Free Tears of the Jaguar by A.J. Hartley Page B

half my life doing damage control.”
    He had bright blue eyes, a blue that was deep and hypnotic, like the water in the
cenote
now that the rubble and dirt had drifted to the bottom. But they were hard, unsmiling. He should have been a handsome man, Deborah thought, with his chiseled features and strong, rangy body, but there was something cold about the man that immediately put her off. He was a store window mannequin with the brain of a computer and the personality of a kitchen appliance.
    The women couldn’t have been more different from each other. Krista Rayburn was young and brimming with energy andenthusiasm. She had a tanned round face—pretty in an ordinary sort of way—and dirty-blonde hair that she wore in a ponytail that made her look younger still. She couldn’t have been more than two or three years Deborah’s junior, but she could have passed for a student, maybe even an undergraduate. She smiled a lot. When Deborah had introduced herself, Krista had flashed that sunny smile and said, “My! Aren’t you tall?” Deborah said that yes, she supposed she was, and Krista said, “Awesome,” patting her arm as if congratulating her on a job well done. Then she’d thanked Deborah repeatedly for the “opportunity” as if she had won the lottery, rather than being the author of the closest thing to a definitive book on Mayan environmental archaeology.
    Marissa Stroud was the strangest of the lot. She was in her midfifties, Deborah guessed, and wore her graying, wavy hair long. It constantly fell in her face, but the woman would just stare through it, like it was a veil, and it was all Deborah could do not to reach forward and part it for her. Stroud was big, not fat so much as solid and powerful. She wore a long brown skirt and faded floral blouse with a tie at the throat, and clutched a stained and battered rucksack. Between her awful outfit and her brownish, uneven teeth, it was clear that here was a woman who paid absolutely no attention to her appearance or what people thought of her. Deborah wanted to like her for that, but she wasn’t what you would call warm, and she had a way of staring at people that unnerved them. After meeting her, Deborah found it easy to believe the rumor of her leaving her husband and child so that she could spend more time in the field, but harder to imagine how she had gotten married in the first place. Maybe there was someone for everyone after all.
    Ha!
laughed her mother’s voice in her head
.
    If Stroud looked ill-kept, her résumé was anything but. A few decades ago, experts had been able to read little of Mayan glyphs beyond proper nouns and calendars, but things had changed drastically of late, and a whole new picture of the Mayan world had begun to emerge. Stroud had been part of that revolution, and her name was all over every monograph on the subject. She was also an authority on royal regalia, European as well as Mayan, and her popular history of royal jewelry had received that rarest of accolades for academic work, a review in the
New York Times
.
    She smelled odd, though Deborah couldn’t place the aroma. Some herb extract, perhaps, dry and dusty with a little musk. It took over the van as soon as she got in, and though it wasn’t exactly unpleasant, it made the air feel heavy, even with the AC on full blast. Rylands pulled a sour face and opened his window, but if Stroud noticed, she didn’t let on.
    Deborah grinned with relief as she swung the van into the site’s parking lot. In person, this group of experts intimidated her less than she had expected, their strangeness somehow making them manageable. Perfect people—or people who seemed to think they were perfect, like Bowerdale—bothered her. Misfits, she could deal with. Misfits (
freak!
) she knew all about.
    She stepped out into heat. It took her a second to realize that the person running toward them from the site entrance was calling her name, and another to realize it was Bowerdale’s graduate