by Amy Waeschle
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Rescuing Reeve
Book 1 in the Cassidy Kincaid Series
Copyright © 2018 by Amy Waeschle. All rights reserved.
Publisher: Savage Creek Press
Genre: Adult Mystery.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the expressed written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN: 9781070174020
Editor: Melanie Austin
Cover Photograph: @allisonk.courtney
Cover Design: Creative Fusion Works
Author Photo: Josh Monthei
For my surf sisters,
thank you for your
inspiration, your laughter,
and for sharing the journey
One
Volcán Arenal, Costa Rica
Everyone wanted to know when the volcano was going to explode. Which was why, on a Friday evening, Dr. Cassidy Kincaid was on her knees in the cindery black dust, fiddling with the seismic station she had built from a car battery, various cables, and a very expensive seismometer. After setting up two of these stations on Arenal that day, she was grubby, her fingertips raw from digging in the volcanic soil, her brow salty from sweat. A cold beer and a shower were just a jeep ride away, if only she could get this signal to transmit.
“Try it now,” Héctor, her field tech and indispensable fixer, called from the nearby solar panel mount that she had also built.
Cassidy flipped her braid over her shoulder and stomped on the ground to make a mini earthquake. The digital waveform on her laptop jumped, and then she watched the GPS finally recording the station’s time and coordinates. She hooted with glee and closed up the ammo box containing the electronics that was set in the ground about a meter deep. She and Héctor carefully buried the box just as the setting sun washed the barren hillside with a golden glow. Cassidy took a moment to close her eyes and let the moment sink in, a moment she would have shared immediately with Pete if he was still alive.
All stations up and running: she would have texted him.
He would have texted back: Nice! Is the volcano behaving herself?
Yes, unlike me. I plan to get drunk and eat too many empanadas.
“There’s dancing tonight,” Héctor said, his accent soft and melodic. She sometimes caught him singing as they hiked to and from her stations. “Are you going?”
She turned to see him leaning on the handle of the shovel, a playful look in his brown eyes. The question took her by surprise. Dancing?
“Are you going?” she asked.
“I think everyone ees going,” he said.
By everyone, she knew he meant their team of seven: a mix of techs like himself, local scientists, government researchers, and University of Oregon academics.
“Then I guess I’m going, too,” she said.
On the jeep ride down the rocky, pockmarked road, she caught Héctor noticing her spinning the gold band around her left ring finger. “How long will you wear it?” he asked her quietly.
Cassidy’s face burned, and a gut-twisting sensation made her feel suddenly sick. She kept her gaze straight ahead. Pete had been gone for just over a year—a year that she had not known how to survive. The anniversary of his passing had come and gone almost three weeks ago, a night she had spent holed up in her small house, waiting for something different to happen, or simply to feel different, though whether she expected it to be better or worse she didn’t know. She had cried, drank one cocktail—a ginger beer, rum, and lime concoction, his favorite—worn his faded, blue hoody, the one that no longer held his scent, and reread the only two cards she had thought to save. One was from a care package he had sent her when she was doing fieldwork on Mt. St. Helens, the other from her birthday two years ago. These things were all she had left of him, besides the ring, a gold band etched with an endless wave and inset with tiny sparks of peridot, a volcanic gem, placed just above the peaks to look like phosphorescence or stars.
“I don’t know,” she said, after swallowing a dry lump in her throat.
Héctor went back to humming the Garth Brooks tune that had been playing on the radio that afternoon.
The shower ran cold after five minutes, but Cassidy didn’t care. It felt good compared to the stuffy humidity of the hotel room; plus, she knew she would just start sweating the minute she stepped out of the shower. Might as well enjoy five more minutes of not feeling like a baked turkey, she thought.
Her phone chirped from the nightstand, and the memory of her imagined text to and from Pete sent a jolt through her heart. Figuring it was only her colleague, Dennis, telling her where to meet for dinner, she ignored it until she had dried off and dressed in faded cotton shorts and a button-down linen shirt. When she checked her phone—the screen’s waterproof case so scratched that it was hard to read in certain kinds of light—she saw that the text was not from Dennis, but from Rebecca, her stepsister.
If you’re still in Costa Rica, please reply. Urgent.
Cassidy frowned. Rebecca, the older of her two stepsiblings but still younger than she by three years, lived in Reno. She did not recall connecting with Rebs, as Cassidy had called her behind her back when they were growing up together, on WhatsApp, but they had probably done so before her first trip to Central America two years ago. Rebecca was like that—she would have wanted a way to reach Cassidy in an emergency. As if any emergency of Reb’s would be an emergency of hers. The urgent at the end made Cassidy especially wary. She decided to ignore the message until the morning.
After a lively dinner at their favorite hangout, where Cassidy, knowing that she didn’t need her mental faculties in place in order to fix broken field equipment later that night, enjoyed several beers (three? Or was it four?), she and her colleagues walked to the club. La Fortuna was a small town, but some nights there was music, and tonight a salsa band was pumping out melodies from inside the fenced stage. They paid the entrance fee, bought beers, and shuffled through a dark hallway to the open-air plaza. The loud horns and rich voices, along with a heavy beat, thumped into the crowded space. About half were locals; the other half were a mix of Arenal volcano tourists and a few other scientists from Cassidy’s team.
