First Things First Page 4

  Chelsea had no intention of going, in person, to Mexico City. Rather, she tempted the fates once more by picking up the phone, this time to dial the number the woman in Chetumal had readily—gratefully, if Chelsea had correctly interpreted the other’s linguistic frustration—given her.

  Once beyond the switchboard at the Secretaria de Governation in Mexico City, Chelsea struck gold. Samuel London had indeed made an appearance there, and though he hadn’t listed a specific spot at which he could be reached, he had given the name and address of a Mexican sponsor, a Professor Paredes from the University of Yucatán in Merida.

  The professor was out all day. Chelsea discovered that by phoning him every hour on the hour. In between calls she walked the beach, which was hot, phoned the airport to check on any progress in locating her luggage, of which there was none, wandered in and out of the local shops with a thought toward buying some clothes, which she eventually vetoed. Her luggage was bound to show up, she reasoned, just as was the professor in Merida.

  Professor Paredes proved to be the more obliging of the two. She reached him early that evening and decided that the wait had been worth it when, in commendable English, he told her that Samuel was presently residing in the environs of Xcan, roughly ninety minutes from Cancun. When she asked him what “in the environs” meant, he explained that there were many unnamed pueblitos and small farms scattered along Route 180, the sole road connecting Cancun and Chichen Itza. The best he could do was to suggest she go to Xcan and start asking.

  That was precisely what she set out to do when she awoke the next morning. Having washed her clothes the night before, she felt as fresh as could be expected, given the fact that again she hadn’t slept well. Oh, she’d mastered the air conditioner, and the bed was no longer as strange, since it seemed she’d spent half her time in Mexico sitting on it with the telephone cradled in her lap. No, it had been the image of Samuel Prescott London that had kept her awake.

  She no longer had to stare at his photograph to see his pale skin, his stern glasses, his lean cheeks. His face had become all too familiar to her, though that in itself wasn’t unusual when she was working on a case. What was unusual was that she felt so very much in the dark as to what made him tick.

  Theoretically, he’d had everything, and from what she’d learned, he wasn’t a rebel. It was possible he’d simply cracked under the pressure, yet she found herself wondering just how much pressure he’d had. Certainly not financial, she mused with the slightest bit of envy. Perhaps his mother had gotten to him; Chelsea could believe that. Yet why it had taken him nearly forty years to react was a mystery, as was the nature of his interest in the Yucatán, given everything else she’d learned about his character.

  Then again, perhaps he was simply taking a prolonged vacation.

  As the beetle pulled away from the Camino Real, Chelsea realized that her heightened obsession with Samuel London related to her conviction that she was close on his tail and getting closer by the minute. She knew it, could feel it in her bones. Perhaps it was the bloodhound instinct that Beatrice London had spoken of, but Chelsea felt assured she’d have a hold on her prey before the day was done.

  Of course, first she had to get out of Cancun, a task easier said than done. When she’d asked at the front desk how to get to the highway, she’d received no less than three sets of directions from the solicitous trio of clerks. In the end she’d chosen what sounded the simplest, yet she found herself making turn after turn, pausing at street corners to search for signposts. On the positive side was the fact that traffic was negligible, something she’d noticed even during the drive in from the airport that first day. Likewise, the drivers were not the impatient types she’d found in Boston, or worse, New York. Impatience, as she already knew, was not part of the Mexican character, and for once she was grateful.

  At long last, and only after several stops to seek confirmation that she was indeed headed in the right direction, she hit Route 180 and stepped on the gas. When the beetle hesitated for a second as though reluctant to leave the city behind, she wondered if it was trying to tell her something. But the lure of Samuel London was too great for her to heed any such warning, so she pressed on.

  Within fifteen minutes she was cursing the car, most notably the fact that it had no air-conditioning. Though it was chugging over the road at a commendable speed, the open windows brought in nothing but dust and hot air. Moreover, the stunted jungle landscape had grown quickly monotonous, so she had nothing to look at but the equally monotonous image of Samuel London, which persisted in flitting before her eyes.

