In the Shadow of the Cypress (18 page)

Luke thought his sister was a thoroughgoing cow, a shameless
suck-up, and a bullying snitch. He was subsequently transported on the wings of heavenly delight the day she moved east. Beth departed with tears in her eyes, a low-mileage BMW station wagon, and a stack of credit cards that could choke a goat. Luke was almost giddy as he hugged his sister good-bye and snickered at her departing tailpipe. It was all he could do to keep from jumping madly into the air, arms arched upward in triumph, while screaming at the top of his lungs, “Eat my shorts, Spooky!” Luke delighted in calling his older sister “Spooky” because she hated it so much.

Luke’s limited curiosity about academic matters continued to hobble along in a halting fashion, while his parents tore out their hair. Then suddenly, just in the middle of his sophomore year, his biology teacher, a brilliant educator with the improbable name of Mrs. Tallulah Entwhistle, took Luke in hand. With skills his parents could not possibly invoke or duplicate, Mrs. Entwhistle somehow turned her rebellious pupil completely around. It didn’t hurt that she looked like an Italian movie star, but that didn’t disguise the fact that she was a hard-core polymath, and possessed an encyclopedic mind and a memory only rivaled by her laptop. Luke was once quoted as saying that “the Intrepid Tallu” could spot sham work and BS through a brick wall and, like she did her dead frogs, publicly dissect the offending student in moments. Nothing got by Mrs. Entwhistle, but she tempered her occasional disappointments with understanding, humor, and compassion, which only made Luke work harder to please her.

Within a half semester, Luke was suddenly making straight A’s in all his courses, and in some subjects, like biology, mathematics, geology, and history, he was adjudged either first or second in the class. This pattern continued and increased in energy
through his junior and senior years. In fact, Luke’s quantum leap from disinterest to total absorption was so remarkable that his amazed parents tried to persuade him to undergo a more advanced battery of computer-aided intelligence tests so they could calibrate the remarkable change in his development.

Luke correctly figured that they just wanted something to boast about to their friends and coworkers, so he told them, as politely as he knew how, to kiss that idea good-bye. And he issued a threat, thinly veiled as humor: if they ever brought up the subject of IQ tests again, he’d start doing serious drugs and begin dating a thirty-year-old lap-dancing pickpocket named Bubbles. It worked. Luke’s parents never mentioned the subject again.

By the time he graduated, Luke was rated the most accomplished student in the school. Two of his papers on biological variation had been published in respected scientific journals, and he was subsequently made valedictorian for his class—an honor he would have preferred to dispense with, as he hated public speaking above all else.

Even before his graduation, four universities had approached Luke. Each vied for his consideration with offers of scholarships and living allowances. This news thrilled his parents, who were already financially stretched to the limit by a daughter at Prince-ton who seemed to be majoring in expensive tastes.

Luke at last decided to take advantage of his parents’ connections, and appreciatively accepted a generous offer to attend Stanford. It was only thirty minutes from his home, so he wouldn’t lose touch with his friends, or his parents’ refrigerator and laundry room. Stanford was also close enough to the Pacific to allow him to surf whenever he could find the time. Happily, Luke’s girlfriend, another compulsive A student named Rosie Hall, had also
been accepted at Stanford, so life would continue much as it had, or at least that was what Luke wished to believe.

During his freshman year, Luke once again floundered. Not in his grades, but in his course choices. His counselor noted that Luke’s schedule included French, astronomy, chemistry, biology, and a broad introduction to engineering. He had also elected to assume extra courses in geology, anthropology, and, of all things, South American history. Luke’s counselor pointedly suggested that he was spread too thin for his freshman year. And though his grades were excellent, his counselor believed the stress of carrying such a weighty course load would ultimately prove detrimental to his health. He’d seen other gifted students literally wither under the pressure of their ambitions, and he told Luke to slow down. After all, he had years to focus his interests and find himself. Even Mrs. Entwhistle, who had made a point of staying in touch with her most gifted pupil, warned Luke against pushing himself too hard in his first two years. She laughed and said there was still plenty of time to kill himself in postgraduate school.

