The Devil's Cauldron

by Michael Wallace

  And it wasn’t her body keeping her that way. After those first dark months upon waking from her coma, when she wanted to die, would have starved herself to death if they hadn’t force fed her, Meggie had come to peace with her physical limitations.

  People kept her imprisoned. Not her body.

  And one person in particular.

  #

  They gave Meggie nine full hours in her bed at night. Normally, she would lie awake for at least an hour, running through her favorite memories: spelunking with friends, the time she scored twenty points and the game-winning three-point shot during a high school playoff game, graduating from college, making love to her first boyfriend. Not her fiancé—she didn’t think about Benjamin when she could help it. He was dead to her.

  But there was no time to lie in bed and think tonight, not with the chemical sledgehammer they put into her applesauce. Before the aides finished bathing her and putting her in fresh Depends and clean satin pajamas, Meggie’s eyes were rolling back in their sockets. She was barely conscious as they hefted her into bed, secured her restraints, and raised the bars. She felt like she should be alarmed, but couldn’t muster the energy as she sank deeper into sleep.

  Why did they drug her? What was going on out there?

  #

  A few weeks before the accident that left her a paralyzed shell, Meggie made a decision that would change her life. Her suspicions had been growing for months, but she needed to be sure before telling her fiancé, Benjamin. The wrongdoer was Benjamin’s cousin, and the news would upset him. They were close.

  No, close was the wrong word.

  Incestuous.

  It was a nasty little word, but once it lodged in Meggie’s mind, she couldn’t shake it, even if it wasn’t entirely accurate. Kaitlyn wasn’t Benjamin’s sister, after all, she was his cousin. So they flirted a little bit—everyone had a cousin like that.

  At a family reunion at Cape Cod when she was five, Meggie had played kissing tag with three of her own cousins, until one of the adults caught them and yelled at them to knock it off and build sandcastles or something. She didn’t understand the fuss; it was the same thing she played at recess at school, and nobody cared then. They were just playing. Later, she understood. Kissing cousins freaked people out.

  Maybe Benjamin and Kaitlyn were like that. They’d grown up in a close family, almost like siblings, but not quite. He and his cousin flirted; they’d done it as kids only there had been no pursed-lipped older relatives to make them feel guilty. So they’d never stopped.

  But there was something unwholesome about the way Kaitlyn turned smoldering eyes on Meggie’s fiancé. Something unhealthy in the way they instant messaged and emailed night and day. Parsing certain veiled comments, it seemed Kaitlyn knew more about Meggie’s sexual habits than she did.

  And they worked together, too. Benjamin’s whole family did. Grandpa had started a little coffee company in the ’60s, some proto-fair-trade thing buying directly from Central American growers. A hippie capitalist and a few buddies looking to finance their weed habit. Then it went legit. Now it employed seventy-eight people, plus Benjamin’s father, about to retire, Benjamin, his two brothers, and their cousin, Kaitlyn. There was a lot of money in the company, even having to divide it between several family members.

  Except that Kaitlyn was greedy. She didn’t want to share.

  Meggie worked in accounting, and one day she followed a discrepancy in a bank statement. It was nothing, a piece of lint in the balance sheet, easily cleaned up. But when she plucked at it, she found a tiny thread, and when she pulled at that, she tugged at a larger string. Soon, she was unraveling an entire quilt of fraud. And it led straight to the IT department, and the person who controlled the company network. The person who had hacked the company bank accounts.

  The problem was, if Meggie spilled the news in the wrong way it might backfire. Benjamin would call his cousin right away. Give Kaitlyn a chance to lie, cover her tracks, attack the messenger. Lock Meggie out of the network while the issue was resolved. Who would Benjamin believe? There was that unhealthy fascination to worry about.

  What Meggie was needed a few days alone with her fiancé. Somewhere without cell coverage.

  She got online. Pinpointed some cell dead zones. Central America was good—maybe she could hitch a ride on one of Benjamin’s trips to meet with suppliers. Except he always traveled with one of his brothers. Meggie didn’t know yet if she could trust them. What about the United States?