  Then, with the abrupt appearance of several small huts, she passed her first Mayan village. She slowed the car, but the minuscule settlement was already behind her. Though sorely tempted to make a U-turn on the highway—in actuality little more than a two-laned road cutting a straight and narrow swath through the lowlands—she tempered the urge, telling herself that there would be other villages to come.

  Indeed there were. On the lookout now, Chelsea slowed the beetle in time to examine the next one more closely. She was intrigued. The tiny hamlet consisted of five or six small huts whose walls were of lashed-together sticks and whose roofs were thatched. Front doors stood open, if there were doors at all, but Chelsea was unable to see much of the dim insides.

  She kept a steady foot on the gas—a miracle, given the dubious condition of the pavement of Route 180—and waited patiently for the next pueblito to appear. This time she saw more—children playing in an open area at the center of the cluster of huts, chickens and an occasional scrawny dog. Beyond the huts were other houses, those sided with concrete and painted in bright pinks, greens and blues.

  Enchanted, she drove on, slowing at each small enclave, adding features she’d missed at the last. A woman with a pot of water balanced on her head. A small table inside one of the huts. A battered bicycle leaning against another. Orange trees, banana trees, pigs. And electrical wires. Electrical wires. Chelsea chuckled at the anachronism, then realized that the huts were anachronisms in and of themselves. The clock had seemingly stopped at a time long past for these people whose homes were nearly primitive.

  Yet before she could begin to feel sorry for these modern-day Maya, Chelsea realized something else. They looked happy. Bemused, she passed two more pueblitos. The people did look happy. Where poverty in the States seemed invariably accompanied by grimness and dirt and sorrow, there was nothing remotely sad in the copper-hued faces that broke into smiles at her passage. There was nothing grim in the beautiful eyes of the children. As as for dirt, Chelsea couldn’t begin to guess how the women kept their white dresses so clean—for they were clean, every one of them, loose expanses of white cotton broken only by collars and hems embroidered in a wild array of color.

  Suddenly the settlements were behind her once more and, momentarily lost in wonder at these innocent, peaceful people, Chelsea had to forcibly remind herself that she was here on a mission. With the reappearance in her mind’s eye of Samuel London’s face—so startlingly different in almost every imaginable way from the faces she’d just passed—she concentrated on looking for the names of the occasional small towns she passed through.

  She approached a gas station on the edge of such a town and brought the beetle to a sputtering stop. The attendant, a boy whom she guessed to be not more than twelve, was quite adept at filling her car, but he gave her a blank look when she mentioned Xcan. She figured she hadn’t pronounced it properly—the professor had only said it once before spelling it for her—so she tried several variations on the theme. One of them must have hit home, for the boy pointed down the road, which didn’t tell her much more than she already knew. By then two girls had approached from the roadside stand across the way and were smiling at Chelsea—at her blond hair, at her yellow sundress with its delicate spaghetti straps, at the white sandals which, Chelsea realized, were biting uncomfortably into her heat-swollen skin.

  “Hello,” Chelsea said, offering a smile she hoped look
ed less parched than she felt. Her gaze dropped to the basket of fruit one of the girls held out, then even more covetously to the glass of juice the other offered. “Is that for sale?” she asked quickly, then realized that the girls couldn’t possibly understand her. She was about to turn back to the car for her phrase book when the taller of the two spoke.

  “One dollah.”

  Chelsea wasn’t about to bicker. Suddenly it seemed that her survival depended on a cold drink. Fishing a dollar free of the pesos in her pocket, she handed it over in return for the glass of what turned out to be fresh grapefruit juice, not terribly cold but wonderfully wet and refreshing. She drained the glass quickly, then returned it. “Thank you … Muchas gracias.” When the girls giggled, she wondered just how bad her accent was. But there was no ridicule on either of her attendants’ faces. They simply stood back, staring at her as they’d done when they’d first approached, and smiled.

