Just ahead, the Devil’s Cauldron sat on the hillside, almost invisible beneath the billowing steam. Water boiled over the edge like from a giant pot left on the stove.
There were three people between the cauldron and the forest behind it, about thirty feet away from him. One held a flashlight, shining it on the other two, one of which was the bad woman. Kaitlyn. She held a gun in her hand. In front of her, on his back, lay Eric’s brother. Wes clutched his leg, his face twisted in pain and fear.
Only three? Where was Becca? Oh, no! Eric’s gut turned to water. Oh, no. They must have got to her. And the woman who had shot Wes now stood over him with her gun pointed down. She was going to shoot again.
A hot rage burned through him. He wanted to do something . . . bad. Very, very bad. He felt like that movie of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That movie scared him, when the doctor twisted and groaned and his face changed, his body straining with muscles. But now he understood. It was a rage tearing beneath the skin.
“Leave my brother ALONE!” he roared.
Even before the words were out of his mouth, he broke into a charge, like an enraged bull. Kaitlyn whirled. She looked startled, but not alarmed or afraid. Instead of squeezing off a quick shot, she smiled, took aim and waited until he had closed half the distance. And in that moment, Eric realized she was going to kill him. He wouldn’t reach her in time. Instead, the bullet would slam into him. Then she would kill his brother anyway.
He was fifteen feet away, then ten. Then . . . bang!
Just as she fired, Wes reached from where he lay and hooked her ankle. He jerked it. She lost her balance with a cry. The shot disappeared into the night. Kaitlyn stumbled, almost fell, then regained her footing. She kicked at Wes to free herself, then turned around as Eric rammed into her.
They fell backward together. Another gunshot rang out as he landed on top of her. A white pain lanced through his left shoulder. He’d been shot. Or grazed maybe. It didn’t seem to stop the use of that arm, but it hurt like hell.
He rolled on the ground with Kaitlyn. She was stronger than he expected, and a nasty fighter. She clawed at his face and drove her elbow under his chin. Her teeth sank into his forearm and he cried out and pushed her away. They separated. She got to her feet. She turned, looking frantically for something on the ground and calling for Benjamin to shine his light down.
Eric struggled to his feet. He put a hand to his shoulder, felt blood, but he could still move his arm. He was lucky; it was barely a scratch. What now? Oh yeah, the gun. Where was it? He must have jarred it loose when he knocked her to the ground.
But at that moment, Becca sprang forward, stepping over Wes. She’d been behind him, near the trees, and that’s why Eric hadn’t seen her. He let out a cry of relief.
“Kill him!” Kaitlyn screamed.
“Eric, look out!” Becca called.
Benjamin, who had been holding the flashlight, had seemed stunned by Eric’s charge. He’d done nothing but stupidly point his flashlight at him, then at Kaitlyn. But now he groped at his waist and came up with the knife. It was the weapon Kaitlyn had used to gut Diego. Now he thrust it toward Eric. It was tentative. If he’d stabbed hard, he would have jammed it up under Eric’s ribs and that would have been the end. Eric jumped back and it only grazed his bare stomach.
As he lurched away from the knife, Becca slammed into Benjamin from the side. He jumped back and slashed, but she stayed out of his way. The two of them circled each other warily. Becca held her own knife. Where had that come from?
Wes was trying to get to his feet, but struggling against the gunshot wound in his leg. “She’s going for the gun,” he warned Eric. “Stop her.”
He turned to see Kaitlyn bending over and groping on the ground. He came at her, punching. One of his blows missed, but the other slammed into her shoulder and knocked her off balance. Cursing, she came up with the pistol and smashed it on the side of his head. He staggered. But before she could get the gun around, he wrapped his arms around her and drove her forward. They slammed against the side of the cauldron. Water boiled over, splashing like fire onto his skin. Steam choked Eric’s lungs.
Kaitlyn cried out in pain. “Get away from me, you freak. Let go!”
“I am NOT a freak. And I am NOT a retard, too!”
