“If you’re looking for a three hundred sixty-five day annual calendar similar to ours, then you go to the Haab.”
“That’s the third Mayan calendar,” Dr. Peet said matter-of-factly.
John nodded. “Which they also adopted from the Toltecs,” he said. “This calendar was obviously created from the sun’s cycles. When by itself, it was probably used to measure planting seasons and so forth. But when the Haab was used in conjunction with the Tzolkin, we get the Toltec’s fifty-two year Calendar Round.”
“Calendar Round?”
“It takes fifty-two years for the Tzolkin-Haab to complete one cycle.”
Lori seemed to consider the information a moment. She retrieved the beige scrap of paper from her pocket and tapped the hieroglyphs printed upon it.
“In other words,” she said, “Ten Coatl comes around only once every fifty-two years.”
* * * *
As Lori considered the Toltec date symbol bookending the word ACATZALAN on the beige note, she couldn’t help but wonder why the thief left it taped to the effigy’s storage container. The strange word printed across the note was Toltec for “among the reeds.” The two snake-like hieroglyphs were the Toltec date symbols for Ten Coatl.
But what did it all mean? How did all of this tie together?
What was the thief trying to tell them?
“Ten Coatl,” she said as her mind tried to make sense of it all. “Coatl. As in Quetzalcoatl?”
Dr. Friedman smiled. “Quetzalcoatl certainly borrowed his name from the word. You see, Quetzalcoatl comes from combining the Nahuatl words,
Quetzal
and
Coatl
,
Quetzal
, referring to the tropical Quetzal bird, and
Coatl
, meaning snake. In essence, Quetzalcoatl is another symbol of the Toltec pursuit to connect heaven and Earth. After all, what living thing is more grounded to the earth than a snake? And what living thing is closer to heaven than a bird? Put the two together and you get the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl.”
Lori picked up a page from the calendar now spread over the lab table. “Did the Toltecs designate a date to Quetzalcoatl?” she asked.
“Not directly in hieroglyphic form such as Ten Coatl. He was, however, strongly linked to the year, One Reed.”
“Why One Reed?”
Dr. Friedman shrugged. “That part’s unclear. It’s my belief that the doctrine of the Quetzalcoatl deity developed in a One Reed year.”
“So One Reed was regarded as the year of Quetzalcoatl’s birth,” Dr. Peet said.
Dr. Friedman shrugged. “In a sense.”
The ring of a cell phone jolted Lori out of her concentration. Dr. Friedman grabbed his coat and rummaged through the pockets until he withdrew his phone. It rang again.
“Pardon me,” he said, turning his back to answer the call.
Lori glanced at Dr. Peet. “Did you know about all of this?” she asked.
“If I did, we wouldn’t have needed
him
to figure out what that date symbol was,” he said.
Lori shuffled through the calendar pages, scanning the Gregorian dates tracking alongside the Toltec Calendar Round.
“What are you doing?” Dr. Peet asked.
“I want to see when the next Ten Coatl is.”
“Are you still thinking this is a ransom note?” he asked in a hushed voice.
“I don’t know what else it would be,” she said. She found the pages that tracked through the year 2012.
“Ten Coatl could have been any time within the last fifty-two years,” Dr. Peet reminded her.
Lori stopped, her finger halting mid-page. “Actually, Ten Coatl hasn’t come yet.”
“So? When is it?”
Lori felt her face pale. “May 20th,” she said.
“What?” He took the page from her and looked at it himself. “My God,” he finally whispered. “That’s only two days away.”
A jangling of keys interrupted from behind them. They spun around to find Dr. Friedman, phone still pressed to his ear, unlocking the storage room door.
Dr. Peet pushed off his stool. “No! Wait!”
But it was too late. The lock clicked and Dr. Friedman threw the door open to the destruction inside.
Caught
Peet froze in his tracks halfway across the lab. He struggled for something to say, but he was speechless. There was no need for words. He could read the shock by the stiffness of John’s back, by the way he merely stood there within the storage room doorway with his keys still hanging in the lock, surveying the remaining damage without uttering a single word.
When John finally did turn around, it was slow, as if it pained him to do so. The cell phone slowly slipped from his ear and he slapped it shut. The look on his face was one of horror and confusion and when his eyes landed on Peet, they bored into him with the strength of criminal accusation.
“I can explain,” Peet said, hoping to avert the explosion that was sure to come. It didn’t work.
