The Devil's Deep

by Michael Wallace

  “I don’t know. It’s a mess.”

  And what about Northrock? With her husband declared dead, Charlotte had sold Davis’s shares to Uncle Bill, but presumably, Bill would be arrested and charged with all sorts of crimes.

  Over the next few days, between talks with his mother’s lawyers, the police, and what the newspapers and television media reported, Wes pieced together what was going on with the police investigation.

  After Wes’s mother confessed her role in faking Davis’s death, together with her fear about the murder of Rosa Solorio, the police had moved swiftly to arrest Bill Carter. He had not been at his house, nor at work, though they’d found his car, together with a running gravel crusher at the Northrock quarry. Ellen Pilson thought he might have killed himself. They found the bodies of Yamila Delgado and Carolina Cruz in a shed on Bill Carter’s property.

  Within twenty-four hours they had charged Dr. Pardo with a host of crimes: murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, unlawful imprisonment, insurance fraud, and medical malpractice being just the beginning. Two days later, they added charges for first degree murder in the cases of Yamila and Carolina.

  They filed charges of insurance fraud, unlawful imprisonment, and conspiracy against Ellen Pilson, but Wes’s dad told him her lawyers were hard at work on a plea bargain. A warrant was put out for Bill Carter’s arrest, even as investigators sifted through crushed gravel for bone chips. More investigators searched the burned out wreckage of a trailer east of Hancock for the remains of Rosa Solorio.

  And then, two weeks later, Rosa turned up. Alive. Seems that Pardo had tried to kill her, but she’d escaped and headed home for Costa Rica. But she didn’t have a passport, and had been afraid to return to her apartment. Afraid, even, to call her family and tell them she was okay. After hiking out of the mountains and finding someone willing to pick up a cold, hypothermic hitchhiker on Route 125, Rosa used the money on her to buy a bus ticket for Texas. She picked up temporary work in Houston, then crossed into Mexico. The borders in Central America were trickier to navigate, but she’d eventually found her way to Agujitas, where she surprised her no-doubt overjoyed father and brother.

  Rosa agreed to return to the United States and testify.

  And an investigation flowed in the opposite direction, as well. One of Dr. Pardo’s sons washed ashore near Drake, half-eaten by sharks. His other son was the prime suspect in the murder of Javier and Maritza Lopez. He had not used his return flight to the United States and Costa Rican police were still searching for him in Central America. Wes and Becca had spoken several times on the telephone with investigators and might have to fly to Costa Rica to testify if they caught James Pardo.

  Back in the United States, as life slowly returned to normal, Charlotte stayed with her fiancé. It was romantic to think of her returning to Davis’s side, but she’d made a new life for herself. Christopher was a good man and it was clear she loved him. Wes wondered if she would have left Christopher if Davis had pushed, but he had not. He must have seen what forcing Charlotte to give up Christopher would do to them, what sort of marriage would remain for the two of them in the end.

  But still, Wes didn’t want to think too hard about what both his uncle and his aunt must be feeling: despair, guilt, regret.

  #

  The single-level ranch-style house was not so big as Charlotte’s above Stowe, but situated on the west side of the Green Mountains it had a fantastic view across Lake Champlain to the Adirondacks in New York State. Wes thought the view would look even better once the leaves filled in on the trees; right now, they were just budding. Men worked on the roof, installing solar panels.

  Wes parked the car and he and Eric walked toward the front door. The long, cold Vermont winter had come to an end and the air was green, cool, and clean. It was only sixty degrees, but sunny, and Wes wore a t-shirt. Eric wore a long-sleeve shirt buttoned all the way to the collar.

  Wes had signed his brother out of Riverwood that afternoon. Once things had settled down with the court stuff, he’d tried to move Eric to a place in Burlington, but to his surprise, his brother wanted nothing to do with it. He had friends at Riverwood. Routine. Becca had been right about that all along; Eric’s injuries and incidents had been random. Not abuse.

  “You remember Uncle Davis, right?” Wes asked.

  “Of course, Wussy.”

