The Devil's Cauldron (15 page)

Eric stood above the Devil’s Cauldron itself, which boiled over, casting gouts of steam like a giant witch’s pot. The way he leaned over to peer inside made Wes nervous and it was all he could do not to shout at his brother to step back. Then Diego pulled him back.

Unfortunately, Eric didn’t set off on his own as they were hoping, but stuck to his aide, chatting. The man nodded, but was watching his other residents, distracted. Together, Eric, Diego, and several others set up in the largest of the unoccupied hot pots. Someone inflated a beachball and they tossed it back and forth.

“What now?” Becca asked. “Wait?”

“Problem is, we have no idea how long they’ll be up here. Maybe not long. They come every week, after all.”

“Let’s try to get his attention. Walk by and see if he notices.” She put a hand on his arm when he started to rise. “Not you, me.”

“After that stunt the other day? One of the aides will recognize you.”

“I’m not the only pregnant woman up here.”

“You’re the only pregnant gringo.”

Becca fixed him with a look that said she thought he was arguing for the sake of arguing. Maybe he was. Nothing wrong with looking after your pregnant wife, he thought stubbornly.

She climbed out of the water and wrapped herself in a towel while Wes watched. And another thing. He was not going to feel guilty for still admiring her body. The glow of her skin, the healthy color in her cheeks. Her enlarged breasts and the extra padding on her hips and butt. Surely he wasn’t the only guy who thought his wife looked sexy when she was pregnant. She saw him watching and raised her eyebrows. He raised his right back, which made her grin.

Becca put on flip-flops and hiked up and around the cauldron. When she came down the other side, Wes saw what she was about. Eric sat in the hot pot with his back downhill, which left him facing back up the hill toward the steaming cauldron. Diego, on the other hand, faced away from her. At the moment, Eric was occupied with tossing the beachball with the other residents, but soon his gaze drifted uphill. She waved at him.

He let out a shout. Wes winced. Becca ducked behind the cauldron, into the narrow gap between the stone bowl and the cloud forest behind. The other residents and their aide looked to where Eric was pointing, but she was now out of sight. They turned their attention back to the game. A moment later Becca reappeared, and this time moved her finger dramatically to her lips, then away and back again.

Shh.

Eric climbed out of the pot. Diego watched him go, but Eric didn’t immediately hike to the cauldron. Instead, he wandered around, looking in on other residents from Colina Nublosa. A few wandered about the hot pots, and the staff left them alone until they bugged other visitors to the springs. Soon, Diego seemed to lose interest and returned to the game. Just when Wes started to worry that Eric had forgotten about Becca, he made his way uphill.

“Way to go, Ruk,” Wes said in a low voice.

Then he casually climbed out of the water himself, grabbed his towel and flip-flops, and hiked up around the cauldron. He met Becca and Eric in the trees to its rear.

Eric spotted him. “Wussy!” It wasn’t a nickname, so much as the result of a slight speech impediment.

Wes grinned and hugged his brother. Eric slapped him on the back.

“What are you doing here?” Eric exclaimed.

“Shh, not so loud. We’re undercover, right?”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot. Sherlock Holmes!”

“That’s right. You were supposed to send me an email.”

“Really?”

“Don’t you remember?” Becca asked. “If you got the video, you’d complain about the food. But if you said the food was yummy, it meant you hadn’t filmed Meggie yet. Don’t you have email?”

Eric’s face darkened and his tongue stuck out a fraction of an inch from the corner of his mouth as he chewed on it. That meant he was confused.

Wes pressed him. “Did you get the video? You were supposed to ask Meggie questions.”

“Oh.”

“You forgot, didn’t you?”

“I tried to remember.” Eric plunged his fingers into his hair and tugged at the roots. Then he made a fist and beat it against his forehead. “I’m a stupid dumb-dumb.”

Wes caught his wrist. “You know the rules, Ruk. You never say that, remember?”

This settled him down, and he nodded gravely. “Against the rules.” His face brightened. “Are you coming to take me home?”

“Not yet.”

He slumped, frowning. “I want to go back to the big house.”

Becca rubbed his shoulder. “We’re not staying there anymore. We’re in a lodge on the other side of the lake.”

“Far away.”

