The Devil's Cauldron (2 page)

The upside of that was that her mind remained sharp and alert. And the downside? That her mind remained sharp and alert. Some days she longed for Ellen’s dazed stare.

They came for Meggie last, and she waited anxiously for relief from the cold drip. No, not yet.

Usher waved them off. “I’ll take this one back myself.” He repeated his instructions in Spanish.

When they were gone, he pulled out his cell phone. What now?

“Jerry Usher here,” he said. “Are you alone? Good. Did you get my email?”

He listened in silence for a few seconds.

“She’s fine, perfectly healthy. A stomach bug a few weeks ago from that pureed crap they shovel down her throat, but otherwise . . . ” He shot Meggie a glance. “In fact, if you looked at her, you’d never know. Looks like she’s lost in thought. Pretty as ever. Only if you watch for a minute, you can see she never moves.”

Meggie’s heart rate picked up its pace.

“What? No, nothing more. Her eyes move sometimes—I think it tires her, so not all the time. She taps her finger once in a while. Can’t move otherwise. The staff know she’s more mentally alert than most.” He paused. “Don’t worry about my people, that’s not the problem.” Another hesitation. “Here’s the thing. We had a second incident.”

Here, Usher started to pace the brick patio again. Meggie couldn’t hear it all, but she got the gist of the conversation. He was telling the person on the other end about the young woman who had stumbled up through the closed gate, claiming to be looking for a path to the hot springs.

“I don’t know if they’re looking for her or not. Might be a coincidence. The thing last week might be unrelated, and maybe we put them off. Or maybe they’re determined. Maybe someone even hired them to get to you.”

He was silent for a long time, and as he looked back at Meggie, his expression darkened. She began to suspect who he might be talking to. Her heart was galloping in her chest now. Could it be, after so many years of silence?

“Okay. If that’s how you feel, you’d better come down.”

Usher hung up the phone. He studied her for a long moment, while the water continued to drip down her back. At last, he took her chair, kicked off the brake, and wheeled her across the patio and toward the center.

A green lizard sunned itself on the stone wall to the right, and tropical birds chirped, whistled, and squawked from the trees dotting the care center’s lawn. To their left, where a green wall of vegetation stretched up the mountainside, a coati emerged from the forest to snuffle its raccoon-like snout in the leaves on the edge, glancing at them with curiosity before returning to its search for food. The sun radiated down on Meggie’s face and bare arms and she stopped shivering.

“You’re going to have company,” he said. “If someone is searching for you all the way down here, we can’t take chances. So they’ve got to come deal with things. How? That’s what I want to know. I mean, I can turn a blind eye—everybody does down here. But these friends of yours . . . ”

A shudder entered his voice as he trailed off. A cold, greasy fear settled in Meggie’s gut.

“I’m not sure a blind eye will do it,” he continued at last. “They might have something uglier in mind.”

Wesley Pilson nervously studied the motorboat bisecting the glass-like surface of the lake. The movement of the boat combined with his inability to hold the binoculars perfectly steady meant it was nearly at the dock before he was certain it was his wife and he relaxed. Becca could take care of herself, but she was entering her third trimester of pregnancy and all this subterfuge made him nervous. And there was no cell coverage up here.

The house jutted from the edge of the forest on a hill roughly a hundred feet above a gorgeous Costa Rican lake, rimmed by dead and dormant volcanoes. Birds everywhere. Green, gold, red, blue, eating the suet or the fruit placed on pedestals by the groundskeeper every morning. Parrots, flying in flocks overhead. Down by the lake, birds with stilt legs and piercing beaks paced through the shallows, looking for fish. Even the occasional quetzal with its impossibly long, brilliant-green tail feathers, perched in the trees behind the house.

Wes’s twin brother Eric, on vacation from the group home back in Vermont, kept a bird log, filled with hilariously misidentified sightings (a flock of ostriches?), written in his childlike scrawl.

Eric was unaware of the drama. This was pure vacation to him.

