“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 afternoon. 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.
“In ten minutes, this place is going to be empty,” Becca said. “We’ll have it to ourselves.”
“Not entirely,” Wes said, with a nod to his brother, who was already peeling off his Sherlock hat, t-shirt, shoes, and knee-length socks. He looked up questioningly when he was down to his blue spandex suit.
“These aren’t the boil and die pools. Go for it.”
Eric found the biggest pool and waded in. He gasped at the heat, but shortly was splashing and goofing off like a kid. Wes envied his energy and enthusiasm.
Becca undressed as Wes sought out a quieter pool. She wore a maternity bathing suit underneath. Pregnant belly or no, she was still damn sexy.
“How about this one?” he said, bending to test the water with a hand. Hot, but not scalding.
“I like this one better,” she said, stopping in front of a steaming pool not much bigger than a bathtub. She sat on a boulder at the edge and dangled her feet in.
“I can’t see my brother from there.”
“He’ll be fine,” she said. “And he’s singing that damn Sherlock Holmes song from his game.”
“Head shot, Watson!” Eric cried.
Wes laughed as he undressed. When he was done, he slipped into the water. It was warm, but not particularly hot. Becca came down and was soon straddling his lap, removing any doubt as
to her intentions. She kissed him. Her belly pressed into him, but so did her breasts, swollen from the pregnancy.
“Do you remember that time on the Golfo Dulce, when we swam out to the island?” she asked. “We got in the pool and stripped out of our dive suits. That was the first time I saw you naked.”
“We were supposed to look away, right?”
“I mostly did.”
“You were such a tease,” he said.
“I didn’t want to be your vacation fling. I wanted more.” She glanced over his shoulder as Eric stopped singing. A moment later, he started up again. “But if you’re looking for a fling,” she said, stroking her fingernails along his chest, “I could go for one right now.”
“Just like that? What if someone comes?”
“Bad light, and we’re mostly underwater. The last few hikers are down the hill. Nobody will see.”
She was sliding back and forth on his lap as she said this and within about three seconds he wouldn’t have been able to resist Becca if the whole Dutch contingent had shown up with their camera phones. She reached her hand down and tugged at his shorts, then she was pulling her own swimming suit to the side. He gasped as she eased herself down on top of him. She arched her back and moaned.
A few minutes later, when they were done, he opened his eyes to see Eric above them on the hillside. Wes startled, but his brother was squatting with his back turned, stacking stones at the edge of one of the pools. And wearing his Sherlock hat.
“Hmm,” Becca said, following Wes’s gaze. “We’re lucky he didn’t leap into our pool, oblivious.”
“You’re still a tease,” Wes said, giving Becca’s bottom a pinch as she slid off and moved to one side.
“I am? You seduced me, sir. Saw that my body was wracked with hormones, and took advantage of me. And in public.”
“I have no shame, it is true.”
“That’s the sort of unprotected sex that can get a girl pregnant, you know. The nuns warned me about that. It only takes one time.”
“Really? I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.
They sat for a minute listening to the burbling water overflowing the cascading hot water pots to run down the hillside. Wes put a hand on Becca’s belly, but the baby lay still and he didn’t feel anything. Gradually, the disquiet of the unresolved case replaced the mellow post-lovemaking feeling.
“I don’t want to go back tomorrow,” he said at last.
“I never thought we would.” Becca’s tone was matter-of-fact.
He gave her a sharp look. “We’re packed up. We told the housekeeper we’d clear out in the morning.”
“Only so we can find another place. Harder for your uncle to track us down that way.”
“So we’re going to blow him off?”
“Wasn’t that the plan all along?” she asked. “I mean, you never seriously thought we would give up now, did you?”
“Well, no. But I thought we’d go back to Vermont and work on something else until we figured out what Davis was thinking.”
“Wes, imagine if it were you. You’ve been suffering LIS for seven years. Someone wants to hide you so badly they brought you to Costa Rica and stashed you in a secretive place like Colina Nublosa. You’re dying inside. Do you want to wait another six months? A year?”
“No.”
“I sent Meggie Kerr a message. I looked right at her and as clearly as I could communicate it, let her know that I’d heard her tapping. She has to know I’m looking for her. She must be going crazy.”
“I know,” Wes said.
He thought about people like Meggie all the time. It was worse than being a prisoner in solitary confinement, worse than being straightjacketed in a padded cell. Worse than almost anything he could imagine. Sometimes he suffered nightmares where he had become the patient in a vast asylum, like something out of some Victorian hell. In the dreams, he lay in a vast hall filled with beds. In each bed lay a patient, and none of them were moving. Not so much as a blink of the eyes. Wes tried to scream, but his mouth wouldn’t move. He woke from these nightmares sweating, his heart pounding.
Becca said, “We find them, we rescue them. That’s our job. That’s the only thing that matters.”
“Why did Davis call us home?”
“I don’t know.”
“There has to be a reason,” he said.
“What do you think?”
