The Secret Path

by Karen Swan

  Holly swallowed. ‘Well, then if she was taken, there will be a ransom demand,’ she said calmly, with a poise she didn’t feel. ‘And if so, we will know soon enough.’ She looked around them all. ‘So we should all keep our phones charged and to hand and try to stay where there’s signal. You especially, Miles, as her brother.’

  He nodded, looking grateful that someone was listening to him at last. He suddenly looked younger than his twenty-eight years. ‘If it is that . . . if they did take her . . . she’ll know what to do. We had kidnap training when we were kids. Well, teenagers really.’

  ‘Kidnap training?’ Holly echoed.

  ‘Yes. Our father arranged for the SAS to teach us what to do in the event of a kidnapping.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Dev whispered, looking appalled.

  Alex looked like he was going to be sick. If he had thought he was used to his employers’ extreme wealth, it was a different ball game to see how it played out in family life. Holly wondered if he was beginning to see now why his lies had been so devastating for Tara, why his betrayal had been so much greater for someone who struggled to trust.

  ‘So she’ll have a good idea of knowing what to do to get away,’ Miles said, his eyes brightening at the prospect as though this alone meant everything was going to be okay. This course, taken twenty years ago, was going to save the day.

  ‘I’m not sure we would want her to get away, in the middle of the jungle,’ Jed said quietly, his gaze on the floor. ‘Not without . . . equipment.’

  He said ‘equipment’ but Holly suspected he meant ‘weapons’. Or survival kit. ‘Tell us about the trouble you’ve been having with the ranchers,’ she said. ‘What exactly has been going on?’

  ‘They don’t like that they can’t expand their farms,’ he shrugged. ‘They say the land belongs to Costa Ricans, not rich foreigners. They refuse to recognize the authority of the land purchase.’

  ‘Refuse, in what way?’

  ‘They grow their acreage secretly – felling a few trees over here, more over there. They start fires and say they were natural. They ignore fines. Intimidate and harass the rangers. And their families.’

  Holly frowned at the stress in his voice on the last word. ‘. . . Yours?’

  Jed’s gaze met hers. He nodded.

  ‘But your son . . .’ She remembered what Tara had said about it not being safe to move Paco, Tara’s desperation to act when she’d returned from seeing him, Jed’s own agitation to return to them and not be helicoptered out of the region to San José; he’d been trying to protect his family. They were especially vulnerable, left alone.

  She kneeled down in front of him. ‘Jed, I know you’ve been trying to protect Tara by keeping from her how bad things have been, but I saw how those men hemmed in your car at the clinic and I know we didn’t get that flat from a sharp stone. Trust me, I work in A&E, I know intimidation tactics. But you need to be honest with us now – when you were attacked, do you think they might have been looking for Tara?’

  Jed swallowed and she could see the sense of failure in him. ‘. . . Perhaps. Things have got a lot worse since she arrived.’

  She felt her heart rate quicken, her mouth become dry. ‘Could they have followed her, do you think, after you were taken back down the mountain?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember much.’ He fiddled again with the wrapped leaves, clutching them tightly like a talisman.

  ‘But they could have stayed there, watching her . . .? Maybe they deliberately hurt you to separate you both, knowing she’d be easy pickings on her own?’

  Jed stared back at her with a haunted look.

  ‘But she wasn’t on her own,’ Alex interjected. ‘I showed up at the base station and found them both there. We got Jed back down to safety, and she and I continued up to Alto Uren together, to get the medicine for Jed’s son.’

  ‘So then they followed both of you,’ Miles said.

  ‘No. We took the microlight for the first leg. There’s no way they could have kept up with us on foot. They couldn’t have known where we were unless, as I said, they’d been listening in on the radio channels.’ His glance only skittered in Rory’s direction.

  ‘But you were worried enough about the possibility of that, that you deliberately kept quiet,’ Holly argued.

  ‘Only partly,’ Rory said with sharp sarcasm.

