“And voilà! This is it,” Ethan announced once they’d reached their destination.
The site really wasn’t much to look at. From the top of the ravine, they stared into the work area: about a dozen square holes measuring six by six scattered about the cleared jungle floor, roped off in a grid for tracking purposes. Piles of sifted dirt sat along the outsides of the site, discarded after confirming the soil was free of any artifacts. Blue tarps covered the work site to shield from both the rain and the relentless sun. Even as deep in the jungle as they were, the sun still pounded on them every day. Great for a tan. Not great for working in ninety-degree heat.
Ford pulled up alongside Ethan and Corrie, then called out to the rest of the crew behind them, “All right, everyone. Go ahead and get started.”
They watched and waited until the crew descended into the ravine, leaving Corrie, Ford, and Ethan standing alone at the top.
“So . . .” Ford started.
“So . . .”
“This is it.”
“That I can see. What brought you here?” Corrie asked.
Wasn’t that obvious? Wasn’t she supposed to be the Chimalli expert, after all?
That was what he wanted to ask, but he knew better than to press his luck on Corrie’s chipperness for the day.
“The Lacandon,” he said, as if that were enough to explain. “And the distance from Tenochtitlán.”
“And who found this particular spot?” she asked, crouching and putting her hands in the dirt.
Ford and Ethan glanced at each other. What on literal earth is she doing? So these were the stories he’d heard so much about. And not just the ones about her running down jags and schmoozing with mob bosses. No, the stories about her methods. How she felt the earth. Meditated during her lunch break. Lay in the dirt. Something about listening to the ancients speak to her or some woo-woo shit like that. They certainly didn’t teach this in grad school.
Some people thought her methods were weird. Others thought she was spiritual, and that spirituality led her on the right path. Ford was intrigued, though he also found lying around to meditate to be a giant waste of time. When he went on digs, he wanted to find things. He didn’t want to speak to dirt or ghosts.
“I did,” he said, standing straighter and shifting his stance. “And then Ethan came with me to scout it out about a month before we broke ground.”
She nodded slowly, as if taking what he said under advisement. Ethan looked at Ford again and shrugged. The urge to prod her for her thoughts nagged at Ford’s senses, as did his desire to beg her to tell him what they were doing wrong.
Because after the first couple of weeks of apparent success, they’d hit a wall.
And not an ancient wall. That would have been a spectacular find. No . . . they hadn’t found anything in more than two months.
“What kind of artifacts have you found?” Corrie stood, brushing her dirty hands against each other and descending into the ravine without waiting for them.
Hot on her tail, Ford and Ethan followed.
“Um, a couple of flints. And a piece of obsidian,” Ethan explained, trying to keep up.
“Where?”
“There,” he pointed. “And also there and there.”
She kept walking, past the crew, past the tents, past the holes dug into the ground. She’d barely paused to look at what they were doing.
“And let me guess, you haven’t found anything in a while, right?” she asked, finally coming to a stop at the far end of the ravine and bending down again, giving Ford a view straight into her cleavage.
“How did you know that?” he asked, trying not to stare.
She glanced up, and he quickly averted his eyes. “Because I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
He looked back at her as she stared up at him, shielding her eyes from the sun shining through an open area in the tree canopy. “That’s why I’m here, right? Because you thought you had the right spot, but now you’re not finding anything?”
Admitting it to Ethan was one thing, but admitting it to Corrie was another. But she was right—she wouldn’t have been there otherwise. If they’d been finding artifacts left and right, there wouldn’t have been a need to call in reinforcements.
“All right. And? What do you think the problem is?”
“Well,” she said, standing again and placing a lump of dirt in Ford’s hand, “you’re not in the right place.”
No. No, that couldn’t be right. Ford had scouted out spots for weeks. He’d read everything there was about Chimalli, including Corrie’s hundred-page dissertation three times. Each account described the lush bowl-like oasis where Chimalli had settled, far from Tenochtitlán. Given the descriptions of the hot, muggy climate, heavy rainfalls, and abundant tropical rain forest trees, the location was most likely situated on the outskirts of the Lacandon Jungle. Old abandoned Mayan territory. A place beyond the reach of the Aztec Empire in the hope that Moctezuma II and his army wouldn’t go looking there. This location checked all the boxes. Ford had trekked hundreds of acres in this jungle before settling on this location.
And Ethan had agreed. It made sense. It had to be the spot where Chimalli spent his final days.
Ford snickered at the absurdity of her proclamation. “I don’t think so, Corrie. This is the spot, I’m certain of it.”
“Oh, really? The accounts all place Chimalli’s site in a bowl. But only that side of the ravine is bowl-like,” she said, pointing to the spot where they’d descended.
Ford glanced back at the high side of the ravine. With the ridgeline sloping to the flat area where they were standing, he couldn’t deny that it didn’t appear much like a bowl. But they were also in a rain forest where hundreds of years of rainfall tended to wash away soil. And when he and Ethan had first located the spot and they’d immediately found evidence of ancient Mexican peoples, well, it had all made sense. “It likely got washed out,” he explained.
“Yeah, that’s possible, but look at the soil.” She pointed at the soil in his hand. The loose, crumbly almost-black dirt had a spongy texture as he pressed the substance between his fingers. “It’s different than at the top. Up there it’s more claylike. There would be some commonalities. And there’s no evidence of any erosion. It’s not the place.”
This. This was the Corrie he remembered—the I’m right, you’re wrong know-it-all. Ford rolled his eyes. She hadn’t even looked at the artifacts they’d found or the dig pits. Like she could tell they were in the wrong place based solely on a handful of dirt. What a colossal waste of time. “Okay, Corrie. Well, thanks for this. Guess we should head back and get you to the airport.”