“He’s afraid. First priority is to keep us alive, remember? Why would he say that? He must have learned something, and it freaked him out.”
“He wasn’t freaked out when we opened the call,” she said. “He was asking about the house, chatting about that kid in the Bronx.”
“I want to ask him,” Wes said. “Whatever it is, we deserve to know.”
Becca pushed wet hair out of her eyes. “And when he insists we fly home?”
“Then we’ll insist on staying. What’s he going to do, come down here and wrestle us onto the plane?”
“He could cancel our accounts, hire someone to shadow us, phone Colina Nublosa and tell them we’re snooping around.” Becca shrugged. “If he’s serious, he can mess with us a dozen ways.”
“So we stay?”
“We stay,” she said firmly. “And we finish the job.”
“He’s going to find out soon enough. When we don’t show up for work, he’ll call the airline and figure out we weren’t on the flight. He can mess with us plenty, then.”
“Right. So we have three days, tops.”
“You’ve thought this out,” Wes said.
“I have. And I have a plan.”
He was getting hot in the water, so he hoisted himself out and waited for Becca to explain. She wore a look of grim determination.
“We need someone on the inside,” she said. “That’s how we got to Walter Fitzroy. I took a job as an aide.”
“They already know you from that stunt you pulled. And you’re pregnant, so it’s not like you can go in disguise. Besides,” he added. “You don’t speak Spanish. I do, though.”
“We have three days, Wes, before Davis is on to us. They’re not going to hire you in three days, even if they have a job opening, which they probably don’t. And can they even hire a foreigner without papers in this country? There are probably laws about that.”
“So if neither of us can get a job, then how do we infiltrate?” he asked.
“We’re not sending an employee. We’re sending a patient.”
Becca turned her gaze as she said this. It fell on Eric, still goofing around in his hat and electric blue trunks at the edge of the water. He’d ripped the seat of his shorts on the rocks, revealing more than either of them cared to see. Good thing he had two identical pairs back at the house.
“No,” Wes said.
“This is his chance to play Sherlock Holmes.”
“I mean it, no.”
“I sent Jerry Usher an email last night via their web form, and he answered this morning. Said they would be happy to accept a high-functioning resident. I filled out the application as you, and sent in a deposit, together with some forged medical records we happened to have on hand for just this sort of contingency.”
“Becca!” Wes said, sharply.
“I only hope the bank doesn’t flag the withdrawal, or Davis will see what we’re doing. It was twenty thousand, and I have to cough up the first six months by the thirtieth.”
“Twenty thousand a month? What kind of a ripoff is that? Eric’s group home is only fourteen hundred.”
“It’s a high-class joint.”
“Never mind,” he said. “I won’t let him do it.”
“Maybe you should ask Eric,” she said, her tone gentle. “Instead of treating him like a child.”
“But he is a child. That’s the point. My brother suffered serious brain damage at birth, in case you forgot. Or maybe that doesn’t matter to you.”
“Be fair, Wes.” She sounded hurt at his tone.
“I’m sorry, but think about it. His memory is p
oor, his powers of observation suck. He has a hard time reading people, and he’s distracted by moving objects. I love Eric, but he can’t hold down a job and he lives in a group home so someone will remind him to brush his teeth.”
Becca was silent and he continued.
“I’ve asked myself a million times why my twin brother and not me. The umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, but it could have easily been mine. So I have to take care of him. I can’t put him in danger, no matter how good the reason.”
She heaved herself out of the water and took Wes’s hand. “There’s one thing your brother has that he didn’t lose. You both have the same moral compass.”
“Becca, I couldn’t stand it when you hiked up there alone. I kept worrying what would happen to you and the baby if something went wrong.”
“I know. You would have stopped me if I’d let you. Too bad you didn’t marry that kind of girl.” She squeezed his hand. “Eric knows right from wrong. Ask him. Tell him what we need and ask.”
“And what am I asking? Go undercover in the facility and what?”
“Take your cell phone. It can record video. Eric will get Meggie Kerr alone, turn on the camera, and then ask her a few carefully memorized questions. She will tap and blink her answers, then we’ll get Eric out of there and get home. Once we’re back in the United States, we’ll raise a stink until the Costa Rican authorities have no choice but to act.”
Wes chewed on his lip. It sounded so simple. Why couldn’t Wes try it himself? He’d been in a few plays before; maybe he could act the part of someone mentally handicapped.
No, not convincingly. And who would introduce him at the facility anyway? Not Becca or Eric. He couldn’t just show up at the front gates.
“Hypothetically,” Wes said, “say we drop him off on Monday, then Davis starts wondering why we didn’t show up later that day. He blows the whole thing. Canceling our accounts and all the rest of it.”
“Once your brother is on the inside, Davis will have to go along. He’ll be pissed,” she added. “But he’ll have no choice unless he wants to put Eric’s life at risk.”
“You mean more at risk. Eric will be at risk the moment we send him in.”
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