Free From the Ashes by Jeremy Burns Page A

of morning. Said the jungle was too dangerous at night. And though the evidence of the danger of the jungle was lying dead at our feet, Michael insisted on beginning the search right then. I sided with Michael, partially because I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway, and partially because... well, it was Michael.”
    Mara smiled a little. She knew what Jon meant. Michael’s influence on his brother, and the esteem Jon held him in, were no secret.
    “So we searched through the night, past sun-up, and all through the next afternoon. I don’t know how many miles we trekked through the jungle that day, but I do know what we found. Nothing. No trail to follow. No scrap of clothing or drop of blood or anything that might explain what happened. Dad called in a favor to the Director of the INAH – the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History who oversee archaeological sites and whatnot – who in turn managed to get a squad of Mexican troops to help comb the jungle for Mom and her group. The search party turned up absolutely nothing. Death certificates were drawn up, but Dad never lost hope that, somehow, Mom was still alive out there somewhere.
    “And that, until now, was the worst moment of my life.” Jon looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath. “Dad immersed himself in his work and got through each day solely on the blind hope that Mom was alive and would some day find her way back to him. And Michael and I were left predominantly to our own devices, forced to mourn our mother in a foreign country with no body, with no support from our father. So Michael was my rock, and I was his. We talked. We cried. We helped to distract each other from the pain. We explored and adventured and forced ourselves to do the things we knew we loved. Because we knew that’s what Mom would have wanted. She would have wanted us to keep on living all the more.” He stopped and bit his lip. “Michael and I wouldn’t have gotten through that without each other. And now that someone else has died, the one guy I relied on to get me through it the last time isn’t there anymore.”
    Mara placed her hand on Jon’s arm. “Well, I’m here now, Jon. And vice versa, I think.”
    “Yeah,” he said, thinking guiltily of the jealousy he’d felt toward her just a few days before. And of the way he’d abandoned his brother when, apparently, he’d needed him most. “Definitely.” A brief pause, a silence that seemed to echo the emptiness they felt, the void Michael had left, the absence of any sense of the future.
    “So what was so interesting that he ran across?” he said, trying to change the subject to something more productive than wallowing in grief. He took another bite of his biscuit before continuing. “I mean, the Mafia of the 1950s is great fodder for Hollywood, but I don’t see how shedding new light on the relationship between the press and the mob half a century ago could have the implications he hinted toward over the phone.”
    “He said he backdoored into something. In his research, he stumbled across a mob-blamed shooting that didn’t add up. And it led him to the threads of something much bigger. A government cover-up or something.”
    Jon put the remains of his biscuit down. “A government cover-up? And what, some G-men killed Michael because he was the man who knew too much?” He shook his head. “C’mon Mara, this is real life, not a Robert Ludlum novel. The government goes around spending money they don’t have and covering up sex scandals, not murdering their own citizens to keep some grad student from publishing his allegations about a sixty-year-old murder charge.”
    Mara’s face flushed. “Well, Michael’s dead, isn’t he? So we’re left with two options: he killed himself, or someone else killed him.”
    Jon cocked an eyebrow. “But the government?”
    “I never said the government killed him. You said that. I was just telling you what he was working on. Like you