Perhaps it was his love of surfing and the ocean that finally turned Luke’s interests toward marine sciences, but his choice was certainly buttressed by all the great Cousteau documentaries he had loved as a boy. So at the beginning of his junior year at Stanford he decided to focus all his efforts toward degrees in marine biology, maritime engineering, and world maritime history, the last being a subject he elected for the sake of pure distraction.

Luke had shown so much promise in his work that in 2008, at the beginning of his senior year, he was invited to study marine biology and related subjects at the prestigious Hopkins Marine Life Observatory in Monterey.

Like his parents, Luke had always loved Monterey. His folks had taken him to see the Monterey Bay Aquarium when he was fourteen, and it was all they could do to drag him out of the building when it closed for the night. He had returned every time they came to Monterey for the weekend, and at one point he’d even been introduced to the aquarium director, Julie Packard. Luke told her that he wanted to work for the aquarium one day, and Ms. Packard indulged him by saying that he should come back after he had finished college, and she would see that he got his wish.

L
UKE’S MOM HELPED HIM FIND
a small but decent apartment high up on David Avenue. Its best feature, as far as Luke was concerned, was that it had an unobstructed view of the bay from the living room window. With the help of his war-surplus Russian binoculars, Luke could just make out the surfing conditions at Lover’s Point when he got up in the morning. He also enjoyed being able to coast his bike downhill all the way to Hopkins. Getting back up David was another matter, and Luke soon developed a set of calves like steel springs.

Using his attendance at Hopkins as an introduction, Luke went back to Julie Packard, and asked for a part-time job to help cover his expenses. She remembered him from years before and, having perused his exceptional academic record from Stanford, was pleased to be able to keep her promise, even though he hadn’t yet graduated.

Luke was offered a job in the aquarium’s complex and extensive water treatment facilities, which he rather enjoyed because he got to work with qualified scientists and engineers and not
the general public. It was also just a skip and a jump from Hopkins, which cut down on travel time.

The best part of being in Monterey was its proximity to Stanford, so Luke’s girlfriend, Rosie, could drive down to see him every other weekend, class work and exams permitting. And since they text-messaged each other at least eight times a day, their separation was easier to bear than might be expected. Happily, Luke’s father was footing the phone bills, and doing so without complaint.

Then, one bleak and foggy day, Luke’s hydrology professor asked some of his students to help him clear out the old storage vault. This room had been a catchall for at least twenty years. Among a vast assortment of oddities, it housed scores of old specimen jars containing long-dead marine exhibits, and crates of antiquated and disused laboratory paraphernalia. But by far the greatest clutter consisted of boxes and boxes of papers that had evidently never been sorted or cataloged or thrown out. The job of sorting and organizing the chaos paid little or no money, but it did put Luke in the position to go rummaging around in Hopkins’s attic.

Old attics stacked with long-forgotten mementos had always sparked Luke’s fertile imagination. His first taste of an attic safari came as a childhood adventure while visiting his grandmother’s old Victorian house in Watsonville. Thus, long after his fellow students had lost interest in the job and found excuses to quit, Luke continued on sorting through the trash, most of which was destined for the Dumpster. And then, one Sunday morning in April, Luke came across something that would completely change his life.

Under a stack of old cardboard file boxes at the back of the vault, Luke discovered a small, antique-looking, leather-bound
trunk stamped with the name of Dr. Charles H. Gilbert. It was very like the trunk he’d found and explored in his grandmother’s attic. That one had contained hundreds of old photographs that his grandfather, an enthusiastic if somewhat untutored shutterbug, had taken over the years and stored away before his death. Luke’s grandmother had totally forgotten about the trunk, and Luke and his grandmother had spent many happy hours going through the photographs. She seemed to bloom again as she recalled every detail depicted in each picture. It had inspired Luke to rummage further, and he went on to also discover a large mahogany case of very fine English silver flatware that his grandmother had been given as a wedding present sixty-six years before. Being a modest creature at heart, she had never found occasion to use it, preferring her mother’s simple flatware pattern instead. However, when Luke’s grandmother decided to sell the silver at auction with Butterfield & Butterfield, she was stunned to find that it had gone out the door for $7,800. Far more than she had ever imagined it was worth. With this youthful experience to inspire him, Luke took to rummaging with a passion. Show him a cluttered attic, and he was off to the races.

