Nightmare Country (37 page)

But something else still mystified her. “What kind of poor people do you suppose those two could be helping? Rafaela told Seferino that they were doing the work of the devil.”

“People on Mayan Cay are relatively well-off.” Dixie stared at the Hotel de Sueños. “There's real poverty on the mainland. But if I know Roudan Perdomo, he's helping Roudan Perdomo. Stefano I've always found inscrutable.”

The side door opened again, and this time a tall figure stepped out. He swung a cloth sack over his shoulder, threw back his head in a wide yawn, and started toward the village.

“Roudan,” Dixie whispered. “Can't believe he's leaving the bar to Seferino at night. It's their busiest time.”

“Apparently off to do the work of the devil.” Tamara started across the cemetery. “Let's see where he's going.”

“It don't have anything to do with us,” Agnes protested.

“We spent all this money to come down here. We should look into anything that seems strange.”

“That'd be everything in this place.” But Agnes was right behind her, and Dixie too.

Roudan moved ahead of them with a relaxed stride, apparently unworried about being followed. He headed straight for the generating plant and slipped into the jungle near the chain-link fence.

“We can't go in there.” Dixie stopped. “It's full of sinkholes.”

“You've lived here for years,” Tamara said. “Haven't you ever been in the jungle?”

“Not very far in. Then I almost got lost.”

“I've been in this way.” Tamara stepped over to the break in the growth. “It's passable if you stay on the trail.”

“When … how? You've only been here two days. Besides, it's too dark.”

The moon was almost full, but it was watery rather than bright. There seemed to be a vapor between it and the earth, and the air seemed to cool even as they talked.

“Agnes, you don't happen to have that little flashlight in your purse? The one you use to find the bathroom at night?”

Careful Agnes was never without her purse, and Tamara had guessed right—never without her flashlight either. She withdrew it, handed it to Tamara. “Shouldn't we go back and get Russ?”

“There's no time. We'll lose him.” Tamara hurried down the trail she'd traveled twice. Once in a dream.

39

Again the smells of the sea receded and the smell of jungle took over. She tried not to think of stinging insects, crawling things that could twine like vines in the branches overhead. The air seemed thick, and though cooling, oppressive. The flashlight was too small to do much good. The tangle of fallen palm fronds, coconut husks, and wet grasses littering their path made it difficult to move quietly or quickly.

“Do you think Roudan has some connection to your daughter or Agnes' husband?” Dixie asked behind her. “Is that why we're doing this?”

“I don't know. But you said yourself that Roudan was behaving oddly. Won't hurt to look into it.” And Backra's father had claimed Roudan was the key to some mystery. Maybe it was all the same mystery. “And it was in here, Agnes, that I saw Alice's shadow.”

When they came to a place where the trail was confused by several paths that could be drainage depressions, Tamara had merely to follow her nose. The sickly, exotic scent of the night-blooming cereus dictated their direction. Agnes had a squelchy shoe from stepping off the trail. She reached out to touch a blossom, and put the other hand over her mouth.

“Night-blooming cereus,” Dixie said. “I think they stink. Bloom every night, close up in the day.”

“Only bloom once a year in Iron Mountain,” Agnes said sadly.

Tamara looked through the vine wall and saw patches of things. Of light and of dark. Pieces of a stone building she didn't remember, on stepped rises and coated with vines and jungle plants. And she thought she heard again that sound of far-off traffic, the distant engines and the angry buzz of tires.

“What's that whirring sound?” Dixie whispered. “You hear it? Like wind … moving through a pine branch or …”

“Sounds like a bunch of bugs to me,” Agnes said. “Don't see that Roudan fella anywhere.”

Tamara moved to another peek hole, and she could see the mosscovered stela with its corner sliced off. Embarrassment, longing, betrayal.… From here the temple mound merely looked like a cone-shaped hill with a few trees and lots of plants angling up its sides, and several droopy palms on top. No stone building on stepped rises.

“I vote we go back to the village.” Dixie slapped at an insect buzzing her cheek. “He's got an entire jungle to lose himself in.”

