Chapter 22
It hurt like the very devil, but Mitch remained stoic while she laid a track of closures along the cut. When she finished with the last one, she assessed her handiwork, then pushed back her chair and went over to the sink to wash her hands.
“They’re holding for now,” she said, “but I don’t recommend you do anything strenuous for the next several days.”
As he pulled on his T-shirt, he grimaced. “I promise I won’t.”
“If it looks like it’s getting infected—”
“I’ve already taken a couple of antibiotic capsules. John keeps a stash here.”
“He keeps a stash?”
“The swamp teems with germs and hazards. There are lots of ways to get sick, debilitated, or dead.”
“Well, I won’t be here long enough to experience any of that.
” She finished returning all the first aid supplies to the shopping bag and, after tying a loose knot to close it, handed it to him.
“Take this with you and keep it handy. Those closures will need replacing. Don’t forget to use the salve.
As soon as I use the bathroom, we can go. ”
“Not until I’ve eaten something. You indulged in Roland Malone’s fine cuisine. I didn’t have dinner of any sort, and I’m starving.”
She looked perturbed and ready to argue, but all she said was, “Excuse me,” and went into John and Beth’s bedroom.
As soon as the door closed behind her, he went over to a sideboard attached to the wall.
The upper half of it had open shelving loaded with mismatched dishes and glassware.
The bottom was formed by three deep drawers.
One of them contained another of John’s stashes: a collection of burner phones that had never been used. They were good to have on hand.
He chose one that was fully charged and sent Jim Tucker a text: Anything?
By the time Dylan returned to the kitchen, he was opening a can of soup. “Steak and potato. A whole meal in a can. I’m happy to share,” he said as he emptied the contents into a saucepan and turned on the stove.
“No thank you.”
“Something to drink?”
“Water’s fine.” She picked up the bottle she’d left on the table and took a drink. “Isn’t that John Bowie in the picture on the nightstand in the bedroom?”
“With the tall, lanky girl? That’s John and his daughter from his first marriage. Molly. That picture was taken about eight years ago. Out of high school, she got a scholarship to a ritzy art school in Manhattan. She’s up there now.”
“Do they have a good relationship?”
He scoffed. “They’d walk through fire for each other. Fortunately, she doesn’t mind sharing him with Beth. She and Molly took to each other from the start.”
While explaining that, the soup had heated.
He took a box of crackers from the pantry, tested one for staleness, and decided they were fresh enough.
He ladled soup into a bowl he took from the sideboard, got a spoon from the silverware drawer, and carried everything over to the table.
“Sure you don’t want anything besides water? ”
“I’m sure.”
He motioned toward the empty chair across from him. “Have a seat.”
“Mitch, I need to get home.”
“Are you just going to hover while I eat?”
She sighed and, with exaggerated annoyance, pulled out the chair. He didn’t sit until she did, then he ate a couple of spoonfuls of soup and a cracker, reached for a napkin in the holder in the center of the table, and wiped his mouth. “What happened down there in Central America?”
Dylan yanked her gaze from the stuffed alligator mounted on the wall. Her posture, her expression, everything about her went en garde.
He said, “You had just as well talk about it, because I already know what happened.”
“Of course. You looked me up and pieced bits together to form a history.”
“Yeah, but you miss a lot when you’re working with bits. You can overlook key pieces. To a detective, that’s like having a dull toothache that hangs on until those missing pieces come to light and you get the full picture.”
Rather than look at him directly, she stared at the strands of Mardi Gras beads dangling from a wall sconce a few degrees to the left behind his head and just below the gator.
“Where did you meet George?”
He could tell she considered ignoring him. Then, seemingly resigned, she looked at him directly. “At school.”
“Duke University.”
“Since you know so much, would you rather tell the story?”
He made an apologetic gesture that invited her to proceed while he methodically ate his soup.
“George was finishing grad school at the same time I got my bachelor’s. We married within months.”
“Was he also a psych major?”
“Philosophy and sociology.”
“That makes sense. All his goodwill work.” He scraped the bottom of his bowl and pushed it aside. He ate one last cracker and took a drink from his bottle of water, waiting to see if she would continue without prodding. She didn’t.
He said, “I know the basics, Dylan. What can it hurt to share a few details? I’m not even asking about you, per se.”
“You told me you weren’t sure what that expression meant.”
“I was lying.”
“I know.”
He waited a beat. “It’s George I want to know about.”
“Why?”
“Curiosity. In all the media about what happened, he comes across as being so noble. Was that an acquired trait, or was he born that way?”
“He wouldn’t have seen himself as being noble.”
“That’s what made him noble.”
“God! There’s no arguing with you.”
He gave her a contrite smile. “That’s what Angela always said.” He folded his arms on the table and leaned on them. “Tell me about George.”
She stared at the gaudy beads again, either trying to figure out how much she was going to relate or puzzling over why the beads were hanging on the light fixture, which was something he’d always wondered himself.
Eventually she began. “When I met him, he had already spent a lot of time in Central America. Through high school and college, he’d spent every summer volunteering with one welfare organization or another.
He’d visited just about every country numerous times, was fluent in Spanish, and had a working knowledge of many regional dialects. He was keen to write a book.”
“About his experiences?”