The leather trunk Luke discovered in the Hopkins vault made him think that perhaps he was at least onto something interesting once more, but he was disappointed at what he found. The bulk of the contents appeared to be the property of a long-departed Hopkins professor. It consisted mostly of old scholastic papers, numerous notebooks, and scientific journals. There was also a box of fading antique photographs that included several labeled pictures of Hopkins when it was just a plain, wooden, two-story building perched on Lover’s Point. There were even some old pictures of the previous owner, Dr. Gilbert, standing with colleagues and students in front of the
first Hopkins Laboratory in 1894. All of this tickled Luke’s sense of history, and he knew the Hopkins administration would love the photographs.

But it was the large package at the bottom of the trunk that drew Luke’s greatest interest. It was neatly wrapped in brown paper and secured with string and sealing wax. When Luke pulled it from the trunk, the rotting string parted and fell away, and when he removed the wrapping paper he discovered a leather-bound print folio and a journal. Luke opened the folio and found it contained some large sheets of folded rice paper, which at first glance appeared to be something like Chinese gravestone rubbings. Next, he found some odd photographs of a flat, black stone with engraved Chinese characters, and a half dozen pictures of an object that looked something akin to a stylized giraffe, but resting on its knees like a camel. Lastly, he examined a handwritten journal with Dr. Gilbert’s name inscribed on the inside cover. Since there was no one around to monitor his activities, Luke decided to let his natural curiosity take point. He indulged himself with an early lunch break and read the journal, if only to find out what the other documents and photographs depicted.

What Luke soon discovered in the journal’s pages set his pulse racing. He couldn’t believe what he was reading. If it was true, and he had no reason to doubt Dr. Gilbert’s account as yet, then out there somewhere was solid, incontrovertible evidence that the Chinese, not the Spanish, had been the first foreigners to discover California. And if this was true, the Chinese, to judge by all the standards of European history at that time, possessed a prior claim to California, and perhaps parts of South America as well.

Luke could barely catch his breath. He had hit the mother lode, the apogee of the rummager’s art: this was a discovery that
could literally change the history of the Western world, and Luke knew it. Though he felt himself to be scrupulously honest, Luke had been around university dons long enough to know that they’d do just about anything to get their hands on something like this; and of course, they would also claim the right of discovery. One of Luke’s roommates at Stanford had once joked that he could judge the level of success of a tenured professor by the number of stab wounds in his competitors’ backs. Luke was not about to reveal his discovery until he knew enough to secure those credentials for himself.

On the other hand, Luke knew that he never wanted to be accused of theft from the university archives, so removing materials from the Hopkins vault was out of the question for the moment. Instantly, Luke knew what must be done. He would have to copy all the relevant material, pack it all back in the trunk just as he found it, and then hide it again under the clutter in the back of the vault, where it would not be discovered without his notice.

As it was a Sunday, nobody was really around to ask uncomfortable questions. So Luke took the rubbings, the faded photographs, and Gilbert’s journal and left to use the office’s broad-plate copier. He duplicated everything in the folio, and then carefully returned the documents, rewrapped in the original paper, to the trunk just as he had found them. He also included the moldy string and wax seals. At first Luke regretted that he had not thought to use specimen gloves when looking through the papers, but he later determined that if provenance were required in the future, his would be the only new fingerprints on the documents, thus giving weight to his claim to prior discovery of Dr. Gilbert’s papers without opening him to charges of theft of university property.

After work Luke went home and immediately fired up his
laptop. He was surprised to find quite a bit of information concerning fifteenth-century Chinese maritime history on the Internet. He discovered at least three books, one of them a bestseller, and numerous articles on the subject. He also found references to three television documentaries, and a plethora of newspaper articles from all over the world. Luke ordered the books and documentaries and downloaded all the newspaper articles he could find. Then he scanned Dr. Gilbert’s journal and, when it was practical, returned to the vault, retrieved the rubbings, and had them copied full size at a blueprint shop in Salinas. The printers also scanned the rubbings onto a disc with exceptional detail. Then he returned the material to the trunk and covered his tracks.