It made sense. In three hundred years someone would have noticed a huge building, even in the middle of a jungle. I twisted the bracelet on my wrist.
“Is Ángel Hermosa a town?”
“No. I don’t know. It translates to ‘my beautiful angel.’” Andrew closed his eyes and tilted his face to the ceiling. “I have heard it before somewhere.” He reached for his notebook and paged through it. “It’s the waterfall where Jorge secretly married Augustine and Maria.”
“Why secretly?” I cocked my head.
“Because her family was opposed to their relationship.”
“Oh. How old were they?”
“She was fifteen, and he was eighteen.”
“Oh wow, young. How long were they married?”
“Twenty-nine years,” he said, lost in his thoughts.
It must have been nice to find the love of your life at such a young age. Too bad they didn’t grow old together.
Andrew bit his bottom lip. “I could’ve sworn Augustine used those words somewhere else. Where did I see it?” He grabbed a green plastic folder and plucked a stack of photocopied letters. Two pages enclosed in transparent laminated sheets fell out of the folder and landed between us. I whisked them up and peered at them, trying to make sense of what they were. Both papers had faint combinations of dotted lines that went up two-thirds of the sheet, with dashed lines branching out left and right, stopping and continuing a few centimeters up the page. Squiggles or maybe letters were marked in some places. One sheet had a short railroad track-looking scribble almost at the center and an inch to the right. Everything looked as if it was drawn in an unsystematic way. One page was in better condition than the other, its lines more defined and not smudged.
“What are these?” I asked, turning them both upside down. They still didn’t make sense.
Andrew directed his attention to me. “That I don’t know yet. Dr. Garcia gave them to me right before I left him. What do you think?”
“Are these also Augustine’s work?”
“We’re not sure, but they were found among other items that belonged to him.”
“Some of this looks like stairs or maybe… shoot, I don’t know… but it looks to me like an incomplete architectural foundation or floorplan drawings maybe? Like, it’s as if whoever made them was just sketching out ideas on a napkin. Version one and version two. Look at this one. If you flip it, it looks like a fountain maybe? Could it be a garden plan?”
After Andrew didn’t answer, I looked at him. He was immersed in reading the letter he held. He scanned the page, then he picked another, and another until he found what he sought. “Here, Ángel Hermosa. It’s from Augustine to Maria. It says… hmm…” Andrew slowly nodded, biting his lip as he read. Then his eyebrows shot up, and his lips parted. He concentrated even harder on the sheet in his hands.
“What?” I straightened and peered at him. “You know where it is?”
“Not exactly.” Andrew shifted in his spot, lifting and adjusting his shirt collar on the back of his neck. “No. It does mention the waterfall.” He hesitated a moment, as though not knowing what to say next, and a blush had crept up his neck. “He says he loves her dearly.”
“Aww.” I cooed. “What else does it say?”
Andrew scratched his forehead. “He’s in Portugal right now,” he murmured, and brushed a hand through his hair. “And he misses her,” he said, so quietly that his voice was barely audible.
I observed him, amused. What had gotten into him?
“Oh my god. I would rip that paper out of your hands and read it myself if I knew how.” I laughed impatiently and pushed his thigh with my foot. “Why are you mumbling?”
“Well…” He rubbed his neck, his eyes flicker to mine and then back to the paper. “He’s talking about how beautiful she was the day he kissed her for the first time behind the waterfall.”
Seriously, that’s what made him so squirmy?
I sighed. “I remember my first kiss. I was in ninth grade.” It was awful. The boy stuck his tongue inside my mouth and just stood there not moving. A minute later he stepped away, shrugged, and said my tits were too small.Asshole. I was only fourteen. Not a first-class introduction to the male species.
Andrew scoffed and scratched his forehead again, the blush on his face deepening. “This is not the kind of first kiss he is talking about.”
I blinked at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s the…” His face turned red. “It’s the other kiss.”
I arched an eyebrow. “The other kiss?”
