In Too Deep (19 page)

A
s soon as we were alone in the back of my mom’s shop, Gracia peppered me with follow-up questions about everything: my out-of-air experience, my cunning use of Mimi both as a diversion at the airport and as a liaison to the governor of Hawaii, Violet’s magical dress. But Gracia saved most of her curiosity for Cortés and the Golden Jaguar.

“So now you’re interested?” I finally said.

“Come on. You know how it goes: if you’re poor, you’re crazy, but if you’re rich, you’re eccentric? Now that all this treasure nonsense is actually true, I see you in a whole new light!”

The buzzer interrupted us, followed by my mom calling, “Annie, someone’s here to see you!”

“Your face just went all white,” Gracia said. “I’ll check if it’s Wayo.”

Before she could even get up, Josh appeared in the doorway looking surprisingly un-Josh-like. He shifted back and forth, put his hands in his pockets, took them out. His tongue darted out along his bottom lip, and he cleared his throat.

“There’s something you should know about Cortés,” he said finally. “But I want to make sure I tell you something else first. Can we talk?”

Gracia crossed her arms and wiggled her shoulders, giving him the finest reality-show sass she could muster. “Whatever you want to say to her you can say in front of me.”

“She’s right,” I said. “She knows everything.”

Josh nodded. He stepped toward an empty tank and lifted it up. It hit the ground with a soft thud. “About Hawaii. I was trying to give you a compliment. I’m sorry.”

“It takes a big man to admit that,” Gracia said. “What else you got?”

“What else is there? I shouldn’t have said what I said, even though I didn’t mean it the way it came out.” I could see a trace of irritation on his face; he didn’t like having to explain himself to her, but he was stuck. If he was going to get what he wanted, he’d have to play the game. “Are we looking for the Jaguar or not?”

Gracia bent a stick of gum onto her tongue and started an exaggerated chew. “She’ll think about it.”

It wasn’t even that I was mad at him. Of all people, I understood that we shouldn’t be held accountable for things coming out wrong. I was more frustrated with myself, given that I couldn’t seem to keep from falling back into his charming little trap. If I could trust myself to think of him as a friend, only a friend, and nothing but a friend so help me God, we were definitely looking for the Jaguar. But how was I supposed to trust myself to do that?

“What did you find?” I said finally, and the tension seemed to vanish from the room.

Josh wandered to the side door and poked his head into the alley as if checking the place for surveillance. He opened up a folding chair and sat across from Gracia and me, then scooted in closer and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

“Okay, so Montezuma dies and Cortés takes over Tenochtitlán, dismantles the Aztec Empire, and renames it Mexico City. He basically rules there for five years, but then he starts to feel all underappreciated. People accuse him of holding back on gold that was due to the Spanish Crown, so he has to go to Spain in 1528 and prove to Charles the Fifth that he hasn’t been stealing from him.”

“We know all that already,” I said.

Josh nodded to Gracia. “I thought she might appreciate a recap.”

“This is a considerate young man, Annie,” Gracia said. “Don’t stifle him. Go on?”

“So the king buys whatever Cortés is selling, but when Hernán gets back to Mexico, the place is a mess. There’s another guy, Antonio de Mendoza, who has most of the governing power, but Cortés still has control of the military, and the freedom to explore stuff. Then he gets accused of murdering his first wife, and the government refuses to exonerate him, even though he’s never convicted. So in 1536, he figures, ‘This sucks. I gotta get out of here,’ and he goes off to the Pacific and discovers Baja California.”

“That’s where we get the Sea of Cortés,” I said to Gracia. “Now called the Gulf of California.”

“You’re kidding. The
very same
Cortés?”

I smiled at her sarcasm and turned back to Josh. “So what’s the big revelation?”

He scooted forward on his folding chair even more, unable to contain his excitement. “In 1539, Cortés paid a captain named Francisco de Ulloa to go back to Baja California. According to most of the information I found, the route he took was only to verify the existence of the Baja Peninsula. But there is evidence that he might have gone farther north than originally thought.”

“That seems like a pretty big deal,” Gracia said. “I mean, wouldn’t historians be all over that?”

“Taken by itself, not really. Reports of expeditions like these were super unreliable. But when you take into account what we know about the Golden Jaguar…that’s when the questions start popping up. Where, exactly, did Cortés go for the three years between 1536 and 1539? And more importantly, why did he send Francisco de Ulloa back to Baja, at roughly the same time the archaeologists on Molokai say the sculpture garden was created, and only a year before Juan de la Torre’s journal entry puts the disk Annie found in the Devil’s Throat? What was Ulloa doing there?”

“Did you find out anything about him?”

“He died in 1540, and that’s where it gets even weirder. Some reports say he was stabbed to death by a sailor when he got back from his expedition, but other reports—equally trustworthy, by the way—say he never even made it back, that his ship disappeared at sea.”

“Oh, boy,” Gracia said, rubbing her hands together. “Now we’re cooking.”

“How far north did Cortés get?” I said.

