In Too Deep (5 page)

“
T
his is going to be so stupid,” Katy said, but I surprised myself by not caring. I held the folder securely in both hands; it was all I could do not to pore through the information on our way to the museum.

By now it was midafternoon. The sun inched down the cloudless sky, and a thick layer of humidity settled over everything. We walked up the main street, Avenida Rafael Melgar, past jewelry stores and day-tour operators and nightclubs filled with enthusiastic spring-breakers who were neither willing nor able to wait for the night.

A woman and her little boy sold silver pendants in the main square, mostly sea creatures and Mayan designs. I squatted down and ran my finger across the top of a small sea turtle pendant about the size of my thumbnail. It was classy and understated, a piece of jewelry that said, “Why, yes, I care about the ocean, but I don’t need a button as evidence.” Gracia and Mimi would approve.

“Come on, Annie,” Nate said, waving at me like an exasperated parent as I paid the little boy with some of the pesos my dad had given me. I quickly fastened the thin silver chain around my neck and hustled back to the group.

The museum was two blocks inland, overlooking a small dirt park with a single soccer goal. We trudged up a short flight of old stone steps, and Nate picked a flake of dark green paint from the wooden door as we pushed through.

“I bet we could hit this place when we’re done with the school,” he mumbled with a snort.

“
Veinte pesos
,” said a girl at the front desk who couldn’t have been more than ten years old.

“
Estudiantes
,” Josh said, turning on the charm as he patted his pockets to explain that he hadn’t brought his wallet. “Students,
sí
?”

The little girl smiled and held out her hand. “Twenty pesos. Special student price.”

Josh and the Sugars looked at me. Katy shrugged. “I only carry plastic.”

“Of course you do.” I dug into my pocket.

The museum was essentially a single hallway winding around a small courtyard with a flagpole in the center. We sat on the floor against the wall outside, and I laid the contents of the folder on the dusty brick in front of us.

“Divide and conquer,” I said, handing Josh the worksheet. “You and Nate go answer as many of the fill-in-the-blanks as you can, and Katy and I will try to figure out what this all has to do with the Golden Jaguar.”

Josh stared at the worksheet as if trying to will the answers into existence. “Why do we even have to do this?”

“It’s just a stupid exercise,” Nate said. “Fake treasure hunt or a scavenger hunt or whatever.”

I motioned for them to get moving. “The sooner we finish, the sooner we can get back to doing nothing.”

“Uh-oh,” Nate said. “Looks like we got ourselves a teacher’s kid in here.”

“Just go,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Nate said with a salute.

“That’s kind of cool,” Katy said when they’d left, pointing at the picture of the Golden Jaguar. “What is it?”

“The Golden Jaguar,” I said. “Cortés’s Golden Jaguar? I did a presentation on it last week?”

“Hmm,” she said, but there was no recognition on her face.

“Really?” I said.

Most of the documents were in Spanish, and that’s where being a freshman really worked against me. Apparently they didn’t cover original Spanish nautical logs until junior year, so I had to depend on Katy.

She squinted at the old calligraphy and read slowly. “Okay, it says the
Vida Preciosa
?”

“The name of the ship,” I said.

“Approached the land of the
golondrinas
during a storm. Looking for
refugio
—refuge, maybe? Shelter?—and dropped anchor on the side
de sotavento
—beats me—where the waters were more calm.”

“Does it say where the land of the
golondrinas
is?” I said.

Katy shrugged. “I don’t even know what
golondrinas
means.”

“What does it say after that?”

“You know what would be awesome?” Katy said, and by the tone of her voice I could already tell she didn’t mean continuing to translate. “If you sat there and obsessed over your treasure, and I sat way over here and didn’t, and we waited for the boys to come back so we could get out of this place.”

While not technically “awesome,” per se, her plan did have the benefit of the two of us not working together.

I sat with the folder in my lap, staring at the color picture of the Golden Jaguar with questions bouncing around my head like Ping-Pong balls in a lottery machine. Why did Alvarez give me the folder? What did that have to do with the museum? What is the land of
golondrinas
? What if this wasn’t just a scavenger hunt? What if it wasn’t just an exercise?

A giggle came from the open doorway, and I looked up to see the front-desk girl whispering to a friend and pointing. I followed her gaze to Katy at the flagpole in the center of the courtyard. She’d wrapped her arms around it so that her body was parallel to the ground, and she was inching up slowly. Even I had to admit that it was impressive.

Josh bounded into the courtyard with Nate trailing behind. “We’re done here,” Nate said.

