Don't Look Back (13 page)

“How far is it?” Will asked.

“Far enough to be scary,” Neto said. “Not so far that you won’t make it.”

Harry said, “Maybe twenty years ago,” and Sue patted his chest affectionately and said,
“Thirty.”

Claire was already peeling off her clothes to her swimsuit beneath. Letting her leg braces fall away, she jumped in next. Will followed. Eve watched them disappear underwater with a hint of envy; swimming through an underground channel to a hidden cavern sounded amazing, but also beyond her skill set.

At her side, Neto pulled a moist white sphere from a plastic bag. “This here is quesillo Oaxaca, like string cheese.” It resembled a giant ball of yarn, with thick, interwoven strands. He broke off a piece, held it out to Eve, a peace offering. They locked eyes for a moment.

She took it. “Thanks.”

Lulu cracked open soursop fruits, which looked like spiky, light green avocados. She picked out the black seeds and gave Eve, Harry, and Sue a taste of the sweet white pulp as Neto screwed miniature bottles of Victoria beer into a soft-sided cooler filled with ice. “The tiny ones stay colder in the heat. And? You can drink
more of them.
”

Harry picked one up, the yellow label coming loose in his grip, and popped the cap. “Amen to that.”

Eve lay back on the rock. It was still warm, but charcoal clouds roiled overhead, which she tried not to take as an omen. She pushed up onto her elbows. “I think I need one of those.”

“There you go,
amiga
!” Neto said, and slapped a cold beer into her palm.

Beyond a brief ridge of dividing jungle, a lazy stream cut through the foliage, a tributary of the tributary that was Sangre del Sol. The splash of the waterfall continued at a calming pitch. Three heads resurfaced in the pool below, Jay giving a whoop of delight.

“Eve!” Will shouted. “You gotta come see the grotto!”

“I’m good.”

“Come
on,
” Claire said. “
I
swam it, and I’m a gimp.”

“Nah, I’m gonna stay up here.”

“Why?”

Because I don’t know that I can make it and would prefer not to drown like an adventuresome dipshit and orphan my seven-year-old.

“The food’s too good to leave,” Eve said.

The swimmers hoisted themselves out, and everyone lounged and ate. Eve noticed herself tapping Theresa’s ring against the bottle, a
clink-clink-clink
that drew Neto’s attention. Their eyes met again, and then Neto went back to hacking coconuts with the machete.

The cracked shells were handed around, and they sipped the sweet water, then squeezed lime and hot sauce onto the pulp and slurped it up. For a moment all was blissful. But as the chatting picked up, Eve found her thoughts drifting again. She pulled off Theresa’s ring, studied the crest. Maybe the others were right. Maybe she
was
overreacting. Maybe she should just let go of Theresa Hamilton and grab hold of why she came here to begin with: to drink beer on a stone ledge overlooking an emerald pool.

Eve closed her eyes, inhaled the fresh scent of vegetation, let herself be soothed by the rush of water tumbling across stone. And finally she blew out a deep breath, allowing a calm to descend over her.

That was when Will said, “Has anyone seen Jay?”

Chapter 18

Jay stepped out of his wet bathing suit, hopping to yank on one leg of his sweatpants, then the other. After palming dirt off his bare feet, he slipped back into his shoes, forgoing socks, wiped his hands on his T-shirt, and adjusted the bandanna tied over his damp hair.

He’d hiked up past a rocky outcropping for some privacy, and he now unzipped his pants and took a long-overdue leak, tilting back his head and watching the hanging vines sway in the faint breeze. He moved to lean on a branch but spotted movement at the last minute and jerked his hand back. It was a centipede, rippling along at eye level. He watched it distrustfully. Their bites, he’d heard, could be murder.

He zipped up and turned around.

A man—
the
man—stood directly behind him, a sudden mass crowding his space where seconds before there had been nothing.

Jay jolted from the surprise, corkscrewing back onto twisting heels, his arms rising. Before he could utter a sound, the man’s hand flew out, fingers bent, dealing a quick, firm blow to Jay’s trachea with the jagged ledge of his knuckles.

Jay lurched forward as if to heave, but his throat had seemingly collapsed—he could neither draw air nor force out the faintest whimper. His mouth stretched wide, a muted rictus.

