Betrayed (36 page)

Michael dropped his hand. “I can’t accept that, Vicki. For your own protection, I’m asking—no, I’m
insisting
—you trust me to make the right decision—”

“The lady said no.”

Michael and Vicki whirled around.

Michael glared at Joe. “Stay out of this. Haven’t you caused enough damage for one night? If I had you under my command—”

“Well, fortunately, I’m a civilian and not under your orders. As is Vicki. So it isn’t up to you. Let her make her own decision.”

Michael’s hands relaxed. “Fine, you’ve made your decision, Vicki. But if you change your mind, the invitation still stands.” Spinning around on his boot heel as sharply as though on a parade ground, he left the thatched shelter.

Vicki had to admire his self-control. She walked over to Joe. “Was that necessary? I’m perfectly capable of fighting my own battles, you know.”

“No, but it sure felt good. By-the-book stuffed shirts like that are one reason I got out of the army.”  His eyes glinted emerald as he looked up at her. “‘Do what is right and do not give way to fear.’ I like that. Yes, I can see you as Sarah’s daughter. Don’t let Camden put you down. I’ll take someone following what they think is right, even into hot water, over a coward watching out for their own back any day.” 

“I appreciate the advice.” Vicki hesitated as she looked at Joe. From this close vantage she could see bits of twigs and leaves in his tangled mane. His body heat was drying the Hawaiian shirt to wrinkles, but it was still damp enough to cling like a second skin over the powerful muscles of chest and shoulders. Vicki could suddenly feel the warmth of that broad chest under her head again. The calming, steady beat of his heart. The gentleness of touch and voice when he’d soothed her and Gabriela and Alicia. The safe feeling she’d felt even in the terror of darkness as long as his arms had been around her.

 “Joe, I never really thanked you for what you did tonight. I am
really
sorry for all the trouble I dragged you into. I . . . I didn’t expect any of this, especially for you to get blamed for it. I’ll pay for any damages to Bill’s truck.  But . . . well, thank you for doing it.”

Behind Vicki, headlights stabbed at the dark. An engine gunned as the army Jeep accelerated out of the cul-de-sac. A long horn beep was followed by Bill’s impatient command, “Ericsson, now!”

Swinging his boots to the floor, Joe got to his feet. “Don’t thank me. Bill was right and so was Camden. It was the stupidest thing I’ve done in a long time.”

He might as well have slapped Vicki. “How can you say that? Are you saying you could have left Alicia and Gabriela out there? that you wouldn’t have done it if . . . if you’d known all this would happen?”

“No!” Joe tossed over his shoulder. “That’s what makes me so stupid.” Two swift strides, and the night swallowed him up.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Vicki was alone at last.

Not only in the physical isolation of this room, the Coleman lantern on the converted crate keeping shadows and thoughts at bay.

She’d waited until the sound of the two vehicles faded before bestirring herself to clean away their impromptu meal. Then she’d lifted down the lantern and checked the sleeping animals before climbing the back stairs to her room. Rosario and Beatriz had indeed retired for the night because Vicki could hear a faint snoring through the dividing wall. She should be following their example.

But Vicki didn’t turn off the lantern when she went to bed, staring instead at the printed images on the bunk overhead. The green and olive of camouflage fatigues. Hard, satisfied faces. Those tiny American flags on lapels.

Something in the relaxed, even bored, self-confidence of one American advisor evoked Michael Camden. Vicki hastily turned her head to happier images of animals and landscape, the wavery glimmer of the lamp flame making colors and shapes shift and sway as though alive. She had spent so much time poring over that group portrait that she hadn’t looked closely at the landscape shots. They weren’t as random as she’d assumed.

Lake Izabal as seen from the lookout rock of
Pozo Azul
.

Another from that rock outcropping but of the ridge rising up from the waterfall where Vicki had run into Joe’s interference.

Vicki wouldn’t have differentiated the next scene had she not seen it that very afternoon. The valley with its overgrown clearings that lay beyond the dividing ridge from the plateau. This one had been taken from much the same vantage point as Vicki had seen it today. But here were no tall weeds or indistinct shapes of feeding animals. Holly’s photo showed the thick, lush carpet of white and pink and lilac and red blooms over which Joe had circled that first day.

And from which the DHC-2 had drawn ground fire that so nearly knocked them from the sky.

Vicki stared at the photos till her eyes burned. It was easier—
safer
—than closing her eyes, allowing her own thoughts to sweep her away. She didn’t mind her physical aloneness. These close walls were a welcome sanctuary. It was the inward aloneness that sat like a hot, hard lump in her chest, stung at her eyes. The recognition that even if she abandoned the solitude of this small room, there was no longer a single person in all these highlands to whom she could confidently turn. She wouldn’t even think of Michael. Nor would she go again easily to Joe or Bill.

Not even for transportation.

Because Vicki was still leaving. There was no more reason than this morning for her to stay. Michael had been right about that. Even for the four villagers, Vicki could do nothing further here. Back in Guatemala City, she could at least register a protest with the embassy and chief of police.