“North of what’s now San Diego, at least,” Josh said. “Remember that Alvarez said Cortés’s life was in chaos before the
Vida Preciosa
headed back to Spain? I think he needed the Jaguar as an insurance policy, but he couldn’t leave it anywhere near Mexico City. He had to protect it, so he took the risk of losing it all, just in case he had to get it back someday. So he commanded the one man he could trust, Francisco de Ulloa, to take it to a spot that only Cortés had discovered before: Alta California.”

I continued for Josh, reaching a crescendo as the pieces all started to fall into place. “Ulloa sent a ship west, with the key to the Jaguar’s location, which they deposited on Molokai. And that was reason enough to keep their knowledge of the island’s existence a secret from recorded history.”

“And he returned to Cortés with the golden disk to show where the Jaguar was hidden, only to die in a knife fight soon thereafter.” Josh slapped his hands on his thighs and leaned back in his chair as if to say,
Eureka!

“I have to admit, this treasure hunting thing is pretty exciting,” Gracia said. “But whatever that key is, you don’t have it, right? The other guys, Wayo and his dermatologically challenged buddy—can we call them the ‘bad guys?’—got to Hawaii first.”

Josh nodded. “True, but we still have the pictures of the disk. And we already know one side leads to Molokai. I bet whatever was in that cave leads to the other side of the disk.”

“So you’d need both items to make the map work,” I said.

“Right. And the rock formation on the other side might be where the Jaguar is hidden. Besides, no matter what the bad guys—”

“Thank you,” Gracia said.

“—took from that cave on Molokai, we still know that Cortez spent time in Alta California, and that he sent Ulloa back there—at his own personal expense, no less—almost immediately after his return to Mexico City.”

The look on Josh’s face was exactly the reason I should have avoided getting involved in treasure hunting with him. Could anyone have been cuter talking about Spanish conquistadors and buried treasure? Impossible.

Gracia said, “What’s the connection between Cortés and California? Right? That’s what we have to find out.”

“Primary sources!” I said, nearly knocking the air tanks over as I jumped to my feet. It was as if the conversation up to that point had built the pressure bit by bit, and my little exclamation caused it all to blow.

“Annie?” Josh said.

I yelled to my mom that we’d be right back, and led a confused Josh and Gracia out the side door just in case prying eyes were watching out front.

“Come on,” I said. “Alvarez told me Cortés had a wife here.”

T
he Iglesia de la Virgen Madre was a historic building across the street from the train station in downtown San Juan Capistrano, with enormous red bougainvilleas shrouding the exposed stone walls of the bell tower. We followed an uneven path to a set of thick wooden front doors. Fortunately for us, the father was in.

We stood on the brick floor and waited, each of us in our own zone. At the beginning of the nearly two-hour trip, Josh’s car was abuzz with theories and conjectures, wild pledges about what we would do with the money when we found the treasure. But gradually all that had dissipated. We’d focused only on the cars around us, making sure we weren’t being followed.

Father Rubén Gonzales was a freakishly tall man. He stepped through the door at the end of the passageway and covered the twenty feet in three or four extraordinarily long steps. For some reason, I’d been expecting to see him in robes, but instead he wore slacks and a white button-down shirt with a brown name tag clipped above the breast pocket.

“How can I help—”

“We’re doing a report on Cortés?” Josh said quickly, waving our folder of research as proof and speaking in one long uninterrupted sentence, with his patented charm absolutely nowhere to be found. “Hernán Cortés, the conquistador? The explorer?”

“I’ve heard of him,” Father Gonzales said with a smile.

“What my classmate means,” Gracia said, stepping ever so elegantly between Josh and the father, “is that we are in need of some primary sources for our report. Our teacher mentioned that you are the archivist.”

Father Gonzales checked his watch. “Normally it would take some time to organize everything for you, but you’re in luck. Lots of interest in Cortés recently.”

“Yeah,” I said, catching a worried glance from Josh. “He’s pretty hot right now.”

We followed the father down the chipped brick pathway through a side door, and suddenly we were walking on clean white tile.

“What happened back there?” I whispered to Josh. “I thought you said you could handle it.”

He shook his head, blushing as he hustled forward. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m a big Cortés fan myself,” Father Gonzales said, leading us down a wooden staircase into the basement. “I find him the most interesting of all the conquistadors. Almost a tragic figure, really.”

“Why tragic?” I said.

“I believe he should have been exonerated in the death of his first wife.” Father Gonzales opened a thick steel door marked
ARCHIVES
. “But politics were politics, I suppose, even then.”

A slight chill greeted us when we entered the room, and my jaw just about fell to the floor. “Wow.”

“You were expecting a dusty old room? With bricks falling from the ceiling? You’d have to read the crackling scrolls with a lantern?”

“Something like that,” I said.

The room was bright and clean, with three long aisles and a series of tables, lit from underneath, in the center of the room. Lamps were clipped to each of the tables. The father handed us each a pair of white cotton gloves.

“We are in the process of digitizing the archives, but this will have to do until then.” He picked up a huge thick folder at least three feet across and laid it gently on the table closest to us. “This is everything we have on Cortés and Francisco de Ulloa, who, as you may not know, was sent by Cortés to Baja California in 1539.”

