She turned up a street and hiked away from the beach, through a residential area. Small houses engulfed by jungle foliage lined the dirt road. Her backpack was beginning to feel heavy; there was something poking into her left kidney and she waggled her pack, trying to move whatever it was, but with no luck. At the next intersection, she paused, double-checking her directions, then turned left and walked some more. The hotel should be appearing soon. She had come to a row of apartments, flanked by empty jungle, and houses with corrugated tin roofs. One appeared to be a makeshift restaurant; a woman wearing a faded flower-print apron tended a wood stove beneath a flat iron surface sizzling with cooking meat. She did not notice Cassidy pass.
After another block of walking, Cassidy realized that she was near Reeve’s apartment building. In the daytime, the surrounding area lacked the menacing shadows and shifty activity as her last visit. The apartment came into view, and she paused, wondering if her feet had brought her here on purpose.
She had been thinking about the girl who had disappeared into the neighbor’s apartment, and the man waiting for her return outside. How did such a system even work? Had the neighbor called a certain phone number, and ordered up his request? I’ll take a thin one with long hair who looks terrified, age sixteen or seventeen, and make it snappy. Or was there a website, like Benita had said, and a customer need only click? The concept made her blood boil. The system should be destroyed. How could people do such terrible things to children?
As if drawn by some invisible force, Cassidy entered the building. Climbing the narrow stairs, she thought about Reeve walking these same steps, imagined him leading Jade by the hand down the hallway. The stained and dingy walls looked no more cheery in the daytime. From one of the rooms came the thumping sounds of vigorous drumming, presumably from a set of bongos.
Reaching the end of the hall, Cassidy noticed that Reeve’s doorknob had been fixed and realized that someone had taken over his space. What had they done with Reeve’s broken things? Thrown them into the street? Hauled them off to some pile in the jungle? She paused, wondering what to do, then remember the neighbor. She stepped to his door and gave it a knock. A feeling of intense rage surfaced in her, and she hit the door again, harder, until she was pounding with her fist.
A middle-aged man with coffee-black skin emerged from the door halfway down the hall. “Hey!” he called out in Caribbean-accented English. “You tryin’ to bring down dis door?”
Cassidy paused, her knuckles throbbing. She shook her head. “No,” she said, her small voice barely a whisper. Just this apartment.
The man’s dreadlocks did not stir when he shook his head. “He gone,” the man said. “The police take him away.”
Cassidy watched him curiously. “Why?”
“Too many parties. People coming and going at all hours of de day and night.”
Cassidy frowned. She did not know what he meant, but felt somehow that she should.
“It bettah now. Much more quiet.” His wrinkled face calmed.
Cassidy lowered her arm from the neighbor’s doorway and shuffled down the hall, feeling the man’s eyes on her as she passed.
“Did Peter send you?” he said.
Cassidy froze. Slowly, she turned back to face him. “What?”
The man gave an impatient stomp of his foot. “Did you evah meet him?” This time he used a different cadence, and she realized her mistake, but for a moment it was like he the floor has vanished and she was falling slowly through space.
“Yes,” she said, recovering her composure. “I was looking for someone else, and he . . . came. He had a girl with him,” she added, unable to ban the image of the two together. “I wanted . . . ” Cassidy stopped. Why was she telling this to a stranger? It didn’t matter now.
“He no good,” the dreadlocked man said, shaking his head, and then closed the door.
Outside the apartment, Cassidy took great, heaping lungfuls of air—as if she had just surfaced from a deep dive. She popped the waist strap of the backpack. It slid off her shoulders and landed softly in the dirt, the hip belt curving up like the dead limbs of an insect. She leaned on her knees, gasping, and the tears came leaking down, her silent sobs shaking her shoulders. She sank to her pack and wept.
Twenty
Cassidy turned another corner, knowing she was lost, but not able to arrive at a plan that would get her found. Her brain was working by instinct, and she just walked—first to get away, and after that because she didn’t know how to stop. Her grief counselor had encouraged her to walk or ride a bike, but Cassidy had ignored this advice. Not because she didn’t love doing those things, but because it sounded like something the counselor would say to an elderly client, and she imagined herself as an old, crumpled woman, walking with her cane along the street, stopping to admire a flower or watch a hummingbird.
Cassidy had no time for such nonsense. If she was going to “walk” then she would hike ten miles or climb a peak. If she was going to “ride a bike,” it would not be a cruise through the park, but an eight-mile grind on a forested trail with lots of tricky roots, with a screaming downhill as the reward. And doing those things did help, even if only for a little while.
But walking here in Tamarindo was not