“Show me how to do that!” Josh said to Katy as he folded the worksheet and put it into his pocket.

“You guys,” I said, “I don’t think we’re supposed—”

“It’ll be quick,” Josh said.

Katy wrapped her arms around him from behind, showing him how to position his hands. She whispered something in his ear before stepping away. Josh braced one elbow at his waist and lifted, but before he could get his legs parallel to the ground, he came crashing down in a heap.

He groaned and rolled over onto his back. “I think I broke my kidney.”

Katy covered her giggle with both hands. Weren’t they so cute together.

A uniformed security guard stepped toward them, and Josh jumped to his feet. The guard removed his baton from its holster and pointed at the door, but he was laughing too much to do any real intimidating.

“If that was the Gold Doubloons part of the trip,” Nate said as we were walking out, “it sucked as much as the Good Deeds.”

I waved to the girl behind the desk, and Josh said, “Pretty cool that Cortés came here, though, right?”

I stopped halfway down the steps. “What did you say?”

“Cortés landed in Cozumel. What, you didn’t know that? I thought you knew everything about him.”

“I spent most of my time on what happened after he got the Jaguar,” I said, more defensively than I wanted.

“It said in there that Cortés came to the island in something like—”

“Show me.” I grabbed his hand—I’m not sure which one of us was more surprised—and pulled him back up the stairs and into the museum.

“Why are you so—”

“Just show me where you saw it.”

Josh saluted the security guard as we rushed through the hallway, and he led me to a large panel filled with drawings of conquistadors and ships and accompanying text in Spanish and English.

“Right here,” he said. The image in the center showed a Mayan contingent spread out on the shore like a welcome party, with the Spanish galleons bearing down on them from the ocean. “Cortés landed in 1519, and there wasn’t any resistance from the native Mayans. He used the island as a staging ground for the conquest of Mexico. Looks like the Mayans should have resisted, though. Smallpox practically wiped them out a few years later.”

“Cortés was here,” I said to myself.

“Can we go now?”

“Wait.” The panel before the one on Cortés caught my eye. It was all about the original settling of the island, the Mayans, and their multitiered temples.

“‘The Land of Swallows,’” I read.

“So?”

“From the Mayan words
cuzam
, meaning ‘swallows,’ and
lumil
, meaning ‘land of.’
Cuzam lumil
…Cozumel!”

“I get it.” Josh chuckled. “Why are you shouting?”

“Do you have a dictionary? Or a phone or something?”

“In the hotel,” he said. “Why?”

I raced back to the girl at the front desk and dropped the folder on the counter. My hands shook as I opened it and flipped frantically through the pages. There it was. “
Golondrina?
” I said. The girl looked at me like I was crazy. Damn you, Spanish!

“
Golondrina
,” I said again, speaking as slowly as I could make myself. I put my trembling thumbs together and flapped my hands in the worst finger-puppet bird ever made. “What does it mean?
En
English?
Es un
bird?”

Josh put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

The girl behind the counter recovered enough from her shock to answer me. “
Sí, es un pájaro pequeño.
A small bird. It means a swallow. Cozumel is called the land of swallows. The name comes—”

“Thank you,” I said.
“Muchas gracias.”

“Annie?” Josh said.

I held the photocopy of de la Torre’s journal in his face as if it were a winning lottery ticket. “The
Vida
Preciosa
approached the land of the
golondrinas
—the Land of Swallows—during a storm! They dropped anchor on the side where seas were more calm.”

“What’s the
Vida Preciosa
again?”

“The leeward side of the island! Where seas were calm,” I said again, pointing to the gentle waves only two blocks away. “De la Torre was
here
, Josh. And that means the Jaguar was here, too.”

M
y mind was on overdrive. I felt like a character in one of Gracia’s video games, as if my entire life force had been transferred to my brain, rendering the rest of my body almost completely unresponsive. I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. Eventually, the others got tired of telling me to hurry up, and they let me wander on the wide concrete sidewalk that ran between Avenida Melgar and the seawall.

I remembered a conversation I’d had with my dad after the last of our metal detector trips to the beach. I was twelve. I’d found an old silver pocket watch and was twirling it in circles as we walked back to the car. The sun had been low in the sky, just like tonight. And like tonight, my mind had been filled with the excitement of treasure.

“Did you ever think of actually being a treasure hunter?” I’d said. “A real one?”

“That’s what drew me to your mother in the first place. She was smart, of course. And good-looking. But she was the first female diver I had ever met, and I had this dream that we could get famous together. The dynamic duo.”

