MICK PARKED, AND WITHOUT THE wind, the broiling heat of the summer day in East Texas was unbearable. Mary knew that Mick had been spending his weekends excavating a burial site near the Harris County Boys’ School––a former home for dependent and delinquent boys––and she was excited when he suggested they stop by on their way to Mexico. They spent the afternoon with their trowels and dental picks and brushes, and Mary found herself wishing she were sipping iced tea instead. But Mick seemed enthralled, talking constantly of his hope that the next trowel of dirt might yield some red ochre. He taught her the principles of how to use a proton magnetometer to detect the iron-laden substance, a technique he had learned from Bill Ritchie in New York. Mary knew that interest in red ochre wasn’t rare, but she had never seen someone with quite such a passion. He was even writing a paper about it.
They didn’t find any, but Mick was thrilled by what his scraper did hit: human remains. They worked until they exhumed the whole skeleton, and shortly after, Mick packed the bones in the trunk of the car.
By the time they got to the border, they had all but forgotten the bones in the back, until a border agent asked them to pop the trunk. Mick—a handsome, white American and a great storyteller—talked them out of trouble just in time to catch their train to Mexico City.
“I was just waltzing through life and tripping over everything and causing hurt and damage in an unconscious way, too,” Mary would later reflect. “I look back at myself in those days and I think, ugh.”
From Mexico City, they traveled by third-class bus across Chiapas and the Yucatán, visiting ancient archaeological ruins and cenotes—mineral pools hidden beneath the cities. It was hard to stray very far from the topic of rituals and death. Some of the cenotes had been sacred places for the ancient Maya; their milky water, the site of human sacrifices.
In Palenque, an ancient Mayan city with giant stone pyramids, Mary and Mick carried their packs up and down the structures. A fer-de-lance, a vicious poisonous snake, crossed their path but scooted past them, more of an omen than a threat. When they noticed an oncoming thunderstorm, they raced to the highest point they could find, eager to watch it violently break through the sky. They perched on top of the pyramid, watching the lightning strike the trees, knowing full well that a bolt could easily strike them dead, but feeling protected by their youth and enthusiasm. As the rain pelted, Mary watched Mick slip into a state of rapture. He chanted to the Mayan gods and went on and on about the spread-eagle position that he believed sacrificial virgins took before they were killed and thrown into the cenotes. Mary was equal parts frightened and transfixed.
At the end of the trip, Mary went home to Illinois and Mick headed to the border where his car was still parked with the skeleton in the trunk. They spent the rest of the summer of ’68 apart, except for a quick visit Mick paid to Mary at her family home. Mary’s mother instantly disliked him, with a forcefulness that seemed born of gut instinct more than anything Mick had actually done wrong. She pulled Mary aside while he was still there to tell her as much. It reminded Mary of an eerie time a stranger in Mexico had watched her and Mick on a bus and whispered to her in Spanish, “Get rid of this guy. He’s no good.”
In the end, Mary reflected, “They were probably very right.”
Mary was done with the relationship, but she didn’t want to “make waves” with Gramly during the summer, so she continued corresponding with him, sending tepid replies and hoping Mick would get the hint. She started seeing a guy at her field school, and she chose not to think too much about a necklace that Mick had sent her, which he called a “Guatemalan wedding necklace.” She didn’t know that it was a Guatemalan tradition to tie a piece of jewelry around bride and groom to symbolize their being bound together forever.
But that fall, when Mick started at Harvard, he wrote to her with renewed ardor. He asked her to marry him. Mary felt blindsided. Sure, they had been impulsive to go to Mexico together after only a few dates, but to propose to someone after knowing her less than a summer? “I always thought, Why would a guy from an unhappy marriage want to get married to someone after only six weeks of being with them? That’s insane.” She suddenly saw the Guatemalan necklace in a new light.
Mary responded to Mick’s letter. I’m sorry I misled you or gave you reason to believe I was more serious than I am but I’m not. She packaged the necklace with the letter and sent both away.
Mick didn’t take kindly to the news. His reply was a “vitriolic condemnation of me and a bitter rebuke for returning the necklace,” she remembered. “Chillingly angry.”
Soon after, her sister, who was studying at Harvard to be an architect, called to tell her that Mick had shown up at her doorstep on her birthday. Mary had no idea how Mick knew where her sister lived, or that October 15 was her sister’s birthday. Her sister said Mick had introduced himself as her sister’s ex-boyfriend and had presented her with a chocolate cake.
“Don’t eat it!” Mary advised her sister.
In January, less than three months later, Mary was reading the newspaper in Houston. A story about a bludgeoning in Cambridge caught her eye. The description of the victim reminded her of herself: an outgoing, flirtatious anthropologist with a touch of insouciance. “As soon as I got to the part about the red ochre, I said, ‘Huh. I think I know who did that.’”
But Mary didn’t tell anyone about her suspicions. “Partly I was scared. Partly I figured, Oh, the police will solve this in five minutes.” She told herself she had nothing to go on except a gut feeling. So Mary went on with her life. Other than a postcard Mick sent her in 1972 to say that he was getting married, the two lost contact. And for the next fifteen years or so, she would think, incorrectly, that she was alone in linking Gramly to Jane Britton.