  Beginning to feel like something of a spectacle, Chelsea crawled back into her now-sweltering car, started its reluctant engine, and steered back onto the road. She passed more groupings of Mayan huts and several small towns before her eyes lit up. Nuevo Xcan. She had to be close!

  That thought was the brightest one she was to have for many hours.

  Somehow—she was later to realize that her attention had been diverted by a truck full of children, which had been bouncing precariously along the road—she missed the sign for Xcan. When, bleary-eyed from scanning every signpost in sight, she arrived in the largest town she’d seen since she’d left Cancun, she discovered she was in Valladolid. The fourth person she approached on the street was able to tell her that Xcan was pronounced “shcan” and that she’d long since passed through it.

  Hot and discouraged and hungry, she treated herself to lunch in the bougainvillea-rich courtyard of a hotel in the main square. Then, putting off as long as possible a return to the stifling confines of her car, she wandered around the square with Samuel London’s picture in hand. Headshakes were becoming as common as smiles, she decided morosely. Oh, yes, she loved the hunt, but the heat was very definitely slowing her down, as was the fact that she hadn’t had much sleep for two nights running.

  Knowing that the day wasn’t getting any younger and that she wanted some concrete progress before nightfall, she returned to the beetle, only to find that one of its tires was flat. She’d never changed a tire before. She didn’t even know if there was a spare in the trunk.

  There was. But the directions for putting it on were written in Spanish. She studied the diagrams and removed the spare. She found the jack and stared at it for a time, wondering somewhat hysterically where AAA was when she needed it. She glanced frantically around the square, but the few people in sight seemed intent on ambling toward wherever it was they went for siesta.

  An hour later, she and the beetle limped out of Valladolid. The knuckles of her right hand were badly scraped, smudges of dirt decorated her once-fresh sundress and her sunburn-pink arms, and her back hurt. But the spare tire was on, she reasoned with grim satisfaction, and the beetle was moving. The fact that she felt sweaty, grubby and tired was a minor problem, one that would be readily solved when she returned to the Camino Real that night. Her suitcase would be awaiting her, she dreamed, as would air-conditioning, a bath and a nice, clean bed.

  First, though, she’d find out where Samuel Prescott London was hiding. If it killed her, she’d smoke him out, and before the sun set!

  Then the beetle died. It sputtered and choked and lost all capacity for acceleration before stumbling to a halt at the side of a forlorn stretch of road. Furious at its betrayal, Chelsea angrily switched the key on and off, jiggled the shift, pumped the clutch, slammed her hand against the steering wheel. Then, not knowing what else to do, she swore.

  The beetle was beyond hearing.

  Fury was quickly replaced by panic when she climbed from the car. There wasn’t another vehicle in sight, much less sign of human habitation. Frantically, she imagined herself stranded, marooned, left to the wild boars and snakes and whatever other fearful beasts were sure to inhabit the surrounding bush.

  And it was all Samuel Prescott London’s fault!

  Chelsea closed her eyes, took a deep breath and counted to ten. By that time she felt in control once more, or in as much control as a person could be under such circumstances. She looked east, then west, either of which held her only hope, since north and south led into the jungle. She could walk, she decided; the last sign of civilization she’d passed had been ten minutes away. Of course, on foot that would be close to an hour, and she was exhausted to start with. No, she decided, she’d wait for another car to come along. If its driver couldn’t pinpoint the beetle’s problem, at least he’d be able to transport her to a town.

  Raising the beetle’s hood, she leaned against its door and waited. And waited. She cursed the sun, which responded by slipping behind a heavy cloud. She cursed the practice of siesta, which had to be the reason why the road was deserted. She cursed a mosquito, which bit her anyway. But most of all, she cursed Samuel London. His face loomed large in her mind and she saw him smile, but it was the icy smile of Beatrice London and it didn’t even cool the heat of her skin.

