Two Graves (44 page)

Corrie reached around by the door to pull out the seat belt, fumbling for the latch, which had somehow slipped down in between the seats. As she did so, she felt a sudden movement behind her, turned partway, and felt a steel arm whip around her neck and a hand stuff a cloth into her face, choking her with the stench of chloroform.

But she was ready.

Hand tightening around a box cutter she’d kept hidden up her sleeve, she brought it up sharply, slicing deep into the meaty part of Foote’s palm and twisting as she did so. Foote roared in pain, dropping the cloth as he grasped at his injured hand. Corrie twisted all the way toward him and brought the blade of the box cutter up against his throat.

“Gotcha,” she said.

Foote did not reply. He was gripping his injured hand.

“Just what kind of an idiot do you take me for?” she said, pressing the edge of the blade deeper into his throat. “Maybe you fooled my dad with your working-class-hero bullshit. But not me. I had you pegged from the beginning. The only honest salesman on the lot, my ass. It was all just too nice and neat and convenient. And that crap about an itemized bill in the safe, for frame-up services rendered? Shit.”

Quickly, before he could recover his wits, she felt through the pockets of his coat and pants, found a heavy-caliber revolver, pulled it out, and pointed it at him.

“So what the hell is really going on?” she asked.

Foote was breathing heavily. “What do you think? A scam. Something a lot sweeter than skimming off a few interest points here and there. I can cut you and your dad in.”

“Like hell. My dad probably started to smell a rat—that’s why you framed him.” She gestured with the gun. “I know you must have figured out where his cabin is. You probably got here early, cased the joint, and saw me emerge onto the main road.” She took a deep breath. “Now this is what’s going to happen. You’re going to drive up to the cabin. I’m going to have this gun trained on you the
whole time. First, you’re going to tell my dad the whole story. Then we’re going to call the police. And you’re going to tell them the story. Understand?”

For a moment, Foote remained motionless. Then he nodded.

“Okay. Drive slow. And no funny business, or I’ll use this.” The fact was, she’d never shot a gun in her life. She wasn’t even sure the safety was off. But Foote didn’t know that.

She kept well away from Foote, covering him with the handgun, as he eased off the shoulder onto Old Foundry Road, then made the turn onto Long Pine. Nothing was said as he made his way up the switchbacks.

A hundred feet from the turnoff to the cabin, she gestured with the gun again. “Stop here.”

Foote stopped.

“Kill the engine and get out.”

Foote complied.

“Now. Walk toward the cabin. I’ll be right behind you. You know what’ll happen if you try anything.”

Foote looked at her. His face was exceedingly pale, with beads of sweat despite the cold. Pale and angry. He began walking toward the cabin, dead twigs snapping beneath his feet.

Corrie felt a hot rush of adrenaline coursing through her, and her heart was beating uncomfortably fast. But she’d managed to keep her voice calm, keep any quaver out of it. She kept telling herself she’d been in worse situations—a lot worse.
Just stay cool. Stay cool and this will all turn out all right
.

Just as they came up to the cabin door, Corrie heard the latch turn. The door opened suddenly, hitting Corrie in the wrist. With a cry of pain, she dropped the gun.

Her father stood in the doorway, looking from Foote to her and back again. “Corrie?” he asked, his face a mask of confusion. “I heard noises. What are you doing here? I thought you were going to town—”

Corrie leapt for the gun, but Foote was quicker. He grabbed it, shoving her roughly back at the same time. Jack Swanson stared
uncomprehendingly at the gun as Foote raised it toward him. Just at the last moment, Jack leapt back into the wooded area behind the cabin, but the gun roared and Corrie could tell from the way her father’s body twisted around that the bullet had hit home.

“You bastard!” she screamed, running at Foote, the box cutter raised. But Foote wheeled around toward her, slamming the butt of the handgun into her temple, and abruptly the world shut down.

She came to rapidly, her brain clearing. She had been hastily bound with plastic cuffs, hands and feet, and dumped unceremoniously in the backseat of Foote’s car, where she was propped sideways.