  Alex didn’t reply for several moments. He looked like he was trying to keep calm; there was a haunted look behind his eyes. ‘. . . I didn’t have any sense that we were being followed.’

  ‘But were you looking?’ Holly pressed. ‘Or were you just enjoying being with her again? Maybe you weren’t concentrating in the way you ordinarily would?’

  Alex’s eyes narrowed. ‘There wasn’t much that was enjoyable about any of it! Tara wasn’t exactly thrilled to see me. She barely even spoke to me for the first day.’

  Rory straightened up, hearing the subtle distinction. ‘But on the second?’

  Alex hesitated. ‘. . . There was an incident that changed things.’

  ‘What kind of incident?’ Miles stepped in, looking fierce.

  ‘I had a boat I’d hidden away along a particular stretch of the river. It’s a fast-flowing stretch but we were driving each other mad. I decided we could make up time if we covered some miles on the water. But the boat came unstuck as I was getting the oars and she . . . was swept away.’

  There was a disbelieving silence. ‘Excuse me?’ Miles asked, his voice hoarse.

  ‘She was okay,’ Alex said quickly. ‘I mean, the boat was carried over some falls and broken up, but it wasn’t . . . I mean it was, but . . .’ He stared back at them all with wide eyes. ‘She was okay. Just in shock for a while.’

  Holly couldn’t speak. She could scarcely believe this was happening. While she’d been lying on the beach the past few days, her best friend had been enduring . . . all this? Quite literally, hell and high water?

  ‘After that, things between us improved. She realized we had to stick together and work as a team. Things were okay—’

  ‘Till you kissed her,’ Rory interjected furiously.

  ‘It’s not his fault,’ Jed said, a look of quiet intensity on his face.

  Everyone turned to look at him again.

  ‘Oh, I think it is!’ Miles cried. ‘Thanks to him jumping my sister’s bones, we have absolutely no bloody idea if she ran or was snatched!’

  ‘It’s the curse.’ Jed stared back at them.

  There was an astounded silence.

  ‘Curse?’ Dev repeated with his characteristic mildness, as though this was a reasonable explanation to enter the conversation.

  ‘You need to understand – to the Bribri people, the river is life. It is fundamental to their culture, their entire way of being. Their lives respect and preserve Iriria, or Mother Nature as you would say. Every living thing should be kept to Mother Earth, even the fossil fuels – oil, coal, gas, they are all the remains of ancient plants and animals and should remain part of Iriria’s body. That is what the Bribri believe.’

  ‘Okay. But what does this have to do with Tara disappearing?’ Dev asked.

  Jed was quiet for a moment. ‘A curse has been cast. That was why the river took her. It was no accident.’

  The silence that greeted these words was deafening.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Miles said finally, looking to Zac for help. ‘What . . . why is he saying these things? What curse?’

  ‘The project has been cursed,’ Jed repeated.

  ‘The project? You mean the park? That makes no sense,’ Zac said with obvious scepticism. ‘The Tremains are the good guys here. Conservation, preservation. They’re the reason there’s no more ranching, no mining. Why, Costa Rica now has a reputation on the global stage as the world’s first country to be run completely on renewable energy. Why put a curse on them . . . if such a thing is even feasible?’

  But Alex straightened up suddenly with a look of intensity on his face, as though he knew why. He
looked like a man who understood, at last, the game. ‘Who placed the curse, Jed? Which tribe?’ There was urgency in his voice.

  Jed blinked, looking unhappy, like a spy being forced to reveal his secrets.

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘. . . The Guetares.’

  Alex slumped, and Holly somehow instinctively knew what that answer meant.

  William.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Day sprang at her like a cat, silent, soft and unforgiving, a beam of sunshine winking past a banana leaf and splashing over her face like water. She blinked a few times, trying to gather her thoughts and process where she was, but it was hard to think; everything ached from lying on the hard ground and she felt peculiarly absent, as though her body was a shell and she was but a shadow flitting inside it.

