“The digital chip was in your backpack?” Roy’s disappointment sounded through, as well as his unspoken accusation that she should have kept it on her person to lessen the risk of its disappearance.
“What about the emerald?” Carolyne figured Melanie as foolish as not to have hand carried that, either.
“I have it here.” Melanie pinched off one corner of her jacket pocket to indicate the gem inside.
“Too bad those jacket pockets weren’t big enough for the digital chip, too.” They were big enough, which was Roy’s point.
“I wasn’t thinking, sorry,” Melanie apologized. If he thought she’d hoped for something like this, he was mistaken.
“What do you want to bet he’s already made off with Gordon’s body, by way of absconding even with that physical evidence?” Roy asked. So much for Carolyne’s efforts to preserve the corpse.
“Figure it’s John Leider?” Teddy threw out for discussion. “Something to do with the emerald?”
Roy had no answers so gave none. “He’s known for his quick temper, especially where his poke is involved.”
They left off additional conjecture to take stock.
Forced to travel lighter, they could travel faster. If they ate only enough calories to get them through any given day, they could reach the Georni Ranch with what they had, hungry but without acute malnutrition. That wasn’t saying they wouldn’t be dog-tired.
In fact, by the time the end was nearly in sight, Carolyne couldn’t remember when she’d been so tired. What’s more, she’d gotten that way with no additional traumas than the day-to-day effort it took to put one foot in front of the other: apparently, they’d left behind the man-eating jaguar, the skull-collecting natives, and the mad killer. Anyway, catching the killer no longer seemed as important as enjoying dreams of deep, feather-down beds, surrounded by acres and acres of delicious food. If she tried really hard, she could smell the wood burning in some giant, outdoor pit, over which a whole steer turned slowly in the flames.
Carolyne’s imagination wasn’t nearly as vivid as she thought. Melanie smelled it, too. “Smoke!”
“There!” Felix pointed.
Carolyne, too, focused on enough bad news to override all the absence of same over the last few days.
It looked like smoke, smelled like smoke, too soon tasted like smoke. If it had looked, smelled, and tasted as much like a duck, it would have been a duck. A distinct crackling, like a few thousand breaking twigs, said it wasn’t alone. In emphasis, a brilliant tongue of orange-yellow flame incinerated a not so distant treetop in two seconds flat.
Carolyne joined right in the ensuing every man and woman for himself and herself panic, and it wasn’t something of which she was proud. Even a brief what do we do powwow might have gleaned enough input to decide the best alternative upon which they could have all acted in unison. As it was, her main concern, aside from escape, was avoiding collisions with other panicked expedition members running full tilt in the bushes around her.
Roy proved the most concerned for his fellow man. He appeared from seeming nowhere and grabbed Carolyne’s arm. He jerked her in an entirely different direction than she was headed with, “Here, this way!” as the bushes into which she’d been headed were consumed with a fiery “Whoosh!”
As tired as Carolyne was, and as old as she was, how could she be moving as fast as she was? If she extended both of her arms, she could probably fly out of there. Except, Roy now had her hand and cracked-the-whip, just like a particularly mean-spirited boy Carolyne had once endured on a childhood playground. It took considerable effort for Carolyne to remember that Roy was trying to help her and not throw her into cardiac arrest.
She didn’t see the pool until they were literally over it. Their drop into it was reminiscent of the one taken by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in a movie of the same name; anyway, it seemed that way. Actually, it was only six feet from the lip of the embankment to the surface of the water, three more feet until Carolyne’s feet sunk into an additional foot of ooze at the bottom.
The force of her landing, though, buckled her knees and folded her five-feet-nine-inches approximately in half. Her head flipped forward on a neck that could pass for silly putty. She had escaped one drowning, in the river, only to fall prey to another, at least until Roy—as before—pulled her head above the water.
“Are you okay, Carolyne?”
Compared to being dead? Compared to being trampled by stampeding buffalo? Compared to long, relaxing nights knitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of some old folk’s home?
