Don't Look Back (18 page)

The interior glowed unevenly from a few well-positioned gas lanterns—the generator must have gone out in the storm. Eve’s eyes moved hopefully across the uplit faces, but Jay’s was not among them. Everyone looked ragged with worry. At their entrance Claire had pulled herself to her feet, clinging to one of the bedposts, her braces resting on the floor at her side. Gripping her stomach, Sue rocked herself autistically, Harry leaning over her, hugging her shoulders. Fortunato crossed to Concepción, who was huddled in the back with three other
indígeno
workers, and embraced her.

“We had to call off the search,” Lulu said. “Did you find any sign of Jay?”

Will shook his head. “Or the man. There was nothing in that house. No ID, no papers, no mail. Like the guy doesn’t
exist.
”

“We reached the
alcalde,
” Eve said. “But his satellite phone won’t work in the storm. He’s taking a report to San Bellarmino in the morning.”

“With fallen trees and trail washouts, that could take
days.
” Neto threw up his hands. “I told you that going there would accomplish nothing.”

“Not
nothing.
” She pulled the boy’s crayon drawing from the soggy paperback, unfolded it, and held it toward Neto.

Neto’s mouth wavered beneath the mustache, trying for words. The wind’s howls abated, if slightly. The drumming on the roof grew less intense.

Drops from Eve’s outheld arm tapped the floor. The drawing fluttered slightly in her grasp, but she kept it there, on display. Lulu looked from the picture to Neto and back to the picture. The stick-figure evil spirit with Theresa Hamilton in his grasp. The eager crocodile. That blue ring, sliding off.

Lulu took two steps toward her husband, her head on aggressive tilt, her tone low and stern. “Manuel
told
you she got on that plane.”

A choking noise escaped Neto, and it took Eve a moment to realize: He was crying. He gasped and shuddered, his chest seizing. It was like watching a man who had never cried before and didn’t know how. His legs collapsed, dropping him neatly into a sitting position at the base of the wall. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know this happened to her. I thought … thought she got lost and died.” The words came in grunts and sobs. “She was already gone. I just wanted her gone somewhere
else.
What was the difference? What was the difference?”

“So you
lied.
” Lulu’s voice grew quieter, which only underscored its fierceness. “About Manuel getting her on the plane in Huatulco.”

He nodded, tears streaming. The others, shocked into silence.

“Who packed her clothes?”

“I threw them away. I saw her leaving that night. She was out of her head, crazy, searching horror stories on the Internet—”

“
What
horror stories?” Eve asked. “The ones you deleted?”

“I don’t know. Yes. Killers and violence and death—I didn’t
read
them. She was being … I thought she was being hysterical. I told her not to go off into the jungle at night. But she wouldn’t stop. And she didn’t come back. I searched for her all the next day and night.”

“When I took the group overnight to Oaxaca City?” Lulu made a fist in the blond hair at her nape, her knuckles bloodless. “You said you weren’t feeling well—”

“I was sick all day. I
was
sick. In my stomach, my head. But I searched. I found her shoe. I knew she was dead.”

Lulu blinked, beads appearing on her eyelashes. “You didn’t
know.
” The last word packed with fury.

Sue’s voice came as a blurry mumble. “… think I’m gonna throw up.”

Claire shuffle-walked through the workers, grabbed a trash can from the bathroom.

“The authorities didn’t check the flight records?” Harry said. “No one
confirmed
that Theresa Hamilton didn’t get on that plane to Mexico City?”

“Flight records,” Neto repeated. “This was just Manuel’s plane.” He rolled his lips over his teeth and bit them. His head jerked with tiny breaths. “The government put a
billion
dollars into this region. With a
b.
You think they wanted this to happen here any more than I did? In
this
economic climate? It takes
one
Natalee Holloway—”

“Theresa Hamilton,” Eve said.

Sue’s back hunched, and then came the splatter of vomit in the trash can.

“So you covered it up with lies.” Lulu spoke through clenched teeth. “And now Jay…”

Will leaned into the wall, his face pale.

Harry made a solemn gesture at the drawing in Eve’s hand. “We need to get out of here as soon as we can.”

