The clothes themselves suggested someone less concerned with sartorial dignity than Perry. The man’s dirt-scuffed, khaki-colored trousers were tucked into battered boots, and his shirt was rolled up to his forearms and open to mid-chest. His legs were planted apart and his hands rested on his hips in a stance faintly hinting of challenge.
But it was his face that arrested her. A hard face, lacking the subtle refinement of Perry’s. Square jaw nicked with a dimple in the chin, high slanted cheekbones, mouth cocked in a twist that indicated a sort of cynical patience. His eyes, under dark straight brows, were pale. Gray, she guessed. His hair was possibly a lightish brown, windblown and just long enough to brush his collar. All things considered, he looked exactly like what he was.
A man from another age. A more romantic age, when a thousand frontiers had yet to be explored. An age when an adventurer would fit right in. And this guy was the perfect specimen. He exuded machismo. It was there in every line of his body.
Funny how that powerful sense of him could transmit itself through an old photo across all these years, when the subject himself was ashes.
“Liam Ignatius O’Shea,” Homer supplied.
Mac started as if the man in the photograph had spoken. She shifted in the chair and put the photo down. “Should I know him?”
“Interesting fellow, isn’t he? He’s quite a story in himself.” Homer settled back, folding his hands across his ribs. “Liam O’Shea was Perry’s friend and, for a time, his partner in adventure. The two men couldn’t have been more different. O’Shea was a self-made man in the true nineteenth-century sense of the word. His family were prosperous landowners in Ireland until they were driven from their farm. They came to New York with almost nothing, and O’Shea lost his mother when he was still a boy. Worked his way across the country with the railroads and right out of poverty to become one of the richest men in San Francisco. They called him ‘Lucky Liam.’ ”
Mac gave Homer a lopsided smile. “I see you can’t wait to tell me all about him, and he’s not even a Sinclair.”
“I’ve been saving the best for last.” But there was a grim sarcasm in Homer’s voice. He glanced at the small box he’d left untouched on the comforter. “Go ahead. Open it.”
Mac didn’t betray the eagerness that had taken unexpected hold of her—just as Homer had undoubtedly intended. Without haste she pried the lid off the box and pushed aside the tissue wrappings.
The ancient chip of rectangular stone inside was evidently part of some larger whole. Three edges were smoothly finished, bordered by decorative symbols; the finely carved glyphs on the stone’s gray surface ended abruptly at a clean break on the fourth side. The piece itself was less than two inches across. A small hole had been drilled near the top, and a cracked leather thong was still threaded through it.
A pendant. Mac lifted the piece out and let the thong dangle over her hand.
“Maya,” she said, recognizing the glyphs. Maya, like the setting of the photograph. Almost unwillingly she looked at the photo again, her eyes drawn to Liam O’Shea and his timeless charisma.
“Take a closer look,” Homer urged.
She saw what she’d missed the first time. Both Liam and her great-great-grandfather were wearing something around their necks—small chips of gray stone on dark, narrow thongs. Perry’s rested neatly against his clothing; Liam’s was displayed in the impressive vee of bare chest exposed by the open neck of his shirt. No detail was visible, but Mac was ready to bet the pendants matched the one she held in her hand.
“They found those in ruins near Tikal, back in 1880,” Homer said.
Mac stroked the raised symbols on the stone. “Then this was Perry’s.”
“He wrote in his notes from the journey that they found a buried temple in the jungle, not far from the central ruins at Tikal, and did a bit of exploring. A fortuitous discovery put them on to an opening that proved to be, from Perry’s account, the entrance to a burial chamber—”