  Her gaze settled on the stone a few inches from her face. It was perfectly smooth and domed, another one placed twelve inches further along, arranged in a form too symmetrical to be random. In a flash she remembered—

  She sat up and looked around her with a gasp. The stones were placed around her body in an oval, far enough away not to become dislodged if she turned. William was sitting on a tree stump, seemingly whittling something from a stick.

  ‘There is tea,’ he said without looking up, and she saw a half-coconut filled with a green tincture just outside her stone perimeter. Without a word, she reached for it, sipping tentatively. She didn’t want to drink it; she didn’t want to accept ‘hospitality’ when she was not a guest but in effect a prisoner – but she also knew she needed fluids. The humidity levels meant dehydration was a constant risk and though she didn’t trust him, she assumed he had had some of this tea too. He might be able to navigate this jungle without compass, map or phone, but he was still a man – seventy per cent water; he needed to drink too.

  ‘What are those for?’ she muttered, nodding towards the stones, extending a leg and deliberately scuffing one so that it rolled a few centimetres out of position; the jarring asymmetry was pleasing. She crossed her legs, staring at him defiantly over the top of the coconut as she sipped the tea.

  But William didn’t look up. ‘Protection. No predators will move past the stones.’

  She gave a snort of disdain – the only protection stones could provide was defensively in the form of a blow to the head – but it struck her that she hadn’t stirred all night; she had slept heavily, even though her eyes had closed against her will as she yearned for the luxury of a string hammock and fretted about pale green eyelash snakes slithering over her in her sleep, the exploratory bites of leaf-cutter ants, the warning stings of scorpions . . .

  She watched him whittle with the knife; it was made from bone, one edge looking as sharp as any of her scalpels. If she could get it off him, she would know exactly where to cut . . . not to kill him, but certainly which tendons to slash to immobilize him enough for her to get away. It didn’t matter that she wouldn’t know where she was going. She didn’t know where she was now with him, and though she knew his skills kept her safe, she was also inherently unsafe in his company. She still didn’t know what he wanted. Money appeared to hold no sway now, even though he had reacted quickly enough when she had gone to his hut and offered him a small fortune to get her off this mountain and back to Puerto Viejo. It was odd. Now when she mentioned money, the numbers going up in ten-thousand-dollar increments, he just seemed to look at her with pity.

  She knew she had to get away from him, and she knew it had to be today, before she grew weaker. She hadn’t eaten enough in the past week to sustain full-day treks in smothering temperatures; her feet were rubbed raw and in this weakening state, she was becoming more vulnerable to accident or infection the longer she was out here. She had no idea how long he intended to keep her here for.

  Did her family know yet what had happened to her? Surely they must do. She couldn’t bear to think about it. Her mother would instantly dissolve into a puddle of hysteria. Miles would freak out but in a different way. As for her father . . . it would be his worst nightmare come true. He had always done his best to shield them from the harsh realities that came with wealth such as theirs; he had tried to give them normality; he had even prepared them for just such an eventuality. ‘Unfortunately, what we’ve got makes us targets,’ he had explained when they were barely teenagers, just as several members of the SAS walked in to the drawing room. But was it really possible to anticipate this? Her kidnapper was a sixty-something tribesman in a blanket, sitting on a tree stump, whittling a stick. Take them out of the jungle setting and in any other scenario, he’d be far more at risk from her than the other way round.

  ‘So . . .’ she said, putting down the coconut. ‘What now?’

  He slipped the bone knife and the stick carving into the waistband of his trousers, then got up and carefully, almost reverentially, picked up the stones from the oval and put them in the bag. He took his walking stick from its place propped against a branch and finally, he looked at her.

  ‘Now we walk.’

  The beauty was lost on her. Twenty thousand different shades of green, monkeys looping through the trees, exotically coloured birds perching on branches and chattering loudly as they passed by . . . She didn’t care. It was raining again (although no banana-leaf umbrellas were offered this time), the temperatures soaring, the relentless din grating, air so thick she could bite down on it. She longed for her bedroom in London, the dim light as the louvred shutters were closed, the silky smoothness of her sheets, the puffiness of her duvet and firm but yielding mattress . . . A bubble bath in the room next door, the scent of rose otto oil delicately tracing the cool air, a chilled glass of fizzing champagne, music on low, dinner cooking, Alex moving about in the kitchen . . .

