The Devil's Deep

by Michael Wallace

  All interesting stuff, but it had nothing to do with Costa Rica, so he continued through the boxes. More of the same. The last box held travel pictures. There were pictures of Davis and Charlotte all over the world: in ruined castles, in front of cathedrals, at the pyramids, on the Great Wall of China, by Mayan ruins in the jungle. Pictures of Arab souks and Buddhist temples, and even several on some sort of elephant trek into the rain forest. But most of all, the box was stuffed with pictures of Costa Rica.

  Davis had kick-ass shots of dolphins and whales and sharks. There were reef fish and marlin so close you could see their eyes bulging. But the pictures didn’t give Wes much help. There were a few of Puerto Jiménez, Matapalo, and the Corcovada, including some wildlife in the park. Maybe eight or ten had people in them: women washing laundry, boys playing the surf, a man with a surfboard. But Uncle Davis had never focused on people in his pictures, not even the Northrock stuff.

  He was wasting his time. He’d driven to Cambridge that morning to talk to Dr. Caliari, who’d acted like a real prick. No pass/fail option, and he would be marked down for every class he missed. Caliari had to force attendance, because his lectures were coma-inducing. Dr. Sizemore never forced anyone to attend class. You went because you wanted to.

  Because he’d started to feel self-conscious about how much time he was taking, Wes almost shut the last box of pictures before he spotted the manila folder tucked into the back. He pulled it out and spread it on the floor.

  And there was the picture of Wes and the hammerhead shark. That had been a hell of a dive. Most of the others hadn’t wanted to dive again. Half the group was leaving the next day; the rest begged off out of fatigue from the previous day’s diving. Just when Wes was about to give up trying to convince them, Uncle Davis had volunteered to be his diving buddy. His mother and Aunt Charlotte had come out on the boat, but not suited up or dived.

  Once in the water, Wes and Davis cruised near the edge of the reef before dropping over the edge. They’d poked at an eel that snapped at them from its cave before Uncle Wes had tapped him on the shoulder and pointed up. There, in black silhouettes against the turquoise light filtering from above swam more than a dozen hammerhead sharks. What an adrenaline rush. Uncle Davis lifted his underwater camera and snapped away.

  Wes had a blow-up of this one in his room, so he set it aside and looked at other pictures of that dive, none of which he’d seen before. There were some good ones, but nothing as cool as that shark over his shoulder.

  There was a bunch of other stuff in this folder, too, as if Charlotte had tossed it in and then put the folder away never to look at again. He found airline ticket stubs, and Uncle Davis’s unused ticket for the return flight. Because of course, he’d never come back, except as ashes. There were a couple of 5,000 colones bills, worth about ten bucks each, and Davis’s dive certification card. Wes was stuffing it back into the envelope when a receipt for a charter boat caught his eye. Written in bad English:

  Two persons, four houres charter. 17 April. 45,000 colones.

  And then signed at the bottom by someone named T. Solorio. It was a generic receipt with no company name or address.

  Wes stared at the receipt. April 17? He couldn’t remember the exact dates, but it was close to the time of that trip. Only they’d never had fewer than four people on the boat, some combination of Wes, his parents, Uncle Davis, Uncle Bill, and Aunt Charlotte. This couldn’t be one of their dives.

  But the name: Solorio. As in Rosa Solorio.

  Only what did that have to do with Riverwood and why his Uncle Bill had come to visit Eric? And what made Rosa disappear, and someone attack Wes with a stun gun? And his mother? What was that about?

  He thought for several minutes, but still couldn’t fit the pieces together.

  Chapter Nine:

  The road down from Bolton Valley Ski Resort had to be pushing ten percent grade, Becca thought. A few inches of snow and you could ski down to Route 2. All they’d need was a lift.

  Becca’s phone rang when she was halfway down and she pulled her Cherokee over to answer, not wanting to talk and take the mountain at the same time. It was snowing again and getting dark. And she’d spent most of the day Sunday skiing, so she was tired.

