“She made contact with Davis Carter, you mean,” Wes corrected. “Chad Lett is a fiction. He never existed.”
“But Rosa was the only one who knew who he really was. My god.”
Wes thought about it. “Let’s say Rosa went to my Uncle Bill. Told him what she’d discovered. She must have thought it was all an accident. That Bill would be happy to discover his brother was still in there somewhere.”
“Only he wasn’t.”
“Only he wasn’t,” Wes agreed.
“What are we doing?” Becca said suddenly. She turned directly to Davis. “You must be dying in there.”
“Blink three times if you can understand,” Wes said.
Davis’s left eye twitched three times. Really, more like two and a half times, as the third time was a quiver. The effort must be exhausting.
“Okay,” Wes said. “Let’s keep it simple. Blink once for yes, zero times for no. Do you understand?”
Blink. Yes.
“Do you know what happened to you?” Wes asked.
Yes.
Wes looked at Becca, then back at his uncle. “Was it an accident?”
No blink, which Wes took as a no.
Becca said, “It’s not a simple yes, no question though, is it? How about you blink twice for don’t know?”
Yes.
“Yes to the blinking twice for don’t know or to the other question?” Wes asked. “Never mind. Was it an accident?”
No.
“Was it Uncle Bill?”
Yes.
“Was he alone, or did someone else help him?” Wes asked.
“That’s not a yes, no question,” Becca said.
“Sorry. Was he alone?”
No.
Was it my mother?
Don’t know.
“And that’s not a yes, no answer, either.” Becca stood back a pace, rubbing her hands together and looking anxious. “Could be a third person. Look, can’t we just get him out of here and ask the questions later?”
“We’ve got to find out who we can trust, first. Or who Davis thinks he can trust, at least. What if we take him to Aunt Charlotte and find out that she was in on it?” He turned to his uncle. “Was Aunt Charlotte involved?”
No.
Or at least Wes thought he said no. It was hard to be sure when there was no blink. Maybe Davis was too tired to blink every time. His twitches looked more labored now, like the effort to blink out the S.O.S. had exhausted him. For a moment Wes doubted himself. He could show this communication to people and half of them would say it was his imagination, like a ouija board, or those people who typed on behalf of their autistic kids. How could he be sure those twitches were not random? He’d have to repeat the questions multiple times, getting the same answer each time to make sure that Davis was really answering him.
“There has to be a better way,” Wes said.
“How about this?” Becca asked. She rummaged through Davis’s nightstand until she pulled out a pack of recipe cards. “Look.” She held out the cards. They had an English word on one side and the Spanish equivalent on the other side. “We had an HT who was taking Spanish in school. I knew he’d left these in here, but kept forgetting to throw them out.”
She searched deeper until she found a pen, then scratched out the words and wrote something of her own. “Here’s what I’m going to do,” She told Davis. “I’m writing the letters of the alphabet. I’m going to flash through them one at a time. When you see the letter you want to write, blink once and Wes’ll write it down. Blink twice when you reach the end of the sentence.”
“That sounds slow,” Wes said.
“Yeah, at first. But not as slow as twenty questions. He can tell us what’s important instead of us sitting here all night, guessing.” Becca worked quickly. A minute later and she had a stack. She handed the pen and another card to Wes, then threw unused cards in the garbage. “We can come up with something better later.”
“Okay, Mr. Carter,” Becca continued. “You know what’s important. Start with the most important thing and work your way down. Try to be brief because…well, you know that. Do you understand?”
Yes.
She lifted the card for A, then put it at the back of the stack when there was no response. Next the B, then the C, and so on. After several letters, Wes started to doubt again. But then she reached the letter I and he blinked. Wes wrote down the letter and Becca flipped the back cards to the front and started over. This time, she flipped faster and was between two letters when Davis blinked.
The letters crawled by, especially when they had a minute or two of confusion when his eye twitched involuntarily. They worked out a code of three twitches for a bad letter and continued. At last, they had the first sentence.
