Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 by High Adventure (v1.1) Read Free Book Online Page B

that problem paled next to the real worry: Tomorrow Witcher and Feldspan would still be here, also at the Fort
George.
                 Estelle
looked worried on Kirby’s behalf, saying, “Kirby? Bad news?”
                 “Bad
news,” Kirby agreed. “I’m sorry, Estelle, maybe I don’t have such a good
appetite after all.”
                 Witcher
and Feldspan. Whitman Lamuel. It was not acceptable that they meet.

 
             6 THE MISSING LAKE
          
                  
             When
the driver steered his cab into a cemetery, Valerie was certain some sort of
mistake had been made. “But I want to go to Belmopan,” she said.
                 “Oh,
sure,” said the driver. “This is the road.”
                 It
was the road. Cemetery flanked them on both sides of the meandering twodane
blacktop; very white stones, very red ribbons wrapped around bright sprays of
flowers or around gaunt remnant clusters of sticks. Off to the left two sinewy
black men, stripped to the waist, dug a grave in the heavy red clay. At one
point, the road bifurcated, making an island of thick'trunked short trees
intermixed with more grave markers; tree roots had pushed up through the
blacktop, forcing the cab to slow to five miles an hour as they jounced by.
                 It’s
like the beginning of a horror movie, Valerie thought, except that it wasn’t,
really. The sun was too bright, the sky too large and beautiful and blue, and
the cemetery itself too cheerful and festive. And the air coming through the
taxi windows—apparently, the air conditioning in all Belizean taxis awaits a part—was too soft and languid, too full
of the sweet scents of life.
                 Most
of the world was still theoretical to Valerie Greene, who was painfully aware
of how many places she hadn’t been. Her pursuit of Mayan sites through the
computers of UCLA and the foundation grantors of New York had been
spurred—beyond her natural enthusiasm as a scholar—by her need to travel, to
get out into what her colleagues called “the field,” to get out into the world 1 . It was time, Valerie
thought, that she and the world got to know one another.
                 Her
father, Robert Edward Greene IV, was a minister in southern Illinois, a fact
Valerie found embarrassing without knowing exactly why. Her older brother, R.
E. Greene V, was an English teacher in a high school 11 miles from their
father’s church, and it was Valerie’s considered opinion that Robby would never travel. Nor marry. Nor do
anything. An R. E. G. VI seemed exceedingly unlikely. And, in truth,
unnecessary. Redundant. Even otiose.
                 It
was to be different for Valerie. Archaeology was endlessly fascinating to her,
and not only because of the travels to remote comers of the globe that the
discipline implied. In her mind, she traveled as well into the past, the remote
and unreachable past, in which the people and the cities and the civilizations
were so different from southern
Illinois. If asked, as she rarely was, what had led her to archaeology in the
first place, she invariably answered, “I’ve always loved it!” since she herself had forgotten how profoundly she had been
influenced, at the age of nine, by Green
Mansions. (Rima the bird girl! Rima! Rima!)
                 After
the cemetery, Belize City was left behind, and the Western Highway settled down
to being an ordinary twodane bumpy potholed country road. It was 52 miles to
the new capital at Belmopan, all of it ranging very gradually uphill, and
within just a few miles of the coast the broaddeaf tropical greenery gave way
to scrub forest, intermixed with weedy fields and intense patches of
cultivation. Small unpainted shacks housed families, usually with many
children.
                 There
was little traffic on the road: the occasional lumbering large