Her, “I’m fine,” came out as if she’d said it in a goldfish bowl. The brackish water, still draining from her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, tasted as if she’d said what she’d said in a toilet bowl.
“Get ready to go back under!”
It was like the movies, except wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of hollow reed through which to breathe? Did Roy know that wouldn’t necessarily work, because fire needed the very same air to burn that they needed to breathe? Or, hopefully, Carolyne had gotten those scientific facts wrong.
Luckily, neither theory was put to the test. Although several bushes burst into flame along the ledge above, there was no overshooting canopy of fire to ignite the vegetation below, or on the other side, nor any drool of fire as far as the water. The crackle and roar went elsewhere, leaving them in smoke-filled silence.
“This old lady thanks you from the bottom of her traumatized heart.” She hoped it safe to wade ashore; her legs were about to give way, and she preferred a collapse onto solid ground.
“Here, lean on me.”
Her reservoir of energy was depleted, zilch, zero, the big goose egg. Only Roy’s reserves got them to the shoreline through the sucking mud.
Carolyne collapsed in a quick slide down Roy’s left side and leg. The man’s thigh and calf were hard as tree trunk.
“I hope you don’t mind if I’m not immediately up to moving?” he said; she laughed appreciatively at his diplomatic good humor. He squatted beside her, his black hair singed, his tanned face sooty. A nasty scratch on his cheek matched the one some bastard’s ring had dug earlier across Teddy’s cheekbone; Carolyne wished she looked as good as he did. “How about some favorable news?” he suggested.
“Aside from the fact that we’re alive?”
“Aside from that.”
“Why not?” She certainly didn’t want to contemplate the fate of the others. Poor Charles: kidnapping, dysentery, near-drowning, forced march, now this.
“Tonight you’ll sleep in a real bed.”
“Do you suspect a connection between the Georni Ranch and our near barbecue?”
“The location is right.”
“Kyle might have picked a less spectacular way of saying hello.”
“Except, he hasn’t done any burning since his father died.”
“Must be about time, huh?”
“Told me he didn’t plan to slash and burn much more.”
“Maybe he doesn’t figure a few hundred acres are much.”
“He gave me the opposite impression.”
“When was this?”
“When Jean-Michael Teruel came around and complained how the crazy American lady was trying for permits yet again.”
“Jean-Michael Teruel: the government representative?”
“The same.”
“Talked over Melanie’s request for permits with Kyle Georni?”
“As a courtesy. Unofficially, the land is/was Georni land.”
“Annexed via a few generations of bribes and greased palms in high places, I’ve heard it rumored.”
“Had Kyle not wanted you in, you would have stayed out.”
“You were actually there?”
“Even I enjoy the occasional amenities of civilization, and Kyle is a gracious host. Besides, my permits were up for renewal, and I had a bit of buttering up to do.”
“The Georni family takes a percentage of your prospecting profits?�
�
“That’s the way it works. That’s the way it’s always worked. That’s the way it’ll continue to work until I’ve the clout to go over Kyle Georni’s head and deal directly with the politicians in Brasilia. Don’t consider that a major complaint, because Kyle takes a smaller percentage than his father did. Not because his bargaining position isn’t as strong; he’s simply fairer. We’re talking less greed as regards land, as well as money. That’s why this fire surprises me. He actually mentioned ecology in his discussion with Jean-Michael.”
“Words come cheap,” was how Carolyne saw it.
“You do have a suspicious mind.”
“You don’t?”
“I like Kyle. What can I say? I liked his father far less.”
“His father is dead. Dead men don’t say, ‘Go out and kill a man so I can end, for a very long time, irritants like this American expedition.’”
“Has no real ring of duplicity; sorry ’bout that,” Roy decided. “Kyle needn’t have even mentioned ecology; no one of importance around here cares. No one around here, at least at the moment, can stop him burning all of the jungle between here and the Pacific. Why tell a nobody, like me, that he has as much pastureland as he needs? As far as your little group, Jean-Michael didn’t expect Kyle to consent; the bigwigs in Brasilia didn’t expect him to consent. His allowing you in caused more tongues to wag than had he kept you out.”