IMALIVE.
Wes couldn’t keep the horror from his voice as he read it aloud. “I’m alive.”
Becca put her hand against Davis’s cheek. It was a touching gesture. “I’m so sorry. God, I’m sorry. I was blind. And stupid. Dumber than any of the people living here.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Wes said. “You couldn’t have known.” His throat was tight. Five years in a prison of his own skull. Jesus.
“I should have known,” she said. “I’m not here to be Saul Cage’s paper pusher, or to shove my head up my ass to the proper depth required by state certification.” Disgust filled her voice. “This was my chance to make a difference. And I screwed up.”
“No, you didn’t. We figured it out. We found him. And you can be damn sure that things will be different from now on.”
“Yes,” she said, seeming to regain her confidence. “They will be.” She turned back to Davis. “Are you ready to continue?”
Yes.
The next letter was a D. Wes was relieved every time the letter came near the beginning of the alphabet. Given enough time they could probably work out a sophisticated system where they sorted letters into common groups and uncommon groups, vowels, letters that started at the beginning of the alphabet or counted back from the end. It might mean more blinking, but it would be faster than this.
The next letter was an R and then there was a bit of confusion where it seemed like his uncle was blinking the end of the sentence, but of course there couldn’t be a period there because DR didn’t make a sentence. He guessed his uncle was trying to say something about drowning and wondered if they did it long enough if they’d also work out a shorthand to cut out extraneous letters, maybe even unneeded words.
The next letter was P.
A knock on the door. They froze and turned toward the door as it swung open. Wes stuffed the recipe card into his pocket, together with the pen.
He breathed a sigh of relief. It was just Dr. Pardo, holding a clipboard. The man glanced up from the clipboard with a look of concentration on his face, and then blinked as if he hadn’t been expecting to see anyone in the room. “Sorry, I didn’t think anyone was in here. The nurse didn’t tell me—”
“It’s alright,” Becca answered quickly. A little too quickly, Wes thought. Her posture was a contrast to Dr. Pardo’s relaxed stance. “I’ve been gone for a few days. I’m just checking out the residents.”
“Ah, okay. Well, I just need to check out Chad Lett’s eye. He’s had this infection.”
“Yes, I know. Looks a lot better though.”
“That’s what I thought,” the doctor answered. “Can you give me a minute? I’ll come find you when I’m done.”
“Of course.”
Wes hesitated. He didn’t want to leave Uncle Davis alone, not even for a minute. But Becca grabbed his arm and led him out of the room. Dr. Pardo was alone inside with the four residents of Team Smile.
#
Davis Carter had never felt a greater feeling of elation in his life than when his nephew recognized his S.O.S. And as Becca, one of his favorite people at Riverwood for her gentle way with the residents, came up with the letter system for communicating, he had almost wept with joy.
H
is first message, the cry that had been on his lips for years: “I’m alive!”
God yes, he was alive. He’d made contact with Rosa and she was gone. Chillingly, horribly abducted that night she had tried to spirit him out of Riverwood. But this was different. He knew it. He just needed to get out a little bit of information and then they would take him to Charlotte, and to the police. And somehow, this nightmare would come to an end. He might not escape completely from the Château d’If, but he’d have a window to the outside world.
And then Dr. Pardo entered the room and Davis’s stomach clenched in fear. And—oh, no! Please, no—Wes and Becca didn’t see the doctor for what he was.
The Abbé Faria had been quiet during the exchange with Wes and Becca, but his voice was urgent now. “Do something, Davis. Do it quickly.”
What? For god’s sake, what? What can I do.
But the abbé had no answer. Because there’s nothing a starved, diseased prisoner can do when the torturers come.
The doctor dismissed the two and to Davis’s horror, they left. Dr. Pardo watched the door shut, then turned to the bed with a smile. “I guess this is it, old friend. It’s not how I would have ended it, but you understand, don’t you?”
Bastard.