  The biggest dead zones were out West. She got onto the caving forum and dug around.

  A few days later, Meggie started talking up a spelunking trip out West. Downloaded caver journals, left her browser open to the forum, and threads about desert spelunking.

  “You serious about this?” Benjamin asked one morning.

  They were taking a coffee break—if there was one perk that working at Tropical Beans offered, it was generous coffee break policies—on the rooftop terrace overlooking Lake Champlain. Meggie had spread out her maps and guidebooks.

  “I want to get away. Do something different. Think you can get off for a few days?”

  He looked over her maps. “Nevada? Idaho? That doesn’t sound easy to reach.”

  “It isn’t. I don’t want a place we can drive up to, then have to sign our name in the rescue book and wait our turn while every kid and his Boy Scout troop puts his greasy hands all over everything.”

  “Have your eye on anything specific?”

  “I like this one,” she said, pointing to a desolate stretch of eastern Nevada. “Twenty miles south of Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park. Might be part of the same complex. Nobody knows for sure. Most of the cave isn’t mapped yet. Only one other group made the descent and that was way back in the eighties. Who knows what’s down there?”

  “It would be awesome to make the discovery.”

  “Exactly,” she said, pushing across a printout of a sketchy hand drawing. It looked like one of those maps from an old Dungeons and Dragons campaign, with little Xs marking ogres and kobolds. Except here they marked stalactite formations, flowstone, cave popcorn, and other speleothems. She pointed at the map. “Look, there are several unexplored tunnels, plus some rooms that people have seen but not entered because they couldn’t get through a really tight squeeze.”

  “Wow.”

  Meggie showed him the notes emailed to her by a forum member. “You rappel 200 feet to the bottom, follow this passage, then you’re on your own—nothing on the map after these first few rooms. Get past them, you’ll be the first ever.”

  His eyes widened. “Wow.”

  “Could be anything up there.”

  “What about getting there?”

  “A pain in the ass,” she said.

  “Roads?”

  “Nope, nothing close. Last several miles on foot, then we hike around for a bit, looking for the exact GPS coordinates while trying not to run out of water or get bit by a snake.”

  “Nice.” He shrugged. “But I guess that’s why it isn’t explored yet.”

  “And it’s gorgeous terrain.” She studied him, tried not to smile at the gleam in his eyes. “We’ve never done anything like it. What’s on the other side of those tunnels? Imagine being the first to discover a new Lehman Caves.”

  “That would be awesome.”

  “So are you in?”

  “Maybe.” He had a mischievous grin, like he was toying with her, but she could tell he was hooked. “So what are you thinking, that we put it to the club? See who else is game?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a long way from Vermont. I can’t find anyone else who has time this fall. Not to mention interest.”

  Meggie hadn’t actually looked. She’d made a few comments with the local spelunkers about investigating a hole in the hot Nevada desert, but that was it.

  “So it’s just the three of us? I don’t know, I’d rather have five or six. A second vehicle in the desert, plus extra bodies on the hike. I
n case something goes wrong.”

  “Not three, not this time,” Meggie said. “I don’t want Kaitlyn.”

  Benjamin looked annoyed. “I thought you two were getting along better these days.”

  “We’re getting along fine.” Meggie was not a good liar, and lifted her coffee mug in front of her face to hide what she was sure was a guilty look. “But I need space every once in a while. And so do you. Unless she’s going to move in with us after the wedding.”

  “Why not? She’s a great cook.”

  Meggie almost spit her coffee before she realized Benjamin was joking.

  “Okay, fine,” he said. “We’ll leave Kaitlyn. But there’s no way we’re hiking into the desert and exploring a two-hundred-foot hole in the ground just the two of us. Imagine sharing that trip plan with the club. They’d freak out.”

  “I’ve been chatting on the forum. There are two cavers in Salt Lake who might be game.”

  “What, a couple of newbies?” he asked.

  “Serious cavers,” she protested.

  “Yeah? What are their handles?”

  “Duperre and someone named HalfOrc.”

  “I know the first guy. Never heard of HalfOrc. Is he a wannabe or a has-been?”

