The Devil's Cauldron Read online

  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.

  Chapter Eight

  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.

  #

  He found her on the second day, sitting with the other residents of her team in the butterfly garden. Some of them watched the butterflies, while others closed their eyes or squinted away from the sun. An aide sat on a bench a few feet away with an open magazine on her lap, but her eyes were closed. Asleep.

  The butterfly garden was pretty. There were lots of flowers and bushes and stuff, and a net above his head like a giant tent you could see through. That way the butterflies wouldn’t fly away. Hundreds, zillions of them fluttered around, making him look this way and that. The prettiest were as big as his hand and blue. Shiny like metal. Eric wished he had a butterfly book so someone could tell him what they were called.

  The pretty lady spotted him and turned her eyes in his direction. She didn’t say anything.

  “Hi, pretty lady,” he said. “My name is Eric. What’s your name?”

  She kept watching him, but didn’t move and didn’t answer. This confused him, but then he remembered what Wes told him. Oh yeah, she couldn’t move. She couldn’t talk. That’s why they had to help her.

  “You look like a Disney princess,” he said. “What’s your favorite? I like all of them. Some have dark hair. There’s one Chinese lady—I like her. She fights the Huns and pretends she’s a boy. Ariel has a fish tail! I like WALL-E. He isn’t a princess, he’s a robot.”

  She didn’t say anything and he felt stupid. Worse, a few of the other residents looked at him. A bald man in a wheelchair muttered something in Spanish.

  “I’m not from Costa Rica,” Eric said, feeling testy. The man was making fun of him, he knew it. “I don’t speak that, I speak American.”

  “He said you should go look for your team,” another resident said. She talked with a funny accent. “Meggie can’t answer you.”

  “Who is Meggie? Oh, Meggie!”

  Excited, Eric reached into his pocket and pulled out Wes’s cell phone. He turned it on. It glowed up at him, but he stared, confused. In a moment it went dark and still he looked at it. What? What was he supposed to do? Frustration bubbled up inside him and he ran his fingers through his hair. Several long seconds passed and he pulled at the roots until his scalp hurt.

  Most of the time Eric was happy and cheerful. He wasn’t like his friend Bruce, who got kicked out of the group home because he broke all the plates. And he was pretty smart compared to some of the people at Riverwood.

  But he wasn’t fooled. He knew what he was. He’d known for a long time. Sometimes, he could almost understand. Things would be there—conversations, stories, movies—and he would listen and stare and almost, almost grasp it.

  “I’m a dumb-dumb,” he muttered. “A stupid dumb-dumb.”

  He felt guilty saying it. “Wes told me not to say that,” he told the lady. “It’s bad for you. That’s called SELF-ESTEEM.”

  Then he remembered one of the other things his brother told him and shut up. “When you’re in there, you can’t talk out loud, Ruk,” Wes had said. “You have to talk inside your head. Always inside your head.”

  Eric promised, of course he had. But he forgot. He always forgot.

  “Find the pretty lady,” Wes said before they brought him to this place to go on a secret spy mission. “This is her picture. Her name is—” And here Eric’s memory went hazy, together with the other things Wes told him. Lots of important stuff, Eric was sure. “When you find her, take out my phone and—”

  And what? It was important. He remembered the gleam in his brother’s eyes and the way Becca squeezed his hand and told him . .
. something. Something important.

  Eric put away the cell phone. He could call his brother later. Right now, he had to think like Sherlock Holmes.

  He was almost distracted again by the butterflies that swirled around his head like blue and green and gold leaves falling from a tree, then he remembered, and looked back at the pretty lady. She still wasn’t moving. Why not? Had he figured that part out yet?

  “Wait,” he said. “I think they told me your name. Um, I think it starts with an M, like Mr. Incredible. Mary? No.” Eric tugged at his ear.

  “I told you,” the woman who’d spoken to him earlier said. She had big eyebrows and really skinny nostrils. “Her name is Meggie, and she can’t talk at all.”