“I can only imagine what’s going on in your mind. Maybe nothing. You know, it’s occurred to me that this is all a fantasy. Like the campesinos, reading the entrails of a chicken to decide when to plant their crops. I see that eye twitching and I think maybe it’s just my imagination, that you’re really dead in there.
His eyes fell on the stack of index cards where Becca had written her letters. He picked them up and thumbed through them before setting them down. “But I don’t think so. I think you’re still trying to break out, aren’t you? And the fact is, I was happy to let you go on living, so long as you stayed quiet. But what’s the first thing you’re going to tell those two when you figure out your little code? Right. And I can’t take that chance.”
No, Davis wanted to say. I swear I’ll stay quiet. Nobody will ever know. Just don’t hurt my eye.
But it wasn’t Davis’s eye that Pardo had in mind. He lowered the bar and put his arms under Davis’s shoulders, then hoisted him to prop against the end of the bed in a partially sitting position. Davis’s head lolled to one side. Pardo moved to the nightstand, out of Davis’s sight. Sounded like he was opening a container of some kind.
The doctor returned with a dropperful of green liquid. The man held up Davis’s chin and pushed the dropper into the back of his mouth. A minty, sweet liquid. It trickled into Davis’s throat.
Pardo went back for another dose, then brought it up to Davis’s mouth and repeated the procedure. When enough liquid was in Davis’s throat, his body swallowed reflexively.
“I won’t say it will be a painless death. Depends on whether or not you’re asleep. It’ll take awhile for your body to absorb the digoxin. We’re going to shut down the electrical currents to your heart. It’ll seize up, like you’re having a heart attack. Eventually, it will stop. You know, the life expectancy of people in your condition isn’t particularly high. Don’t think anyone will give a second thought. Well, except for Wes and Becca, but they won’t be around to ask questions.”
Pardo returned for a third dropperful, then a fourth.
Chapter Twenty-four:
Ellen Pilson knew where to find her brother, Bill. Bids to pour concrete for a new reactor at a nuclear plant in upstate New York were due in two days. Bill was like her father, who had worked almost around the clock in the last few days before placing a major bid. You had to have the numbers just right. Too high and you’d surrender the project to a competitor. Miss one detail and you’d bid too low and lose millions. There were so many variables and so many ways to screw it up. Even after the numbers were perfect, her dad had sifted through them again and again. Bill was the same way.
When she pulled up to the office, she could see the lights glowing in his corner office overlooking the gravel pit. A fantastic view of that ugly scar. Again, it was just like her father.
A Caterpillar articulated haul truck sat on the front lawn in front of the building. It was a curious place to leave a truck, but as she drew closer she saw that it was not one of the 740 Ejectors that she saw at Northrock’s job sites around the state, but an older, smaller model. It wasn’t a working truck at all, but one mounted on a poured concrete pad with a plaque that read:
“Moose Hollow Road: February – August, 1983. Bruce Wiley, Mike Garcia, Harvey Drummond.”
She drew her breath at this last name, then walked to the front of the haul truck and looked at the crankcase guard. Dented. Her brother had mounted the very truck from the accident as a monument to the men who had died building the Moose Hollow Road.
Ellen put her hand on the cold metal grill, wondering how things might have turned out differently if she hadn’t trusted Bill and parked that equipment on the edge of a mud slide. She’d be the one looking over the bid for that reactor. Bill and Davis would work for her. She’d have been tough, but fair, even with her brothers. And she would have built Northrock into a mighty empire far beyond what even Bill or her father could have dreamed.
She stepped up to the front door, unlockable at this hour only by key card, then rang her brother’s cell phone. It was a cold night, the kind that burns into the lungs, but she enjoyed a warm glow spreading through her limbs.
“Yeah? What is it?”
“It’s me,” she said. “Your darling sister. We need to talk.”
“Ellen? Can it hold until Tuesday? Got a lot on my plate at the moment.”
“I’m standing outside the building,” she said. “We need to talk, now.”