Bored with his bird journal, Eric had gone inside to feed one of his other obsessions, Sherlock Holmes. He’d lugged a massive illustrated copy of
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
to Costa Rica (what was wrong with an e-book?) which he made Wes read to him. Right now, he was sitting on the couch with an unlit pipe at his lips and a PlayStation controller in hand, playing some ridiculous thing called
Sherlock Holmes: Zombie Assassin.
The sequel to
Sherlock Holmes: Vampire Hunter.
It was short on deductive reasoning and “elementary, my dear Watson” moments, and long on blood-curdling screams and sprays of blood.
 

Down at the lake, Becca killed the motor, tied off the boat, and took the stone staircase from the dock two steps at a time. She was sweating and flushed by the time she got up. Wes came down from the deck and met her on the lawn.

“She’s there.” Becca stopped, gasping for air, hand on her back. “And she’s awake!”

“What? Are you sure?”

“She was tapping her finger. And she can move her eyes! It’s not even full LIS. She can communicate.”

The news was electrifying. After weeks of searching for Meggie Kerr, could they have really found her with a simple trick? Was the woman’s seven-year nightmare almost over?

They’d been pretty sure Meggie was at Colina Nublosa for several weeks now. The facility kept its resident list under tight control, but they knew she was at a high-end facility in Costa Rica, and the staff at the other two such places were more cooperative. They allowed Wes and Becca to tour the grounds and meet the low-functioning residents. It hadn’t taken long to drop the two from suspicion.

“What happened?” Wes asked. “Tell me everything.”

Becca nodded, still panting. “Just a second. I think I’m going to die.”

“You’re okay? You don’t need a doctor, do you?”

“I’m good.”

“It’s not labor, is it?” Given what had happened to his brother at birth, Wes couldn’t shake his worries about Becca’s looming delivery.

“Hah!”

“Just being sure. It’s forty-five minutes to the nearest clinic.”

“And thousands of women in Costa Rica give birth without complication every year.”

He laughed. “That’s encouraging. Should I get the towels and hot water? Go across the lake to dig up some old
abuela
to serve as midwife?”
 

Becca gave him a look, but it was teasing, not serious.“But I’d love to get off my feet. And to have my nice, considerate husband bring me a glass of iced tea.”

A few minutes later, on the patio with her feet propped up, iced tea in hand, she relayed her adventure infiltrating Colina Nublosa. The reconnaissance hike to the Devil’s Cauldron from the backside of the mountain had paid off. She had driven the road up to the facility, hidden the car, then walked right onto the grounds. She’d wandered for at least twenty minutes before being challenged, and by the time someone did, she had discovered their missing patient. Who seemed to be awake and alert.

“And you’re sure it was her?” Wes asked. “You know how LIS changes people’s bodies.”

“She looks exactly like the pictures. I don’t know what kind of therapy they have up here—”

“The best, according to their web site.”

“—but they must have stimulated her muscles to limit atrophy. Only her eyes and one index finger moved, but otherwise, she looks great. Young, pretty. Whole life ahead of her.”

“Except that she’s doubly a prisoner. Stuck in her body and stuck in that facility.”

“And someone wants to keep it that way,” Becca said. “They practically carried me out and tossed me down the hill.”

“You were trespassing. Rich people don’t like that. Makes them cranky.”

“The director guy was more than just unfriendly. He was hiding something.”

Wes finished his own glass of iced tea and swirled the half-melted cubes around the bottom, thinking. Through the open sliding glass door came the moan of zombies from Eric’s video game.

Sherlock Holmes cried, “Head shot, Watson!”

Last week, when they’d ruled out the other two facilities, Wes and Becca met with a contact in the Costa Rican Ministry of Health in San Jose, to talk about forcing a visit to Colina Nublosa. The man agreed to investigate, but later that day sent a curt email, telling them he’d verified that the facility had no Meggie Kerr and urging them to drop the case and return to the United States. What had changed? Had he made discrete inquires at Colina Nublosa and either been threatened or bribed into dropping the matter?

And the case had started so promisingly, too. Two months earlier, an anonymous tip came in via the form on the foundation’s web site:

Subject:
Meggie Kerr
 

Message:
She is in Costa Rica. They say she is in a coma, but she might be awake. Please investigate.
 

The tipster left no email or name in the contact information field.

Costa Rica? There were tens of thousands of hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and care centers in the United States—they couldn’t run down to Central America on a lark.