  “Please be quiet. I’m talking to the pretty lady. Meggie. Oh, yeah.” He looked back to Meggie. “I am supposed to do something. Do you remember? I can’t, I’m a stupid dumb-dumb. That’s what everyone knows. Not my brother. He says I’m smart like Sherlock Holmes. He and Becca got married. She’s pretty, like you. She has a baby growing in her belly.”

  Meggie’s eyes had been drifting away. Eric knew that look. When people were bored and only pretending to listen. But when he mentioned Becca’s baby, her eyes whipped around again.

  “Do you like babies?” he asked. “Me too!”

  Eric stared at her for a long moment, trying to think. Why couldn’t he remember what he was supposed to do? If something happened, he could remember. Like in the Scarlet Band, when Sherlock Holmes found that a death adder was biting people. But when someone told him something, it didn’t stick. Wes told him something. Becca told him something. What?

  The lady still wouldn’t talk to him, was only staring and tapping one finger impatiently, and Eric felt embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to bother you and your friends. Sorry.”

  He turned away and was through the door and out of the butterfly garden before he remembered that she wasn’t talking because she couldn’t talk. Not because he was bothering her. He laughed in relief. Wait until Wes came on visit day. He would tell his brother all about the pretty lady. Or maybe he could call with Wes’s phone. Find his brother’s name in the list and push the call button. He turned it on.

  The phone wasn’t working. That was strange. Oh yeah, Wes said he couldn’t make phone calls up here in the mountains. It was only good if he wanted to take pictures or a movie.

  #

  Late at night, when Eric was in bed, thinking about bats and wondering if they could get into his room through the shutters (Costa Rica had lots of bats), he started to worry. Not about bats—he liked bats. So did Batman. Batman had a bat cave.

  Why was he worried? Foggy Hill was nice. There was yummy food in this place. Lots of birds in the trees. A movie room with all sorts of cartoons. A therapist who read to him any story he wanted from the library. They had Robin Hood. It had really good pictures, too.

  But then he remembered. Undercover. Secret. Sherlock Holmes. The pretty lady he was supposed to help. He had talked to her in the butterfly garden and didn’t do anything.

  “Oh, I made a big mistake. A honking mistake.”

  “Quiet in there,” an aide said from the hallway. “It’s bedtime.”

  Eric spoke to himself in a lower voice. “I was supposed to say something to the pretty lady. But she didn’t talk. She didn’t answer.” He put his hands behind his head and stared up at the slowly swishing ceiling fan, just visible from the light in the hallway that crept between the cracks in the door planks. A gecko crawled across the ceiling, then ran into another gecko and they chirped at each other before one ran away.

  That’s right. She didn’t talk because she couldn’t talk. Wes and Becca told Eric that already. The other resident in the butterfly garden told him, too.

  “Only you didn’t remember because you’re a stupid dumb-dumb.” He grabbed his hair and pulled until his eyes started to water. Then he remembered Wes said not to do that when he was mad, but to count Mississippis.

  “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi.”

  He was on fifty-seven Mississippi and not only was he not angry anymore, he was starting to feel sleepy. Then he heard voices in the hallway outside his door. Speaking in low voices, like they were telling secrets.

  Everything in this building was wood that made it look like a giant treehouse up in the roof of the forest, but with all of the open shutters and bare walls he could hear people all around. Coughing and snoring and farting.

  “Who are these people?” a man’s voice said.

  “Medical investigators,” a woman answered. “I tried to warn them off, but I think they’re still in the country.”

  “It has been seven years. Why here? Why now?”

  The man sounded like the man with the gray bushy mustache that made him look like a walrus. The chief boss of this place, Eric thought. He could remember the name if he thought about it.

  Usher! That’s right. What a funny name. When he introduced himself to Eric and Wes, Eric got excited. The man was an usher. Foggy Hill must have its own movie theater, with popcorn and everything. No, Wes explained, that’s his name, not what he does. Oh. Well that was a disappointment.

  Usher sounded nervous, but the woman didn’t. There was something cold and hard in her voice that scared Eric. And scared Usher, too. That was confusing, because once Eric learned the man didn’t work in a movie theater, he had figured out that Usher was the big chief of Foggy Mountain. She should be worried about the boss, not the other way around.