I winked at Josh, who looked particularly proud of himself.

“Please leave everything in the order and condition you found it,” the father said. “No eating, no touching without the gloves, no flash photography. The lamps use special lightbulbs so as not to damage the documents.” He checked his watch again. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I trust you’ll take utmost care. And remember, God is watching.”

He laughed and pointed at a blinking red light in a corner of the room.

“You wouldn’t happen to have the names of the other people who were looking at the Cortés stuff, would you?” Gracia said. “I was thinking that maybe we could talk to them for our project?”

Father Gonzales shook his head. “We don’t keep a visitor’s log.”

As soon as the father left, Josh set our research on the adjoining table and helped us spread out the contents of the large archival folder. The papers seemed to be journal entries and maps, most of which had been encased in protective plastic sleeves. It was all in Spanish, and in cursive, which made progress slow, but finally Gracia shouted, “Yahtzee!”

Josh and I hustled to either side of her.

“Alvarez was right,” she continued, pointing to the flowery calligraphy of what looked like a short obituary. “Cortés
did
have a wife here. She died in 1559.”

“That’s twenty years after Ulloa came back,” I said.

Gracia swung a lamp down closer to the table’s surface and squinted. “It says here her name was Salento Torres García del Nacimiento.”

Josh’s head shot up, and he bit the inside of his cheek. “I’ve heard that name before.” He went to our folder and searched through the pages, scanning each one quickly before slapping it down on the table and moving on to the next.

The name sounded familiar to me as well, so I leaned down over a primitive-looking map of the California coast and tried to decipher the handwritten markers. And then, at exactly the same time—

“Found it!” I said.

“Here it is!” Josh said.

I looked at him, a wide smile planted on my face. “You first.”

“No, you.”

There was a connection here—I knew it. The same connection that had led us to that fleeting kiss in the Hawaiian cavern. The same connection that I’d sworn—only hours before—I wouldn’t become distracted by. But there you have it.

“Enough!” Gracia said. “No foreplay around the archives!”

I ignored her. Josh held up a color photocopy of an article. Circled at the top was a picture: a stone statue of a woman overlooking the ocean, staring directly out into the water, holding her hands beneath her chin as if in prayer.

“This statue dates to the mid–fifteen hundreds and has been restored to close to original condition. Carved at the bottom is one simple word:
Salento
.”

Gracia gasped. “And do you know where it is?”

“Dana Point,” I said triumphantly. “Only three miles down the road from where we are right now.”

This time, Gracia shook her head. “How can you be sure?”

“Because Dana Point was originally called…” I spread my white-gloved palms across the surface of the map and pointed to a knob of a peninsula, like a big pointed zit on the Southern California shoreline. “Punta Salento.”

“It’s there,” Josh said, looking at his picture. “Out there in the ocean. That’s the next step. That’s where Ulloa hid the Golden Jaguar.”

“Not to burst y’all’s bubbles,” Gracia said, “but we have no idea what Wayo and his evil pizza-faced henchman already know. They could still be way ahead of us.”

A memory flashed into my head, and I smiled, then giggled, and then I flat-out laughed, the sound echoing off the concrete floor.

“
Pizza-faced
isn’t that funny,” Josh said.

“It’s not that.” I glanced up at the camera’s blinking light, and my laughter died down as I started replacing the documents carefully in Father Gonzales’s large folder. I whispered, “He used a credit card.”

We were back at the dive shop less than eighty minutes later, thanks to the carpool lane and Josh’s high-performance machine. It was well past sundown as we hustled through the alley and entered the shop through the back.

“Josh,” I said, “I need you to distract my mom. Tell her about how much you like to dive, or ask her about wetsuits or something. Just get her away from the register.”

“Done.”

We hit the retail area at a jog.

“I didn’t expect to see you back,” my mom said, looking up from a display of dive-computer brochures.

“Struck out,” I said. “No luck with the research.”

Josh waved at her. “Mrs. Fleet, can I talk to you for a second? I was hoping for some feedback on dry suits, but Annie said you were more knowledgeable than she was.”

“What are you looking for?” my mom said, clearly pleased. Flattery will get you everywhere.

“All I know is that I don’t like the cold.”

He walked away from the register as he talked—slowly, though, so as not to seem too obvious—and my mom followed right along. He was good.

I went to the front and waved Gracia around the counter. It took me a couple of seconds to access the register database, and I could tell that Gracia was doing her best not to leap in and help me.

“What are you looking—”

“I remember what he bought,” I said. “And shhh.”

Gracia whistled in mock reverence. “You’re like the idiot savant of treasure myths and retail transactions.”

Finally, there it was. “I knew it. Anthony Snow. Paid with a credit card two weeks ago, $15.99 for a save-a-dive kit.”

“If he’d only known that his save-a-dive kit would end up ruining everything for him,” Gracia said. “Irony, thy name is scuba-retail-shop receipt.”

I printed out the receipt and handed it to her. “Can you do something with this?”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” She pshhhawed me and snatched the paper and stared at it for a few seconds. Then her eyes lit up. “But not here.”