Betrayed (38 page)

Vicki swallowed as Cesar glanced at the box showing against the canvas of the knapsack. “So, if you don’t think it was poachers, what else could it be? You must have some idea.”

 “I know nothing of which I haven’t told you. Only that it is an evil and dark
zona
of the sierras, and I did not wish to go there. Nor do I wish to go back. But I will take you, if only because I do not wish you to be lost or hurt, and you are Holly’s sister, and like her will go whether I say yes or no. But you must in turn swear to me that you will leave tonight as you have said.”

Cesar looked so unhappy that Vicki would have backed down if the urgency of her mission were not so strongly upon her.

“I promise,” she said gravely.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Vicki curbed impatience as Cesar wheeled out his bike and tucked a water bottle and food into a handwoven bag looped across his chest. But the sun was barely clearing the far shore of Lake Izabal when they finally started up the trail rising from the waterfall to parallel the stream that supplied the center with its water. At first the path was so steep, the underbrush so thick and tangled, that they had to walk the bikes.

But he vegetation thinned as they climbed higher. Pausing to look back, Vicki was amazed again to see how quickly the canopy had swallowed up the center buildings. Her calf muscles were protesting when the slope flattened toward the top of the first ridge, the path becoming a meandering zigzag that still led upward but not steeply. When Vicki saw Cesar mount his bike, she swung a leg over hers as well, the shift of muscles involved a relief.

Until now they’d been paralleling the rush of water, but as they reached the top of the ridge, the path made an abrupt left to wind its way along the summit. The undergrowth was less dense here, the trail clear enough to ride. But the cloud forest canopy was still well above Vicki’s head, closing in on both sides, so she had time to catch her breath before a curve of the trail and a gap in the vegetation gave her the first clear glimpse of what lay beyond the ridge.

She lost her breath. Straight ahead the mountainside tumbled down for hundreds—perhaps thousands—of feet into a long valley. To either side, fold after emerald fold rose up from either flank of that valley to merge at last into a gray-blue that could be even higher mountain peaks, cloud banks, or the distant horizon of the sky.

Here was the wilderness Vicki had flown over with Joe, but this was far more intimate than a plane’s cabin. The chatter and caw and twittering of the fauna. The pungency of leaf and moss and earth. The taste of sweat trickling down her face and the coolness of a breeze fanning her cheeks dry.

The gash in that curtain of green had been ripped when lightning had struck down a hardwood of a species Vicki didn’t recognize. Dismounting, she propped her bike against the exposed roots of the fallen hardwood and climbed onto a moss-covered trunk. From here she could see a brown ribbon of water winding through the valley. A flowering tree thrust out yellow blossoms from the steep slope a few meters away. Far in the distance, the silver thread of a waterfall sprang out over a rock face.

But there was no sign from this angle of the overgrown clearings in Holly’s photos, and when Vicki heard Cesar’s impatient whistle, she remounted and rode on down the trail.

The path did not again become too steep to ride, though they had to lift the bikes across occasional fallen trees or streams. Greenery closed back in around Vicki, and she caught only intermittent vistas of sky and mountains and valley below. From those glimpses she knew they’d left the first ridge behind the center and were now following the left flank of that mountain valley. Somewhere in this same flank was the biosphere service road. But of this Vicki saw no sign, though other trails crisscrossed their path. She soon realized she’d have been hopelessly lost without the metallic glint of Cesar’s bike as her focus point.

Most of the trails were wide enough only to give passage to their bike wheels and might have been worn by either human or animal feet. Or both since two- and four-legged wanderers alike tended to trace the same paths of least resistance. But two paths they intersected were wide enough for a cart with ruts still distinguishable through a riot of foliage. A reminder these mountains had once been home to any number of human habitants.

Though as Vicki had assured Cesar, they saw no sign of human life, neither armed patrols nor the Mayan highlanders who’d lived scattered throughout these ridges and valleys. Of animal life, by contrast, there was ample evidence. Without the noises of engines and too many humans to spook them, the forest residents made no effort to evade these two odd but quiet intruders. A herd of brocket deer had to be shooed from the trail. A peccary burst across Vicki’s path so that she almost lost control of her bike. A troop of howler monkeys chose to follow the bikes, their leaping figures and excited chatter keeping abreast in the branches overhead.

When across the trail dipped a flash of color that might have been a macaw or even a quetzal bird, Vicki found herself letting out a sigh of pleasure. Tonight she’d be leaving these mountains, and the hours ahead promised any amount of unpleasantness. But for this moment she’d been offered a gift she’d been longing for her arrival—to see these mountains, the cloud forest habitat, as they’d been created before humankind had touched them.

Up ahead, Cesar showed no hesitation as to where he was going. So for this brief reprieve, Vicki let slide away the purpose for this journey and gave herself up to the delight of sights and sounds and smells, the adrenaline of pushing herself and bike over the curves and bumps of the trail so fast she couldn’t have spared time for thought had she chosen.

It was almost a shock when Vicki had to brake to keep from running into Cesar’s back wheel. He’d stopped at a massive rock slide that had ripped open the view to the valley below. Perhaps even the same they’d scrambled down to reach the helicopter. She immediately recognized the original of Holly’s photograph as she joined Cesar at the edge of the rock fall. The same vista she’d glimpsed yesterday from the service road not long before the pickup stopped.