He grabbed her wrist, the one with the gun. She twisted her arm, trying to free it, but he forced it back, toward the cauldron. Hot water sloshed over them and she screamed. He shoved her hand under the surface and she dropped the gun into the cauldron. Kaitlyn lashed out, and her hand raked him across the face. Momentarily, she drove him back, then he wrapped her in a fresh bear hug and crushed her against the side of the cauldron.
The heat was intense, like standing in front of an oven. Sweat beaded on his face and back. And he’d burned his hand and chest. The bullet wound throbbed in his arm.
Kaitlyn bit at him, snarling, trying to knee him in the groin. Anything to gain an advantage. Grimly, he pushed and pushed. Water washed over them both, but Kaitlyn took the brunt of it. She thrashed and screamed like a rabbit with its leg caught in a trap.
He gave a final heave and she flipped over the stone lip and toppled into the cauldron. She shrieked, a sound so awful, so penetrating that it tore the night in two. Arms flailed out, trying to get over the side.
Eric staggered backward, horrified. He clamped his hands over his ears. The awful screaming went on and on and on.
Arms came up again, followed by her head. Eyes bulged in their sockets and her mouth froze into a grimace of pain and rage. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. The shriek died, trailing off into a final, strangled gurgle. Her head disappeared beneath the water and steam.
He thrust his fingers into his hair and gave a terrific pull. Clumps came out. It hurt so badly, but he couldn’t stop. He took another fistful by the roots.
“No, Eric! No!” Wes cried.
Wes dragged him back from the edge of the cauldron. Eric started to struggle, then realized who it was and went limp in his brother’s arms. He let out a long, shuddering sob.
“I killed her!”
“It’s okay. It’s okay. You didn’t want to. You didn’t try. It’s not your fault.”
He buried his head in his brother’s chest and cried. Wes staggered and Eric remembered that his brother had been shot, so he let himself be taken to the ground. When he finally stopped crying, feeling stupid and miserable, he looked around for Becca.
She stood, holding both knives in one hand, with a flashlight in the other. It shone down on Benjamin, who sat with his knees up and his head buried in his hands. His body shuddered.
“You’re all right?” Wes asked.
“He gave up,” she said. “I gave one feint and he threw down his knife.”
“Oh God,” Benjamin said. “Please. Oh, please.”
Becca handed the knives to Wes, then bent to look at his leg. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital.”
“I’ll be all right,” he said.
“He shot you in the leg,” Eric said.
“You got shot, too, buddy.”
“It doesn’t really hurt. The burns are worse.” He shuddered as he looked at his brother’s leg. It looked awful.
“It seems to have gone right through the muscle. I’ll be okay.” He was pale, but his face held a hard, determined expression. He turned to Becca. “Let’s get it now, while he’s like this.”
“Get what?”
“The video.”
“Of course.” She turned to Eric. “There’s another flashlight in my bag. Grab it, will you? No, over there, by the tree. Now look on the ground, right there. Wes’s cell phone is around there somewhere.”
“We know what you did,” Wes said to Benjamin while Eric searched on the ground. “We know everything.”
“What are you going to do to me?” the man asked.
Eric spotted the phone and snatched it up triumphantly. “Got it!”
He handed it to Becca, who pressed a button and grinned when the l
ight came on. She wiped it on her shirt.
“We don’t care about you,” Wes went on. “We only want to get Meggie away from here. Away from you.”
“But will you tell the police?”
“We have to. Your cousin is dead. And you caused the accident in the first place, didn’t you? What happened in the cave that day.”
“It wasn’t me!”
“Tell me what happened.”
Eric glanced at Becca to see that she had the phone up and pointing at Benjamin, who squinted in the light of both Becca’s and Eric’s flashlights. Was she taking a picture? Why now?
Benjamin fell quiet. “I don’t know,” he said sullenly when Wes prodded him again.
“We can help you explain it to the police when they come. You know how these things work, you help the investigation and they treat you with lenience. You help us, we help you.”
Eric thought of the TV shows he’d seen and was confused. “I thought only the police could—”
“Shh, Eric,” Becca said sharply. “Not another word. I mean it.”
Eric frowned, feeling hurt. Then he got it, almost like a cartoon, with a little light bulb flashing on over his head. It was all he could do not to burst out, I know! I know! You want him to confess on camera!