  “Well, he’s different. Kind of like those people in wheelchairs at Riverwood.”

  “Okay.”

  He’d tried to explain, actually, but Eric didn’t quite grasp how Davis had been living in Riverwood, but with a different name, and now they thought he didn’t need to live there anymore. Mostly, Eric was upset that he wouldn’t see his mother for a long time, and complained every time Wes saw him.

  Becca greeted him at the door. She wore a black skirt that stopped above her knees and a black top that cut down at the neck to show a hint of cleavage. She looked fantastic.

  “Becca!” Eric cried.

  She gave Eric a big hug. Another for Wes. “Hi Eric, hi Wussy,” she added with a teasing smile. “I’m so glad to see you. Come in.”

  Wes stepped into the foyer and admired the framed photographs hanging on the walls, mostly dive pictures, but also some of the Vermont mountains during winter, summer, and foliage season. She’d hung another copy of the picture of Wes with the hammerheads and smiled when she saw him admiring it.

  “Those are huge,” Becca said. “Thank god I didn’t see any of those when we were swimming toward the island.”

  “These are hammerheads. Ours were white tips, which are much more aggressive.”

  “So you say.”

  She led him back to the living room. Uncle Davis sat in his chair, facing the back windows, which overlooked a pasture and the foothills of the Green Mountains. Two horses grazed in the pasture. There were men out back, too, building some kind of stone wall that bisected the stream bed.

  An audio book played on the stereo. Something with archaic language, filled with French names like Danglars and Villefort. Becca turned it off and turned Davis to face the others.

  “What’s that?” Wes asked, pointing to the wall going up in the pasture.

  “We got a permit to dam the stream and set up a micro-hydro station,” Becca said. “Davis wants to go totally off-grid. Micro-hydro and solar nine months of the year, with a wood boiler in winter.”

  “What, no cold fusion power plant?”

  A laptop sat on a tray in front of his uncle’s chair, and a few seconds later, a voice answered from the speakers, “Maybe next year.”

  “Wow, that’s great,” Wes said. Becca had told him about the system over the phone, but it still surprised him to see it in action. A camera propped atop the laptop screen read tiny flickers in Davis’s left eye as they moved from letter to letter. The software “guessed” words based on a sophisticated algorithm that could learn from past mistakes. Becca said it was 95 percent accurate.

  “Everything all settled with Northrock, Uncle Davis?”

  “Yes,” Davis said, via his computer. “Northrock gone.” Pause. “Very sad. Dad’s life work.”

  “The lawyers finished picking over the corpse last week,” Becca said.

  Business had ground to a halt during the legal wrangling. Until Bill could be proven dead, his shares were tied up. Davis had recovered a slight majority once they’d proven he was still alive, but by then, and with the company decapitated by Bill’s departure and Davis’s severe handicap and lengthy absence, Davis had sold it to a competitor based out of Philadelphia before its value could erode further. Even at fifty cents on the dollar, however, Davis had seen money out of the sale, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.

  “Thank you,” Davis said. “You saved my life. In more than one way.”

  Wes didn’t know what to say, as any answer sounded wrong as soon as it occurred to him. At last, he said, “You’re welcome.”

  “It’s great to see you, Wes,” Becca said, seeming to catch his discomf
ort. She walked toward the kitchen. “You guys want something to drink?”

  “I’m all set, thanks.”

  “I want root beer,” Eric said. He stood at the window, rocking, watching the horses. “Two root beers.”

  “Is Coke okay?”

  “No Coke. No Coke.”

  They finally settled on Sprite, then Becca showed them around, finishing with the home theater system built by the former owners. Eric was quite taken with it, even more so when Becca produced his favorite movie, Ratatouille. He clapped when the DVD menu came on and wore a big grin at the first glimpse of a talking rat.

  “Watch the movie, Eric,” Becca said. “I’ve got meatloaf in the oven for lunch. How does that sound?”

  “Meatloaf! I love meatloaf!”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Does it have pig snouts in it?” Wes asked.

