The Devil's Cauldron (8 page)

Breakfast went fine. Kaitlyn was all charm with the two other men, and barely flirted with her cousin at all. She was sweet as the high-fructose, fake maple syrup that came in pitchers to the table to drench their pancakes. Duperre updated the caving plan, then quizzed them on gear and supplies. Outside, they dropped the tailgate on Duperre’s extended-cab pickup to double-check equipment: boots, headlamps and helmets, ropes and harnesses, surveying gear, caving packs, a first aid kit, and everything else on the list. He had a clipboard and he physically checked them off one by one. Duperre even checked the food supplies, and broke open another pack of energy bars, which he passed around to put in their packs.

“You never know what we’ll find down there,” he said. “Hate to call it quits early because someone has the munchies.”

The older man’s professionalism calmed Meggie’s nerves, and by the time they crammed into the truck and headed east into the Snake Range, she found herself getting excited about the cave.

But when they crawled into the hills on a dusty ranch road, Duperre started getting sick. He pulled over on a steep, winding turn, then bent over in front of the bumper, breathing heavily.

“You okay?” Meggie called.

“Yeah, I’m good. Give me a minute.”

“What, is he carsick or something?” Kaitlyn asked HalfOrc, but the other man shrugged.

He came back still pale, but looking stronger. “Sorry, guys. That doesn’t usually happen to me.”

They spent another quarter of a mile bumping over and through ruts before he had to stop again. This time he stomped down the emergency brake, staggered out, and puked his guts over the edge of the hill.

HalfOrc got out, too. He walked around for a few seconds, then came back with his hand over his belly and a deep scowl on his face.

“Don’t tell me you’re carsick, too,” Kaitlyn said.

“I don’t get it,” Duperre said when he got back. “I never get motion sickness. Not like this.”

“Feel like I’m going to have a bad case of the shits,” HalfOrc said. “Maybe it was that greasy spoon where we ate this morning. Food poisoning.”

The other three exchanged bewildered glances. None of them were affected. Finally, Benjamin dug around in his pack for Dramamine, which the two sick men took.

Meggie spread the map in the backseat. “We’re almost to the trailhead. Another twenty minutes.”

“I can hold on that long,” HalfOrc said. “How about you, dude?”

Duperre nodded. “I’m sure I’ll be better once we stop driving.”

But by the time they reached the spot marked on the map and parked, the two men had already stopped again and thrown up the Dramamine, then some Pepto Bismol, which came up pink. HalfOrc rushed off into the scrub oak with a roll of tissue. Moments later, explosive noises came from behind the trees.

Benjamin and the two women lined up the gear, then paced around the truck. The two sick men weren’t getting better. HalfOrc let out a flurry of curses from the brush.

Meggie came back to the vehicle, still in the middle of the ranch road, where Duperre lay in the truck bed with his pack as a pillow and one arm draped over his eyes. “I’m wondering if we should get you back down.”

He peered out. “What, you mean, a hospital?”

“You tell me.”

“It’s not that bad. I think I hit the worst.”

Meggie glanced up at the sky, with the sun rising from behind the mountains to the east. They were still in the shadow of the range, but the sunlight was spreading across the valley floor and would soon be overhead. A wide, sagebrush-strewn plain stretched thirty or forty miles to the west, unbroken by any towns or other signs of human civilization. A second, smaller range lifted its dry, brown shoulders above the valley floor on the opposite side. No clouds, no pollution, just a view that stretched forever. A single contrail split the blue dome like a smear of white frosting.

“The thing is,” Meggie began, worried he would protest. “I don’t think you’re fit to rappel into the cave. Sorry, that’s the way I see it.”

Duperre looked disgusted. “No, I can’t go down. HalfOrc, either.”

“Not your fault. We’ll scrub the descent.”

“Damn it!”

“No way,” Kaitlyn said from where she was standing with Benjamin in front of the bumper. She came around and he followed. “It’s totally not your fault,” she said to Duperre, “and I’m not blaming you for anything, but we came a long way to explore that cave.”

Duperre lifted his head from the pack and squinted at her. “Yeah, I know.”

