One Grave Less

bowl of soup from the little girl’s hands.
    “Good.” He grinned broadly. “See, we friends.”
    He lifted a satellite phone from a hook on his belt and made a call. It took a while to go through. The prisoner sipped the soup from the bowl. It was surprisingly good. The man moved away and spoke into the phone—Spanish, at first—something about May 3. The prisoner’s Spanish was almost nonexistent. He changed to English. She strained to listen with her head down, as if interested only in her soup.
    “ Sí , I have her. I am looking at her now. Sí , forensic anthro-pol-ogist from Georgia, U.S.A.,” he said. “She ask many questions about the bird feathers. She wanted to know everything about them.”
    Patia nodded, as if verifying what he was telling the person at the other end. Patia’s eyes gleamed brightly as she looked at the captive, who, for her part, was feeling a great deal of confusion.
    When he finished his conversation, he said, “Everything is okay. You be good.”
    He rose and walked away with Patia. The child tagged along. Of the three, only Patia looked back. Her face wore a sly grin of triumph.
    At nightfall the prisoner was curled into a ball in the center of her cage, trying to hide her exposed skin from mosquitoes. She opened her eyes at the sound of someone approaching from the jungle side of her cage. Whoever was advancing was quiet. She barely heard the sound. But it was there. She froze, holding herself rigid, mentally preparing for a fight, an attempt at escape.
    “Miss.” It was a delicate whisper.
    In the deep jungle shadow illuminated only by slivers of moonlight was the child who had given her the soup.
    “Be still, please. They should not see us,” she said.
    Her English was surprisingly good.
    The prisoner nodded.
    “I will help you to get free if you will take me to my mother,” the girl said.
    “Who are you?” the captive whispered.
    “My name is Ariel Fallon. Diane Fallon is my mother. Do you know her?”

    The impossibly steep steps of Chichén Itzá’s Kukulkan pyramid rose in front of Diane Fallon.
    Remarkable , she thought. It looks so real .
    The brown-gray-white-green fake stone had the same mottled appearance as the original.
    Visitors will love it .
    But Diane found it frightening. It brought horrible images up from her memory. She closed her eyes, took a breath, and put a hand on her chest, as if that would slow down her pounding heart.
    She’d seen the display many times as it was being built, approving the plans along the way, feeling no apprehension, believing that the step-by-step process was desensitizing her to its effect on her emotions as the rising structure gradually took shape. But here, alone before the finished monument, the large presence filled her with dread and sorrow.
    The pyramid was a facade. It was the entrance to the new Mayan special exhibit scheduled to open in just two weeks at the RiverTrail Museum of Natural History where Diane was director. The entry into the exhibit hall was via a passageway through the lower steps of the pyramid. The artifacts on display in the exhibit were on loan from Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology.
    As she looked into the dimly lit passageway under the pyramid, the quickening of her pulse and her sense of dread accelerated. The Mayan ruins looked too much like the ruins where Diane had hopelessly searched for her daughter after the massacre in South America.
    Diane had worked for the human rights organization World Accord International, collecting evidence of crimes against humanity. She and her team excavated mass graves, interviewed frightened witnesses, and exposed secret torture rooms, accumulating a mountain of evidence of the atrocities committed by dictator Ivan Santos. During his rule he’d massacred thousands of the native population, along with anyone who either disagreed with him or got in his way. He was deposed eventually, but he and his illegal army continued a reign of killings and intimidation against his enemies. Even out of official power he was still a dangerous man, and he was out there somewhere.
    During her work in the area, Diane and her crew often stayed at a mission just across the border in Brazil. Her team shared food, blankets, and medicine with the sisters running the mission in exchange for their hospitality and a safe haven. Over the years the mission had taken in countless refugees running from cruel regimes.
    One day, outside the mission compound, a tiny