  Meggie laughed. “Duperre vouches for him, and that’s good enough for me. They’ve been out three times together. Supposedly collaborating on a book. Caving for Morons, or something like that.”

  His phone vibrated. He picked it up and looked at a text. At first, he started to smile, then it turned to a frown.

  “Something wrong?” Meggie asked.

  “It’s Kaitlyn. She’s shopping for lingerie and threatening to send me pictures.”

  “Is that the smile or the frown?”

  “Was I frowning? I remembered we’re going caving without her. She’s going to be pissed.”

  “Kaitlyn will be fine without you for a few days. You can send pictures of your dirty underwear if it makes her feel better.”

  “Uh huh.”

  He was already texting back his response, a grin crossing his face, not at Meggie, but at whatever he was typing on his phone. That damn phone was like an umbilical cord.

  Too bad you won’t have cell coverage, Meggie thought with some satisfaction.

  Chapter Four

  “Uncle Davis is no coward,” Wes said as he, Becca, and Eric sweated their way up the trail toward the hot springs. It was their last afternoon in Costa Rica; tomorrow morning they left for San Jose and the flight home to Vermont, returning with their tails between their legs.

  “Bravest man I know,” Becca said. “After the things he’s survived, nothing scares him.”

  “And remember when he sent you into Vanderzee after Walter Fitzroy? We knew someone might try to murder the guy. Then they’d come after you.”

  “Yeah, Walter’s psycho girlfriend.”

  “Did Davis ever say he was sorry?” Wes asked.

  “What for?”

  “For almost getting you killed. Did he apologize?”

  “Seriously?” Becca glanced over her shoulder, eyebrow raised. “It was worth the risk. Think of how Walter’s life is different now. He was dead, and now he’s alive. Don’t you think it was worth it?”

  “Now I do, sure. At the time, it freaked me out. You might have noticed, I’m kind of attached to you. But my point is that Davis never apologized because he thought it was worth the risk. Even when it was clear there was a threat, he didn’t pull you out. So what’s different now?”

  Becca put a hand over her belly. “The baby?”

  “Maybe,” he said, skeptical. “But only if he thinks your life is at risk. And our daughter’s too. Why would he think that?”

  “I don’t know. You think he’s holding out on us? That’s not his style.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  His uncle’s entire attitude was bizarre. Why send them to Costa Rica to look for Meggie Kerr if he wasn’t going to follow through when they found the woman? Finding the patients was the hardest part of their job. Raising false hopes in families, submitting immobile patients to endless, expensive tests, only to shake their heads sadly and admit that no, the loved one didn’t suffer from locked-in syndrome. He would never regain consciousness. Or the woman wasn’t just in a coma, she was effectively brain dead.

  Sometimes, everything came together, like with that kid in the Bronx. And sometimes there was opposition. For every person overjoyed to establish contact with a long-gone loved one, there was another who refused to admit they had been complicit in keeping that person locked in. To the foundation, it didn’t matter. Freeing the prisoner was the only thing. They would go to court if they had to. Use whatever means necessary.

  And Meggie Kerr? The woman moved her eyes. She tapped her blasted finger. How could they see that and walk away?

  “Hurry up, guys!” Eric called.

  “Cálmate,” Wes said in Spanish. Calm down. “We’ve got a pregnant lady here, dude.”

  “The pregnant lady is kicking your butt,” Becca said. “You’re the one holding us up.”

  “All this heavy thinking is sapping my strength.”

  Half a dozen hikers came down the other direction, chatting in Dutch as they picked their way past twisting roots and stepped over the muddy rivulets that crossed the trail to seep into the dense foliage on the other side. The air was cool, but thick as soup and dense with the smell of moss, ferns, and hanging orchids.

  Eric drew curious stares from the other hikers as they stepped by each other. He wore electric blue spandex shorts, which would double as his swimsuit when they reached the hot springs. Sturdy shoes, with socks pulled all the way to his knees. And of course the double-billed Sherlock Holmes hat, like something out of a Victorian melodrama. One of the Dutch girls leaned in and whispered something to her companion. The man had the good taste not to grin or snicker, but his eyes moved to Eric’s shorts, then up to his face.