The man considered him. Fringe of beard, puckered flesh, calm dead eyes. He held his hand perfectly flat now, palm tilted upward, thumb folded in, as if he were pointing vaguely with four fingers.

The hand flashed like a snake strike, the tips of those four fingers hitting Jay on the rise directly under the rib cage. He felt a clump of breath—what had been trapped in his lungs—leave him. There was a vacuum in his chest, air all around and yet out of reach. He batted the man away and staggered toward the edge of the outcropping.

Voices rose from below. Jay’s mouth wavered, still a bared O, and he felt his lips crack, tiny fissures in the flesh from the strain. Not a noise escaped him, not a sip of air entered.

The foliage grew fuzzy, and he pinballed off a shaggy trunk and went down, breaking his fall with his hands and landing in a push-up position. Through a spray of sugarcane, he made out the others clustered right there below on the flat rock, glancing around and discussing something heatedly. Will’s back was to him, and he was pointing away, into the tree line, but Jay couldn’t make out what anyone was saying until Harry cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted Jay’s name. They couldn’t have been more than twenty yards from him. Jay pounded the earth with his palm but there was no way it could be heard over the rush of tumbling water.

If Neto made a half turn or Eve lifted her eyes, either would see him here at the ledge above, see his gnarled hand groping at nothing, trying to part the sugarcane so that more than a sliver of his face would come visible. His remaining arm gave out, and mud suctioned his chest and chin. He heard his name called again and then again, different voices joining the chorus.

He was still figuring out how to scream when two hands clamped over his ankles and dragged him back into the jungle.

Chapter 19

Eve stood at the edge of the flat stone like a sentinel, her back to the cascade, her eyes picking across the jungle. Movement everywhere—falling leaves, rustling branches, swooping birds. In her ears a tinny ring, like the aftermath of an explosion. She heard the voices behind her faintly, as if underwater, but her own breathing was amplified, thunderous.

“I’m sure he sneaked off to hike up to the waterfall,” Neto was saying.

“I don’t know,” Will said. “We’d just discussed staying close, being careful.”

“Being careful
why
?” Sue asked.

Harry shouted Jay’s name again, the sound fading beneath the waterfall’s roar.

Neto gave a laugh, but it came out high-pitched, forced. “He probably went to go—how does he say?—
take the mountain.
We should just wait here and enjoy. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Bullshit. We should worry.

Eve seemed to come back to herself as if tumbling into her skin from a great height. A sudden, abrupt serenity claimed her. She turned on her heel to face the others.

“Bullshit,” she said. “We
should
worry.”

Neto’s eyes grew a bit wider at her tone.

“Jay is probably just exploring,” Lulu said.

No. Something’s wrong.

“No,” Eve said. “Something’s wrong.”

Harry lowered his cupped hand from his mouth. “What could be wrong?”

There’s a dangerous man in this jungle.

“There’s a dangerous man in this jungle.”

Claire and Will were staring at Eve, clearly caught off guard by her sudden assertiveness.

“What?”
Sue canted her head. Her linen shirt spotted with perspiration. “Dangerous? Dangerous
how
? Why weren’t we told?”

Neto buckled his knees and rolled his head back, appealing to the sky. “
¡Chingada madre!
This is
estúpido.
”

“We need to stay calm and wait for him,” Lulu said.

We’re not waiting—
this time Eve caught the thought midstream—“we’re searching for him now.”

“A
search
?” Neto coughed out a laugh. “Hang on. I’m sure Jay will be back any minute. No one’s talking about a search.”

Eve said, “
I
am.”

*   *   *

They kept in groups, sweeping the jungle around the waterfall as the thickening clouds dampened the day by degrees. Unable to navigate the steep slopes, Claire waited on the rock. Eve paired with Will, wading through the brush, calling out, trying to wrestle her concern under control. In certain spots the cascade drowned out all sound, but sporadically they could hear the shouts of the others echoing through the treetops like birdcalls.

Forty-five minutes later they reconvened on the stone ledge.

Sitting, Claire rubbed at her ankle where the brace had raised a row of blisters. Sue added a few drops of iodine to her canteen, drank greedily, and passed it to her husband.