“So, maybe it isn’t a perfect hypothesis, but I’m working on it. That’s what we scientists do.”
Roy had his second wind, but Carolyne needed a few more minutes. She could have been magnanimous and sent him to reconnoiter, but she didn’t want to stay behind and wonder what he found. Besides, she felt safer with him around. He’d been there for her at the river, and he’d been there for her at the fire. That counted in her book.
“You read about this pond as a fire-stop in Luke Wentlock’s journals?” she asked to make conversation.
“This pond is actually one I previously stumbled upon, quite on my own. I’m talking stumbled in the literal sense. Right from up there.” He pointed to their launch pad. “It wasn’t one of my more cognizant of my surroundings moments.”
“Tell me some more about Gordon Wentlock’s people.”
“My first day in the area, I was told by three different people: ‘You want to know anything about this neck of the woods, ask Jeremy Wentlock. His father, Luke, was everywhere, saw it all, wrote it all down.’”
“And Jeremy said, ‘Here, read my father’s journals; they’ll save me from talking myself hoarse.’”
“Not exactly.”
“But, it eventually did come to that?”
“Yes, but Jeremy wasn’t an easy man to get to know. I don’t think Gordon ever got to know him.”
“My second husband, Randolph P. Santire, Senior, had a son when I married him. I never met anyone, except Randolph, Junior, who didn’t like Randolph, Senior. I even liked Randolph, Senior, after our divorce, which is more than I can say for my first husband. The moral: Being a father to a son, or a son to a father, is no easy business. Probably the only things worse is being a stepmother or stepson.”
“Randolph, Junior, and you didn’t get along?”
“I’m not the mothering type”
“No?”
She would have preferred an argument, but she gave him points for no direct agreement.
“My story to be continued.” She was up to moving out and confessed it.
He helped her to her feet and watched her first tentative steps. “No one says we can’t hang around here a little while longer.”
“I’ll be fine if you keep my mind off my aches and pains with more talk about Luke Wentlock’s journals.”
“They were genuinely interesting, even just as a local history. If I’d known Gordon was just going to give them a toss, I.…” He shrugged. Here’s where you fill in the homily about spilt milk.”
“Consider it done.”
They paused on the fire line; some bushes and trees were only half burned.
“Let’s hope there was no Lygodium cornelius growing here,” Carolyne said in a small prayer, “or any other plant that might have cured cancer, or AIDS, or Parkinson’s, or.… Here’s where you fill in the appropriate blank.”
“Does look a bit dismal.”
“It is dismal. I hope the few cattle this cleared land can sustain are appreciative of the cost paid by humanity for fattening their bellies for slaughter.”
“This Lygodium-whatever; that’s what you came for?”
“Your Mr. Wentlock didn’t mention it in his journal, did he? Not that it necessarily would do us any good. Melanie’s father, who ran across the only known sample, way back when, was quite detailed in his records, and quite specific as to locale. My guess is that it just couldn’t survive any longer in its ecological niche. A jungle is one large laboratory in which experiments constantly succeed and fail.”
“Kyle’s father kept you from looking for a good many years?”
“Actually, to be fair, ignorance played even more of a role in keeping us out; ignorance of anything to see but an insignificant plant that couldn’t look like much when growing in the wild when it looked so unimpressive when dried out and pressed in a binder. You see, finding a new plant isn’t the half of it. Years go into research to find what each plant, if anything, has to offer, whether a cure for some disease, ingredient for some cosmetic, or just a particularly colorful bloom for someone’s garden. You can’t usually tell just by looking, either, and such alternatives for each plant are seemingly infinite. There are archives filled with still untested specimens from days when new plants were nowhere as hard to come by as they are today. A new plant you or I find today, or one Cornelius Ditherson picked up in his time, has to wait its turn. There aren’t enough researchers; of those there are, some only like to work with aesthetically attractive plants, others only with mosses, others only with grasses. Some believe they don’t even have to experiment with erotic flora but only need go no farther than their own backyards to make a major breakthrough; it was the common periwinkle, after all, that provided a source of antineplastic.”
