A curt response returned: “Stop meddling in local affairs or we will send the police to question you.”
Of course things worked differently down here. But the ministry’s stonewalling was suspicious.
When Wes finished, Davis said nothing. His eye flickered across the screen, but the computer didn’t speak.
“Are you there?” Wes asked.
No answer.
“I think we lost him,” Becca said. “The software crashed or something. Kill the chat and see if you can reconnect.”
“No, I’m here,” Davis said. “Hold on.” Several seconds passed before he spoke again. “Okay, guys, time to bring you home.”
“What?” Becca and Wes exclaimed together.
They were loud enough that it startled Eric from his video game. He looked at them, blinking, with that glazed expression of gamers everywhere, whether they were mentally handicapped or not. Then he turned back to the zombie battle.
“I’ve been doing my own digging,” Davis said. “I don’t like what I turned up. I want to drop it for now.”
Becca and Wes exchanged bewildered looks before looking back to the chat.
“Did something happen?” Wes asked.
“I turned up a few things. I’d rather not discuss it here, because I don’t want you to ignore me.”
“Give us some credit,” Becca said. “We’re not going to blow you off. What is it?”
“Come back to Vermont—I’ll explain here. The upshot is we’re dropping the Meggie Kerr case.”
“Why would we do that?” Wes asked.
“Bigger priorities. Other cases with fewer difficulties. Maybe we’ll get back to this one later. But for now—”
“Whatever happened to ‘we find them, we rescue them’?” Wes cut in. “And ‘no value judgments’? ”
“First priority is to keep you alive.”
“Alive?”
“Whatever it is, we can handle it,” Becca said. She sounded equally baffled. “Remember Walter Fitzroy’s case? His psycho girlfriend tried to kill me. It can’t be worse than that.”
“Come back to Vermont.”
“No,” she said. “Not until we’re finished.”
“It’s not a discussion,” Davis said. “You’re coming home.”
Wes’s surprise was turning quickly to irritation. “Since when have you ever pulled rank? We’re a team, not a dictatorship.”
“At the end of the day, someone has to make the tough calls. And that’s me. I’m going to change your flights. I’ll email you the new itinerary when I’ve book your tickets. And I’m going to email and cancel the house.”
“Seriously,” Wes persisted. “You can’t pull the plug without explaining first. Give us the info. We’ll talk it out.”
“No. This isn’t up for discussion. You will come home and that’s the end of it.”
And with that, the chat window went black. Wes and Becca exchanged bewildered, frustrated looks. Behind them, Eric’s computer game continued to chime and chirp merrily.
Chapter Three
An unpleasant surprise appeared in Meggie’s applesauce at pill time. The weather was clear, so the residents had eaten on the veranda. Dinner was the highest-quality organic vegetables and tropical fruits, together with an expertly prepared sea bass. Or so went the announcement. Meggie couldn’t eat on her own, so they pureed her food into something resembling pig slop, then spooned it deep into her throat until reflex made her swallow.
As they finished, nightfall came over the forested hills with all the speed of closing shutters, and the bird calls gave way to the chirps, croaks, and thrumming of frogs. Insects buzzing and thrilling. Geckos perched near lights to gobble up the circling bugs. The shadowy forms of bats dive-bombed through the clouds of mosquitoes trying to thread their way through the gauntlet of citronella torches and sickly-sweet incense pots designed to drive them away.
The higher-functioning residents shuffled inside, while a nurse wheeled out a cart to hand-deliver meds to the wheelchair-bound. She wore a nurse’s cap and a pinafore apron, starched white, looking like something out of the mid-twentieth century.
The nurse presented the pills in cups, ground up and mixed with applesauce. As she coaxed residents into opening their mouths, she spoke in a soothing singsong, like she was house-training puppies.
“Eat up now. Good boy. Here you go, there’s a good girl. Good girl!”
When the nurse reached the end of the row, Jimena, tonight’s aide, pried open Meggie’s mouth, while the nurse scooped out applesauce with a plastic spoon. The woman opened her own mouth. “Ah, there you go. Something new tonight for the big girl. Now swallow, be good.”
The pills were always bitter going down, but whatever new pill was lurking in the applesauce had an especially sharp, corrosive taste in its ground-up form. Meggie almost gagged on pure reflex, but then her throat was moving and the applesauce went down.
“That’s a good girl!” The nurse tossed the cup and spoon in the garbage attached to her cart, then patted Meggie on the head. “You were agitated this afternoon. That’s what they say. But this should help my good girl get some sleep.”
Agitated? Who said that, Usher? Couldn’t he have at least pretended to consult the doctor before changing her meds? Wasn’t there a law somewhere, even in Costa Rica? Or did they simply not care about the law?
Do I look agitated? Meggie thought angrily, as the nurse pushed the cart back inside. As if anyone could tell. As if anyone cared to ask her what she thought. How hard would it be to ask once in a while? To ask anything?
Such as, “Blink once if you’re tired, twice if you want to stay up.”
“Do you need to go to the bathroom? Blink once for yes, twice for no.”
Or how about this? “Do you want to talk to anyone? Do you have any friends and relatives we could contact? Would you like a visit?”
Meggie had no name for her condition, and nobody ever told her.
Paralyzed seemed the wrong term. Even quadriplegic was inadequate. There had been a kid in one of her classes at college who couldn’t move his hands or legs and used his mouth to wheel his chair around, blowing in a straw or something. But he could talk, and smile, and laugh. He was alive to the world.
So if Meggie wasn’t a quadriplegic, what was she? There had to be a medical term for this.
The psychological term was prisoner.
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. In 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?”
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