  There had been a few freshies on the mountain. Not exactly a powder day, but it was only the second ski day she’d taken that winter and she wouldn’t have been up for big powder, anyway. She stuck to the groomed trails, mostly blues with a couple of blacks when she felt ambitious. Even with the inspection looming and feeling wrung out from two weeks of double shifts, a day on the mountain had improved her mood.

  It was Andrew. “Hey, babe,” she said. “I just left Bolton. Went skiing today. I am so out of shape.”

  “Yeah, I went skiing today, too.” His voice, curiously flat.

  “Really?” Her knowledge of California geography was weak, but taking a day trip from the Bay Area must have meant a hell of a drive. “What’s the closest resort?”

  “Actually, I’m at Tahoe. Came with a couple of buddies from work. Taking Monday off.” And then he started in, nervously, she thought, about the trails that he’d skied.

  “I don’t understand,” she interrupted. “You’re at Tahoe now? What about next week?”

  “Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that. Things are picking up at work. You know, this deadline. Crazy. I’m not a hundred percent sure I can go. And I had the condo already for this week.”

  “You said you’d switched the reservations,” she said.

  “I think I forgot.”

  “You think you forgot? What are you talking about? Are you canceling? I’ve got my plane tickets and everything.” She’d been holding out for this trip; it was the only thing keeping her sane. And god, she was feeling lonely and missing him. “Andrew?”

  Silence from the other end. And Becca realized that he was breaking up with her in his passive aggressive way. This was how it had been when he’d taken the job in San Francisco (just a year, he’d promised); he told her only after he’d interviewed and accepted the job offer. She could not believe she was sitting here on the side of the road, having this conversation on her cell phone.

  She felt herself taking on that whiney tone that she hated so much in others. “Is it because I couldn’t come last week, is that what this is about, Andrew? You know I couldn’t help it. I had to rearrange my schedule. We lost two HTs and there’s this certification thing, and besides…and I already told you all this stuff.” She forced herself to stop. “Andrew?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Is this it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We said one year. One year long distance and then—”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s been nine months already and I don’t feel like coming back. Things are good here. I’m good.”

  “And if I came to California?” she asked. Stop pushing, she told herself. Just stop.

  “I don’t know. I’m just, I don’t know. Ready to move on.”

  “Can you say what you mean, for once?”

  But people didn’t just grow a backbone in the middle of a breakup. “I don’t know, what do you think?” he asked.

  What did she think? Hadn’t things run their course when Andrew had first told her about his new job? You didn’t move to the other side of the country without your girlfriend. Unless, that is, you meant to make your girlfriend into your ex-girlfriend.

  And the stupidest thing was that she knew that if she pushed, he’d back down. She’d see him next week in Tahoe. And if she pushed harder, he’d say that he wanted her to come to California to move in with him again. And if she kept pushing…well, god, now she wondered if she’d pushed him into the relationship in the first place. Maybe he’d never been that keen on her. Maybe he thought she was a pushy bitch. Maybe she was a pushy bitch.

  “Okay, Andrew,” she said when she couldn’t stand sparring with her inner critic any longer. “Good luck out there. Take care.”

  “You
don’t want to talk about it?”

  “God, no. What is wrong with you?” It was almost like he wanted her to push back. Or at least, expected it and couldn’t believe she was letting him off the hook so easily. “No, I don’t want to talk. It’s obvious what’s going on here. Let’s just…let’s not end this badly. Or worse than it has to be. And I don’t want to talk. So, goodbye.”

  And with that, Becca hung up. Funny, wasn’t it, how a nice day could turn to shit in about two seconds.

  A half inch of snow had piled on her windshield while she talked. And there was a car behind her with its lights on. How long had it been there?

  She was in a turn off and it occurred to her that it might be a flatlander, afraid of driving in the snow. He’d seen her pulled over, mistaken the reason, and stopped to wait out the snow with her. Waiting would be a mistake; the snow plow wouldn’t come until it had cleared Route 2 below. In the meanwhile, if it came down any harder, they’d be stranded on the mountain.