“Before we find Jay?” Will said. “Uh-uh. No way.”

Eve looked across the room at Fortunato. “Is leaving an option in this weather?”

Fortunato started to respond, but Neto, from his exhausted slump on the floor, cut him off. “In a storm like this, we get a
meter of rain
in a day. You can drown just by
breathing.
”

Eve kept her gaze on Fortunato. “It seems to be slowing.”

Once more Neto spoke first. “It will quicken again before morning. And the van will not make it across roads this muddy. Look, I’ll get the generator back up in the morning and—”

“We could cram into the Jeep,” Harry said.

“And fit no luggage,” Neto said. “You want to end your vacation like this, leave all your things—”

“Vacation?”
Lulu said. “You think they’re gonna stay and—
what?
Have
fun
? Make artisanal
pinche
mezcal? Look at you, still trying to protect the lodge. For
what
? To avoid bad word of mouth on the Internet? A woman
died
here. Under
our
care. And Jay, too, now, gone. It’s over. Harry is right. We will pack up and leave.”

Neto kept his head bowed, unable to meet Lulu’s unwavering stare.

Eve said, “Fortunato? What do you think?”

Fortunato glanced nervously at the tourists, then at Neto. Without looking up, Neto waved a hand. “Tell them, Fortunato.”

“Very dangerous for to travel in
tormenta
at night,” Fortunato said.

Sue lifted her sweaty face from the brim of the bucket. “More dangerous than waiting here? With that
man
out there somewhere?”

“He’s one guy,” Claire said. “And we are twelve strong.”

Battle lines drawn. The rain had quieted to a light tapping on the roof. But sporadic rumbling made clear that the storm was far from over. They endured the semi-quiet uncomfortably, eyes averted.

Harry’s hand continued making small circles on his wife’s back. Finally he cleared his throat, straightened his spine. “Okay. I hate to say this—God
knows
I hate to say this—but I’ll be the bad guy since no else is willing to.” He half turned to Will. “In all likelihood”—his nostrils flared—“Jay is already dead.”

Will said, “Watch your mouth, old man.”

“You can’t say that,” Claire told Harry. “You don’t know that any more than this jackass”—a thumb jerk in Neto’s direction—“
knew
that Theresa Hamilton was lost instead of being murdered and fed to a fucking crocodile.”

Harry held up his hands. “Look, we have to face facts. The odds are—”

“What odds would you take if Sue went missing?” Will said.

“—Jay is
gone,
whether he was injured or got lost on his own or that man took him. Especially now, given this storm. We have done
everything
we can for him—”

Will came off the wall, finger-jabbing at Harry. “I don’t recall
you
doing shit.”

“—and the time has come for us to get down off this mountain.”

“That isn’t even a
choice,
” Will said. “We can’t go anywhere. It’s pitch-black out there, and we’re in the middle of a fucking
tropical monsoon.
”

Harry tightened his grip around Sue’s shoulders. “We’re leaving at first light. Storm or no storm.”

Claire wove her arms across her chest, her cheeks rouged with anger. “Jay or no Jay.”

“That’s right.”

Will’s focus swung to Eve. “And you? Where are you in all this?”

Considerations flipped in her mind like quick-dealt cards. No satellite connection and a seven-year-old at home. Loyalty to Jay. The feeling she’d had, minutes ago, of breathing water instead of air. It seemed unthinkable to tell Will,
Sorry, we’re leaving your best friend to a maelstrom and a maniac.
Yet as a mother she had responsibilities beyond Jay—beyond even herself.

Her delay lasted only a second or two, but it felt interminable.

“There’s nothing to decide until the morning,” she said.

Will shook his head and turned away. She felt awful, deflated, and yet there was nothing else she could think to say.

“Everyone grab the basics from their huts and meet back here,” Harry said. “We should stay together.”

Lulu coughed out a single note of disgust, seized the crayon drawing from Eve’s hand, and threw it at her husband. It fluttered to the floor. She walked out, slamming the door behind her.

Eve paused over the drawing, which had settled a few inches from Neto’s feet. “She deserved better than that.”

Neto pinched his eyes, tears leaking around his fingers and thumb.

She left him there on the floor.

