His father gave a soft chuckle. “Just a little more than you are now.”
He kissed Jack on the forehead and slipped out of the room. Jack listened as he collected his bags from the hallway and carried them out to the car. A minute later the engine chugged to life, and Jack ran to the living room window as the car backed out of the garage. He watched his father drive off down the street, turn the corner, and disappear.
Chapter 02
Chicago, Illinois
Twelve years later
“Jack… you haven’t gotten any further.”
Jack Kendrick looked up from behind his father’s old mahogany desk as Rudy finally returned with the pizza. “Because I’ve been too weak from hunger. What took you so long?”
Rudy shrugged. “It’s Friday night. The place was packed.”
Jack had spent most of the day sorting through the contents of his house, trying to get it ready for the estate sale. He’d been making great progress until he got to his father’s study. In that room Jack felt more like he was emptying memories out of his own head, dredging up a strange concoction of old emotions.
Rudy set the pizza on a stack of boxes. “You’ve been stuck in here for the last three hours. What’s up with that?”
Jack sighed and shook his head. “I guess I just put it off too long.”
Jack and Rudy had been best friends since their sophomore year in high school, when Rudy’s parents relocated from New York. Jack had first seen the scrawny white kid getting harassed by a gang of juniors and couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. He had intervened on Rudy’s behalf and wound up getting suspended for the ensuing fistfight—just one of many during his teenage years. His aunt Doreen had grounded him for a week, but he had won a loyal friend in Rudy Peterson.
Jack took a slice of pizza and looked around the room. “He never even let me in here when I was a kid. Dad was always pretty guarded about his work.”
“I guess.” Rudy chuckled. “So, what? You got this psychological never-measured-up-to-my-old-man’s- expectations-and-now-I’m-all-filled-with-regret thing going on?”
“No, it’s just that there’s so much stuff,” Jack said through a mouthful of pizza. “He never threw anything away. I guess he was a more meticulous researcher than I remember.”
“Y’know, Jack, no offense, but some people call that being obsessed.”
Jack stared at the stacks of boxes filled with files and books and a host of obscure artifacts his father had collected from all over the world. The man had apparently not been able to part with any of them. And neither had Jack.
The last twelve years had been filled with regret. A day hadn’t gone by that Jack didn’t wish he could travel back in time and beg his father not to go on that trip. But research had been the man’s sole passion in life.
He’d written several papers on his theories about the lost pre-Columbian civilization, none of which were very well received by his peers in the anthropological community. In fact, they had largely repudiated them. After his disappearance, one had even written an article for the
The scurrilous piece had been intended to lay his father’s crackpot ideas to rest once and for all, but it had only served to strengthen Jack’s resolve, and he promised himself that someday he would make them eat their words.
So when he finally arrived at the U of Chicago, Jack pursued his degree in anthropology with the goal of salvaging his father’s reputation and following in his research. It had been no easy task enduring the insufferable arrogance and condescension of his father’s former colleagues. Yet for Jack, rehabilitating his father’s legacy had now become
After graduation, Jack was set to start working on his PhD and decided it was time to finally sell the old house to help finance this new stage in his life. And part of him was well ready to be rid of it. The place had become a brooding mausoleum of sorts, haunted by the ghosts of a father he had barely known and a mother he couldn’t remember.
It had only been on the market for two weeks when he’d gotten an offer, and now he was in a rush to clean it out. Aunt Doreen and his other relatives had already divided up most of the furniture, and Jack was going to box up the files and artifacts from his father’s office to go into storage. Everything else was slated for the estate sale. Jack would’ve loved to bring the massive, ornate desk with him, but he knew it wouldn’t fit in his apartment. He just hoped it would go to a good home. A doctor or a lawyer perhaps. Or maybe another teacher.
They polished off the pizza, and Rudy started hauling boxes to the garage while Jack finished cleaning out the desk. He pulled the drawers out one by one to wipe the insides with a damp rag. Years of dust and moisture and more dust had built up a mucky residue.
Jack was stacking the drawers in a clear spot on the floor when he noticed something strange. One of the drawers was a little shorter than the rest. And the back panel looked like it had been glued together with considerably less craftsmanship than the others… as if someone had lopped four inches off the drawer’s length to make room for something inside the desk itself.
Jack peered in and saw a crude wooden box mounted to the back with something wedged inside. His heart was pounding as he pulled out a large yellow envelope and tore it open. Inside was a brown folder.
Rudy returned for more boxes, and Jack showed him what he had found. Rudy’s eyebrows curled into a frown. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said, almost too excited to talk.
The folder contained several loose pages, and Jack laid them out on the desk. One of them looked like a copy of some kind of official document. Large portions had been blacked out, but it appeared to be a journal entry or maybe part of a report. The date in the corner was four months before his father had disappeared.
…suggests similarities to original piece found in… pre-Columbian engravings, even though the peripheral markings point to a later dating; the design and construction are definitely Bronze Age or earlier….
Access to the original data is extremely limited…. has been kept under tight security at… The first artifact discovered in… and the next stage is to determine location of second site… hopes to find the second piece at that location.
There were also several photocopied pages from an old
The body of the article largely discussed the plight of an obscure American Indian tribe in western Wyoming called the Caieche. Anthropologists worried that the decline of the enigmatic tribe could lead to a total loss of their history, still relatively unknown. But there was no mention of an artifact or anything else related to the first document.
The final page contained what appeared to be a hand-drawn depiction of a circular emblem with various figures scattered around the interior.
There was some text in the lower corner of the page that had been blacked out completely. Everything except a string of numbers: 520712.
Rudy peered over his shoulder. “What is that thing?”
Jack could barely contain himself as he paced the study. “I’m guessing it’s a drawing of the artifact the report mentions.”
“Yeah, but what
Jack shook his head. That was the million-dollar question. The mystery only seemed to deepen. He had