  Becca got out of her car and went back to talk to the driver of the other car. It was cold and the snow swirled around her face. And getting dark, fast. He drove a Ford Expedition; shouldn’t have problems with that vehicle. He pulled away as she came to his window. She caught a glimpse: young man, ski cap. No ski rack though, or skis that she could see in the back.

  She returned to her car. It was a white knuckle drive hitting the switchbacks, riding the brakes, and trying not to skid. She passed the Expedition moments later, pulled off the road again. He came back onto the road, behind her this time.

  Make up your mind, dude.

  She’d feel better with him in front, rather than behind, trying to follow her tracks down the mountain. He was getting uncomfortably close and this only made her slow down.

  And then, he accelerated and the asshole actually pulled around her, like he was going to pass. Jesus. She hit the brakes and he hit the brakes too, driving on her left. A car came from the other direction, inching along, and laying hard on the horn as the driver saw the Expedition blocking his path. The Expedition fell behind Becca again.

  This time, he came up on her bumper and nudged her. She swore and fought to keep the Cherokee from sliding. She’d go right into the trees. She looked in her rear view mirror, her anger turning to terror. This was not some random jerk.

  He nudged her again, harder this time. She slid toward the edge. Her wheels caught and she straightened the Cherokee just before going over the shoulder. And then the Expedition pulled around her and was down the mountain, going too fast. It hit a bend, fishtailed, then regained control. In a moment it was gone and someone was honking behind her. Becca had come to a complete stop and she gripped the steering wheel with trembling hands.

  The road now looked like an icy cliff and she thought there was no way she would make it down the mountain. But the car behind her was honking hard now and she inched back into motion.

  #

  The state inspectors arrived Monday morning at 6:30, and things promptly went to hell.

  It started when one of Carolina’s residents scratched her on the arm, raising blood, and she had to go to the nurse station—per regulations—and get a bandage. She’d been doing the fox, goat, cabbage trick, where you have to cross the river without leaving the goat alone with the cabbage or the fox alone with the goat, only in this case, it was Dale who could not be left alone.

  She said something to Wes as she left, but he’d been shuttling his own residents to the dining room and somehow he ended up losing Dale. One of the three inspectors caught him as he was leaving the building and brought him back to Carolina without comment. Dale screamed his frustration.

  “Quien es la negra?” Carolina asked when the inspector left with her clipboard tucked under arm. Who is the black woman?

  “State inspector.”

  “Already? Didn’t we do that a few months ago?”

  Becca rushed past with some sheets under her arm and Wes blinked at Carolina, stunned that she hadn’t known. It was all everyone had been talking about. Yet somehow, though she understood more English than she spoke, Carolina had missed it. As he explained, a tense look came over her face.

  The inspectors stood around the room, making notes or whispering to each other. Maybe sensing their HTs’ anxiety, the residents were louder than usual, more resistant to instruction. A Team Winner resident threw his food when he discovered the menu had changed, and there would be no French toast. Soggy eggs hit one of his teammates in the face, sparking another meltdown. Jack, Team Winner’s HT, couldn’t get things under control until Becca came over to soothe the two men before they came to blows.

  Carolina wrinkled up her face as she pushed Dale into his seat in an attempt to get him to eat some pureed toast. “Oh, and I just changed him, too,” she said in Spanish. “Couldn’t he wait until after breakfast?”

  Wes caught a whiff. He looked over her other residents. “Go ahead and change him. I’ll keep an eye on these three.”

  She let Dale rise, stagger away from the table, then took his elbow and guided him toward the resident wing. One of Carolina’s other residents made a hungry-sounding protest and Wes reached across the table to spoon eggs into her mouth.

  Becca joined him at the table a minute later and took over for Carolina. Wes was glad to see her. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m all right.” She smiled and for a moment, some of the exhaustion left her face. “I keep telling myself that if we fail and they fire me, it’ll be Saul Cage out here pulling double shifts until he finds my replacement. Which, at my salary, could take awhile.”