John ran a hand over his silver hair. “What in God’s good name happened in here?”
“It was my mistake.”
John’s face began to glow red. “Your whole
life
has been a mistake, Anthony.”
Peet let the insult slide. He was too busy trying to formulate an explanation. “If you’ll just let me—”
John threw up his hands. “Please, don’t,” he roared. “I don’t want to hear it.”
To Peet’s surprise, he grabbed his keys from the lock, marched straight for his coat and pulled it off the stool.
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“You can’t go,” Peet pleaded. “Not yet.”
“I can go, and I’m doing just that.” He furiously threw on his coat. “I don’t know what the two of you are up to and I certainly don’t want any more part of it.”
Lori skittered around the last lab table. “Please,” she said. “We need your help.”
John ignored her. He adjusted his coat and retrieved his gloves from the pockets.
“You don’t understand,” Peet said hesitantly. It was time to take the plunge. There was no more avoiding it. If he truly expected the man’s help, he had to come clean. “It’s about the effigy.”
John stopped and stared him down. He looked expectant, like he already knew what was about to be confessed. Peet had never felt more scrutinized in his life, but there was nothing left to hide. John had to understand that.
The retired professor tugged at the glove he’d already managed to pull onto his hand. “What about the effigy?”
Peet suddenly felt weak. Lori gave him an uncertain look but he knew he couldn’t back out now. “It was stolen two nights ago. And it may have never happened if I hadn’t removed it from the museum first.”
“You took it out of the museum?”
Peet braced himself against a table. If there had been a hole available in the floor, he would have considered crawling into it.
Lori took a step forward as if to put herself between them. “He was helping me with my dissertation.”
John eyed her skeptically. “Does anyone else know about this?”
“No.”
By now the color had escaped from John’s face. There was less edge in the tone of his voice, but his anger still flared in his eyes. The corners of his mouth were still turned down in an irritated scowl. He paced the floor like a prosecutor prowling the witness stand.
“So where were the two of you when the effigy was taken?”
“I went to Dr. Peet’s office to ask him a question. I was only gone a minute—”
“Did you see the thief take the effigy?”
“We saw him leave the lab,” Peet said wearily.
“We found the storage room torn apart and the effigy gone,” Lori added.
John nodded and glanced at the boxes sorted across the lab tables. “So that explains the mess,” he said bitterly. “Did either of you get a good look at him?”
Peet shook his head. “Lori had the best opportunity. She’s the one that chased him down.”
John turned to her in surprise. “
You
chased him down?”
She took a deep breath. “Well, sort of. But not really.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Lori huffed impatiently. “It means I didn’t get a good look at him,” she blurted. “He had on a mask. One of those Zorro-type masks, that goes around the eyes.”
John stepped back. “That’s a bit odd.” He turned to Peet. “How about you? Did
you
notice anything?”
Peet thought back to the night of the theft. The only time he got any real look at the thief was right after he’d boldly stepped out of the lab. He was walking away, nothing more than a shadow going down a dark hall.
“There’s something else,” Lori interrupted. “When he was getting into his car I noticed something catch the street lights from his belt.”
John returned his focus to her. “You mean something metallic, like a belt buckle?”
“I thought so at the time, but now I think it was bigger than a belt buckle. And it was hanging at his hip, not in front where a buckle should be.”
“Could have been a knife,” Peet suggested.
Lori shook her head. “It was round. I didn’t get a real good look at it though.”
“How about a license plate?” John asked. “Did you get a look at that?”
Peet shrugged. “Everything happened so fast.”
“And afterwards? Did you think to call the police?”
He cringed. This wasn’t going to sound good, no matter how he said it. “We haven’t called them yet.” What more was there to say?
John turned away with a heavy sigh. It was that sigh of utter disappointment. Peet knew it well.
The silence that followed was pure agony. John was pacing the floor with his own thoughts. Peet felt his fate hanging from a frayed line of trust. Perhaps that too had already snapped.
John reached into his coat pocket and withdrew his cell phone. Lori bolted toward him.
“You can’t call the cops,” she cried, snatching the phone out of his hand.
“Have you lost your mind, Miss Dewson?”
“We can fix this,” she said.
“How, may I ask, are you going to fix this?”
“The thief left a ransom note.”
“We think it’s a ransom note,” Peet clarified.
John looked puzzled. “What note?”
“The stationary we showed you with the Toltec date symbol. We think the note is telling us that we have two days.”
“Two days for what?”