  Eric roared. “Pig snouts!”

  “Men,” Becca said. “I swear, you guys never outgrow the gross-out jokes, do you?”

  Becca put a hand on Wes’s arm as they walked back to the front room. “I mean it, Wes. It’s really great to see you.”

  “You, too.”

  He hadn’t seen her since the trial and even then, the prosecution had asked that they not spend time together without someone from the district attorney’s office present.

  Vermont had a death penalty. It was rarely implemented, but the two murdered immigrant women and the attempted murder of a well-known citizen of the state seemed tailor-made for the ultimate punishment. As the evidence mounted against Pardo, the DA had approached with a plea bargain. Pardo accepted consecutive life sentences. Wes’s mother pled her way to eighteen months plus probation. She probably deserved more. Wes didn’t know what had happened or why she’d gone along, but suspected it had more to do with money or the ugly business with Grandpa Carter than with being afraid of her brother, Bill, as she’d claimed. It was depressing to lose his faith in his mother.

  “You figure things out at Harvard?” she asked. She wheeled Davis to the couch, turned him to face it and sat down opposite. Wes sat on the other side of the couch.

  “Dr. Sizemore loved my paper. I still have to defend it before the committee to get my credit. My other class…well, Caliari is a jerk, but I might pull a gentleman’s C from civil procedures class, if I’m lucky. Got an incomplete at the moment.”

  “Cool.”

  “So you live here, now?”

  “Yeah, I have my own room. And my own kitchen. Someone else comes in and does the cooking and cleaning. Others for PT, massage, all that kind of stuff. There are half a dozen full-time employees, counting me. But that’s just a start. You wouldn’t believe how hard Davis works. Every morning he’s got about fifty things to go over.”

  “He’s a Carter,” Wes said. “Nobody ever said we didn’t know how to work. What’re you guys thinking about?”

  Becca said, “Just to start, he’s working on a petition to collect signatures from fellow sufferers of locked-in syndrome in favor of stem cell research. You wouldn’t believe how many there are. And those are just the known sufferers. To find the rest, we’re starting an advocacy group to search nursing homes and other long-term care facilities for other people suffering the same condition. Even if you can’t move a single muscle, they can give you a CT scan, ask questions, and determine how awake you are.”

  “We’ll find them all,” Davis said.

  “Once that’s rolling,” Becca said. “Davis wants to write a memoir. He’s already taken calls from people trying to buy his story, but he doesn’t exactly need the money, know what I mean? He’d rather tell it in his own way. After that, we’re going to concentrate on the alt-energy stuff. We’ve got a lot of ideas, and the money to do it.”

  “What about Rosa?”

  “I think we’ve got that worked out. She’s coming back next week on a tourist visa, but we had a meeting last week with Barry Flanders and he’s going to pull some strings to get her a green card.”

  Flanders was Vermont’s socialist senator and a big fan of alternative energy. Wes didn’t always agree with the man’s politics, but Flanders was a straight shooter who said what he meant and did what he said.

  “We’re going to get her into UVM,” Becca said. “It won’t be short or easy, but medical school is Rosa’s dream. And I think she’ll be a good doctor. We can use doctors.”

  “Need more doctors,” Davis said through his computer. “Sorry, too slow. Redundant.”

  Becca smiled. “I was just speaking your words, anyway, Davis. Besides, you’re twice as fast as before. Couple more months and you’ll be completing my thoughts.”

  Wes looked around, at the bright, high-ceilinged room, at his uncle. And at Becca, her cynicism from Riverwood left behind. It was a perfect set-up for both of them.

  “I’m envious.”

  “How envious?” the computer intoned.

  “Sounds a hell of a lot more exciting than law school.” He looked Davis in the eyes, something that he still found difficult. With no movement in the face, he had to constantly remind himself that the man was there, always listening and participating.

  Becca, on the other hand, seemed perfectly at ease around the handicapped man. She asked Davis, “What do you think? Can he hack it?”

  “Maybe,” Davis said.

  “Can I hack what?”

