High Desert Detective, A Fiona Marlowe Mystery (Fiona Marlowe Mysteries) (42 page)

“You were expecting my
call,” I said.

“Right.
Have you seen Hudson?”

“No, why would I have seen
Hudson?”

“You go out there, don't
you?”

“Sure, but not today.”

“He seems to have left
town.”

“You mean as in disappear?”

“That's right.”

“I called earlier today and
left a message for him to call me, but had no call back.”

“Opal hasn't seen him since
he served dinner last night. When she went down to the kitchen this morning, he
wasn't there. She checked the garage for his car, and it's gone. She thought he
ran an errand, but he still isn't back as of an hour ago. I thought maybe he
was with you, doing the library thing.”

“Nope, haven't seen him. So
it was the butler in the library with an overdose.”

“What?”

“My friend Judith said it
is always the butler that commits the crime. So it couldn't have been Colonel
Mustard. Hudson murdered Albert with an overdose in the library.”

“Fiona, you have a very
active imagination.”

“You're not the first
person who's told me that. Have you called the police to report Hudson
missing?”

“Not yet. We'll give him a
day to show up. But it’s very unlike him to disappear.”

I hung up and stood looking
out the windows across the Potomac at the lights of D.C. The monuments stood
stark white against the black of night. Light reflected off the river. Red
lights blinked from atop the Iwo Jima Memorial.

Hudson
gone
missing. Now there was an interesting plot twist Olympia would
like.

* * * * *

Shirley at Colonial
Furniture was delighted to see me on Sunday afternoon. She always saw dollar
signs when I walked in. After a tussle over a number of high priced offerings,
I ordered two great off white loveseats with a chicken wire bas relief pattern
in the same color. I know, it doesn’t sound haute
coteur
but trust me, it will look great. Working a deal with Shirley is always exhausting,
so I took the rest of the day off.

All afternoon I worried
about Hudson and couldn't resist a call to Jake that night.
“Find Hudson yet?”

“Yes, he came back late
last night. Opal said he’d gone to his sister's again in West Virginia around
Harper's Ferry. She’d had a relapse. He forgot to tell Opal he was leaving. Or
Opal forgot that he told her he was leaving.”

“Don't you think that’s
strange?

“Apparently
there a serious case of memory loss in the Lodge household.”

“But that is strange. Opal
seems pretty sharp to me. Unlikely to forget the butler was leaving for the
day.”

No answer.

“Jake?”

“Yeah.
There's some things not making
sense to me. Maybe it's because there's a boatload of relatives descending on
the house, and everyone is stressed out. This is traumatic for all of them.
Plus Hudson’s sister is going downhill, and he’s worried about her.”

“He runs the household.”

“Right.
They hired a maid and a cook through a temp agency to help with the relatives.
There’s a relative a minute showing at the front door. Everyone’s running
around like coyotes after sage rats because the memorial service is tomorrow
afternoon, and the reception is at the house.”

“Are you going to the
memorial service?” I asked.

“You bet.”

“I'll look for you there. We
can sit together and you can point out the cast of characters.”

“I can't wait.”

End Chapter Three
, Designer
Detective.

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The Hieroglyphic Staircase

Chapter One

Another carved
stone was missing.

Elena ran her
finger over the cool, lifeless limestone and checked the pattern against the
computer drawing she had made of the Hieroglyphic Staircase. She was not
mistaken. A gap separated a frowning face from a stylized flower. This was the
third stone gone missing since she started the project three weeks ago. The
Mayan gods definitely had it in for her. They must not like her poking into
their secrets.

She perched on
the narrow step of the steep stone staircase that led to the top of the pyramid
and stared at the space where yesterday a finely etched head with bulbous Mayan
lips had resided. A crowd of vacant eyes stared back at her along the facing of
the step, refusing to share their knowledge of who had stolen another stone.

This theft could
tarnish the name she was trying to build in the world of Mayan epigraphy, the
study of ancient inscriptions. The disappearance of valuable pieces of an
intricate puzzle did not bode well for her career. How could someone steal the
stone carvings right out from under her?

Two fieldworkers
in battered straw hats imitated her posture and sat on the narrow steps below
her, looking at the empty space and muttering to each other. But their
conversation in Spanish had to do with Raul’s eldest daughter who was to be
married the coming weekend. They didn’t seem to share her concern.

“Do you know
anything about these missing hieroglyphs?” she asked them in Spanish. Her
question came out with a suspicious edge. The two men flinched, as if the words
were knives.

“We do not know,
doctora
Palomares,” said Raul,
throwing up his hands, straight black eyebrows moving skyward with his hands.
“Only the tourists come during the day, and we have kept careful watch.”

The younger
worker, Francisco, new to the project, mimicked Raul’s gestures.

“Maybe not
during the day,” said Elena, softening her tone, “but someone could slip by the
guard at the entrance during night.”

Calm down, she thought. She had to maintain her
professional attitude and not take her frustration out on these poor workers. She
stood and brushed the seat of her khaki shorts.

“I’m going to notify the Museum director.
Please watch the site while I’m gone. I shouldn’t be long.”

“
Sí, doctora.
Cómo no
?”
Raul
tipped his hat and continued his conversation with Francisco about the wedding,
the theft forgotten.

Folding the
computer drawing, she stuffed it in one of the many pockets of her field vest.
She picked her way crab fashion down stairs so narrow her work boots would only
fit sideways on the uneven steps.
Summer
sizzled at Copan in western Honduras, and Elena had risen before dawn to work
the site before the heat became unbearable. Not that heat bothered her much.
Nothing could be as bad as a hot, humid Houston summer day, where she grew up.