Agnes still peered through vines. “That hill looks something like Iron Mountain, only smaller.”

A misty cloud made rings around the moon, dimmed its light even more as Tamara led her companions to the place where Backra had shown her a passageway through the vine. She avoided looking at the stela. She did notice the odd shapes along the mound that sleeping shadow weeds could make. If she were the imaginative type, she could see gargoyles and hunched lions and—

Dixie's startled yip had the effect of a gunshot in the stillness. She leaped and danced into the clearing. “Get away from there!”

Tamara played the flashlight on the ground, where the earth moved in a continuous line, angling from the vine wall out into the clearing for as far as the small light could follow it, a flow of tiny bits of jungle debris that seemed to have no end and was about four inches wide.

Dixie stripped off her sandals with a frenzy to match her dance. Tamara knelt well to the side of the tiny river to see a swarm of ants in a procession carrying the bits of leaves and grass on their heads and backs. There must have been a million of them.

“Parachute ants.” Dixie brushed at her legs and skirt. Tamara took the flashlight, and jumping over the busy ants, walked to the base of the mound Backra had called a Mayan temple.

She stepped carefully around the edges of the clearing, looking for a continuation of the trail, but found nothing that wouldn't require a machete to get through. The light flashed over something at her feet, and she bent to pick it up. The flash had come from a metal hinge on the end of a bow to a pair of eyeglasses. The earth was disturbed around her, but she could find no trace of the rest of the glasses. They would definitely have to come back here in daylight.

Tamara forgot her caution and stumbled as she ran back to the two women waiting by the stela.

“Find anything, Nancy Drew?” Dixie asked dryly.

Agnes made a little choking cough and traced the flesh-colored earpiece hanging from the bow with a hesitant finger, touched the tiny transistor inset. “It's Fred's.”

“Now, Agnes, lots of people wear glasses with hearing-aid devices.” But a treacherous hope had ignited in Tamara too.

Thad Alexander tried to sleep sitting up in the air terminal in New Orleans. His Sahsa flight from Belize City had arrived without incident and he'd cleared customs shortly before noon, only to find his connection to Los Angeles, Seattle, and on home canceled by an airline strike.

There were many good things about being out of touch with the rest of the world, but they all ended abruptly when you tried to reenter. The motels nearby were booked. He was promised the possibility of a seat on another airline if he was present for standby anywhere from now to eternity. He waited in line for a hamburger for lunch; and steak, rare, for dinner.

Even the longed-for juicy red meat didn't do it.
Takes a while to get back into the swing
, he told himself, and found an uncomfortable plastic chair molded for humans under five-foot-five. He read a complete
New York Times
and two local papers. That took up most of the afternoon and evening. No mention of weird stuff going on in the Caribbean, just the usual hurricane watch for this time of year. The rest of the world was cracking up as per usual, but nothing like what he'd just lived through.

Eventually he found a padded chair, still plastic, which relieved the wait a little. He scanned the
Times
again, down to the tiniest of items. Nothing even going on in the Bermuda Triangle.
Well, so much for reality
. He dozed, slept, shifted, began to ache in places he hadn't known existed. And then he began to dream, but just in snatches, which was the way he slept. The dream woman, Tamara, looked at him with My Lady's limpid amber eyes—sullen now, accepting death.

“There are always hurricanes in the Caribbean this time of year,” he said to the young woman in the chair next to him, who was nursing a baby, and realized he was awake but had been dreaming.

“Really?” She tried to shift herself without shifting the baby. “What do people who live there do in a hurricane?”

He looked at the exposed breast and thought of Martha Durwent and the blood streak running from her head down across her breast in the dive boat. “I don't know.”

He shifted again, dozed again, woke again. The mother and the breast with the baby on it were gone. The man with a beard who sat in their place turned a page in his newspaper. “I don't know either. But how do you save the world? Have you seen this?” He slapped the paper angrily and dropped it in Thad's lap. Thad shifted, dozed.