She waited, unbearably tense, straining, listening. She had planned it all so carefully—and it had all unraveled in the space of fifteen seconds. What was she going to do now? What was going to happen? Oh, God, it was all her fault—she should have gone to the police instead of trying to handle it herself, but she was afraid they’d just arrest her father…

Then she heard more shots—two of them in rapid succession. And then silence. It was broken eventually by a gust of wind that started the tree branches swaying, knocking, knocking, knocking.

T
HE NATURALIST WAITED IN THE SHADE, RESTING ON HIS
pack, for Senhor Michael Jackson Mendonça to arrive. The man eventually made his appearance, with fanfare: a big, broad, brown, relatively young man with a gigantic smile, long curly hair tied with a bandanna, wearing a sleeveless shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. He bulled his way through the crowd, his loud, friendly voice urging one and all to make way. He extended his hand twenty yards before he even reached the naturalist, striding up and pumping the limp arm vigorously.

“Michael Jackson Mendonça!” he said. “At your service!”

The naturalist retrieved his much-shaken hand as quickly as he could. “I am Percival Fawcett,” he said, somewhat stiffly. At least Mendonça’s English was near perfect.

“Percival! May I call you Percy?”

This was permitted with another stiff nod.

“Good, good! I myself am from New York. Queens! Twenty years in your great country of America. So… I hear you want to go to Nova Godói?”

“Yes. Although it seems that it may be difficult.”

“No, not at all!” cried Mendonça. “It’s a long journey, yes. And Nova Godói isn’t a real town, a
public
town, that is. It’s way up there in the forest. Off limits to outsiders. They’re not friendly.
Not
friendly.”

“I’m not in need of friends,” said the naturalist. “I won’t bother anyone. If there are problems, I can pay. You see, I’m on the trail of the Queen Beatrice. Are you familiar with it?”

Mendonça scrunched his face up in puzzlement. “No.”

“No? It’s the rarest butterfly in the world. Only one specimen was
ever collected—it’s now in the British Museum, specimen number 75935A1901.” His voice took on a reverent tone as he recited the number. “Everyone assumes it’s extinct… but I have reason to believe it’s not. You see—” he was now waxing eloquent on his subject—“from what my research tells me, the Nova Godói crater is a unique ecosystem, with special conditions all its own. The butterfly lived there and nowhere else. And that crater hasn’t seen a professional lepidopterist since the Second World War! So what do you expect? Of
course
no more have been sighted—because no entomologist has been there to see one! But now there is:
me
.”

He fumbled in his pack and extracted a laminated photograph, showing a small brown butterfly pinned to a white card, with writing below it.

Mendonça peered at the image. “That is the Queen Beatrice?”

“Isn’t it magnificent?”

“
Esplêndido
. Now we must talk about expense.”

“That’s the specimen in the British Museum. You can see it’s sadly faded. The original is said to have a rich mahogany color.”

“About the expense,” continued Mendonça.

“Yes, yes. How much?”

“Three thousand reals,” said Mendonça, trying to keep his voice nonchalant. “That includes four days. Plus cost of food and supplies.”

“On top of the boat rental? Hmm. Well, if that’s what it costs, that’s what it costs.”

“All up front,” he added quickly.

A pause. “Half and half.”

“Two thousand up front, a thousand when we arrive.”

“Well, all right.”

“When do we leave?” Mendonça asked.

The naturalist looked surprised. “Right now, of course.” He began counting out the money.

The naturalist sat in the bow with his backpack, reading a book by Vladimir Nabokov, while Mendonça loaded the boat with a cooler
of food, along with dry foodstuffs, a tent, sleeping bags, and his own modest kit bag containing a change of clothes.

In no time they were heading upstream, Mendonça at the tiller, the skiff cutting a creamy wake through the brown water. It was already late morning and Mendonça was thinking that they could reach the last town before the forest by nightfall. While there was no lodging there, they could at least get dinner and—especially—cold beer at a local
fornecimento
. They could camp in a field by the river. And there, he hoped to God, he could find out from someone how to get up the final leg of the Rio Itajaí do Sul to Nova Godói, a place that in truth he had never been to, although he had heard plenty of rumors about it.

