The Devil's Cauldron (11 page)

She couldn’t take that risk. Meggie had always known too much. But what she was learning now, with every word out of Kaitlyn’s mouth, could only seal her death.

Wes paced the deck of the guest house, gnawing nervously on the tip of his thumb. Green and gold tanagers kept trying to feed at the plate of cut mango and melon put up by Señora Sanchez, and lifted with chirping protests whenever he drew too close, before settling back down when he’d passed.

“Calm down, Wes,” Becca said. “That’s not helping.”

“Something is wrong up there.”

“You don’t know that.”

He turned to where his wife was sitting calmly, sipping a cup of coffee and typing at her laptop. A trellis rose behind her, covered in flowering vines that attracted hummingbirds. Becca looked calm, but he knew that she was worrying in her own way.

The guest house sat in the town of Santa María del Lago, on the opposite side of the lake from their more luxurious digs of the previous couple of weeks. The accommodations were basic, with a shared bathroom servicing the five different guest rooms, and the other lodgers seemed to be entirely backpackers on their way to the cloud forest preserves of Santa Elena and Monte Verde. The lodge served full, hearty breakfasts, and offered a path through the forest down to the lake, with a view up at the cloud-covered volcano. Wes’s brother was only a few miles away on the other side of that mountain, but it took two hours to get there from here.

“He was supposed to send an email by now,” Wes said. “He was supposed to complain about the food and I’d come up and grab the phone and the video. Soon as it checks out, we get him out of there.”

“Maybe he hasn’t found her yet.”

“How many residents are there at Colina Nublosa? Thirty? Forty? They eat their meals together—Eric must have seen her a dozen times by now.”

“That doesn’t mean he got her alone long enough to ask questions and video her answers.”

“Doesn’t matter. There’s a signal for that, too, remember?”

Eric was supposed to email one way or the other. Complain about the food if he had the video, and rave about it if he didn’t. Either way, Wes would get a message and know where they stood. He’d dropped his brother off on Monday morning and given strict instructions for Eric to email no later than Tuesday night. It was now Friday.

“I’m going to call the administrator.”

“Don’t make him suspicious,” Becca said.

“It’s not suspicious. I just dropped him off, so naturally I want to know how he’s adapting.”

“They said not to do that until he’d been there two weeks. It disrupts the adjustment.” As Wes passed, she took his arm. “Sit down. Please.”

He obeyed and she poured him coffee. He didn’t drink it. They sat in silence while Becca typed at her laptop.
“Any word from Davis yet?” he asked.

“The usual. Emails, back and forth. I haven’t told him where we are, and he hasn’t asked.”

“What about the money?”

“He hasn’t noticed it’s missing yet. Or if he has, he hasn’t mentioned it.”

“And he doesn’t want to know why we never showed up at the house?”

“Not yet. Kind of surprising.”

“Yeah,” he said with a frown.

Maybe his uncle would have given them a pass on Tuesday, figuring they were wiped out from the travel. Maybe as long as Becca kept the emails coming, he would give them a pass on Wednesday, too. Maybe even Thursday. But Davis didn’t like a purely virtual office—being wheelchair-bound, it made him feel doubly isolated. It was now Friday, and he’d expect them in. It was already noon in Vermont, so wasn’t he at least curious as to why Becca and Wes were nowhere to be found?

“Forget about Davis for now,” she said. “What about Eric?”

“I bet he forgot. I bet he spaced out why he’s there and what he’s supposed to be doing.”

“We drilled it a million times. His memory isn’t that bad.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“He gave me a blow-by-blow description of
The Hound of the Baskervilles,
” she said. “How bad could it be?”
 

“That’s different. That’s a story. He can remember stories.”

“Hmm.” She frowned and closed her laptop. “My guess is he
almost
has it. If we could find a different way to get him the information, instead of making him memorize and repeat it back.”
 

“Good idea. I could get him out of there and try again.” He gestured at the laptop. “Pass it over. I’ll send admin an email and tell them I want to see my brother one last time before I fly home to the States.”

“They told you no,” Becca said. “Zero contact in the first two weeks.”

“I don’t care, he’s my brother.”