About three o'clock in the morning Thad gave up and went in search of a coffee machine. He leaned against it, stuck in two quarters, and saw Bo Smith's expression, when he'd refused to let Thad stay inside himself, where it was safe. The coffee from these machines was always either so thin it had no taste or so thick it laid an instant coating on the inside of Thad's mouth. This cup fit the latter category, and he scraped his tongue against his teeth after every sip.

He stood at a window and watched his reflection against the night and between runway lights. The lines on his face, accentuated by the fitful sleep and the shadow-shading of uneven lighting, showed Thad what the years were doing and what they would bring.

The coffee had been one of his poorer ideas, and it hit his empty stomach like a fireball. He was soon in search of a breakfast. In the cafeteria he sat next to three men whose manner and dress pegged them as salesmen trying to make the best of a trying situation. Thad ate some pancakes he didn't want to assuage his stomach, and listened to them swap stories, laugh. He thought of his own survivor-induced relationship with Don Bodecker and Harry Rothnel.

In the men's room Thad stared at his unshaven chin and saw the dream woman of whose pain and loss he'd taken advantage, been helpless not to. He put both hands on the edge of the sink, rested his head against the mirror, and clamped his eyes shut. But he saw the gray monster swelling above a maddened ocean, life preservers from the dive boat flinging out to the ends of their rope tethers, shining an odd luminous white against a sooty sky.

He gripped the sink so hard his fingers ached, but saw the empty stretch of water where the
Ambergris
should have swung to anchor, the lone pelican diving into the water in the same area and as if the
Ambergris
had never been. Sweat prickled on his face. He smelled the cloying blossoms on the vine wall, saw Roudan Perdomo against the moonlit temple mound.

He left the terminal building to walk a concrete parking ramp in a night warm and scented with exhaust fumes. Thad had a premonition of his own death if he should return to Mayan Cay, and of the endless torment of never knowing if he didn't.

40

Neither Tamara nor Agnes could sleep that night. Russ had been off to the village bars with his new friends from Alabama when they returned from the clearing.

The morning dawned cool and cloudy, with a stiffer breeze off the sea. They had to shake Russ awake and coax him into waking Don and Harry. Tamara even talked Dixie into allowing her to cook an early breakfast for them all in the Mayapan's kitchen.

“You got us up for this?” Harry picked up the glasses' bow and set it down again.

“That little woman gets on a toot”—Russ mopped egg yolk with toast—“and you might as well give in right now, brother.”

“It might be nothing, but it was too dark last night to see that much.” Tamara squeezed Agnes' hand. “And it might be bad news. But three stalwart men cannot let us gals wander around in the jungle alone. Can you? Aren't you still curious?”

The three stalwarts exchanged blurry glances.

“I'm not going anywhere.” Dixie poured another round of coffee. “There's weather moving in, and I've got a hotel to run. There could be flight cancellations, stranded guests. And I don't like the way the sky looks. I vote we call the whole thing off.”

“This is Fred's. I'd know it anywhere.” Agnes put the bow in her purse. Then she patted the purse. “I'm going in to see that place in daylight.”

“Those things all look alike. Could be anybody's.” But Russ Burnham looked defeated again.

Tamara couldn't budge Dixie, but within the hour had the rest straggling toward the power plant. “If it is nothing … at least we'll know.”

My Lady shivered in the cemetery. She looked up as the door to the man's house opened, but he didn't come out to leave food for her. Instead, another came to lean on a post of the house and scan the sky, listen to the water, fold her arms above a swollen belly.

No birds in the sky this morning, no seabirds screeching arguments over fish heads and entrails at the water's edge. Waves roared against the surf. Even the water rolling against the beach foamed with anger, crept closer to the tombstones.

My Lady could smell rain, far off yet, but coming. The heaviness in the air pressed on her body and ears. She scratched at her shoulder with the toenails of a hind foot and whined softly. She glanced at the other dogs who inhabited this graveyard to see if they were getting nervous, and caught the woman with the bloated belly watching her.

Thad Alexander looked down on piles of dirty, lumpy clouds from his window seat on the 737 over the Gulf of Mexico. The sun shone up where he was, and the cloud cover which seemed to be only a matter of yards beneath the plane looked ominous, impenetrable.