His excitement diminished when he heard the ugly story come out of Benjamin’s mouth. About how Meggie had fallen in the cave when Benjamin’s knots came undone. Or maybe Kaitlyn untied the rope; he didn’t know for sure.
How they knew she was out of her coma, and decided to hide her in Costa Rica, so she couldn’t tell anyone. Then, how Kaitlyn stabbed Diego to death when he came in. They’d come up looking for Eric and Meggie, to kill them. Of course, it wasn’t Benjamin’s idea at all. Everything was Kaitlyn’s doing.
“What a weasel,” Becca said. “You won’t take responsibility for anything, will you?”
“It’s not my fault, I swear.”
“But why did she do it?” Wes said. “Was she jealous or something?”
“Kaitlyn hated Meggie. She always did. I don’t know why.”
“You’re hiding something,” Becca said.
“No, I’m not.”
“Never mind,” Wes said. “Look, there’s something else you’re not explaining. If Kaitlyn tried to kill Meggie in the cave, then why not finish the job? Why wait all this time? There must have been a hundred opportunities.”
Benjamin looked down and shrugged.
“Come on, man. Help us out here.”
“I’m not saying anything more. You can shoot me if you want, I don’t care.”
Becca put down the phone. “That’s more than enough. Come on, guys, it’s time to get you to a hospital. We’ll take this idiot back to the boat with us. He’s not going to cause any trouble.”
Becca gathered their backpacks and tucked the phone into an inner pocket.
Eric tugged at his hair with his free hand. Something still bothered him.
Becca rubbed his shoulder. She pried his fingers off the flashlight. “It’s okay, Ruk. You had to push her in. She was going to kill us.”
“I forgot something. What is it?”
“Seems you lost your shirt,” she said with a smile in her voice. “And your shoes. Did you forget to get dressed before you left your room?”
“I didn’t have time to put on my shoes,” he said. “And I left my shirt with . . . with Meggie! I left her behind!”
He snatched the flashlight from her hand and ran down the trail leading to Foggy Hill.
“Wait!” Becca cried. “Eric!”
He ignored her and raced to find the woman he’d abandoned by the side of the trail. Hopefully, she wasn’t angry with him.
#
Tears welled in Meggie’s eyes when Eric came running back down the hillside, shouting her name. He was okay. He was alive.
She had been waiting in terror. Listening for additional gunshots. When another shot came, her guts turned to liquid. She was sure they’d killed him, like the first two shots had killed Wes’s brother and his wife. That was a good half-hour ago.
And so she waited in fear and anguish to see that hated blue penlight searching the trail again, looking for her. It didn’t come. What was taking them?
Relief flooded through her when she picked out Eric’s voice and realized it was him. Here I am! she tried to call. Over here!
In that brief moment, she forgot she was paralyzed and helpless. She had to wait for him, doing nothing, absolutely nothing to help.
Eric ran past her spot. Calling, looking. Sounding confused. Where was she? Worry tinged his voice. He came past another time. The light swept past the rock where he’d propped her, but he didn’t stop long enough to find her.
“Eric!” a woman’s voice called. It wasn’t Kaitlyn, thank God. Another light flashed along the trail. A wider, stronger beam.
“I can’t find her,” he cried. “I lost her. Maybe animals. Maybe more kidnappers.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t animals. Now think, where was it? Where did you leave her?”
“I remember this tree. It tripped me after I got on the trail.”
I’m right here!
“Slow down. Let’s be careful. She’ll turn up.”
Moving methodically now, the two of them walked up and down the path. It still wasn’t a good search, as Eric couldn’t remember so much as which side of the trail he’d left her on.
And then came the wonderful moment when Eric’s flashlight shone in her face and she squinted her eyes shut, while he let out a whoop of joy. He rushed up and hugged her. She looked him over, feeling more grateful than she could ever remember. Scratches raked his face, and blood trickled down his right shoulder. But he was alive.
The woman came down. “Thank God.” She squatted and gently peeled Eric away. “It’s okay, you’re safe now. Kaitlyn is dead. Benjamin gave himself up. He confessed on camera. We’re going to turn him over to the police.”