“That place has so many rules and regulations. What if you piss this Usher guy off and he gives Eric the boot? Then how do we get to Meggie?”

“We’ll think of something. Becca, please!”

Frowning, she slid the laptop across the table. He pulled up his email and sent a quick message. It said that Wes would be coming for his brother at five-thirty that evening. No need to save dinner—Wes would feed Eric before he brought him back. He apologized for the inconvenience, but didn’t make it sound like it was up for negotiation.

The answer came back from Jerry Usher less than five minutes later. A visit was against the rules, it being within the first two weeks of Eric’s residency at Colina Nublosa, so reluctantly, Usher would have to decline the request. Also, all visitations must be scheduled at least forty-eight hours in advance. But he sincerely hoped that Wes had a safe trip back to the United States, with no travel delays or other annoyances.

Becca sighed when Wes read her Usher’s response. She put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry.”

“Can he do that?”

“You signed papers, right?”

“And what if I show up anyway? I’ll tell him I left my hotel after sending that and never saw his answer. Will they turn me away at the gates?”

“Probably. And then it will make them suspicious. They might even keep a closer eye on Eric, and that won’t help anything.”

“This was all a mistake,” he said. “I shouldn’t have put him in there.”

“Maybe not. I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

“That’s generous,” she said. “It was my idea.”

Wes had plenty to feel guilty about. Becca had had more faith in Eric than he had. And maybe she was right; maybe Wes was overplaying his brother’s handicap. Eric had enough challenges without people holding him down when he had a chance to do some genuine good. Why shouldn’t he be able to rise above his limitations? Eric certainly
wanted
to help. He looked up to his brother and his uncle and adored Becca.
 

Wes even suspected that Eric’s obsession with Sherlock Holmes was because of their investigations. Holmes was like the super-hero version of their team, using his powers of deduction to force open the dark corners of criminal minds and bring in light and justice.

“Are you angry with me?” Becca asked in a soft voice.

“No, with myself. I shouldn’t have let him go.”

Wes felt guilty for holding his brother back, and guilty for letting him go. For ignoring his misgivings. He wished more than anything they hadn’t proven justified. He realized glumly that Eric simply didn’t have the tools to do the job.

“Give him a chance,” she said.

“He had a chance. Time to end this. I’ll go up this afternoon and yank him out of there.”

“There has to be another way,” Becca said. “What if we give him more instructions? Eric has an email account, right?”

“Which he never checks unless someone tells him to. And his reading comprehension sucks. Whatever I said, he wouldn’t get. Besides, what if someone is looking over his shoulder while he puzzles over my message? Do they monitor email up there? Does he even have computer access yet? Who knows?”

“I’m just trying to think of something. If only we could get to him outside the facility somehow. Wait a second,” she added. “I saw something on their site about field trips. What about that?”

Wes was still sitting at the computer and pulled up Colina Nublosa’s web page. Yes, there was a big page about field trips, with pictures and flowery prose. One photo showed older people on a boat cruise on the lake, and others showed the younger, higher-functioning residents doing things like canopy walks and even zip lines. According to the site, all residents left the facility once a week, generally with their team of residents at a similar ability level.

“Except there’s no calendar,” Wes said. “I could call and ask what Eric is going to do this week.”

“Right after you got an email denying your request to visit him? Sure, they’d never guess you were up to something.”

“Crap.”

“Hold on.” She was looking over his shoulder and took the computer away and scrolled down. A grin broke across her face. “Check this out.”

Frowning, Wes scanned to the bottom of the page, where she’d put her finger. He’d been skimming quickly looking for a link to a schedule and had missed it the first time. But there it was at the bottom, clear as anything.

Every Sunday afternoon the staff takes residents to hike to the hot springs at Devil’s Cauldron. All residents who are ambulatory and not on behavior restriction are invited to attend.

“And Eric loved the hot springs,” Becca said. “He’ll be sure to go.”

“The springs are open to the public. Anyone could be there.”

He sat back and stared at the birds fussing over the fruit plate. A black squirrel scrambled down from a vine and chased them away so he could steal in peace. At breakfast, one of the other guests, a backpacker from Seattle, had watched the same squirrel scampering in the branches high overhead and excitedly called his buddies out to look at the “monkey.” When the squirrel came lower, the others had a laugh at his expense.