As the boat moved up the river, passing various fishermen and river travelers, a nice breeze came over the water, cooling them and keeping away the mosquitoes. They passed the last few houses of Alsdorf, green fields coming into view, some planted with crops, others pastures for cattle. Everything was very neat and tended; that was how things were in southern Brazil. Not like chaotic, criminal-ridden Rio de Janeiro.

The naturalist put down his book. “Have you been to Nova Godói?” he asked pleasantly.

“Well, not exactly,” said Mendonça. “But I know how to get there, of course.”

“What do you know about the place?”

Mendonça gave a little laugh, to cover up his nervousness. He’d been afraid the man might start asking questions like this. While he didn’t believe half the rumors he’d heard, he didn’t want to frighten a customer off.

“I’ve heard some things.” Mendonça shook his head, steering the boat past a group of fishermen hauling in a net.

“How many people live there?”

“I don’t know. It’s not a real town, like I said. It’s on an old tobacco plantation, private property, closed to the public. It’s a German colony of the kind that used to exist all around here, only much more remote.”

“And it used to be a tobacco plantation?”

“Yes. Tobacco is one of our biggest agricultural products,” said Mendonça proudly. To underscore this he removed a pair of cigars from his pocket, offering one to the naturalist.

“No, thank you. I don’t smoke coffin nails.”

“Ha, ha,” said Mendonça, lighting his up. “You are funny.” He puffed. “Tobacco. The plantation was abandoned in the 1930s. After the war, Germans arrived and a small settlement sprang up. They live up there and hardly ever come to town. The Germans down here don’t like them, say they’re Nazis.” Mendonça laughed heartily.

“But you don’t believe it.”

“Here in Brazil, people think they see Nazis everywhere. It’s a national pastime. If there are five old Germans in a town, everyone says,
They must be Nazis.
No—the people of Nova Godói just keep to themselves, that’s all. They are like a… what is the word?… like a cult. Outsiders not welcome. Not welcome at all.”

Another big puff of cigar smoke, then another, leaving two clouds drifting behind the boat.

“Some people seem to think the murders in Alsdorf originate from Nova Godói,” the naturalist said, offhandedly.

“Murders? Oh, you speak of the rumors going around town. People here are so provincial. You ask around in any town in Brazil, and they’ll tell you the next town is all bad people. I lived in Queens, so I don’t fall for that talk.” He laughed again, making light of the rumors. He was surprised the naturalist had picked up as much as he had. No point in spooking the man until he had collected his final thousand.

“How about the
other
rumor? You know—that everyone up there in Nova Godói are twins?”

At this, Mendonça froze. He had heard that rumor, but it was a deep one, only whispered about. How in the world had the naturalist heard of it?

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

“Surely you do. They say the town is freakishly populated with twins, mostly identical. They say there have been experiments, genetic experiments.
Horrible
genetic experiments.”

“Where did you hear this?”

“In a beer hall.”

That seemed improbable. Mendonça felt a small chill. This naturalist was beginning to give him the creeps. “No, I don’t know anything about that. It’s not true.” He cast about, hoping to change the subject. “There’s an old ruin up there, though. A fort. Do you know the history of that?”

“No.”

“It was built by the Portuguese in the late seventeenth century.” Among many of his other jobs, Mendonça drove a tour bus in Blumenau; he knew almost everything. “A group of Franciscan missionaries built a monastery on an island in the middle of the Godói crater lake and converted the Aweikoma Indians. Or at least they thought they did!” He gave a belly laugh. “One day the Indians rose up. They were tired of taking care of the monks’ gardens. Killed them all. So the Portuguese military moved in, turned the monastery into a fortress, killed off or drove away the Indians. And when there were no more Indians, the soldiers left. Later, it was turned into a plantation.”