To Cassidy’s surprise, Elizabeth, a postdoc from the University of Washington, accepted the hand of Eduardo, a researcher from the local observatory, and they disappeared into the throng. She watched them move in time to the beat and wondered where Elizabeth, a volcanologist specializing in feldspar zonation, had learned to salsa dance. She bobbed in time with the beat, and the others in her group did variations of this, sipping their beers and chatting in loud voices over the music. Héctor was laughing with Dennis, a postdoc from Cambridge, but caught her eye. Cassidy looked away.
A moment later, he was at her side. “Let’s go, profesora,” he said, his hand at her back.
“I can’t,” Cassidy said, her body rigid. In graduate school, she and two friends had taken a Latin dance class, but she had never used it. Pete didn’t know how, and they had never gotten around to trying it together. Just one of the many things they hadn’t had the time to do.
“I teach you,” he said in his rich voice, his lips close to her ear. She watched him for a moment, took in his curly brown hair that was touched with a few strands of gray at the temples, his solid, trim body. At that moment, his smile was warm, mischievous. She had kno
wn Héctor since her first trip to Arenal. He was strong, had an easy laugh, and could fix anything. Her pause must have signaled some kind of acquiescence because he led her out to the dance floor.
Cassidy had been awake, listening to the geckos chirp softly for some time before the dawn. It might have been the squall that had woke her or the distant thunder. She had never been very good at sleep, so wasn’t surprised to be awake. Héctor breathed softly next to her, his muscular back exposed from the sheet and thin blanket. The memory of his touch lingered on her skin, and she tried to savor it, take it for what it was—a lovely, sweet moment with a caring, attentive lover. Her first since Pete.
She slipped out of bed and moved to the window, peeked through the wide, wooden slats. Her hotel room had no view, only a partial of the street outside and the jungle, which extended to Arenal’s black, bald cone. Dawn wasn’t far off—she knew that because the frog song was fading, and the half moon, free of the clouds, hovered low in the sky.
A sudden glow lit up a small area of the floor, where she had deposited her shorts—no, where Héctor had let them fall. The memory made her blush in the darkness. The glow came from her phone, which displayed another text from Rebecca. She slipped on her glasses and read the message: Q told me you’re still in CR. It’s about Reeve. I think he’s in trouble. Has he called you?
Of course, Rebecca had called Quinn, Cassidy’s biological brother and best friend. And, of course, the urgent message was about Reeve, her stepbrother and perennial screw-up. Rebecca’s: I think he’s in trouble rang in her head. Cassidy gazed through the window’s slats again to pale pink hues weaving into the jungle. She sighed and felt her shoulders drop in resignation. When wasn’t Reeve in trouble? Rebecca’s suggestion that Reeve may have called her wouldn’t settle in her mind. Reeve never called her—the last time she had seen him, a police officer was shoving him into the back of a patrol car.
Her fingers scrolled through her WhatsApp call log. She remembered vaguely that Reeve had been in Costa Rica for about a year, doing what she didn’t know. Hopefully, getting his shit together. The log was full of correspondence with her CR team, as she had readied for her trip down, details she had been coordinating for weeks before her travel. Then, she saw it: a call from Reeve on October 5th at 9:18 p.m. No message.
Cassidy’s skin pricked with goose bumps.
She did not need to wrack her brain to figure out why she had missed it. That was the night she had spent holed up in her house, suffocating in grief.
A warm hand slid over her shoulder, making her jump. “Everything all right?” Héctor asked, his voice soft in her ear.
Cassidy hadn’t heard him get out of bed. He leaned down and kissed her, his warm chest brushing against her body.
“Come back to bed,” he said, pulling her gently by the hand. She dropped her phone into her pile of clothes and followed him.
Two
Cassidy tried calling Rebecca a third time, but with no luck. Ironically, she would have had better reception in the field, but her work on the volcano was finished. She had packed up her equipment, dirty field boots, tool bag, field notebooks, and other small necessities, and returned the keys to the jeep.
Her awkward goodbye to Héctor hung over her like a fog. It was not that she had regrets; it just felt different in the daytime. And no, she didn’t want to talk about it and was grateful that Héctor hadn’t tried to. He had just said, “Adios,” with a smile, and kissed her one last time. Her team had already dispersed. Elizabeth had left early for the airport, Dennis was on a bus to the Mineral Hot Springs resort for a one-day layover of R&R, and the local scientists and techs had returned to their regular lives and work at OVSICORI—the Volcano and Seismology Observatory of Costa Rica. Cassidy had boarded her bus for the coast, eager to get to the ocean.
When her bus stopped in Cañas, she stood on the corner and dialed again. Rebecca picked up on the second ring.
“What the hell, Cass?” she said, sounding breathless.
Cassidy squinted down the bright, dusty street. The moist, superheated air of midday was making her sweat, but it felt good compared to the over-air conditioned bus. “Reception sucks, okay?” Cassidy answered. “I’ve been trying all morning.”