But Wes and his brother had practically grown up in the country, not to mention the experiences of Uncle Davis, the head of the foundation. Also, Becca and Wes had fallen in love down here, while diving on the Pacific coast and trying to track down who had tried to kill Uncle Davis.

At the time of the Meggie Kerr tip, the team was busy working with a veterans organization helping three Iraq War vets with high brain stem injuries. Plenty of money available for therapy, they just needed the latest technology for bridging that gap between a trapped mind and the outside world. It was exciting work, and with dozens of other leads to follow, Wes had only nibbled around the edges of the Meggie Kerr case. New info trickled in. Turned out, she was a fellow Vermonter. Now he was intrigued. And once he was intrigued, he got Becca interested, and then the case warmed up in a hurry.

Even now, with the woman at the top of the list, there were still a million questions to answer. The case had progressed from intriguing to an obsession. But Wes faced the uncomfortable worry they had stumbled into dangerous territory: rich people with secrets.

Becca’s eyes shone with an intense gleam. “Have you been keeping track? This is number sixty.”

Wes hadn’t counted recently, but he had no doubt she was right. Sixty people found and identified over the past five years. Prisoners within their own minds, fully alert, but with injuries so high on their brain stems that they couldn’t communicate with the outside world. So many, yet so few. Statistically, there were thousands of unidentified sufferers of locked-in syndrome in the United States alone. They needed more resources, more employees, more media attention.

“It’s not sixty yet,” he said. “Not until we get Meggie out of there.”

Becca set down her glass and rose to her feet.

“I’m going to grab the laptops,” she said. “We need to talk to Uncle Davis.”

#

Uncle Davis appeared on the screen. Outwardly immobile, his body bent and rigid like Stephen Hawking’s in a specially made wheelchair, his mind was a twisting, turning clockwork of moving gears, always probing, thinking.

Wes remembered a smart man from before Davis’s spear gun injury to the base of his skull, but the years of hell with undiagnosed LIS had honed his uncle’s mind to another level. Davis could remember conversations verbatim, spent his spare time listening to poetry audiobooks, which he committed to memory, and had taught himself Spanish, French, and German
after
his paralysis.
 

Once, a newspaper reporter openly wondered if the whole thing were a fraud, like those autistic children who supposedly pressed their mother’s fingers to play the piano. The reporter left his first interview with Uncle Davis a believer.

“The house okay?” Davis asked. “Comfortable enough, I mean?”

A tiny camera on his computer read his eye movements as they flashed across a sophisticated pattern of words, letters, and shorthand symbols. A computer voice translated those flickering glances into a smooth baritone. The software had grown increasingly sophisticated over the past couple of years until he no longer sounded like a robot.

Wes and Becca sat with their laptops in the front room where the light wasn’t as strong. Wes looked out the sliding glass doors at the clean, clear waters of Lago Cristal and laughed. “Yeah, I’d say it’s comfortable.”

They enjoyed a million-dollar, 360-degree view, with the dormant volcano rising from the mist to their rear, and thousands of acres of cloud forest beyond the immaculate grounds. In front of them, the lake itself. Tropical birds woke them in the morning, and last night Wes’s brother Eric had burst into the front room shouting that he’d seen a tiger. Probably an ocelot, rather than the rare jaguar but still, pretty cool.

Becca took her laptop to the window to let the webcam pan slowly over the view, before returning to the table.

“Fantastic,” Davis said. “Wish I were there. Don’t know how the wheelchair would do on those hills, but I’m sure you guys could carry me around, right?” There was a smile in his voice. “And all my gear, too?”

“How much does that chair weigh?” Wes asked. “Four hundred pounds?”

“Point taken.”

“Really, though, it’s too much. Next time a guest house or lodge would be fine. We don’t need the private house. We’re only three people—we could have rented rooms across the lake for a fraction of the cost.”

Wes had already found one in Santa María del Lago if they needed to stay past the end of the month. Twenty bucks a night per person, with coffee and fresh fruit at breakfast in some gorgeous Garden of Eden-like setting almost enough to make up for the shared bathroom down the hall. This rental house, in comparison, cost fifteen hundred per week.