The Secret Path by Karen Swan (summer beach reads TXT) 📕

okay,’ Alex said quickly. ‘I mean, the boat was carried over some falls and broken up, but it wasn’t . . . I mean it was, but . . .’ He stared back at them all with wide eyes. ‘She was okay. Just in shock for a while.’

Holly couldn’t speak. She could scarcely believe this was happening. While she’d been lying on the beach the past few days, her best friend had been enduring . . . all this? Quite literally, hell and high water?

‘After that, things between us improved. She realized we had to stick together and work as a team. Things were okay—’

‘Till you kissed her,’ Rory interjected furiously.

‘It’s not his fault,’ Jed said, a look of quiet intensity on his face.

Everyone turned to look at him again.

‘Oh, I think it is!’ Miles cried. ‘Thanks to him jumping my sister’s bones, we have absolutely no bloody idea if she ran or was snatched!’

‘It’s the curse.’ Jed stared back at them.

There was an astounded silence.

‘Curse?’ Dev repeated with his characteristic mildness, as though this was a reasonable explanation to enter the conversation.

‘You need to understand – to the Bribri people, the river is life. It is fundamental to their culture, their entire way of being. Their lives respect and preserve Iriria, or Mother Nature as you would say. Every living thing should be kept to Mother Earth, even the fossil fuels – oil, coal, gas, they are all the remains of ancient plants and animals and should remain part of Iriria’s body. That is what the Bribri believe.’

‘Okay. But what does this have to do with Tara disappearing?’ Dev asked.

Jed was quiet for a moment. ‘A curse has been cast. That was why the river took her. It was no accident.’

The silence that greeted these words was deafening.

‘I don’t understand,’ Miles said finally, looking to Zac for help. ‘What . . . why is he saying these things? What curse?’

‘The project has been cursed,’ Jed repeated.

‘The project? You mean the park? That makes no sense,’ Zac said with obvious scepticism. ‘The Tremains are the good guys here. Conservation, preservation. They’re the reason there’s no more ranching, no mining. Why, Costa Rica now has a reputation on the global stage as the world’s first country to be run completely on renewable energy. Why put a curse on them . . . if such a thing is even feasible?’

But Alex straightened up suddenly with a look of intensity on his face, as though he knew why. He looked like a man who understood, at last, the game. ‘Who placed the curse, Jed? Which tribe?’ There was urgency in his voice.

Jed blinked, looking unhappy, like a spy being forced to reveal his secrets.

‘Tell me!’

‘. . . The Guetares.’

Alex slumped, and Holly somehow instinctively knew what that answer meant.

William.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Day sprang at her like a cat, silent, soft and unforgiving, a beam of sunshine winking past a banana leaf and splashing over her face like water. She blinked a few times, trying to gather her thoughts and process where she was, but it was hard to think; everything ached from lying on the hard ground and she felt peculiarly absent, as though her body was a shell and she was but a shadow flitting inside it.

Her gaze settled on the stone a few inches from her face. It was perfectly smooth and domed, another one placed twelve inches further along, arranged in a form too symmetrical to be random. In a flash she remembered—

She sat up and looked around her with a gasp. The stones were placed around her body in an oval, far enough away not to become dislodged if she turned. William was sitting on a tree stump, seemingly whittling something from a stick.

‘There is tea,’ he said without looking up, and she saw a half-coconut filled with a green tincture just outside her stone perimeter. Without a word, she reached for it, sipping tentatively. She didn’t want to drink it; she didn’t want to accept ‘hospitality’ when she was not a guest but in effect a prisoner – but she also knew she needed fluids. The humidity levels meant dehydration was a constant risk and though she didn’t trust him, she assumed he had had some of this tea too. He might be able to navigate this jungle without compass, map or phone, but he was still a man – seventy per cent water; he needed to drink too.

‘What are those for?’ she muttered, nodding towards the stones, extending a leg and deliberately scuffing one so that it rolled a few centimetres out of position; the jarring asymmetry was pleasing. She crossed her legs, staring at him defiantly over the top of the coconut as she sipped the tea.

But William didn’t look up. ‘Protection. No predators will move past the stones.’

She gave a snort of disdain – the only protection stones could provide was defensively in the form of a blow to the head – but it struck her that she hadn’t stirred all night; she had slept heavily, even though her eyes had closed against her will as she yearned for the luxury of a string hammock and fretted about pale green eyelash snakes slithering over her in her sleep, the exploratory bites of leaf-cutter ants, the warning stings of scorpions . . .

She watched him whittle with the knife; it was made from bone, one edge looking as sharp as any of her scalpels. If she could get it off him, she would know exactly where to cut . . . not to kill him, but certainly which tendons to slash to immobilize him enough for her to get away. It didn’t matter that she wouldn’t know where she was going. She didn’t know where she was now with him, and though she knew his skills kept her safe, she was also inherently unsafe in his company. She still didn’t know what he wanted. Money appeared to hold no sway now, even though he had reacted quickly enough when she had gone to his hut and offered him a small fortune to get her off this mountain and back to Puerto Viejo. It was odd.