Meggie thought she couldn’t feel any deeper relief than upon her discovery moments earlier, but this time she felt ready to collapse. It was like a giant stone had been pressing on her chest and now she could breathe.
“And we have enough evidence to force the Costa Rican government to turn you over to our care. My name is Becca Pilson, and I work for a foundation that brings locked-in patients into the real world. Blink once if you understand.”
Blink.
A smile broke across the woman’s face.
“I know it has been hell,” she said, “but I can promise you one thing. From this moment on, it gets better.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“You fooled us,” Wes told Uncle Davis. “I’ll give you that. We thought you really wanted us to come home.”
Three weeks had passed since the fight at Devil’s Cauldron, and a nightmare of police, lawyers, paperwork, media coverage, and all the other hassles involved in exonerating Wes, Becca, and Eric of any crimes. Wes endured surgery at a Costa Rican hospital and hobbled around on crutches for the next ten days.
Eric—fiercely loyal to the end—had insisted on attending Diego’s funeral in San Jose. While Wes stood back, feeling guilty and self-conscious, Eric hugged Diego’s widow and his children. They wept in his arms, and Wes watched, marveling at his brother’s heart. After a talk with Becca and his uncle, Wes quietly set up a bank account for the grieving Palomar family.
With all of the distractions, it had taken almost two weeks to return Meggie to the United States. And this was the first time Wes and Becca had had a chance to sit down with Davis and talk.
They met in his house overlooking Lake Champlain, on the west side of the Green Mountains. Summer had arrived in Vermont, when the fields and forests turned a brilliant shade of green. Meadows and pastures sloped toward the lake. Herds of content cows grazed the knee-high grass. Here and there white-clapboard farmhouses and red barns dotted the countryside. The lake itself was a sparkling blue strip, pinned between the mountains of Vermont and the more rugged Adironda
cks of Upstate New York on the other side.
Davis’s chair turned and his eye flickered across the video screen that hung in front of his chest. The computer voice responded with a speed and fluency that made it easy to forget that the man couldn’t talk, couldn’t move, could only blink and move his eyes. Even that was an accomplishment clawed loose from his paralysis by years of work.
“I thought you’d get it on your own,” Davis said. The computer even added a hint of teasing. “Was I expecting too much?”
“Almost,” Wes said. “At first, we couldn’t figure out why you wanted us home. Or why you didn’t ask for us at the house. We were too caught up in the case.”
Becca came in from the kitchen, where she’d been pouring herself a glass of iced tea. In the other room, gunfire chattered from Eric’s latest video game. Meggie was also in the house, working with Walter Fitzroy in the language lab.
“We guessed it in the end,” Becca said.
Wes had seen the email that threw Davis. An anonymous, threatening letter. Stay away from Meggie Kerr or I will destroy you.
“You were right,” Davis said, “I figured I’d been hacked. Too much research into Kaitlyn Potterman and her ways to think otherwise.”
“That was more suspicion than we had,” Wes said. “At that point, anyway.”
“I’d looked into that keystroke-logging accusation a little more. If I hadn’t wasted so much time blathering about the case in the Bronx, I’d have told you already. Soon as I got that email, I decided to play it safe. Of course, it wasn’t really safe in the end.”
Wes glanced in at Eric and was relieved to see only the back of his brother’s head as he stared at the T.V. Eric was playing the newly released sequel to the zombie assassin game, Sherlock Holmes: Werewolf Adventure. In the background, Holmes exclaimed, “Give him the silver bullet, Watson!”
Good. Wes didn’t want his brother to hear this. The police had grilled Eric more than anyone. A lawyer was always present, and Wes served as his translator, doing his best to shield him. The police were only doing their jobs; Wes never felt that they were being too hard, even though they grew exasperated by Eric’s inability to tell a straight story. He would forget details, then remember them, then forget them again. It was a grueling set of interrogations, spread over four days. At the end of it, Wes was a wreck, and his brother so agitated that it took three days back in the States before he calmed down to his usual self. Even then, he woke with nightmares over what had happened at the Devil’s Cauldron.
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