CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“We need to get moving,” he said, getting to his feet. “We’ve only got a few more hours of daylight and from Elaine’s calculations, we can make it to the first waterfall just before dusk.”
When he reached down to pick up his pack, he noticed the graffiti on the side of Corazón Roto and shook his head.
“Nothing is sacred anymore,” he said. “I’m always amazed at the things people do without thinking, and then I remember that a good portion of the population spends a lot of its time not thinking at all.”
She snorted out a laugh and glanced at the two names carved on the rock inside of a heart. “When I was at the Colosseum in Rome, someone had spray-painted ‘Texas A&M’ on the side in Aggie maroon. I’d never been so mortified in my life to be from Texas.”
His muscles had tightened since he’d sat down and taken a break, and he stretched before he put his pack on. And then he watched as Miller did stretches of her own. She hadn’t uttered one word of complaint, and he knew he’d set a grueling pace. But his gut was telling him their time to find Justin was very limited.
“Wait a second,” she said, dropping her pack back on the ground and squatting down so she could see the names more clearly. “Bull Brazer and Lily Crowe. I know them. Both of them.”
“That’s not a coincidence,” he said. “Now we just have to figure out what the hell they have to do with finding him.”
“Well,” she said, “I can tell you for sure that they’re not in love as the heart suggests. Bull was a friend of my brother’s in high school.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“He was dumber than a box of hair and he once broke both his legs jumping off his roof with a sheet tied around his neck like a cape.”
Elias’s lips twitched, but he said, “Maybe something else that comes to mind will be more helpful.”
She shrugged. “I really don’t know what I can tell you,” she said. “He and my brother were childhood friends. I think Bull moved away his sophomore or junior year of high school. His dad got a job in Oklahoma, I think. The only thing I really remember about Bull is that he was a neighborhood kid. He lived over on North Street, and my brother would ride his bike down there so they could play basketball.”
“There it is,” he said. “Elaine, which of the two waterfalls is north of here?”
Both of the waterfalls you earmarked for your journey are north of Corazón Roto, though neither are true north. But there is a difference of ten miles between them and an elevation difference of almost a thousand feet. They are also on two separate paths.
“That doesn’t help,” he said. “What about Lily Crowe? Who’s she?”
“I know even less about her,” Miller said. “Do you know Charles and Mildred Crowe? He’s been postmaster for more than forty years, and she’s been a teller at the bank for just as long. Lily was their only child.”
“What’s their address?” he asked.
“They live over on Mockingbird. It’s the little white clapboard.”
“I know the one,” he said. “You said ‘was’. What happened to Lily?”
“They used to hold Fourth of July celebrations and picnics on the other side of the lake from where y’all have your secret entrance to the Bat Cave. A bunch of kids were swimming, swinging from a rope and into the water, and most everyone else was watching the fireworks. It was dark, so kids were coming and going, and no one noticed when Lily didn’t get out of the water after her turn. They didn’t find her body until daylight the next morning. She was eight years old. But that was well before my time. I don’t know anything else about her. People still talk about it because it was such a tragedy, and things like that don’t happen often in Last Stop.”
Elias thought about it for a minute, trying to remember the Justin he knew and his thinking patterns. He’d know Miller’s knowledge of the girl would be limited, and it wasn’t so cut-and-dried as a street name.
“Elaine, is one of the waterfalls eight degrees north from here?”
The 3-D image erupted from Elias’s phone, and there was a section highlighted over one of the waterfalls.
Affirmative . . . uploading coordinates now.
“Well, I guess we can assume that Cordova and his men will never figure that one out,” she said.
“Which is why he wanted you to begin with,” he said. “Let’s move while we’ve still got daylight. We’ve got a long way to go.”
“I’ve got visions of a good night’s sleep already in my head.”
“You’ll have earned it by the time we get there. We’re going up pretty high. Let me know if you get light-headed or start to feel sick. It’s still pretty warm out here, and it’ll be a while before the afternoon rain comes in.”
“I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “Sleep is a great motivator for me. I hardly ever get any, so having that as a light at the end of the tunnel is all I need to make it through.”
THE RAIN STARTED four hours later.
Elias hadn’t been kidding about the shift in elevation. She felt the tightness in her chest as they climbed higher and higher, though the temperature had cooled off considerably, so much so that she’d put on the all-weather jacket and pulled the hood over her head. It didn’t do much good for keeping the rain off, as the droplets hit her in the face and slithered down her neck.
Her calves and thighs were on fire, and the pack on her back got heavier with every step.
“I hope you can appreciate the fact that I’ve refrained from making any movie references about the One Ring and how heavy it gets as Frodo and Samwise Gamgee get closer to Mordor. This is a volcanic island after all.”