Near the bottom of the Staircase, she peered at
the point halfway up the steep incline of stairs where she had discovered the
missing stone. She hoped the thieves were not her field worker assistants.
Surely, they wouldn’t be tempted to supplement their meager incomes with
contraband from Copan, the Florence of the Mayan world. Surely, they wouldn’t,
though Raul had been complaining about the expense of the wedding. A small
stone Mayan head would bring an enormous price on the black market. He could
pay for the wedding and retire on the money he’d make on the sale.

The Sculpture Museum was a good hike across the
courtyard, past the Temple of Inscriptions which was for the most part clear of
stone-crumbling vegetation. One large, insistent tree remained that was so
entangled in the slope of the pyramid-shaped Temple that to remove it would
have destroyed the structure. There the tree defiantly grew, its roots serving
to hold the ruins together.

That’s what she felt like – a lone figure
trying to hold a crumbling situation together.

She strode across the clearing toward the exit
of the site. The Sculpture Museum housed many of the original stellae and
carvings from the site. It stood near the tourist information center and
restaurant.
The Museum director would not
be happy. He never was. His thin, pinched face reflected his sour disposition.
Never a kind word for any of the other professionals in the field
and certainly not for her.
Especially not for her.

A small, neat workman in worn pants and shabby
but clean white shirt was sweeping the walk to the Museum free of leaves and
trash from yesterday’s tourists. He had a wife and four small children, and
they lived in a poor neighborhood in town. He was desperate to go to the United
States to earn money so his family could dig out of the hole of poverty. Was he
so desperate he would steal hieroglyphs from the ruins to get money to make the
trip? Was she getting so paranoid that she was suspicious of everyone?

“
Hola,
Armando, cómo le
va
?” she said as she waved and walked
by.

He stopped
sweeping to greet her.
“
Bien.
Y usted
?”

Today she didn’t
stop to chat. She waved and walked on, her mind worrying the problem of the
missing hieroglyphs and the director’s reaction. A trip to the dentist would be
preferable to this visit with the director.

The Sculpture
Museum was built into a hillside and illuminated by a massive open-air
skylight. An airy courtyard formed the center of the square-shaped building
which inside was dominated by a full-scale replica of the Rosalila Temple,
found under the Copan acropolis in 1989. She loved the Rosalila Temple with its
bright colors – rosy red, mint green, flaming yellow. Its intricately carved
Mayan heads and scroll work lay open to the sky. Sculpture galleries framed the
replica centerpiece on two levels.

Taking off her
wide brim hat, she dusted it against her leg and with determined steps strode
to the director’s office located in one corner of the Museum. Carved stellae of
Mayan kings, the
kuhul
ajaw
or holy
lords, with characteristic big, hooked noses, staring stone eyes, and round ear
plugs lined the walls. She had studied every one and knew them like family.
They were some of the finest examples of Mayan sculpture found anywhere.

The director’s
door was open. He bent over a large volume, intent on what he was reading.

She tapped on
the door.
“
Permiso
, director
.”

He looked up
from the volume, unsmiling. “
Doctora
,”
he said by way of acknowledgement. No greeting, no inquiring after her health.

The disdain with
which he said the word annoyed her, so she gave up on social pleasantries and
launched right into the bad news. “I’ve found another stone missing from the Staircase.”

“Are you sure,
doctora
Palomares?” His hawkish features
pinched into a frown and were in stark opposition to the broad Mayan features
of the local people. Not a smile line existed on his face.

Maybe he thought
she needed glasses.

“Yes
, director
, I am very sure. It was there
yesterday. Today it’s gone. I can show you.”
 

She unfolded the drawing from her vest pocket
and pointed to the location of the missing piece.

He studied the
drawing and the places she had marked where the three stones had been.

“They are all
head hieroglyphs,” he said.

She nodded and
waited for his reaction.

“You are sure it
is gone?” He turned the question slightly sinister and pointed it toward her,
like she was responsible for the theft. He reminded her of a colleague who had
tried to frame her back in her university teaching days. She vowed that would
not happen again.

 
“I’m sure.” What she wanted to say was what a
moron he was and if she said it was gone, she wasn’t kidding.

“We will have to notify the police as before.”
He wagged his head like a man displeased with the prank of a child.

She hated when he did that.

“Have the police found anything on the other
two thefts that I reported?”

“No, nothing,” he said. Creases gathered on his
brow, accentuating the pinched look of his face. His black hair was combed
straight back and lay in furrows.

Of all the
pleasant, smiling people in this lovely country why did her boss have to be the
exception?

He continued.
“The police are investigating these thefts that threaten our national image and
Honduran tourism. Something like this makes it look as though we cannot protect
our national treasures.”

He had a flair
for the dramatic. She hardly thought all of Honduran tourism might suffer. But
it might affect the local economy and that was a concern because so many of the
people in the town of Copan Ruinas depended on tourism for their livelihood.

Uninvited, she took a seat in one of the arm
chairs before his desk, made of dark, fragrant Honduran wood with a haunting
citrus scent. The front of the desk was elaborately carved in Mayan flowers.
The top was wide and smooth, polished to a deep brown, not a scrap of paper on
it, only the book he was perusing and a telephone. Books on Copan archaeology
lined the bookcases behind him. He was a notable scholar on the subject and had
written extensively on Copan.

He was the reason Elena had come to Copan to
mentor under him. Things hadn’t turned out the way she had planned. They rarely
had a discussion about her work. He was too busy. In his bare office she saw
little evidence of the work he was famous for. Maybe he did his scholarly research
and writing at home.

“I have arranged for more guards because of the
thefts,” he was saying, “but their arrival is taking longer than expected. I
will call the ministry and insist that they send the extra guards immediately.
In the meantime, you will work through the day at the site until these guards
arrive.”