ooking in the Wrong Place for the Maya
G. J. Irrera
Copyright G. J. Irrera 2005
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Looking in the Wrong Place for the Maya
I call this little mystery, “Looking in the Wrong Place for the Maya”. It all started with a trip to the Franklin Institute.
It was going to be a sort of family outing consisting of mom, my dad and me my cousin Paula, Aunt Betty and Uncle Dave.
Like most well planned trips, the whole thing started falling apart just as we past the Betsy Ross bridge on our way downtown. First daddy’s phone rang, he hates talking on his phone when he is driving so he just handed it to my mom. It was Uncle Dave; he was running a little bit late but would meet us at the Institute.
Then it was my turn; Paula called; she had gone with her mom, Aunt Betty, to drop off some resumes at her boss’s office; she called me to say that the plans had changed, her mom was tied up at her office at the university.
She had to sort through some resumes for her boss and find two or three possible candidates for the job of Assistant to the Director of Laboratories.
Aunt Betty said for us to go to the institute and she would be there as soon as she could.
Since we were only a few minutes from the university we stopped there first.
My Aunt Betty, she’s a secretary (sorry an Administrative Assistant) to Professor Elmer Jacob, Professor, Emeritus of Anthropology, at Temple University. The professor was looking for someone with knowledge of the ancient tribes that lived in Mexico, Central and South America and with extensive knowledge of the Maya.
I think I told you that my Dad is a detective with the Philadelphia Police Department and my Mom is an Insurance Investigator. They have been working together on a big jewelry robbery. The company my Mom works for had insured a shipment of jewelry for over five million dollars and it just disappeared. So she was looking into the case for the insurance company and my Dad was looking at it as grand theft for the Philadelphia Police Department.
This is one of the few times they ever work together; they wrapped the whole thing up in less then a week. Mom saved her company five million dollar and Daddy had three suspects in jail for grand theft and insurance fraud.
The reason I mention this is that they are both really great detectives and they figured out this little mystery in just a few minutes, it took me a little longer but I came up with the same answer as they did.
As I said the Professor wanted Aunt Betty to look through a bunch of resumes for someone with a lot of experience with the Mayan culture. I am not too sure what the Director of Laboratories does but they needed help.
When we arrived at Aunt Betty’s office, she was up to her chin in resumes. “
“The professor wants to hire someone to help with the classification and cataloging of Mayan artifacts”, Aunt Betty said, “There are hundreds of them and this person must really know what they are doing”.
Mom said that everyone would help by eliminating any resumes that were obviously not a match; leaving only the most qualified for my Aunt to look through.
So she and Aunt Betty moved the huge stack of resumes to a table in the center of the room and started to sort through them: Daddy joined in.
This looked like so much fun that Paula and I thought we would leave them to their sorting and go to the book store and see if there was anything a little more interesting then resumes to look at there.
We had been gone for about an hour and since it was getting close to lunchtime, we went back to the office to see if everyone was ready to go to lunch.
Uncle Dave had arrived and he had joined in with the resume sorting. Everyone was still sitting at the big table in the center of the room and they were still sorting through resumes.
As Paula and I arrived, Doctor Suzzanne McNulty, PhD, was coming in from one of the adjoining offices. Yes, she spells her name with two Z’s.
She is also a professor at the university, I’m not sure what she teaches but I do know that she has a PhD in Mathematics, a PhD in Meteorology, and a Masters in Physics, but her specialty is the weather.
She can tell you more then you could possibly care to hear about rain, clouds, ice crystals and other weather related things.
Aunt Betty pointed out a resume to Mom that she felt might be from a suitable candidate; the resume was from William Bradshaw. Under his qualifications he had a few relevant jobs listed with all the requirements but it wasn’t his job history the caught my Aunt’s attention.
There was one section where he talked about hobbies and other special interests, Mr. Bradshaw had listed that he was very interested in the Mayan culture and had been studying their language, alphabet, geography, religion, history and customs for close to ten years and had made numerous trips to Central and South America.