“I really appreciate your restraint,” he said, using the machete to cut through the thick vines.
She noticed he’d gotten quieter the farther they went, and how difficult it was to forge a path that wasn’t there. He was using all his strength and concentration to get them to the waterfall, and it was far from an easy battle. She hoped like hell they were going to the right one, and they hadn’t misinterpreted Justin’s clues.
“You hear that?” he asked sometime later.
She hadn’t heard much of anything for the past couple of miles. Blisters had rubbed themselves raw on both of her feet, and all she could hear was the miserable whining inside her head, and the occasional whimper she let slip. He’d been checking on her often, asking if she was okay, and she always told him yes. She didn’t want to slow them down. It was her own stupid pride that was keeping her silent, but she didn’t see what good it would do or what would change if she told him what was wrong. It would just worry him, and put them in potential danger. She’d noticed he’d spent a lot more time stopping to listen before it had started raining, and checking in with Elaine to see if the Devil’s Due had been boarded again.
No one had boarded their boat, but Elaine had reported there were more boats in the water surrounding the islands. What couldn’t be deciphered was if the boats contained friend or foe. But Elias had said it was best to always assume the worst and deal with it.
The rain hadn’t let up, and it was almost dark. It wasn’t often she found herself in the midst of a full-blown pity party. She was the kind of girl who took her knocks and then pulled herself up by the bootstraps and kept going. But she was physically and mentally exhausted, and she just didn’t have a lot left in her. They were both soaked to the skin, and water dripped from her eyelashes and the tip of her nose.
“Hear what?” she asked, but she didn’t think he heard her.
It took her a minute to focus on what he could possibly be talking about. And then she heard it. The sound of rushing water could be heard through the rain, and she almost collapsed to her knees in relief.
“Oh, praise Jesus,” she said, trying to pick up her pace, but her feet wouldn’t let her. She would’ve taken off her shoes miles ago, but the ground was a mix of gnarled roots and rocks. Not to mention she was pretty sure she’d seen a couple of more moving vines, and she didn’t want to take the chance of exposing bare skin. At least her boots protected her above the ankle.
“What’s wrong?” he said, stopping to look at her closely. “You weren’t limping before.”
“Blisters,” she said automatically, not caring anymore since they’d made it to their destination.
“Dammit, woman,” he said, coming toward her. He looked like a madman, coming at her with machete in hand and a vicious scowl on his face. “Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt? That’s all we need is to be in a situation where we have to make a run for it and you can’t take two steps.”
She felt her temper bubble to the surface. “What difference would it have made? Would you have carried me the rest of the way? If not, then there’s nothing you could’ve done about it. We still have to go to the same stupid place, whether I’ve got blisters on my feet or not.”
“Take your shoes off,” he demanded. “We don’t have time to stop and doctor them, but you can at least give them some relief. We’ve got about another mile to go, but the sun is going down. It’s going to get dark here first because we’re canopied by the trees. Damn stubborn woman,” he muttered under his breath.
“I heard that,” she said, narrowing her eyes.
“I meant for you to,” he shot back.
“The ground is too rough to take off my shoes. I’ll tear up the bottoms of my feet,” she said. “And what do you mean we have another mile? We can hear the falls. It’s deafening. I thought we were here.”
“It’s going to get a lot louder,” he said. “And you should be fine to walk. The closer we get to the falls, the smoother the rocks are becoming.”
The thought of another mile was just depressing, but she sat down and undid the laces of her boots, stifling a sob as she tried to pull the first one off. She didn’t quite manage to stifle it when she pulled the second boot off. Her white socks were stained with blood.
“Oh, baby,” Elias said, kneeling down in front of her and gently taking a foot in his hand. “I’ve got a first-aid kit in my bag.” He stood and then held out his hand to help her to her feet. “Take your pack off your back and put it on your front,” he told her.
“What?” she asked, confused.
He was already pulling the pack off and shoving her arms through the holes so it rested over her chest. He reached down and grabbed her boots, tying the laces together and then attaching them to her pack, and then with a heroic amount of strength, he put his arms beneath her knees and her back and he picked her up, carrying her like a baby.
She put her arms around his neck automatically, afraid he might drop her, but he didn’t even let out a groan as he shifted her weight in his arms.
“You’re out of your mind,” she said. “You can’t possibly carry me a mile in the rain, plus both of our packs. You’ll kill yourself.”
“I’ve carried a man twice your size and both of our gear through the desert. This is not such a big deal.”
And then he proved his words to be true as he carried her the rest of the way to the falls.