  It had been, oh, twenty years since Wes gave a damn about what people thought about his brother. But at one time, that whisper and that look would have boiled his blood. He couldn’t count the number of times that he got in trouble as a kid defending his brother. The worst was during one of their parents’ mainstreaming attempts in the seventh grade, when Wes spent three weeks in detention for fighting some idiot who mouthed off about Eric.

  Kids mostly left the handicapped boy alone, but his twin brother Wes was fair game. Older kids, bullies, and assorted jerks quickly realized that they could get a rise out of Wes by needling him with words like “special” or comments about the “short bus.” Wes was young, insecure, and fiercely protective. These comments made his head feel like it would explode. It wasn’t until his junior year in high school that he finally figured it out. It happened when the brothers were in Montpelier buying maple creemees, and some assholes in a jacked-up truck shouted something about ’tards and dummies.

  Wes shouted a few choice words at the back of the truck as it sped off.

  “Your face is red!” Eric told him gleefully, as he licked the bottom of his cone where the creemee started to melt through.

  “Didn’t you hear what they said, Ruk? They were talking about you.”

  “I don’t listen. I never listen. I know I’m a dummy.”

  “You’re not a dummy, that’s stupid. And stop eating the bottom of your cone, it’s going to—”

  The bottom of Eric’s cone fell out and the creemee plopped to the ground. And that set Eric off. He stomped his feet, repeated the exact curse words Wes had just shouted, only directed at the injustice of cones that melted through and hot pavements that turned creemees into puddles. He wouldn’t settle down until Wes bought him another cone. Then, he was perfectly content. Delighted, in fact, because now he had an entire creemee, plus the half he’d already wolfed down.

  And at that moment, Wes decided to stop worrying so much about what people said, and give more thought to things like maple creemees, and hanging with his brother on a warm summer afternoo
n. And so he ignored the Dutch hikers.

  They reached the first of the hot springs about twenty minutes later. The water was only lukewarm here at the bottom, having run down the hillside from the Devil’s Cauldron through a series of channels and basins. The air smelled of sulfur.

  Young kids in various stages of undress played in the pools while their parents picnicked on the mossy bank. Mostly locals. Another group of hikers—Americans or Canadians—hiked down from the upper pools. It was getting late, and all the traffic had been downhill. Wes figured they had an hour before they had to turn back to reach the trailhead before dark.

  The cauldron itself was a swirling, boiling mass of water. Huge trees dripping with moss, vines, and orchids hung their branches over its basin. It looked like a giant hot tub with the jets on, but signs in several languages, together with pictographs of mercury-busting thermometers and X-ed out bathers warned against entering the water. In the United States, they’d have surrounded the cauldron with a fence, but here it sat in the open, like a stone-rimmed Jacuzzi. Only deadly.

  The mountain was a dormant volcano, with its fires smoldering far beneath the ground. Water seeped into the rock, then heated under pressure before boiling back to the surface. Dip your foot in and you’d get a scalding. Climb up those branches and dive in and you’d turn the cauldron into tourist soup. No doubt some bonehead had done it, too. Several boneheads, speaking several languages. Hence, the signs.

  When they hiked up, Eric stared with a look of fascination. “A giant hot tub!”

  “Not there, Ruk,” Wes said. “Not unless you want to boil up and die.”

  He gave a honking laugh. “Boil and die!”

  “Dude, you’re easily amused. Come on. Let’s go back to the bathing pools, down this way.”

  The water divided into two streams as it flowed down the canyon, splitting at a massive stone thrust, before connecting again and then flowing into the river down at the trailhead. The right side was wading pools and the picnic area they’d already passed. On the left side people had gathered stones and channeled the water into a series of depressions that ranged in size from large wading pools to deeper holes no more than five feet across. Steam swirled into the air. Together with the thick, close canopy and the late afternoon light, it left the mountainside in a mysterious shroud. More people were packing up and leaving.