He also said that after graduating from high school in 2004 and finished college, in 2007, he and some friends spent the entire summer touring Mexico, Central America and the western part of South America.
They made it to Yucatan Peninsula by the middle of August. They stayed there for just over two weeks. Then just by luck, they met an archeologist there who was on his way back to South America and he invited them to go with him to the site of one of his latest digs.
So, Mr. Bradshaw and his friends spent the last week of August and the first two weeks of September on the west cost of South America visiting some of the Mayan temples.
The resume then went on to list other details that would also be of some advantage to a person in this position.
“I think we may have found our candidate” Aunt Betty said, “With his previous job experience, his extensive background and knowledge of the Mayan culture, I doubt I will be able to find anyone else that is more suitable for the task. I think I’ll give him a call and see if we can meet this afternoon”.
Daddy said there’s something off about Mr. Bradshaw’s resume that leads him to believe that he is not being totally honest about his qualifications.
Mom took the resume from Daddy, read it and smiled. “James is right”, she said, “I smell a rat”.
Doctor McNulty asked Mom what was wrong with the resume; she handed it to her.
Doctor McNulty gave it a quick look, “there certainly is something wrong here”, she said.
What did my mom and Dad find in Mr. Bradshaw’s resume that made them think he wasn’t telling the truth? Also, since Doctor McNulty cares only about things that have to do with the weather, what did she see that the rest of us didn’t?
This part is a lot harder; I think Dr. McNulty is probably one of maybe three people in the whole world that would have found this problem with Mr. Bradshaw’s resume.
I took the resume from Dr. McNulty and read through it twice and on the second pass, I spotted what my mom and dad had seen.
You see; Mr. Bradshaw claims that he had been studying the Mayan culture for ten years and even visited South America to see some of their temples.
The first question I had was a simple math problem; Mr. Bradshaw said that he graduating from high school in 2004 and finished college in 2007 that would make him about twenty-five that means he started visiting Central and South America when he was just fifteen.
I suppose thi
s is possible; he finished high school in 2004 and finished college in 2007 that would mean that he got a degree in only three years, also possible I guess.
More importantly if Mr. Bradshaw had been studying the Maya for so many years as he claimed he should have known that the Maya do not have an alphabet but use symbols, much like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, that represent words or ideas. Of course the most important of all is that the Maya civilization was located in Central America and parts of Southern Mexico, not South America.
If Mr. Bradshaw was looking for Mayan temples in South America, he was looking in the wrong place. So, that could mean only one of two possibilities; he made a historic discovery of a Mayan temple in South America or he was lying about his experience. I would bet it is the second.
Doctor McNulty brought up an interesting fact about the area where Mr. Bradshaw claimed to be visiting in 2007. This is the part that I said is probably known only by Dr. McNulty and National Weather Service.
Doctor McNulty talked for twenty minutes about the Atlantic Hurricane season of 2007 but what it came down to was this. Hurricane Dean made landfall on the Yucatan Peninsula, which is where the Maya lived, on August 21 as a powerful Category 5 storm.
Hurricane Dean was the strongest tropical cyclone of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season.
The hurricane's intense winds, waves, rains and storm surge were responsible for at least 45 deaths across ten countries and caused estimated $1.5 billion in damages.
If by chance Mr. Bradshaw actually was in Central America during the month of August 2007 as he claimed; he is lucky to be alive according to Doctor McNulty.
Just in case you’re interested the Inca lived mostly on the west coast of South America, part of what is now Peru. So if Mr. Bradshaw was looking at temples in South America they were built by the Inca not the Mayan.
There are a lot more mysteries that I would like to share with you, but some are not quite done, but will be available soon.
The next mystery that will be placed on Smash Words is entitled Death at Noon and should be available soon.
To learn more about me, Marlow Phillips, and the other stories that are coming please visit my website.
https://mysterygirljournal.com
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