As for the bubble of enchantment that had held her here, it had burst beyond repair under angry shouts and guns and running boots and frightened faces and crying children. There was no more retreat or sanctuary from human cruelty and greed and pain in these beautiful mountains than in the burning stench of Guatemala City’s garbage dumps.

So Vicki would leave.

And as she’d told Michael, she’d make her own arrangements. If air flight was inaccessible, there was always the evening “chicken bus,” a refurbished school bus redolent of gas fumes and cigarettes and crowded with locals hauling market goods, even livestock, into the city. If not a comfortable way to spend the night, it would get Vicki to the capital by morning. If the bus didn’t go over a cliff as white crosses marked so many along the way. Or a
mara
didn’t stake out Vicki and her duffel bag as an easy target.

“Do what is right and do not give way to fear.”

Vicki had thrown that challenge at Bill and Joe and Michael. She’d followed it blindly, hopefully, to this place. But if it had made any difference—if
she’d
made any difference—she couldn’t see it. Except that single piece of luggage, she was leaving these mountains empty-handed, with no more idea than when she’d come of what had killed her sister. And more importantly, why.

Yet . . . was she really leaving so empty-handed? Or even alone?

A breeze rattling the screen above the door gusted the scent of a cloud forest night into the room. Green, wild, moist with a taste of flowers, and underlying it all, the chill, metallic tang of the mists. A curl of quietude, even peace, stole through Vicki at its familiar, clean sweetness.

I came up to these mountains to uncover a murderer. You led me instead to a sanctuary. I came here to understand Holly’s death. But it’s her life I’ve come to understand. And . . . and her faith
.

"
This is my Father’s world
."

But so was that world outside the center where people hurt and fought and cried. Yes, and loved too. With all its beauty—and all its pain.

And it was to that world which Vicki, unlike Holly, had been called to make a difference.

Father God, I still don’t understand why You let the world be such a terrible place. Why You can’t make it all better now. But if I can’t see my way forward from this place and time, if I’ve no idea what You’re doing with me, at least I can believe You do. That You see the end, and that it’s worth it. That You’re down there in the world I’m going back to as much as up here in these cloud forests. I always believed the world had to be right—that I had to make it right—for You to be there with me. But if these villagers who’ve lost home and family and been hurt so much more than I can sing with such peace and faith of You and the future You have for them, then surely I can believe You’re there for me too
.

If Vicki took nothing else of Holly from this place, that would be enough.

Which left only one task before boarding that bus tomorrow evening. Rolling over on her stomach, Vicki hauled out the small cardboard box that had sat untouched under the bunk all these weeks.

Holly, tomorrow it’s you and me
.

Vicki knew just where she’d say good-bye. The memory trail that must have been a favorite of Holly’s because she’d left it laid out for her sister. Vicki tugged the crate and lantern over to the bunk. Holly’s photos were vivid and crisp, another inheritance from a father she’d never known. The
Pozo Azul
lookout. The thin line of a path running parallel to the waterfall up the ridge. The carpet of wildflowers clear enough under the brighter lighting for Vicki to make out individual blooms.

Vicki sat up so suddenly her skull made painful contact with the planking. Lifting the lantern high in one hand, she leaned closer.

No, there was one other task she had to do before leaving these mountains.

As Vicki blew out the lamp, plunging the room into darkness, a new flame of excitement and uncertainty burned away the last of her resignation.

Tonight the villagers were not singing.

At first there’d been screaming and running and frightened tears. Children, mostly, young and forgetful. The adults knew only too well why they were being rousted from hammocks and floor pallets. A few men had braved automatic rifles and bayonets to rush forward when lighted torches began raining down on thatch. Several women scuttled after children who’d slipped away.

The latter had been resolved by snatching up small runaways and tossing them into the throng. Lacerations and groaning bodies in the dirt showed how the others had been dealt with. Now they stood passively, he noted with satisfaction, huddled into a single mass, women clutching children close, men shielding their families.

Standing back in the shadows of the vehicles, he tilted his hat against the betrayal of leaping flames, bandanna covering mouth and nose against gasoline fumes and smoke. The only sounds were a crackle of fire, the whimper of some child too small to be terrified into silence, shouted orders, and a coarse jest from the man beside him. Only when the timbers holding up the roof crashed down did a young Ladino step forward with a cry.

He winched as a baton crashed down, slamming the man to the ground. But he didn’t interfere. After all, they were alive.

And for that, they could thank him.

His hands clenched on the night vision goggles with enough force to crack them had they been of civilian make. He lowered the NVGs as flames blazed white in his scope. The running figures, metallic containers splashing a liquid that was definitely not water, the vehicles and distinctive shape of weapons were now identifiable in the mounting inferno, if not the individual faces above them.

Fury burned acid in his stomach, tightened his jaw under green and black paint to stone. But he didn’t interfere either. There was nothing one man could do after all.

And how many times have people like me used that same excuse?
he questioned bitterly as he lowered himself silently, invisibly, from the canopy height of his perch.
And in these same mountains?