“Not so much about himself, but an exposé on the political corruption, the squalid living conditions of thousands, the lack of modern medicine and basic education.”
“Violent insurgencies.”
“Yes,” she said softly.
It was a bad idea to cast aspersions on a knight in shining armor, especially a deceased one.
He figured the best tactic was to ease into it.
He stalled by taking another drink of water and finally said, “Despite the volatile political climate and poor living conditions, George volunteered to go back down there and take you with him.”
“Yes. He signed on with a welfare program and committed us to a year.”
“A year. You agreed to that and went willingly?”
She gave a soft laugh. “I was a newlywed.”
“Starry-eyed.”
She conceded that with a nod. “In love with a man who passionately wanted to help people in oppressed areas where each day presented a challenge to their very survival.”
“He was an idealist.”
“You can call him that if you like, but he wasn’t quixotic. He was also a realist. He saw a desperate need and genuinely wanted to fill it. That’s why I fell in love with him.”
“You never entertained second thoughts about committing yourself to spending a year in a potentially hostile environment?”
“Not really.”
It was a qualified denial, and Mitch didn’t believe it anyway.
She must have sensed his skepticism, because she came back defensively.
“We were sent to a very remote village in a region where there hadn’t been any political unrest. We were warmly welcomed by the villagers.
Their homes were hovels. The school was a hut on the brink of collapse.
Our mission was to build a proper one. We worked diligently.
The school was almost finished.” She stopped and her expression turned bleak.
“And then?”
She took a deep breath. “There was a coup in the capital city. The president was executed in a public square. Sides formed. Rebels, contra rebels, vigilante gangs who were completely lawless and indiscriminately preyed on all factions.
“George tried to remain neutral, but it was inevitable that being a norteamericano he would come under suspicion, as would the villagers who’d come to idolize him.
One night, one of the most infamous gangs raided the village.
Two of the young men who were helping George build the school were murdered. Brutally, in front of their families.
“During the exchange of gunfire, George was shot in the thigh. One of the gang members was also killed. The attackers retreated into the jungle but not before vowing reprisal for the death of their compatriot.
“George insisted that I return to the United States immediately. Not without him, I said. But he refused to leave until the school was finished. He had promised the villagers, and himself, that he wouldn’t abandon the project until it was completed.
“He insisted that his leg wound wasn’t that serious.
No severed artery, no broken bone. We had a limited supply of penicillin he could inject into himself to stave off infection.
He could walk with the help of a walking stick stout enough to use on mountain trails.
He would be fine, he said. It was barely a scratch. And so forth.”
She gave him a meaningful look before continuing. “He would be right behind me, he said. Another week, two at the most, the school would be finished. I pleaded with him to come with me then, but…” She reached for her water bottle, uncapped it, and took a drink.
“The following day tension was high. Everyone was fearful the vigilantes would return. When darkness fell, one of the brave young men of the village drove me through the jungle to a landing strip still operated by the country’s military, which by then was ragtag at best.
“The welfare organization had sent a small plane to fly George and me out. The pilot was shocked to learn that he wasn’t with me. He warned me that he might not be able to return for George and gave me only minutes to decide whether to stay or go.”
She raised her hands in a helpless gesture. “Obviously, I boarded the plane. I was flown to San José, Costa Rica. From there, I took a commercial flight to Dallas.”
After taking another sip of water, she continued. “When we landed, the captain came on over the speaker and instructed everyone to remain seated while a passenger was escorted off. I was led by a flight attendant to the jetway where I was met by emissaries from the US state department.
“They escorted me to a room. Of course I knew then that George was dead, but they made it official. He’d been killed by ‘hostiles.’ The unfinished school had been set on fire. George and roughly half of the villagers were either shot or hacked to death with machetes.”
The silence that followed was interrupted by the drip-drip of the faucet. Mitch waited a full minute before saying anything. “Dylan, you can’t blame yourself for leaving when you did.”
She raised her head from the study of her hands tightly clasped on the tabletop. “I don’t. I made the only choice I could. I was pregnant.”
Mitch’s stomach dropped.
“I’d been back in the States for only a week when I miscarried,” she said. “I gather from your stunned reaction that that was one of the missing pieces you didn’t know.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “No, I didn’t know. Did George?”
Smiling ruefully, she shook her head. “I knew if I told him, it would only strengthen his insistence that I leave. But… but if I had told him, if he had known that he was going to be a father, maybe he would have left with me. I’m haunted by my decision not to tell him.”
It was that decision that kept her inside the bell jar. And Mitch understood her need for that self-defense mechanism all too well.
He got up, cleared the table, and rinsed out everything he’d used before turning back to her.
“I told you that the night I lost Angela, John and I were working late. Tough case, and we were getting nowhere. We decided to shut down and pick up in the morning. As we left headquarters together, I suggested we stop and get a beer. I’d already told Angela I was going to be late. What were a few more minutes?”
Dylan covered her mouth with her hand. She knew what was coming.
“When I found her, her body wasn’t even cold,” he said, his voice cracking. “I’m haunted by those extra twenty minutes I took to drink a beer.”
They were looking into each other’s eyes with such complete understanding and compassion that they both jumped when the burner in Mitch’s pocket rang.
Only one person knew to call it.