“So, why—”

“We got married. Then you came along.” He stopped walking and dragged his toes through the sand. “The truth is that I probably didn’t have what it took anyway. I know it probably seems romantic to you, but it’s dangerous. Pirates are still out there, but not with swords and cannons. Now everybody has guns.”

“So you decided it was better to study history than to make it?”

He’d let a short burst of air escape through his teeth as though I’d punched him. It hadn’t been what I’d meant, and I’d apologized, but the damage had been done. He gave me a quick little squeeze on the shoulder and hauled his metal detector back.

Now, though, I had to wonder. If he’d ever held in his hands what I was holding in mine—actual evidence, a clue to something more—would he still have walked away?

I didn’t know what any of it meant yet, but there had to be something there. De la Torre’s journal said that the
Vida Preciosa
had anchored off of Cozumel during a storm. What if he’d unloaded it? What if the Jaguar was here, on the island? Did Cozumel just happen to be a safe harbor, or was it the destination all along?

I was so lost in thought, I didn’t notice that the others had stopped walking until I almost hit my head on Nate’s shoulder. They were standing on the seawall, glaring down at the ocean below.

“What’s going on?” I said.

Alvarez was standing in the water, waist-deep, on the other side of the seawall, his T-shirt drenched, hefting an enormous mahimahi onto the sidewalk.

“Looks like they were biting,” Nate said.

Alvarez smiled at Nate’s tone. “Wait here.”

He waded to a small boat anchored about fifty feet offshore, where Wayo loaded him up with what looked like a marlin. Alvarez slogged back through the water with one hand clutching the body of the fish and the other holding a washcloth around the spearlike nose.

“White marlin,” Alvarez said when he got back to the seawall. He tried to lift it up. “A little help?”

“I’m not touching that,” Nate said.

Josh reached over and grabbed the washcloth-covered spear, but not the body of the fish. Alvarez pushed while Josh pulled, and the marlin slid across the concrete, clear scales sprinkling into the ocean like snowflakes.

“Careful with the beautiful fish,
amigos
!” Wayo laughed, sloshing through the water as he carried two huge silver wahoos by the tails. His two fish smacked to the sidewalk when he deposited them.

Katy scoffed. “Having a nice vacation?”

“It was a tournament,” Alvarez said. “Wayo needed an extra hand.”

There were now seven fish lying in a row like torpedoes: a white marlin, the two wahoos, a silver barracuda sporting the telltale underbite, and three emerald-green mahimahi.

Alvarez dumped two buckets of seawater on the fish and pointed down the shore to the main pier, where another marlin was hanging by its tail from some sort of crane. A line of boats waited just offshore. “You get to weigh one of each species you catch. Greatest combined weight wins.”

“Wins what?” Josh said.

Wayo pulled himself up on the seawall. “
Dinero
,” he said.
“Mucho, mucho dinero.”

“So you get to go fishing and make money, and we have to paint all day?” Nate said.

Alvarez hefted himself onto the sidewalk. “You got to see the museum, didn’t you?”

An old woman pedaled by with a snack cart on her bicycle, stopping when Wayo waved her down. “
Lo que
quieren
,” Wayo said to the woman. He motioned for us to help ourselves from the cart.

There didn’t seem to be much else to do, so I stuffed the folder into my back pocket and chose a paper cone of jicama sticks sprinkled with red chile salt. Josh got a pack of gum, and the Sugars ignored the offer altogether.

Wayo knelt down next to the marlin and began to clean it. A small crowd was gathering around us. Some were cruise ship tourists, the men with lobster sunburns, the women in island-themed T-shirts at least a size too big. More locals appeared as word seemed to spread.

“Wayo and I used to fish quite a bit,” Alvarez said to me. “Back when we were young and he was skinny.”

“I hear you just fine from here,” Wayo said with a laugh. He filleted the marlin and cut the meat into massive chunks. He gave the first big piece to the old woman with the cart.

“It’s not about the money,” Alvarez said. “He’s donating all his winnings to the school. It’s about the ocean, about beating the fish. He’s very competitive. Hates to lose.”

The crowd swelled, the locals overtaking the tourists, and as more people came over, Alvarez and I stepped back to give them space. Wayo would cut a big piece off the marlin, point to someone in the crowd, and that person would walk away with the night’s dinner.

There was something so peaceful about it. We stood only a few feet from the ocean, with the sun dipping toward the horizon, and golden light sparkled off the waves. My lips tingled from the chile on the jicama. For a moment I actually felt like I was on vacation.