“You’ve got everything you need right here,” Kaitlyn said. “Including a second GPS. We’ll hike up to the cave. It’ll take a bit to get set up. If you guys feel better in the next half-hour or so, come find us. Otherwise, we’ll be back tonight.”

“That’s fair enough,” Duperre said. “We can be sick here just as easily as back at the motel.”

HalfOrc made puking sounds from the bushes, followed by another string of expletives.

“The trip plan has five people,” Meggie protested.

Kaitlyn shrugged. “We already amended the plan once. We can do it again.”

“That was different,” Meggie said. “That was adding a person, figuring out the logistics. This is a question of safety.”

“Three people can make a safe descent,” Duperre said. “If there’s an experienced trip leader.”

“I’m experienced,” Kaitlyn said. “I’ve done twenty-seven descents, led six times.”

“We’ll stay behind and serve duty as surface watch,” Duperre said.

Meggie didn’t like it. “Three people is the
minimum.
We’re out in the middle of nowhere. It’s desert. There’s a hike, there might be rattlesnakes.”
 

“Stop worrying,” Kaitlyn said. She put her hands on her hips with an impatient look. “These two will be waiting at the truck if anything goes wrong.”

“They’re sick, they’re in no shape to—”

“They’ll be fine in a couple of hours, I’m sure,” Kaitlyn said.

“Oh, really? And how do you know that?”

Kaitlyn’s face darkened. “What is that supposed to mean? You think I had something to do with this?”

“I don’t know, did you?”

“Come on, Meggie,” Benjamin said. “That’s not fair.”

“I’m sure she didn’t,” Duperre said. “It was that crappy diner food.”

“Whatever, I don’t like it. Come on, Duperre. Help me out here. She wasn’t even a part of the plans twelve hours ago, and now she’s the trip leader?”
The older man looked uncertain. He also looked like he was working up to puke again and was in no shape to make this kind of decision. He glanced at Benjamin as he lifted himself and shifted to the edge of the truck.

“Your call, man,” Duperre said. “You’re the tie breaker.”

No, don’t put it in his hands.

Duperre leaned over the edge and barfed up a little. Then he was wracked with several rounds of dry heaves, before he finally eased back down with a groan.

“We’ll do it tomorrow,” Meggie told Benjamin. “We had a buffer day in case the weather turned crappy or something.”

He frowned. “That would have us driving half the night to Vegas so we could catch our flight on Sunday morning.”

Kaitlyn put her hand on his arm. “And I don’t even have that option. I’ve got to go back tomorrow.”

“You do?” he asked. “You never said that. I don’t know. Maybe Meggie is right. Sometimes you have to cancel. It’s not the end of the world.”

“You know you’ll be sorry if we don’t give it a shot.”

Meggie stared in frustration as Kaitlyn quite blatantly manipulated him. You couldn’t blame Duperre for giving in—he didn’t know Kaitlyn except online. But didn’t Benjamin know by now his cousin’s true character?

“Okay,” he said. “I guess we can.”

“Oh, come on,” Meggie said.

He gave a sheepish shrug. “Sorry, Megs. Don’t be mad.”

Even then Meggie knew she should balk. If she refused to go down, Benjamin and Kaitlyn would have no choice but to scrub. They could either try again tomorrow or not. Duperre and HalfOrc would think she was overreacting, but what did that matter?

When Meggie was eleven, she had gone to Six Flags as part of a classmate’s birthday party. Because her uncle and aunt were unmotivated to help her develop a social life, she’d had few opportunities to make friends among her peers, and so she was terrified of standing out. She had climbed into one of those swing carousels that spun a bunch of kids fifty feet above the ground, when she discovered that the buckle of her harness wouldn’t latch. It was supposed to hold her in her seat, but it was broken.

The teenage employee who was supposed to go around checking the harnesses started two swings beyond her as he went around the circle, and in his laziness, stopped just short on the other side. She was going to point out the broken buckle when he came, but then realized in fear when he turned his back that he was never going to check to make sure she was secured. Meggie opened her mouth to yell for him to look at her swing before he flipped the lever and started the ride, but her voice died in her throat. There were girls all around her and they would laugh. And besides, it was probably her fault, not the swing at all.

I’m going to die of embarrassment,
she thought.
I don’t want to look like an idiot, so I’m going to get flung fifty feet in the air and get killed.
 