Wes imagined how Eric’s visit to the Devil’s Cauldron would play out. Both he and Becca had worked in care centers; field trips challenged the staff. The mentally handicapped residents, like Eric, were like children in adult bodies. Easy to find trouble up there—boiling water, falls, getting lost in the forest—and Eric would be on a tight leash.

But what about after a half-hour or so? They’d relax their vigil. Sooner or later, he’d wander around with little supervision, much like he’d almost stumbled into Wes and Becca’s lovemaking the previous week. If they positioned themselves well, it would only be a matter of time before they could make contact. And then what? Debrief him? Give further instructions? Maybe nothing more than verify that he was okay, that they could leave him in there until he completed his mission.

“Okay,” Wes said at last. “But if he doesn’t show, or if we see him and anything seems off, that’s it. He’s my brother, so I make the call. I’ll pull the plug.”

Meggie stepped uneasily to the edge of the cave where it dropped into the hillside. Behind her, Benjamin tied the 150-foot rope to a boulder, while Kaitlyn spread a tarp and laid out their gear for one last check. An hour had passed since they’d abandoned the two sick men at the truck. For a cave so nearly unexplored, it was easy to find with the GPS. A few minutes wandering around, calling out numbers, and then Meggie saw it yawning black and round in front of her, a mouth opening into the mountain.

The sun had climbed into the sky as they picked their way up the brush-covered, rock-strewn foothills of Nevada’s Snake Range. Glaring down from a brilliant blue sky, it sent heat shimmering from the desert floor far below them. But instead of shedding layers, they were pulling on long-sleeved cotton shirts in preparation for the subterranean chill. Night and day, summer and winter had little meaning two hundred feet underground. They put on tight-fitting leather rappelling gloves.

Meggie lay on her belly and crawled the last few feet to the hole, then shone a flashlight into its depths. The entrance was about ten feet across and dropped straight down like a well. Only the first fifteen feet lay exposed to daylight, before the shaft bent behind a jutting boulder that obscured the rest of the drop. In spite of the dry climate, water seeped from the cave walls a few feet below the surface, then dripped onto the boulder, which sprouted moss until it looked like a fuzzy green skull.

Benjamin crawled to her side and peered down. “Watch that boulder—that’ll be slick. Don’t stop there to rest, not unless you want to slip free and bash your head.”

“Not to mention dropping rocks down on whoever is below,” Kaitlyn said. She stood above them. “There’s loose rubble on that rock.”

Meggie, still on her belly, glanced up, surprised to see the other woman leaning over the edge with no fear. The sky framed her body and shifting clouds made it look like she was moving. Meggie’s head swam with vertigo. She scooted back from the edge.

According to notes from the only other cavers who had made the descent, the initial drop was 120 feet, where they would land on a rocky ledge wide enough for several people to bivouac, while they prepared ropes for a second descent, this one a shade under 80 feet, taking them to the bottom. Once at the bottom, they’d find the tunnels and caverns that were their primary goal.

There were so many things to fear about caving: that frightening moment when you first leaned back into the hole and trusted the rope, the tight squeeze through a passageway that felt like getting extruded from a birth canal, and the exhausting ascent back to the surface with vertical ascenders, a punishing, inch-by-inch climb that turned leg muscles to jelly. But trusting your companions shouldn’t be one of them.

Yet that was where Meggie was at. She wanted Duperre here, confident and mature. An experienced trip leader. Not lying, conniving Kaitlyn and the cousin she bullied around. And not when Meggie couldn’t shake the feeling that the other woman had something to do with the sick men back at the truck.

Get over it. She has to rely on you, too. She’s not going to drop a rock on your head. And those guys ate something weird at the diner, that’s all.

They put on the rest of their gear, double-checking the most critical things—helmet and lights, spare batteries, and water supply. They tested each other’s harnesses, then Meggie and Benjamin each gave a tug to the rope Kaitlyn had tied for the descent. It was secure on the boulder, and the knot tied correctly.