  She’d been standing for little more than five minutes, though it had seemed like hours, when an old pickup truck appeared on the horizon. It approached at what seemed to Chelsea a crawl, slowing all the more as it neared, mercifully coming to a full halt behind the VW. Chelsea hadn’t even had to raise her arms to flag it down, a good thing since she doubted she had the energy.

  Two men climbed from the cab of the truck. They wore baggy brown pants, loose white shirts, hats and sandals. They were small of build, as were so many of the natives, and had the same bronzed skin and friendly smiles.

  Chelsea’s dilemma was obvious, a fact she was grateful for when, chattering softly in Spanish, the two men bent over her engine. The situation was equally obvious when they pushed and poked, then straightened and shook their heads first at each other, then at Chelsea.

  “Xcan,” she said. “I need to go to Xcan.” She enunciated each word with care, as though it might help the men understand her English, which, of course, it didn’t. But they both nodded, repeated the name of the town and pointed east. It was the direction they’d been headed when they’d stopped to aid her. She tried again. “I have to get to Xcan. Can you take me there?” She accompanied her words with exaggerated gestures, pointing first at herself, then the men, then their truck. “Xcan.” She repeated the gestures. “Can you give me a ride?”

  When the driver of the truck smiled and nodded, Chelsea breathed a sigh of relief. In a burst of motion she might not have been capable of, had she not feared the men might leave without her, she scooped her bag from the seat of the car and climbed into the cab of the truck.

  The beetle had been luxury compared with the fitful motion of the pickup, not to mention the worn, unpadded seat. Squashed between the men, Chelsea bumped along with them, clutching her bag to her chest for all she was worth. It was her trusty carry-on, minus the sweater and the heavy books, and being her sole link to the real world, she suddenly treasured it.

  Xcan was three towns down the road. By the time the truck reached it, Chelsea knew her bottom would be bruised for days. With multiple nods and a profusion of gracias, she gingerly eased herself from the truck and watched it disappear. Only then did she turn to inspect the small town in which she’d been left.

  It wasn’t much of a town, at least by American standards, though Chelsea saw that it was on a par with most of the other towns she’d passed through that day. There was a food store, a machine shop and a small church. Set farther back from the road and framed by huts of the concrete-and-thatch variety was a school.

  Unsure as to which should be her first priority—the beetle or Samuel London—Chelsea let her thirst guide her. Entering the food store to an audience of curious eyes, she grabbed for the nearest Coke and guzzled half of it before sheepishly lowering
the bottle and dipping into her pocket for money. When she was done with the Coke, she dipped again, this time into her bag for the picture of Samuel London.

  One man, three women and two children stared in turn at the photograph. They talked among themselves, frowned and talked more. Chelsea held her breath. Though she couldn’t understand a word they said, she sensed some difference of opinion among them and hoped that it would be resolved in her favor. But soon assorted shrugs circled the group, and one of the women handed the photograph back, her apologetic eyes saying all that was necessary.

  Chelsea let out her breath. Discouraged, she murmured her thanks and headed for the machine shop. She was well aware that she might be out of luck if no one there recongized Samuel. The church looked closed, the school in a like state of abandonment. She could go from house to house, but if none of the people in these two shops knew who or where Samuel was, she doubted the others would. And, of course, there was the language barrier to contend with.

  There was only one man in the machine shop, lounging in a chair balanced on its rear legs. He didn’t shift position when Chelsea entered, other than to offer her a pleasant smile.

  “¿Habla usted ingles?” Chelsea asked hesitantly.

  “Si. A leetle,” he said.

  Intensely relieved, she began to speak. “I had an awful problem with my car a few miles back on the road—” She stopped when she saw the young man’s utterly dumb expression, and began again, more slowly this time. “My car stopped. Down the road a little.” She was encouraged when he nodded. “Is there someone nearby who can fix it?”

  “Ah … si, senorita. Een Valladolid.”