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Nora Mecate had been a descendant of that great civilization. She’d been fascinated—some say obsessed—with proving a theory she’d gleaned from ancient writings passed down through her family for generations. She spent her life—no, she gave her life—trying to prove it.
“You could become the chair of this department when I retire. But you need to abandon your mother’s ridiculous theory. You’re becoming a laughingstock.” Enright lowered his voice. “As she was.”
Matt stiffened. Any academic who refused to face facts became an amusing anecdote at the staff watercooler. Matt had noticed a lot of the graduate students staring and whispering lately.
Not that such behavior was anything new. For some reason the women around here liked to fashion him a Hispanic Indiana Jones. He wasn’t, but that didn’t stop them from pointing and giggling and showing up during his office hours with foolish questions they already knew the answer to.
Matt wasn’t interested. Not that he didn’t occasionally date—if the willing women he took to dinner, then back to his bed, then never saw again could be considered dates—but his life was work, and he had little use for anything else.
“I have one more location on my mother’s list of possibilities,” Matt said.
Enright lifted his artificially darkened brows. Everything about Enright was artificial—his gelled, black toupee, his high-gloss manicure, even his right hip.
When Matt did not elaborate, Enright sighed. His breath smelled of the Jack Daniel’s he kept filed under W.
“The semester is nearly done, Mateo. By fall, be ready to move on.”
“Move on?” Matt echoed.
“Choose a different avenue for your research or choose another university.” The door shut behind Enright with a decisive click.
Matt glanced at his mother’s notes. As he shuffled them, searching for something he might have missed during the eight thousand other times he’d shuffled them, he could have sworn the scent of her—oranges, earth, and sunshine—lifted from the pages. Sometimes, when he touched them in the depths of the night, their whisper was her voice calling him in from childish explorations across every dig they’d ever shared.
He’d enjoyed a charmed childhood. What wasn’t to love about living in a tent, searching for buried treasure, and never once—until he’d come here—stepping foot in a school?
Nora had been the only child of the very wealthy Mecate family. When she’d chosen to become an archaeologist more than a few inky black Mecate eyebrows had been raised. She didn’t need to work for a living; she most definitely didn’t need to dig in the dirt. That she wanted to had been beyond the comprehension of many, including her father.
However, only poor people were crazy. Rich people were eccentric, and the more eccentrics in a rich family the greater their prestige. The raised eyebrows had lowered before too long.
When Nora had turned up pregnant—not a boyfriend or a husband in sight—no one had bothered to exert their eyebrows at all. That Mateo would be a Mecate, and carry on that precious name, had gone a long way to bridging the gap between Nora and her father.
She’d dragged Matt with her all over Mexico and the Southwest. She’d taught him everything she knew about how to research and explore. Then she’d died on a dig the summer before he left for college.
“Hell,” Matt muttered, tracing one finger over his mother’s chicken scratch scrawl.
While still a young woman, Nora had translated the ancient Aztec writings she’d uncovered in the musty library of the family estate and discovered something amazing.
The reason the Aztecs never lost in battle was because they possessed a secret weapon, what Nora referred to as a superwarrior, a being of such incredible strength and power she believed him to be a sorcerer. That warrior had been buried somewhere in the American Southwest. All she had to do was find the tomb.
Scholars would have accepted her searching for remains north of the Rio Grande, even though most believed the Aztecs had not ventured farther than Central Mexico. But the tomb of a supernatural warrior? A sorcerer?
No one but Nora believed that.
Certainly when Matt was a child his mother’s tales had captivated him. He’d accepted them completely. But as time went on, Matt’s enthusiasm for a supernatural warrior waned.
However, Nora’s research on the tomb itself was solid. There was something buried at an as-yet-undiscovered site north of the Rio Grande. Perhaps nothing more than a very large, freakishly strong, and more deadly than usual Aztec, but if Matt found that tomb and those remains, he could vindicate his mother’s theory. Or at least those parts it was possible to vindicate. Then she would no longer be a laughingstock.
And neither would he.
His mother had translated a list of half a dozen possible sites from the hieroglyphics she’d found. They’d explored all of them—save one—and to date they’d found nothing but rocks.
Detractors pointed out that the Spanish had destroyed most, if not all, of the Aztec records—flat, accordion-like books known as codices, fashioned from deerskins or agave paper. Any texts that survived had been written under the strict supervision, and often with the help of, the Spanish clergy.
Therefore, the writings Nora Mecate had based her life’s work upon—Superwarrior? Sorcerer? Indeed!—were nothing more than a hoax perpetrated by some laugh-a-minute priest in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.
“Because priests back then were known for being extremely ‘ha-ha’ kinds of guys,” Matt muttered.
Matt had been studying the documents himself ever since Nora had died. He could find nothing wrong with her geographic translations. He had found no other viable sites.
