Book 1: Revelation at Tikal — Ch. 1: The Tombstone Painting

Chapter 1 — The Tombstone Painting Los Angeles, December 20, 1977. Cutty Braughn flies in from Anchorage expecting a surprise reunion at his sister Floey's first gallery opening on La Cienega. What he walks into instead is a small framed painting of a tombstone — her name, her dates, her handwriting — and a room full of strangers placing bets on whether she's dead, missing, or staging a stunt to raise her prices. Eight hundred miles south, on the old Maya causeway between Palenque and Tikal, the woman who used to be Florence Magnin-Braughn is walking barefoot toward an altar she doesn't yet understand. Neither of them knows about the other. The opening chapter of Revelation at Tikal — a 1970s literary thriller about money, missing children, painted gods, and the year a brother went looking for his sister and found a stranger waiting at the end of the road. Narrated by the author. New chapters every Wednesday.