Will picked up Jay’s Mariners hat where it had been left to dry on the rock. His face looked ashen. He scratched at the top of his head a few times, then hiked up to a vantage point above an outcropping of rock, keeping his back to the group. Eve watched him bow his forehead into his hand.

“How far are we from the lodge?” Sue asked.

Neto bunched his lips. “Five kilometers or so.”

“We should go back. I want to go back.” She turned sideways into Harry and he patted her shoulder.

“Hey. Hey!” Will scrambled down the slope toward them, his sneakers freeing tumbles of tiny stones. He half fell onto the rock slab and lifted his hand.

In it Jay’s blue bandanna.

A line of dark drops near the hem. Dried blood.

Neto’s Adam’s apple bobbed. Sue made a strangled noise and twisted a finger in her turquoise necklace, hard.

“It was there by that cliff face,” Will said, his voice unsteady. “I found it by a broken-off ledge of rock that looks like it snapped off about ten feet up. I could see … I could see the fresh break on the wall.”

Neto: “Like he tried to climb to the top of the waterfall and fell.”

“Or like it was
staged
to look that way,” Eve said.

Will’s gaze was loose, his eyes drifting across everything and nothing.

“If he hit his head,” Harry said, “he could be disoriented.”

“Maybe he hiked back to the lodge,” Lulu said, the hopeful note in her voice a touch strained.

Claire blew out a disgusted breath.

“We need to get onto Skype,” Eve said, “report him missing.”

Neto started to protest, but Will shut him down with a glare. Silently, they headed up to the ATVs.

Chapter 20

Will’s jaw clenched, cords ghosting beneath the skin of his cheeks. “You’re joking, right?”

The tour group stood around the open door of the admin shack in a semicircle, their arrangement funereal. Though it was midday, it felt like dusk, the sun lost behind a shroud of bruise-colored clouds. Harry and Sue had been brought up to speed, Harry taking in the details somberly while Sue twined her fingers in her necklace and made faint noises of despair.

The chair squeaked inside the shack, and then Neto emerged from behind the desk. “No, I’m not
joking,
” he said, stepping outside, craning to examine the sky. “It’s the storm clouds. They make it impossible to catch a signal.”

The light guttered in the shack, casting the side of his face in sporadic orange.

“How do you know the dish hasn’t been tampered with?” Claire asked.

“Let’s not get paranoid,” Lulu said.

“Let’s not tell me what to do in the first-person plural,” Claire said.

“It’s
normal,
” Neto said. “We
never
get a signal in weather like this.”

“How long can it be?” Sue asked.

“A day. Maybe two.”

“Days,” Will said.

Neto came toward him, patting the air. “We have an expression here.
‘Lo que pasa, es.’
It means, ‘What happens, is.’”

Will’s lips moved, but his teeth barely parted. “Well, that’s really fucking Mexican, now, isn’t it?”

Neto said, “Take it
easy.
”

“I’ll take it easy when we’ve reported Jay’s disappearance.”

“Fine,” Neto. “How do you propose we report this?”

Claire said, “We reach a detective—”

“Detective.” Neto snorted. “There
are
no detectives in Mexico. Not in this entire state.”

Harry’s mouth opened in disbelief. “If someone gets killed, who investigates it?”

“Their family,” Lulu said.

The Americans took a moment with that one.

“Look,” Neto said, “everyone should wait here. Lulu and I know this jungle
forward and backward.
We can go in the Jeep, make a more thorough search. Jay is probably wandering out there now.”

“What about that man in the jungle?” Sue said.

“You’re safe here.” Lulu placed a manicured hand on Sue’s sleeve. “Oaxacans are gentle, honest people.”

“Maybe so,” Claire said. “But the problem is,
he
ain’t Oaxacan.”

Will flicked his thumb against the fingers of the same hand. “I’m going to that house,” he said. “In the canyon.”

All heads swiveled to him.

“Wait,” Harry said. “Wait, wait, wait.” He hadn’t shaved, and he wasn’t the kind of man that looked good on. Sparse white curls flecked his shiny cheeks.

“He could
have
Jay,” Will said. “He’s a psycho. We saw a picture of him with that local woman, pulling her into the house.” He wheeled on Neto, punching his words angrily. “And don’t give me any bullshit about how he leaves everyone alone. Where’d the guy come from?”