  “We want to offer you a job,” Becca said. “Part-time until you graduate. Full-time, after that.”

  “Always need lawyers, too,” Davis said. “You study medical law, right?”

  “Yes, that’s the angle that interests me. Patient advocacy, specifically.”

  “Perfect,” Davis said.

  Together, they explained more. Their plans were ambitious, but Becca seemed supremely confident and in spite of his uncle’s near total paralysis and the slow way he had to express his thoughts, there was no question Davis knew what he was talking about.

  The slow pace of conversation while waiting for Davis’s answer was something else Wes had to get used to. When his uncle finished he said, “I like the idea, but can I think about it?” He looked at Becca. “Maybe you can tell me a little more what you’re looking for, specifically.”

  “Sure, I’ll put something together.”

  His uncle fell silent while Becca and Wes continued chatting for a few minutes. All at once, Becca glanced back and forth between Davis and Wes, then stood and wheeled Davis back toward the window, then drew the blinds.

  Wes frowned when she returned, not sure what this was about. “What are you doing?”

  “I've been thinking about some stuff.” She sat next to him on the couch, closer this time. “About what you said in Costa Rica. At the waterfall.”

  “Oh. You mean the so-called banter?”

  “Wes, it was the wrong time. Okay, so sitting in a gorgeous tropical pool with a waterfall is damn sexy. Yeah, I wanted you right then. I wanted you all over me. In me.”

  He glanced toward his uncle. “Uhm, did you forget something? Or someone?”

  “Forget about him for a moment. He won't say anything.”

  “I’m not worried about what he’ll say.”

  She leaned foward and whispered, “He's asleep, that's why I rolled him to the window, but you're interrupting. So, we’re sitting next to each other on the couch, just like you told me that day in Costa Rica. I’m not wearing a smock, and we’re not at Riverwood, but what I want to know is if you’re still fantasizing about me, like you promised.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “That’s all the answer I need.” She rose to her feet, pulled off her black top and unzipped her skirt and let it fall to the floor. And there she stood in her underwear and he wanted her more than ever.

  “You love green, don’t you?”

  She smiled. “You don’t think they’re hot?”

  “Very hot.” He glanced again toward the man in the wheelchair.

  “Forget about Davis for now, okay?”

  He smile
d. “Okay. Davis forgotten. Now what?”

  Becca straddled his lap and pushed him back into the couch. She leaned close and he could smell her. Her hair brushed against his face and her lips were centimeters from his. “Question, Wes. What were you thinking when I crawled into bed next to you that night at Casa Guacamaya?”

  “That you were sexy as hell and I wanted you.”

  “That’s what I thought. So what happened?”

  He laughed. “You turned me down, remember?”

  “Come on, Wes. I was already half-naked when I climbed into bed.”

  “You said you were scared, then you started chatting about work.”

  It was her turn to laugh. “Fair enough. So, what’s it going to be? Did you change your mind, or do you still want me?”

  “And this is a fair question to ask while you’re half-naked in my lap?”

  “Of course. See, I have a certain answer I want to hear. I figure the half-naked bit tilts the odds in my favor.”

  He’d heard something else in her voice, just a hint, but it was there. Doubt. Fear. Vulnerability. “You’re trembling,” he whispered in her ear.

  “I’m nervous as hell,” she whispered back.

  “You sure fooled me,” he said.

  “Just acting confident because I want to be confident.”

  “Well, I’m nervous too,” Wes said. “The answer is yes, I still feel the same. I’ve been thinking about you almost non-stop.” He hesitated, feeling himself swept along in the moment, but afraid of saying too much. “I think I’ve fallen in love with you.”

  Becca pulled back. “Do you mean that? Really? I mean, already?”

  “You might have noticed that I’m the kind of guy who makes quick decisions. I see what I want and I go for it.”

  “I’ve noticed. But, I’m sorry. Can you say that one more time?” Her face was flush, her eyes large.

  “I love you, Becca.”

  “Thank you.” She kissed him. “Now will you quit messing around and make love to me? Now?”