The Devil's Cauldron (3 page)

And he was jealous of the money. He wanted every penny to track down the locked-in sufferers. But Uncle Davis had made the reservations from back in the U.S., and he insisted they needed more privacy.

“Did you get my email?” Davis asked. “I sent it about thirty minutes ago.”

“No, we haven’t checked,” Wes said. “Becca was out and just got back. What’s up?”

“That kid in the Bronx checked out. Easiest case all year. Jaleel was there all along, but nobody cared enough to check him out. High brain stem injury, but little brain damage otherwise.”

“What happened to him?” Becca asked.

“He took a bullet to the back of the skull several years ago. Gang violence. He’s still young, and shows a lot of promise if we can get him the right treatment. The
New York Times
is running a big feature on him next week.”
 

Becca frowned. “Please tell me he was a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, and not some gangbanger.”

“A kid, but definitely banging.” Somehow, Davis’s voice software managed to sound equivocating. “He was one of the shooters in the incident.”

“Great,” she said. “Just who we want as the poster boy of the foundation.”

“But he was only fourteen, he didn’t personally injure anyone, and his older brother was killed in the shootout. Jaleel has had a lot of time to think about things inside that head of his. I read a preview of the piece—it will be favorable coverage.”

“I’m all for giving the kid a second chance,” Becca said, “but I’m the media rep, and we need those donations to come in. So no child molesters or anything, right?”

“We find them, we rescue them,” Davis said. “No value judgments.”

She made grumbling sounds.

“So what did you find at Colina Nublosa?” came the voice from Davis’s computer. “Tell me everything.”

Wes gave him the rundown of the past few days’ events. After bombing out with the Ministry of Health, Becca had tried again with the facility itself, sending the director, a man named Jerry Usher, a couple of emails. No answer. One more email to the ministry.

It was urgent that they visit Colina Nublosa. Barring that, even a meeting with Usher off site would be a first step. How about a simple confirmation that they had a patient named Meggie Kerr?

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.

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?”