  “Do you want to move her out?” Usher asked. “I could ask around, see what else is available in the country.”

  “No. There’s no point in that. Her usefulness is wearing thin. She isn’t worth the bother.”

  “I don’t understand,” Usher said. “If I stop trying to hide her and they get her out of here, won’t they figure out what you did?”

  “What I did?” Her voice was sharp.

  “Or, whatever got her in this condition,” he added quickly. “Whatever the reason is you want to hide her here.”

  “Tell me something,” the woman said, “if you had to get rid of someone like her, how would you do it?”

  A long pause. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  Her voice rose. “Answer the question.”

  “Shh, keep it down. I’m thinking. Well, it wouldn’t be hard. Overdose of medication, maybe. Give her something to stop her heart—people in comas suffer cardiac arrest all the time. Or someone could take her to Devil’s Cauldron on a field trip and let slip the brake on her chair so she rolls into one of the pools. By the time anyone notices, she’ll have drowned. Purely an accident.”

  “Won’t the government investigate?” she asked. “And wouldn’t it look suspicious if she died just as people came looking for her?”

  “Sure,” Usher said, “but that’s easy enough to take care of. You won’t get rid of the suspicions, but nobody would prove that you killed her.”

  Eric stiffened. He’d been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the tone and direction of the conversation, but couldn’t have said why. Suddenly, he realized they were talking about murdering someone, then making it look like an accident.

  Wes was right. It was like Sherlock Holmes.

  He sat up, which made the bed creak. The people outside the door hushed. It occurred to him that if he could hear them, they could probably hear him, too. He held still, less excited now than terrified. Because he remembered that in those stories, the killers always tried to keep secrets. That meant they killed witnesses, because dead men tell no tales.

  He almost said this last part out loud, and clamped his hand over his mouth just in time.

  “So you’ll do it?” the woman asked after a moment.

  “Me? No. I’m not touching it.”

  “It would be a shame if your role in all this came out,” she said. “You’d lose everything. End up in prison.”

  “Don’t try to blackmail me, Kaitlyn. We’re too far down the
road for that. If this gets out, you’ll be the one to take the hardest fall.”

  His words were unpleasant, but Eric thought he still sounded worried.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, I’m not quite ready to finish it yet,” she added.

  “What do you mean?” Usher asked, cautiously.

  “I need to know a couple of things first. Who put these people on her trail?”

  “You don’t know?” Usher asked.

  “I’m pretty sure I do. I asked my cousin, but he lied to my face. I need to put the pressure on, get it out of him. And that might mean bringing him down here. It’s going to be messy.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll send money. Start the cleanup early, if you know what I mean.”

  “Got it.”

  “By the time you’re done, I want to be able to deny that Meggie Kerr was ever in Costa Rica, let alone within a hundred miles of this place.”

  They walked away, still talking in low voices, while Eric strained to hear. His heart was pounding.

  Meggie. He knew that name. Who was she? Five minutes ago, he guessed, he could have answered. Or if he had some way to remember, like how he remembered Mr. Usher’s name, who should have worked in the movie theater, but didn’t.

  Tomorrow he could ask the pretty lady if she knew. Then he’d give her Wes’s phone to make a call, tell her to warn his brother that a killer had come to Foggy Hill.

  Eric climbed down to check the lock on the door. He didn’t like the way the floor creaked. And there was no lock. There never was.

  “Oh, yeah. They don’t let us lock our doors.”

  He climbed back under the covers and pulled the sheet up over his head.

  Now feeling safer, Eric fell asleep while trying to remember what Wes and Becca told him to do with the pretty lady in the butterfly garden.

  Chapter Nine

  Meggie hadn’t seen Kaitlyn in two days and began to hope that the woman had left Costa Rica to return to the United States. Maybe she’d even imagined the entire thing while under sedation. It must have been the tranquilizer that had done it. She’d imagined Kaitlyn coming into her room early in the morning, tapping on her forehead, delivering dark threats, then disappearing.