minutes later through the same door with a plate of food covered in tin foil. Hood waited below the oil torch and when she saw him he spoke in Spanish.
— Good evening, Itixa. My name is Charlie Hood.
She stopped and looked at him. 'English. Quakers teach me.'
'I apologize for interrupting your dinner. But I want to talk to you about Father Joe Leftwich and the Gravas couple-Sean and Seliah.'
'Why?'
'Some bad things have happened to Mr. and Mrs. Gravas. And they all seemed to begin here at this lodge with Father Joe.'
She was short and stout and had a belly. Her black-gray hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail and she wore a loose maroon dress with birds and butterflies embroidered around the neck. Her cheekbones were high and her chin narrow and her face an etched lattice. She searched his eyes matter-of-factly.
'Come, I tell you.'
Hood followed her up the dirt pathway. It bore rake tracks and either side was bordered by tropical plants and flowers. Her casita sat behind a small grass clearing with a blue table and three blue chairs. She set her plate on the table and tapped the back of a chair, then disappeared into her home.
Hood sat and smelled the food. Tonight's entree was roast beef with garlic and baby onions and he was hungry again. He saw a bat flicker at the edge of the torchlight, then wheel back into the darkness. He looked out to Arenal and the trickle of hot red lava lacing its way down the cone and thought of the saliva swaying on Seliah's chin and he wondered if she had spent another night in the hospital.
Itixa came back with two open beers and she handed one to Hood, then sat. From a pocket of her dress she produced flatware wrapped in a white paper napkin.
'I eat. Tell me of bad things of Mr. and Mrs. Gravas.'
Hood told her what he could about their strange ailments and erratic behavior. He told her that Sean had left his job and his home and left Seliah, too. As he spoke he watched her expression become worried, then calculating, then touched with fear.
'A man when he lies have a look,' she said. 'Hard to see. Father Joe have the look. I stay away him and he stay away me. Mr. Gravas have look. Mrs. Gravas no look.'
'What lie did Joe tell?'
'He was the lie.'
She ate and Hood sipped the beer.
'Asema,' she said quietly.
'Joe was an asema?'
She studied him, chewing. 'In the day, a man or a woman. At night, the asema take off his skin and become a ball of light. Blue light. Drink blood of people. If they like the blood, they drink until the person die. Asema hate garlic and some herbs. You find the asema skin and put many salt and pepper and skin will shrink. Asema cannot get skin back on so it dies. Sun kill asema also.'
'What does this have to do with Father Joe?'
'Listen. Eduardo goes to the library they build. Eduardo think Father Joe is good. Always talk and laugh. Eduardo tell me Father Joe want to see the bats. Bats are evil, this I know. I follow because I fear for Eduardo. They see the bats fly. They are the blood-drinking bats, the bats of damnation. The bite of this bat will create asema. I see Father Joe push Eduardo into the cave. It was in my dream. When they leave the cave I run fast but they see me. Later I tell Eduardo I don't care you see me! I protect you! I tell your father everything I see! He calls me superstitious witch.'
'And his father told him to stay away from Father Joe,' said Hood, remembering that this was when Itixa upped the garlic for all Volcano View meals until Father Joe left.
He watched Itixa swipe the last of a tortilla across the last of the juice on her plate. She finished her beer and got two more from her casita. They were open and cold.
'You told him there are some things a child does not need to see or know.'
She looked at Hood and in the torchlight he could see the worry on her face. 'I tell Felix. For his son.'
'Please tell me.'
She looked past Hood and out at the jungle, then leaned toward Hood and spoke quietly. Her eyes caught the torchlight and they were black and shiny as obsidian. 'On the night they all drink too much I am there for beer. I like beer. I see Mrs. Gravas embrace Mr. Gravas. I see her shake the hand of Father Joe. Then she go walking, not… not a walk that is straight. She go to her room. I come back very late for only one more beer. Bar is closed but I hear voices of the men in Father Joe's room. Is loud. Both talking. In the morning I clean the rooms. Everyone gone. In Joe's room I empty the basket into the bag. Something is moving in the bag. I put down the basket and open the bag and look in. There is a bat. It is wrapped in tissue. It makes very bad face. Hate is this face. It is a vampire bat. Bloody mouth and bloody chin and bloody teeth. One wing is broken. It is almost escaping the tissue.'
Hood felt his heart downshift. 'A bat like the ones in the cave?'
'Yes. That make the asema.'
'What did you do with it?'
'Shake bat out of the bag. Step on the bat five time. Use towel. Flush down toilet. Wash floor with bleach and rub with garlic. Say words that have power over evil.'
Hood figured Joe Leftwich had put the bat in the wastebasket. Creatures get into these rooms all the time, he thought-geckos and mice and moths and mantids and cockroaches. Joe had probably found it in his room and tried to dispatch it, then wrapped the animal in tissue and thrown it away, thinking it was dead. Or, in the poor light of the tree-house room, superstitious Itixa might have seen something else altogether. A mouse?
'How big was the bat?' he asked.
Itixa held up her hands about a foot apart. 'The wings.' Then moved them to what Hood guessed was four inches. 'Body. There was blood on the tissue in the basket. There was blood on the bedspread on the floor. There was blood on the sheets at the foot of the bed. Small blood. Drops of blood. Mr. Gravas's blood. Asema Joe drink his blood. He share it with the bat.'
And in his mind's eye Hood saw what dropped from Joe Leftwich's hands as the priest turned to greet Seliah as he turned away from Sean Ozburn's sleeping body, and this thing fell into the folds of the bedspread.
Something small and heavy wrapped in something loose, like a golf ball wrapped in a washcloth.
A bat, thought Hood.
Superstition meets science.
'Excuse me.'
He used the resort satellite phone in the dining room to call the number that Brennan had written on the back of his card. When the doctor answered, Hood could hear the baseball play-offs on Brennan's TV.
'There's a good possibility that Sean Ozburn was bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica on or around July twentieth,' said Hood. 'That's about five weeks before he started feeling strange and bad. And about nine weeks before Seliah started feeling the same way.'
The television went silent. 'Deputy, can you repeat that, please?'
Hood repeated and there was a brief silence.
'This changes everything,' said Brennan.
'What do you know about rabies?'
'Maybe one out of ten thousand physicians in this country has even seen a case of human rabies. I'm not one of them. But I do know this-by the time symptoms show, it's almost always fatal. And it's transmittable by sexual activity, even kissing.'
'Didn't a girl survive it just recently?'
'They used the Milwaukee Protocol,' said Brennan. 'It very likely saved her life. Very controversial. Potentially very damaging on its own. How did the bite occur? Where was it on his body?'
Hood told the truth, not the whole truth, and something other than the truth. He looked out at Arenal. A shower of red embers puffed into the air and he heard the distant clacking of the thrown boulders knocking their way down the mountain.
'The Milwaukee Protocol,' said Hood.
'The Medical College of Wisconsin. Dr. Rodney Willoughby and colleagues. I followed that case. The protocol