There was the valley floor with its winding riverbed. Beyond, the Sierra de las Minas range rose like cresting green waves. The silver ribbon of the waterfall was much nearer now and bright in the midmorning sun. Down on the valley floor and scattered along the nearest flank were the overgrown clearings that in Holly’s photo had been white, pink, lilac, and red.

Vicki glanced at her watch. Not much over an hour. The trek hadn’t taken as long as she’d anticipated. But then the mountain bikes had probably made as good time as the pickup over that rutted service road. Beside her, Cesar was studying the valley as intently as Vicki.

They hadn’t exchanged a word since leaving the center, and Vicki’s voice echoed louder than she’d anticipated as she asked, “How far are we from the service road?”

If the sound of her own voice startled Vicki, Cesar started as though he’d been stung. He was shivering, his rapid breathing not from the hard ride they’d just completed.

“It’s okay,” Vicki whispered. “There’s no one here. We haven’t been seen. We’re not going to be seen.”

His shivering abated, but he shook his head. “This is not a good place. We should not stay here.”

She looked around, puzzled. Except for the vista the landslide had allowed, she saw nothing different from any other piece of the trail over which they’d ridden. The horror in Cesar’s eyes would seem no more rational than the panic that had struck Vicki so vividly and painfully those first minutes on the plateau.

And perhaps just as real. Which made it all the more remarkable that he’d brought her all this way, exactly where she’d asked him to, without protesting or turning back.

“We won’t stay long. I promise,” Vicki assured gently. “Just a few minutes, okay?”

Vicki unslung her knapsack. She didn’t reach for the binoculars she’d placed there. Not yet. If what she expected to see was there, she’d know at last—or thought she would—why Holly had died, if not at whose hand. But for just a short while longer, she’d hold on to the contentment of this pilgrimage. Long enough to say good-bye.

She took time for a drink of water, then lifted out the cardboard box. As she did so, Cesar pushed the bikes off the trail deep into a tangle of ferns and elephant ears. An unnecessary precaution, surely, but maybe it would make him feel easier.

Vicki focused completely on the box she cradled. Scrambling across the broken rock to a shallow ledge that had survived the landslide, she sank cross-legged at an angle that didn’t show the overgrown clearings. Settling the box on her lap, she opened it. But she didn’t immediately reach for its contents.

Near her boot, a fern curved upward to form a feathery arch through which Vicki could see the vast panorama of the Sierra de las Minas range. Above her head a tangle of wide fronds and vines had woven her own private shelter. A rush of water couldn’t be the falls across the valley but some closer cascade out of sight. A monkey screeched from a branch overhead. The smell of rich loam where her boots had broken through moss caught at the back of her nostrils.

Only a few weeks ago, these same sights and sounds and smells had provoked in her as much panic as Cesar had just displayed. Now they were familiar and vastly comforting. So familiar that when Vicki shut her eyes, she could almost imagine herself the small child who somewhere in her elusive memory had played in these mountains.

Yes, we were digging in the dirt. We were building a house. Holly was humming. There was a monkey. And a boy too. A Mayan boy
.

The tranquility of her reminiscence must have reached Cesar because Vicki felt a quiver of moss under her boots as he joined her. With a quiet sigh that no longer held fear, he sank under the green roofing of their shelter.

Vicki didn’t open her eyes. Was it only Evelyn’s photos and stories that were bringing images to her mind? Or did she really remember a tall, blond giant with laughing eyes and strong arms lifting her high? Long, dark hair spilling across a gentle face and a soft, sweet voice singing lullabies? And a love that was suddenly as warm and real around her as a soft comforter?

I was loved!
The thought actually stunned Vicki with its force.

All my life I’ve thought of myself as somehow alone and abandoned, fighting for my place against a world that was so full of injustice and cruelty and grief. And yet I was loved. Not by just one set of parents but two, because Mom and Dad Andrews loved me too. And Holly. And Evelyn, though I never knew it
.

And You, Father God, who made me and created all this. Even when I couldn’t see You, didn’t want to believe You were still there, You loved me. You sent me people to love me. How could I have been so blind?

Yes, Vicki had been more fortunate in her life than she’d ever been willing to recognize.

It had been Joe who’d first pointed that out. And how angry she’d been with him for it. Just as it was Joe who’d quietly prodded Vicki toward Holly’s unquestioning faith that there really was a purpose and design and loving hand behind the mess humanity had made of this world.

Only now was Vicki realizing just how many times Joe had been there in these last weeks, for all that he’d seemed to avoid her. Shielding her from prying eyes and tongues at Holly’s funeral. And from Alpiro’s cold fury at the airstrip. Singing beside her in the little thatched church. Smashing through that roadblock. Gentling a hysterical child. Backing Vicki up, calm but unyielding, against Michael’s icy demands.

In fact, Joe had stepped forward—reluctantly, caustically, but there— every time Vicki had called on him, and often enough when she hadn’t. So why had she turned so automatically to Michael when she’d needed help?