’ way. He was pretty sure he would see them before they saw him. No one knew this place better than Eustachio. Yes, the gringos had the fancy contoured maps, but he knew the stones themselves, and the trees. He knew the
motmot
in the branches and the skink that watched from the grass.
    He reached to touch the sticky bark of a
chakaj
tree and crossed himself, then began his swift, limping walk. Hopefully, there would be nothing to find. A few minutes in, he spotted one of Bowerdale’s students coming through the brush. She turned but didn’t see him. He watched her balefully. If he’d ever learned his grandmother’s spells, maybe he could have slowed her. She was getting too close. If his misgivings about the state of the site were correct, if what he had guarded for so long might at last be visible, she would have to be stopped.

Chapter Six

     
    Alice wasn’t sure what she had signed up for, but it sure as shit wasn’t trekking around to see if a few rocks had shifted in the rain. She scowled to herself. Archaeology had seemed a hell of a lot more interesting before she’d actually started doing it. She remembered the lectures in her intro courses at Brandeis, all those beguiling photographs of statues and mummies. That had been cool, and she’d doodled little sketches of ancient coins and jewels in her notebook margins. Her first actual fieldwork had revealed that archeology was anything but exciting. Her team’s only “discovery” had been a few stones from an old foundation and a handful of potsherds that the dig leader had positively wet himself over. Three weeks of back-breaking digging and cataloguing for that: a footnote to some academic paper no one would ever read.
    So she’d looked into doing site surveys. That seemed better. Less actual shouldering of pickaxes and more walking aroundtaking pictures and sketching. She had a good eye and a better hand, and had even considered being an art major once. She thought she’d hit the jackpot when she was selected by Bowerdale. He was, after all, pretty much the god of the field, even if his tales of past adventurers and the bags of money paid to him by the military got old fast. It had taken him exactly two days—right after some pompous speech about how the old ways were the most reliable, and that there was no substitute for staring through a transit lens with a pencil behind your ear—to suggest he wouldn’t mind getting into her shorts.
    She had considered it, even been flattered by his interest, and for a few days had sort of flirted with him in a noncommittal kind of way. At first he had seemed to enjoy it, and she thought she’d found an easy way to stay on his good side, but it soon became clear that he expected something more tangible. She might have done it too. It was, after all, no big deal. But then he tried to stick his tongue in her mouth without asking, and Alice—who liked to make the first move herself—had told him where he could shove it. That had been the end of that. Now he barely looked at her except to complain about the way she was doing something. She had a nagging feeling that the glowing reference letter she had hoped to get from him at the end of all this was dead in the water.
    She scowled up at Structure 2.
    “Looks like a pile of old rocks,” she muttered aloud. “Which is what it looked like yesterday, and the day before.”
    She rubbed a sunburned shoulder where she had a tattoo of a rose twined