Rebecca made a dramatic huff on her end. “I can’t get a hold of Reeve,” she said.
“He did call me,” Cassidy said. A stubborn grain of guilt was hitching her progress towards being aloof. Like a tiny irritant stuck in a sock on a long hike—all she had to do was ignore it, and the thing would eventually work itself out.
Why would Reeve call her?
“When?” Rebecca gasped.
“Last month.”
The line buzzed with silence, and Cassidy knew what Rebs was thinking because she was thinking it, too. That Reeve wouldn’t just call to say hello.
“I haven’t heard from him since then. He checks in.”
“What’s he doing down here?” she asked. It wasn’t like she and Reeve talked. Ever. Cassidy got all her news from Rebecca.
“He’s in some surfing town,” Rebecca said. “Maybe you’ve heard of it.”
Cassidy shuffled her feet, and the grit beneath her flip-flops scraped noisily against the sidewalk. She leaned against the outer wall of the Supermercado, where an advertisement for a drink called Tropical was painted in bright blue, yellow, and green.
“Which town,” Cassidy sighed, picturing her version of post-field work R&R—five days of surfing uncrowded waves and lounging by a gorgeous pool—bursting into flames.
“Tamarindo,” Rebecca said slowly, as if she was reading it. “Is that anywhere near you?”
“No,” Cassidy lied.
“Come on, Cassidy,” Rebecca replied. In the background, a baby began to scream, and Cassidy could hear Rebecca’s body moving swiftly, then her calming, chirpy mommy voice soothing the baby with some kind of nonsense language. So it was Lyle, her youngest.
“If you gotta go, we can talk later,” Cassidy said, doing her best to not sound hopeful.
The child made some kind of snuffling noise, like it was sucking on something. Cassidy wondered if the something was Rebecca.
“No, it’s okay,” she said in a voice that was halfway between her cooing sweet voice and the bark she usually deployed on Cassidy. “Can you just go and ask around in Tamarindo? He was working on some kind of boat. Something to do with surf tours.”
Cassidy sighed. Reeve was probably high off his gourd somewhere, his phone stolen or lost, and oblivious that Rebecca was distraught with worry. “Okay, I’ll ask around, but I’ve only got five days left, and I’m not going to spend them pulling him out of whatever hole he’s stuck in.”
“He might really be in trouble, Cass.”
Cassidy sighed a long, slow breath, but it only deepened her guilt. Reeve had stolen from her, threatened her, lied to her. There were moments when she had hated him, but her father had loved him, had tried so hard to help him. Deep down Cassidy knew that she cared for him, too. He just made it so hard to sometimes. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
Cassidy had to wait for a different bus, and the trip was longer, so she didn’t arrive in the surf mecca of Tamarindo until well after dark. She had no idea where to look for Reeve and had no place to stay. From the bus stop, she shouldered her backpack and walked down the dirt road. Music and lights from the open-air restaurants spilled out onto the street. Cassidy peered into each as she passed. A mixture of young backpackers, couples, or families were eating, or playing pool, or at the bar watching TV. At a place called Crazy Mike’s Surf Camp, she noticed a typical surfer crowd: young guys in loose T-shirts and board shorts, sitting at the bar or hunched over giant plates of food.
She didn’t see anyone who looked like Reeve, but didn’t expect to. By the time she reached the end of the street, her shoulders, worn out from five hard days of schlepping loads of gear all over the mountain, were aching, and she was soaked with sweat. At a roundabout, the street made a s
harp turn to the left, away from the beach. The soft shushhhh of waves breaking on the shore drifted through a gap in the storefronts; she followed a path to the cocoa-brown sand and sat down in a tired heap. Another wave crashed on the shore, a pearly white mash in the soft glow coming from the businesses lining it. Offshore, the lights from fishing boats blinked in and out of focus on the black expanse of ocean.
Where would Reeve have hung out, worked? Rebecca had said something about a surf tours business involving a boat. She groaned, realizing that she would need to return to the surfer hangout and brave its testosterone-scented atmosphere. She could visit other businesses, too, but Crazy Mike’s had the right vibe: party.
The gnats had found her ankles, and her stomach was empty. With a sigh, she decided to walk back on the beach. Maybe the town would feel different to her from that perspective.
At the surf camp, she threaded the handful of outside tables full of surfers enjoying nachos or cocktails and peanuts, found the brightly lit bar and slid onto a stool, dropping her grubby pack to the tiled floor. The bartender, a tall, forty-something gringo with a thick blonde ponytail tied at the nape of his neck and quick blue eyes, pushed off the bar and approached her. He tossed down a coaster that landed perfectly between her hands, which were perched on the bar like parentheses.
“What can I get you?” he asked.
“Una cerveza, por favor,” she said. Even though it was obvious that English was the language of choice in Crazy Mike’s, after her week on the mountain, Spanish flowed just as easily as English. Plus, she wanted some way to communicate that she wasn’t some hapless tourist.
The bartender raised an eyebrow, and then brought her an Imperial, cracking the lid on a hidden opener behind the bar before setting it down. “Tienes hambre, querida?”