In Too Deep by Coert Voorhees

defensively than I wanted.
    “It said in there that Cortés came to the island in something like—”
    “Show me.” I grabbed his hand—I’m not sure which one of us was more surprised—and pulled him back up the stairs and into the museum.
    “Why are you so—”
    “Just show me where you saw it.”
    Josh saluted the security guard as we rushed through the hallway, and he led me to a large panel filled with drawings of conquistadors and ships and accompanying text in Spanish and English.
    “Right here,” he said. The image in the center showed a Mayan contingent spread out on the shore like a welcome party, with the Spanish galleons bearing down on them from the ocean. “Cortés landed in 1519, and there wasn’t any resistance from the native Mayans. He used the island as a staging ground for the conquest of Mexico. Looks like the Mayans should have resisted, though. Smallpox practically wiped them out a few years later.”
    “Cortés was here,” I said to myself.
    “Can we go now?”
    “Wait.” The panel before the one on Cortés caught my eye. It was all about the original settling of the island, the Mayans, and their multitiered temples.
    “‘The Land of Swallows,’” I read.
    “So?”
    “From the Mayan words cuzam , meaning ‘swallows,’ and lumil , meaning ‘land of.’ Cuzam lumil …Cozumel!”
    “I get it.” Josh chuckled. “Why are you shouting?”
    “Do you have a dictionary? Or a phone or something?”
    “In the hotel,” he said. “Why?”
    I raced back to the girl at the front desk and dropped the folder on the counter. My hands shook as I opened it and flipped frantically through the pages. There it was. “ Golondrina? ” I said. The girl looked at me like I was crazy. Damn you, Spanish!
    “ Golondrina ,” I said again, speaking as slowly as I could make myself. I put my trembling thumbs together and flapped my hands in the worst finger-puppet bird ever made. “What does it mean? En English? Es un bird?”
    Josh put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
    The girl behind the counter recovered enough from her shock to answer me. “ Sí, es un pájaro pequeño. A small bird. It means a swallow. Cozumel is called the land of swallows. The name comes—”
    “Thank you,” I said. “Muchas gracias.”
    “Annie?” Josh said.
    I held the photocopy of de la Torre’s journal in his face as if it were a winning lottery ticket. “The Vida Preciosa approached the land of the golondrinas —the Land of Swallows—during a storm! They dropped anchor on the side where seas were more calm.”
    “What’s the Vida Preciosa again?”
    “The leeward side of the island! Where seas were calm,” I said again, pointing to the gentle waves only two blocks away. “De la Torre was here , Josh. And that means the Jaguar was here, too.”

SEVEN
    M y mind was on overdrive. I felt like a character in one of Gracia’s video games, as if my entire life force had been transferred to my brain, rendering the rest of my body almost completely unresponsive. I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. Eventually, the others got tired of telling me to hurry up, and they let me wander on the wide concrete sidewalk that ran between Avenida Melgar and the seawall.
    I remembered a conversation I’d had with my dad after the last of our metal detector trips to the beach. I was twelve. I’d found an old silver pocket watch and was twirling it in circles as we walked back to the car. The sun had been low in the sky, just like tonight. And like tonight, my mind had been filled with the excitement of treasure.
    “Did you ever think of actually being a treasure hunter?” I’d said. “A real one?”
    “That’s what drew me to your mother in the first place. She was smart, of course. And good-looking. But she was the first female diver I had ever met, and I had this dream that we could get famous together. The dynamic duo.”
    “So, why—”
    “We got married. Then you came along.” He