“Not that far,” Wes said. “Take that trail down to the lake, hire a boat, and you’re across. An hour or two, that’s all. Anything goes wrong, we’ll come get you. Don’t worry.”

“I want to go with you to the other side of the lake.”

“Not yet,” Becca said. “Soon, though.” She cleared her throat. “We don’t have much time, Ruk. Tell us everything that happened. Did you talk to Meggie Kerr?”

“She doesn’t talk much. But she’s really pretty.” He blushed.

It took a few minutes to cut through the confused jumble of Eric’s story. He’d struggled to remember the clear and simple instructions. Find Meggie Kerr alone, use Wes’s camera phone to capture her blinking answers to some simple questions, then send an email that the food was terrible. That was the signal to extract him. They’d have enough to bring pressure to get her out of here and back to the States where they could break her out of her LIS.

How frustrating. They’d spent so much time drilling instructions, but the instant Eric stepped onto the grounds of Colina Nublosa, that information evaporated from his mind like steam rising off a hot spring.

He hung his head. “I’m sorry, Wussy.”

“Not your fault, buddy.” Wes turned to Becca. “It’s not going to work.”

“He’s not in any danger, and Davis is giving us a pass, so why not try again?”

The Davis thing was odd, admittedly. It was now Sunday, six days after the flight from San Jose that they had blown off. They should have physically checked in by Wednesday, at the latest. Wes and Becca had been emailing back and forth with Davis, carrying on their work remotely, and he hadn’t yet asked why they weren’t coming out to the house.

Uncle Davis knew. That was the only thing that made sense. Somehow, he’d figured out they were still in Costa Rica, but wasn’t pressing the issue. But if he didn’t care, why had he been so insistent in the first place?

Wes studied his brother, who rocked back and forth on his heels. Eric chewed on his tongue, which still hung out the corner of his mouth.

“We have to try something else,” Wes said, “or the exact same thing will happen. He’ll forget.”

“I’m trying!” Eric said.

“I know you are.” Wes put an arm around his brother. “It’s not your fault.”

Becca threw up her hands, looking bewildered.

“I tried to remember,” Eric said. “I tried, I tried. Stupid bad memory.”

Wes fought down his own frustration and kept his voice even. “Your memory isn’t
that
bad, Ruk. You know the lyrics to movie musicals, right?”
 

Eric responded by belting out the theme song from
Man of La Mancha
in his off-tune baritone. Wes and Becca hushed him again.
 

“Wait,” Becca said to Wes. “He can remember some of it. The part about Sherlock Holmes—
that’s the part that sticks. It’s the
story
that he remembers.” Her voice rose in excitement. “Dramatize the rest of it. Tell it like a story. Do that, and he’ll remember.”
 

It was a great idea. Wes planted a kiss on her mouth, which made Eric hoot in delight.

He turned back to Eric, thinking. “Okay, um . . . so let me tell you a story about Sherlock Holmes and the pirate queen.”

“Make her a princess,” Eric said.

“Right. There was a princess from the far away kingdom of Vermont. Every day for breakfast she ate waffles with maple syrup and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream for dessert. And when she was queen she would banish kale and cauliflower eaters from Vermont, never to return on pain of death.”

Eric guffawed.

“She was happy,” Wes continued, “except then a wizard cast a spell—”

“A witch,” Eric interrupted.

“Okay, a witch. She cast a spell on the beautiful princess and trapped her in a deep dungeon. The dungeon is her body, Ruk. The princess can’t speak, ever—she can’t move—because the witch has trapped her up here.” He tapped his forehead. “If only she could tell someone, she could banish the witch and get her kingdom back.”

“It’s like a magic spell,” Eric said.

“Exactly. She can’t talk because of the spell. She can only blink her eyes. Maybe move one finger.”

“Wow.”

Becca took Eric’s hand. “The princess is Meggie, Ruk. And you’re a knight, coming to free her from the dungeon.”

“I thought I was Sherlock Holmes.”

“Not anymore, not in this story,” Becca said. “You’re a knight. A brave, smart knight. You’re the only one who can help her.”

“Tell me the rest.”