“I don’t have time for this.” Irritation darkened his voice.
“I think you do.” Again, her voice cheery. “The police are looking for you, Bill. I told them you were at the house. But I’m guessing they’ll figure out the truth soon enough. You might have an hour, if you’re lucky.”
A pause. “Godamnit. What are you playing at, Ellen?”
“I’ll tell you. But not over the phone.”
Bill came to the doors a few minutes later and led her back to the office. His hands were shaking, rubbing together. He kept clearing his throat. When he got to the office, he turned off the lights, as if afraid that someone else would drive up and know that he was in here. Security lights from the pit found their way into the room, catching his face in shadow.
“The police are looking for me? Don’t tell me that Pardo—”
“Yeah, your friend was going to stab you in the back. He was going to blackmail you for a few million dollars. Something about buying back his land in El Salvador.”
“I could never trust him again. Not after Costa Rica. Not after the way he turned on my brother so quickly. I mean, I didn’t have a choice. I had to save the company. But why did Pardo care? Why wouldn’t he have defended his friend?”
“Odd, isn’t it?”
Bill turned, apparently missing the irony in her voice. “What did he tell the police?”
“He didn’t tell them anything. I said he was going to stab you in the back. But he didn’t. I’m the one who told the police, Bill. And I turned over a file with photos, contact numbers at the hospital in Neily, Costa Rica. I gave them the names of Ernesto and Tomás Solorio, and how to find them in Agujitas. I gave them a copy of Davis’s file from Riverwood. I gave them medical records from St. Luke’s in Boston. And I gave them this.”
She handed over the blow-ups of the burned out trailer near Hancock. Bill looked at them with visible alarm.
“They’ve probably already sealed off the crime scene. Damn tricky, I’ve heard, to burn a human body. There are always bone chips, teeth. Other identifiable remains.”
Bill was sputtering. “But you…you’re guilty too. The police—”
She gave a deliberate shrug. “Sure, I’m expecting hard questions, but I’m guessing a plea bargain will be valuable. And it’s not like
I killed anyone. What I’m guilty of is keeping my mouth shut too long. They’ll forgive that crime. To get to the murderer.”
“But why?”
“You think I’d forget? You think that because I was young or that it’s been over twenty-five years that I’d forget what you did to me?”
“You’re talking about that day at Moose Hollow?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You knew what you were doing. You sent me to park on that mudslide and you knew it was unstable. I’ve thought about it a million times. The company was mine, and you cheated me.”
Bill said, “Why should Dad have given it to you? Because you’re the oldest? You couldn’t have run Northrock, Ellen. You know it and I know it. For one, you’re a woman. Those construction guys never respected you. If you don’t have their respect, you’ve got nothing.”
“Go to hell. I could have and I would have. And I would have done just as good a job as you.” She shook her head. “But that’s not why I’m doing this. I’m doing this because of my son.”
“Wes?”
“Eric, you moron. It’s your fault he’s the way he is.”
“My fault?”
She burned at his ignorance. All this anger, all these years of hating her brother, and he was worse than uncaring. He was oblivious. “We didn’t have insurance. Did you know that? So goddamn poor that we were fighting the doctors every step of the childbirth to save a few bucks. No epidural, because it’s too expensive. If we’d done what we were told—which I would have, damn it, if I could have afforded it—I would’ve taken the emergency C-section when the doctor told me. Instead, I told him to wait. Because I couldn’t afford it.”
“That’s your fault,” Bill said. “Yours and that worthless husband of yours. It didn’t take a job at Northrock to give you insurance. One of you needed a job with benefits. Could have been any job.”
She knew it. And she’d blamed herself, blamed her husband, Jim, and even blamed Wes for taking so long to be born. But it all came down to the way Bill had sabotaged her at Moose Hollow. Only twenty-seven years old, under the watchful eye of her elderly father, testing her, seeing if she could handle the work. She’d failed and her father’s faith in her collapsed. Hadn’t everything else been inevitable?
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