Walking wasn’t easy, because the fire hadn’t wiped the ground clean. Most of what was killed was denuded but standing. Some trees, vital wood locked behind protective epidermis of water-rich barks, weren’t dead at all but would soon be taken out by the men and bulldozers to follow.
“Melanie discovered Lygodium’s potential, right?” Roy ventured.
“In a very dark and very gloomy corner of a very dark and very gloomy sub-basement of the University of Washington. On a day she would have preferred to be skiing, except she’d broken her leg on a slippery sidewalk before she got near that winter’s ski slopes. She’d been through the specimens before, but this time she remembered some cancer research recently begun at Crystin Companies on plants similar to Lygodium cornelius. She decided to run a few preliminary experiments on the plant Cornelius had picked up here. Upon such chances of fate are based such repercussions as my being here, now, wondering where Melanie is, not to mention where Charles, Teddy, and even obnoxious-at-times Felix is.”
“You’d be surprised how many pockets of safety exist in these fires,” Roy encouraged. “A rain forest is pretty wet by definition.”
Normally, that might have been overly optimistic, but this time it had taken only one such pocket to save the other expedition members who, via four different routes, had ended up in one and the same water-soaked gully.
Carolyne hadn’t been so surprised by a survival rate since they’d all successfully made it across the river. Actually, she thought Felix looked better with all the hair on his head singed off, eyebrows and eyelashes included. Melanie’s hair needed some work with scissors to balance out spots where some hair was now missing. There was a new burn on Teddy’s left forearm to accompany the rope burns still not healed on each wrist.
The joyous reunion was cut short only because none of the participants wanted
another night out-of-doors. Beds and bedrooms beckoned, as did baths and bathrooms, dining and dining-rooms.
“It was ghastly!” Immediately, Melanie knew Carolyne thought she’d referenced the fire; there was no denying it had been ghastly. “The death of Teddy’s father,” Melanie better defined to what she referred.
Carolyne wondered how that bit of trivia resulted from the last few minutes.
“We were huddled together, sure we were about to be roasted alive,” Melanie said, “and I said, ‘Here I am, about to die with you in some godforsaken jungle, and I don’t even know anything about your father.’”
Carolyne suspected a relationship in real trouble if such circumstances had elicited a conversation of that caliber.
“‘What about my father?’ Teddy asked. I said, ‘Like how did he die, exactly?’ Was I diplomatic, or what?”
What it was…was strange. “No kiss. No hug. Only, ‘How did your father die?’” Carolyne was incredulous.
Melanie sensed veiled disapproval. “You had to be there.”
That didn’t mean Carolyne wasn’t interested. Maybe, she’d been so unlucky at love because she didn’t know what to discuss and when to discuss it. “You were saying?”
“Teddy was young when it happened. Too young to drive, but that didn’t stop him; nor did his father not owning a car: Teddy ‘borrowed’ a neighbor’s.”
Carolyne didn’t follow but waited, none too patiently, for the connection.
“His father had some kind of an attack. Down on the floor, rolling around. Teddy drove him to a hospital. Hospital wouldn’t take him; no health insurance. He drove him to a private clinic; repeat, except some doctor—or a least someone who looked like one—said: ‘Your old man will be fine, son. Take him home, give him a couple of aspirins, and don’t call me in the morning!’ Something like that. Neighbor never did know his car had been used as a taxi.”
It was a story too fantastic not to be believed.
“Melanie!” Carolyne suddenly thought the younger woman a little unsteady on her feet.
“Just a bit dizzy,” Melanie admitted. “I guess a girl can’t make it through what I’ve been through and maintain her total cool.” She held out her hands; they were shaking.
Amaz'n Murder Page 8