*   *   *

Dark clouds bunched, belching lightning at the horizon. The wind and rain had ceased, though the air still felt wet and heavy, thick with a sense that the worst was yet to come, that the storm had drawn back into itself only to ready for the next charge. Slugs pulsed along the walkway, but for once not an insect buzzed about her.

Eve jogged to her hut and started grabbing items at random—change of clothes, dry sneakers, bag of toiletries. It wasn’t until she raised her face to the bathroom mirror that she realized she was crying.

She walked around the pony wall and sat on the bed, then lay back partway on the pillows, her stiff lower back complaining, her feet throbbing. The mattress sagged and creaked. Tears streamed down her temples. She thought of Theresa Hamilton lying in this bed, her journalist brain at work, piecing together a picture that no one else wanted to see. Neto had cleaned out her clothes, deleted her Internet searches, tried to
expunge
her.

What
had
Theresa been looking into with those Internet searches?
Killers and violence and death,
Neto had said.

Eve closed her eyes, put herself with Theresa Hamilton in the chair before the admin-shack computer. Staring at that glowing screen, sandwiched between the credit-card scanner and the battered printer.

Eve’s eyes flew open.

Her racing mind fastened on one of the photographs from the digital camera—the shot of Lulu with her arm around Theresa’s neck. Based on the time stamp, the picture had been snapped the day after Theresa’s sighting of the man dragging the
indígena
into his canyon house. Theresa looked distracted, either by the abuse she’d witnessed or the night expedition to come. Eve recalled the wan smile captured on Theresa’s face. The tenseness of her wide jaw. The thin sheaf of papers clutched to her chest.

Printouts. From an Internet search.

She’d gone to Neto, as Eve had, with her concerns, and Neto had disregarded her, tried to dissuade her. But that hadn’t stopped Theresa. She’d kept on with her investigation. She’d made her own plan. In the photo she’d held the papers tight to her body so as to conceal the text. She didn’t trust anyone to believe her anymore.

Which meant she might have hidden those printouts, maybe in this very hut.

Eve was on her feet, tugging the wardrobe from the wall with a screech. Nothing behind. She searched the toilet tank, beneath the nightstand, in the cracks between the bamboo walls.

Leaning to check behind the door, she paused, a notion scratching at the base of her skull. The rain was still on pause, but thunder rolled through the earth, rattling the floorboards beneath her soles.

With measured steps she walked back to the bed. Parted the mosquito netting. There on the side of the mattress was that split in the ticking, held together poorly with duct tape. She remembered Neto firming the tape to the fabric with a self-conscious smile when he’d first showed her the room:
Make sure no bugs crawl in there.

She gripped the curled end of the tape, the back side barely sticky, and peeled it off. Foam crowded the burst seam, innards welling from a cut. She shoved her hand in up to the forearm and groped around the worn batting. Her fingertips struck something—yes, paper.

The thin sheaf she extracted was yellowed and damp. The ink of the first page had bled, rendering it illegible. Her fingernail lifted the corner, and she stripped off the top sheet, revealing an article printed off thedailynewscairo.com.

Her breath grew louder until it was all she could hear. Thunder registered faintly, something from another world. She blinked once, hard, and refocused.

A sullen man glowered up from the poor-quality news photograph. Massy shoulders. Wispy beard. Burn tissue gnarling jaw and neck.

The heading labeled it an intel shot from an unnamed Egyptian jail in 1998. He looked decades younger in the photo, certainly, his forehead unlined, the bushy beard devoid of gray, and yet his bearing still held an overlord’s gravitas.

The caption at last provided a name to go with the face.

Bashir Ahmat al-Gilani.

The Bear of Bajaur.

Chapter 26

Candlelight licked at the dark corners of the cramped room. A gas lantern remained on the table, dimmed. Bashir leaned forward, letting Theresa Hamilton’s camera dangle from a strap. It spun like an American Christmas ornament over the big man’s face. Jay Rudwick—he’d given his name—stared up from the floor. His arms bound. His torso as well. Thighs, knees, ankles. And throat. The mat beneath him had been replaced by the piece of plywood Bashir used for target practice. Jay’s pinned silhouette overlay the human outline.