  “You look wiped out. Did you even leave this place this weekend?”

  “Sure. I even went skiing on Sunday. Broke up with my boyfriend. Other productive stuff.”

  “Oh,” Wes said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was probably over anyway,” she said as she spooned eggs into an open mouth. “It’s never a good sign when your boyfriend moves to the other side of the country. Still, it pisses me off that he waited until I was about to fly to California. We were supposed to go skiing at Tahoe the day after tomorrow. It was the one thing helping me through this inspection. When it comes time to break up with your girlfriend, be a man and just do it.”

  “No girlfriend here.”

  In fact, it had been six months since he’d had a date of any kind. There was a girl in his civil procedures class that he’d wanted to ask out, but it looked like that ship had sailed now that he was just trying to keep from failing the class.

  Becca said, “The real reason I’m so tired? I couldn’t sleep last night because someone tried to run me off the road when I was coming down from Bolton.”

  Wes leaned forward. “Are you kidding me? What happened?”

  She told him how she’d got off the phone with her boyfriend to see someone waiting for her, how he’d driven off, and then come in behind her to try to push her off the road. Wes listened with alarm.

  “It might have been nothing,” she said. “Just some jerk. But he didn’t have skis in his truck. I don’t think it was random.”

  Wes thought. Who had seen them together? His Uncle Bill and Doctor Pardo. The other employees of Riverwood. But she’d said it was a young man driving an Expedition. Oh, and Carolina and Yamila, but they were the ones who had pushed Wes to find out what had happened to Rosa—Carolina had already asked him that morning, in fact, if he’d come up with anything—and both incidents had involved men. Wes’s attacker had been a native English speaker.

  “I don’t know what to think,” he said as he worked on feeding Chad Lett, whose muscles kept tightening. Chad’s left eye was seeping; the nurse had told him that the man had some sort of infection.

  “I can’t believe how pissed I am. I was scared. Shaking. But pretty soon I just wanted to find this asshole and run him off the road. For about five minutes, I would have done it, too.”

  Wes nodded. He knew exactly what she was talking about. His anger still hadn’t faded from the attac
k with the stun gun. That Lieutenant Stiles hadn’t believed him only made him angrier. “You know, if this is about my family, you could walk away and you’d have nothing more to worry about. You want to let it go?”

  “After what happened at Bolton? Hell, no.” She spooned the food dribbling down a resident’s chin. “About your family. You find anything new?”

  “Here, check this out.”

  Wes handed her the receipt he’d pilfered from Aunt Charlotte’s house. She looked at it for a moment before she nodded, folded it, and handed it back.

  “Solorio. So Rosa does know your family. There’s something messed up here.”

  “But I still don’t see how this involves Eric,” Wes said.

  “What if your brother isn’t involved. Maybe this is about your uncle who died in Costa Rica.”

  “Okay, but what about Rosa? And my mom? I keep coming up blank. You do any digging in the files this weekend?”

  “Some,” she said. “Didn’t turn up anything. Oh, I did unlock Rosa’s employee drawer. She left her mp3 player. Same sort of thing you saw at her apartment, with all the furniture she left behind.”

  “This wasn’t a girl who was planning to leave in a hurry.”

  “If we had a number we could call Rosa’s family,” Becca said. “By the way, I talked to Yamila. Rosa told her she paid for her apartment with money her family sent from Costa Rica. Thought it worked the other way around. It’s the people up here who send money back home.”

  “Yeah, usually. But there are plenty of rich people in Costa Rica. Well, in San Jose or Alajuela. Not so many on the Osa. The only people with money down there are foreigners.”

  “Could be Rosa was lying to Yamila.”

  “Could be,” he agreed.

  Carolina returned with Dale, who looked happy to be walking. He tried to angle away from the breakfast table, but Carolina guided him back to his chair and pushed him down. He popped up, whack-a-mole-style the instant she removed her hands from his shoulders.