I noticed a dive boat coming back to town, wetsuits tied to the canopy frame and flapping in the wind. That made me remember the paint on my fingers. And the folder in my back pocket.

“Why would you wait two days to show me that stuff?” I said so that only Alvarez could hear.

He stared straight ahead, but his face broke into a huge smile. “I knew you’d figure it out.”

“Cortés was really here?” I said.

“Now you understand the importance of those primary sources.” He turned to me and smiled again. There was so much more I wanted to ask him, but the crowd was still growing.

Katy and Nate dangled their feet above the ocean, and suddenly Josh went over and sat on the seawall with them. He could have sat next to Nate, but he didn’t. He chose Katy. They shared a laugh, and she elbowed him. How wonderful for them.

I did my best to look away from that disaster, and since I didn’t feel like contemplating the beauty of the open seas, I turned my attention to the crowd. One of the assembled witnesses looked just like the guy with the pockmarks who my mom had tried to persuade to buy the paddle fins.

“Hey!” I said, waving at him. The man didn’t say anything, looking over his shoulder and apparently deciding that I wasn’t talking to him, so I tried again. “You were at my mom’s dive shop a couple of days ago? In California?”

“Right,” he said as he wandered over. He wore an aggressively Hawaiian shirt and was gnawing on a piece of sugarcane. “Of course.”

“I hope you went with the hybrid fins.”

“You were quite persuasive. How’s the diving so far?”

“I wish I knew,” I said, wiggling my paint-splattered fingertips. “Volunteer work.”

“Building up the résumé already, am I right? I have a niece about your age.” His laugh was warm and good-natured. He winked at me and nodded politely to Alvarez and then continued on down the street.

“Small world, huh?” I said to Alvarez. “I met that guy at our dive shop.”

“Mmm,” he said, nodding as he watched Mr. Pockmarks disappear into the evening crowd.

Josh was still talking to Katy, and now they actually seemed to be deep in conversation. She pointed toward the central plaza, and I could have sworn that she let her hand rest on his shoulder as she brought it back down.

Wayo turned the marlin over, bringing it up and slapping it on the concrete. A dull sound rang out, as though he’d hit the ground with a hammer.

“Where did you meet this guy?” My question was both genuine and rhetorical.

“Have you ever heard of the
Santa Lucia
? Small ship, nothing huge like the
Atocha
, for example. Just one of the many Spanish ships that didn’t make it back home.”

I turned to Alvarez. “Near the Keys? In the Spanish Main?”

He must have noticed the eagerness in my voice, and it seemed to make him happy. “We worked that crew for over a year together.”

I waited for more, but he had nothing else to add. “And?”

“That’s it,” he said with a shrug. “We never found it. Mel Fisher looked—”

“For twenty years for the
Atocha
—I know. My mom and I got my dad one of the silver pieces of eight from that wreck.”

“Shipwrecks are amazing that way. The treasure can be right under your nose for years, and you have no idea if you’re hot or cold. That’s what makes it so frustrating, and so addictive. You think that if you can just stay in the game long enough, you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

“So you didn’t find the
Santa Lucia
, and that was it?”

“That was it. The investors ran out of money, and we all went on our way. Treasure hunting is expensive.”

The kernel of a thought began to sprout in my mind, an explanation for what had been bothering me ever since our arrival. “There’s nothing wrong with this island, you know. The Good Deeds. They don’t need us here.”

Alvarez turned and grinned like an idiot. “The locals worked hard to clean it up.”

When it hit me, I laughed, and a piece of jicama snagged in my throat. “This is a sham?”

“
Sham
is such a negative word,” Alvarez said. “The Pinedale Academy prides itself on providing a wide range of opportunities for its motivated student body. I was just doing my part. Besides, I tend to get sick of being in one place too long.”

“You just wanted to see your friend,” I said.

The crowd had thinned out by now. The sun was well below the horizon, and the air held a slight chill. Wayo had distributed nearly all of his catch.

“And you’re going to have Borders Unlimited on your college application. That’s what I call a win-win.”

A wheelbarrow had appeared, and Wayo filled it with the skeletal remains of his fish. He lifted the white marlin by the tail, and as he moved it to the wheelbarrow, something fell from its mouth and hit the concrete with a thud. I stepped closer for a better look.

It was a five-pound dive weight.

Wayo sheepishly picked it up and tossed it into the wheelbarrow as he said something in Spanish.

“Combined weight wins, huh?” I said.

Alvarez shrugged as if to say,
What can you do?
Then he clapped and rounded up our little crew. “Let’s go eat some fish!”