Eric listened, enraptured, while the other two spun a story about the magic phone that could take pictures and break the spell. When they finished, they asked him to repeat the story. He almost got it. So much better than last time. Unfortunately, exactly
how
to work the phone camera eluded him. They’d gone over that part a good twenty times the last time they’d given Eric instructions, so the fact that he couldn’t recall was incredibly frustrating. And it didn’t help that Eric had left the phone in his
bedroom at Colina Nublosa. They couldn’t show him, either.
 

“Okay, Ruk,” Wes said with a sigh. “Let’s go over this one more time. The phone has a green button.” More details. “It’s because the witch tried to poison the knight and a drop of green poison fell on his phone.”

He was reaching now, but couldn’t think of anything else.

“Wes,” Becca said, her voice sharp.

Eric’s aide came around the side of the Devil’s Cauldron. He scowled as he looked this way and that. The frown vanished when he spotted Eric, replaced by a look of relief.

“
Hombre,
you can’t wander off like that. These people don’t want you bugging them, they—” He stopped and sized up Becca and Wes. His eyes widened as he met Wes’s gaze. “Wait, what are you doing here?”
 

Any hope Wes had of slipping away unrecognized vanished. He’d spoken to Diego for several minutes when he dropped his brother off, asking questions about Eric’s care. Playing the concerned family member.

Wes laughed. “How funny. I had no idea you guys were going to be here. We were sitting in one of the hot pots and were totally shocked when we saw Eric.”

Diego’s eyes hardened. “Oh, really?”

Wes thought about forcing his denial. He’d be lying, Diego would know he was lying, and Wes would know that Diego knew. In a social situation, they might each get away with egos intact. Here, that game would be fatal to Wes and Becca’s plans.

Becca seemed to grasp this a split second sooner. “Okay, we’ll admit it,” she said. “We were checking up on Eric.” It was a clever deflection.

“I’m sorry,” Wes said. “I know I shouldn’t have, but I’m having real problems turning my brother over. He’s so far from home, and he’s not used to this place. I needed to see Eric one last time before I flew home—make sure he’s happy.”

“That’s against the rules,” Diego said. “Two weeks, no phone or personal contact. Email, if you want.”

“That seems unfair,” Wes said.

“We didn’t pull that out of thin air. It’s been proven to help residents adjust. If you want to stick around the country, feel free to come back in another week. And after thirty days, you can check him in and out of the facility any time you want. Forty-eight hours notice, that’s all.”

“Sorry.” Wes made his voice sound sheepish.

“Come on,
hombre,
” Diego said. “If Usher gets wind of this, you’ll be the one to get in trouble, not your brother.” He shot Wes a dirty look, then hauled Eric away.
 

“I should have come clean,” Wes told Becca after the other two had left. “Maybe Diego would help us.”

“I doubt it. He’s already bent out of shape that you were talking to your own brother. If he thinks that’s out of line, what would he think if he knew we were trying to get to Meggie Kerr?”

“Point taken.”

“Besides,” Becca said, “if she can blink and move her eyes, everyone there must know she has LIS, and nobody has bothered to help her yet. Why would they start now?”

“Because they don’t understand. They have no idea we can give her back her voice.”

But it was a troubling question. Locked-in syndrome had been defined for decades. Means to communicate directly with a person’s brain had been developed several years ago, and the technology to enable speech and other forms of autonomy were advancing all the time. And it was well known that thousands of people were out there, either suffering in silence, undiagnosed and mistaken for vegetables. Nobody cared.

That was the most maddening thing about their job. It was like the princess in the dungeon who Eric was trying to find. There were real dungeons out there, with thousands of innocent prisoners. Wes wanted to scream it to the world.

Let them go!

“Is Eric going to remember?” Becca asked. “Do you think he’ll get it this time?”

“I hope so,” Wes said. He remembered the suspicious look on Diego’s face. “Because we’re pushing our luck.”

They’d been gradually drifting around the edge of the cauldron to look down on the hot pots and the bathers and hikers dotting the hillside. He spotted a woman waiting near Eric’s team.

She was tall with light brown hair. She didn’t look Costa Rican. When Diego came down leading Eric, she stopped them. No way to hear what they were saying, not from this distance and with the cauldron gurgling so loudly only a few yards away. But Diego’s gestures and the woman’s aggressive posture made it look like an interrogation.