  Was she hallucinating? Or just dreaming? Would she ever get back to it? It felt like an impossible task. She couldn’t imagine ever getting out of here, stepping away from the towering trees, seeing an open sky again. How much had changed in under a week? A little girl had died, a little boy had gone unsaved and it was her life in London that felt like the paradise escape now, not this.

  Wait.

  Her feet stopped moving as she caught up with the mental mistake.

  Alex? She had meant Rory.

  Rory.

  She was just confused. And soaked. And tired.

  She resumed walking, falling into autopilot.

  Rory.

  Rory in the kitchen.

  Wearing just his jeans, the tea towel tucked into the waistband, a leaf in his brown hair as he pulled the chicken pie out of the oven . . .

  She stopped again, raindrops falling from the end of her nose, her hair. Her mind was playing tricks on her. She closed her eyes and felt his lips press against hers, so vivid, almost real . . . Hate me, then. All this had happened because she had tried to get away from him, deny a truth that was plain to them both. If she had just stayed . . .

  She watched William walk on ahead, pulling further away with each step and it occurred to her – for the first time – that she could just . . . turn around. He didn’t have a gun to her head. She could simply walk in the opposite direction and go back the way they’d come. He walked mile after mile after mile without ever turning around to check on her; she could be ten miles away before he even noticed she had gone. Sure, she would be lost within ten metres, but what did that matter? She had no idea where they were heading to anyway. And what was he going to do? Stop her with that little bone knife?

  She glanced behind her and then ahead again.

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  Tears gathered in her eyes, frustration and fury marbling in her blood as she saw William had stopped and was watching her. He hadn’t so much as twitched in her direction in over two days of walking, and yet the first time she even thought about turning around, he caught her?

  ‘Why the hell not? I’m not scared of you!’ she yelled, her self-control snapping in half finally. ‘I’m not your bloody prisoner! And you’re not my captor! You can’t make me do a dam
n thing!’

  He didn’t reply, the benign villain with a carry-bag of stones and a walking stick. He just stood there for a few moments, then turned around and continued on his way. Almost as though he agreed with her. He couldn’t make her.

  Tara’s mouth opened in disbelief. That was it? He was going to leave her there? ‘What do you even want?’ she cried after him. ‘Tell me! Tell me what you want!’

  But he didn’t turn back and she watched as the leaves and branches began to flutter back into place after him, steadily taking him from her sights in chunks. Within moments he was gone. Just like that.

  She turned on the spot – breath held, heart clattering – as she felt the same overwhelming, terrifying aloneness she had felt on the canoe, when the river had rushed powerfully beneath her.

  With a sob, she broke into a run after him. ‘William!’ she cried, rushing blindly past the branches, feeling them scratch and claw her as she ran too close, too fast—

  He had stopped in a clearing, a rainbow winking in the sunlight even as the rain continued to pour.

  ‘. . . What . . .?’ she faltered, taking in the sight. She had never seen anything like it. She reached an arm out and walked over to the rock in front of her. It was vast – as high as she was tall but at least two metres in diameter and perfectly, completely spherical. Her hand brushed over its smooth surface in awe. How on earth had something so huge and precision-sculpted come to be here, in the very middle of the jungle?

  And not just one of them, but . . . she counted them . . . twelve in all. They were of varying sizes but their symmetry was perfect. There was no way the vehicles needed to transport boulders of these sizes – fourteen, fifteen tons, surely – could get through these trees; and they were days away from anywhere. There were no roads for miles.

  She walked into the middle and turned slowly on the spot. The gap in the trees allowed the sun to break through, beaming onto the grass with dazzling intensity even as the rain poured. ‘What is this?’ she whispered.