She struggled in terror with the buckle as the ride picked up speed. Even then, as she passed the bored kid at the controls, she could have screamed for help, but didn’t. At the last moment, the harness latched.

Here she was, a dozen years later, and nothing had changed. She was about to die of embarrassment. Not that she truly believed that Kaitlyn had poisoned Duperre and HalfOrc, but she
might
have. Why not? That was her style. And it was doubtful that Kaitlyn would pull a stunt 200 feet
underground, but she
might.
That was the terrifying thing. Meggie was convinced that Kaitlyn had a shorted circuit in her moral GPS. The little internal computer that said, hey, don’t push someone off a cliff because you don’t like her screwing your cousin.
 

But Meggie had been backed into a corner. And she didn’t speak up. Instead, she laced her boots, slathered sunblock, and strapped on her pack. Then she followed Benjamin and Kaitlyn up the hillside and away from the two sick men at the truck.

And hiked toward the cave in the desert.

Eric woke up in the new facility on his first morning and completely forgot about looking for the pretty lady. Everything was so new and wonderful here in Colin . . . Colina . . .
Foggy Hill.
That’s what Wes said the Spanish name meant. It had a swimming pool and parrots in the trees and eleven different kinds of breakfast cereal. He counted. Eleven!
 

It was only when he was walking back to his table with a third bowl of cereal that he remembered. He happened to glance to one side, at the wheelchair team, sitting around a big table on the veranda. They were eating outdoors. You couldn’t do that in Vermont most of the year. Not when there was snow. Heck, no!

Then Eric stared at the wheelchair people, his mouth open, wondering. They were all ages, young and old, with their heads slumping on their chests while aides spooned food into their mouths. Some had head restraints. One woman wore a string of pearls around her neck, and another old lady wore big diamond rings.

“Come on, Eric,” an aide said. “Nothing to look at. Some of the residents are low functioning. You’ll have to get used to it.”

“Riverwood had wheelchair people too,” he said. “That’s in Vermont. It’s the Green Mountain State.”

“Okay. Go sit down.”

He kept staring. There was something about these seven or eight residents that reminded him of something.

“I mean it,” the woman said. “Go sit down and eat your chocolate crispies.”

“Cocoa Puffs,” Eric corrected. “Chocolate crispies are fake and yucky. They turn to mush in the milk.”

His eyes drifted around the circle and then he saw her, a pretty blond lady.

Oh!

She looked like her picture, just like Wes showed him. Eric stirred himself to motion. When he walked by, her eyes followed. He felt a funny sort of feeling. Like she was a puppy and he wanted to pick her up and hug her and pet her. He wanted to hold her hand and tell her she was going to be okay. In fact, he was muttering it to himself.

“You’re okay. I’m here to help. My name is Eric and I’m from Vermont.”

He realized what he was doing and angrily told himself to cool it. He sat down and crunched his cereal in silence, thinking furiously, but not doing a good job at it. In a minute, the cereal was gone.

Remember,
he told himself as he went back to the counter, this time for a bowl of Captain Crunch.
Sherlock Holmes.
 

Investigate, watch and observe. Elementary. For a moment he forgot he wasn’t very smart.

He stood at the cereal counter so long that the aide from his team came to find him. “Come on Eric, you’ve had enough cereal. That’s your fourth bowl already.”

“But only my second bowl of Captain Crunch!”

The man reached out a hand to take away the bowl, but Eric wouldn’t let go. “No! Two bowls of Cocoa Puffs and two of Captain Crunch!” People turned to look at him.

Then he remembered, Sherlock Holmes! “Oh, yeah. I had enough.” He gave up the bowl and looked at the lady again as he walked back. He had to get to her with Wes’s phone. Too many people here. What would Sherlock do?

Careful, careful, just like he promised Wes and Becca. He must wait until they stopped watching him all the time before he found the lady. Eric could play by the rules, he could show he was what they called RELIABLE. That’s what they always wanted. Like back at the group home. If you weren’t reliable, they came into the bathroom and watched while you took a shower, to make sure you were using soap. If you weren’t reliable, they took away your privileges.

So Eric was reliable. And soon they let him walk around the grounds of Foggy Hill. He looked for the pretty lady.

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