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

after them, still young enough to be fun. And he had been fun! He knew the area intimately and had grown up doing all the things they now learned as adventurers – he kept them safe as they dived the reef, taught them what to look for as they learned to track ocelots. Father and son had proved their loyalty as well as friendship over the years and had become the Tremains’ gatekeepers on Costa Rican soil – they fixed whatever needed fixing, did the helicopter pickups, organized moonlit treks, put extras of her favourite papayas in the fruit bowl. And once the conservation project had swung into action, Jed’s father had been rewarded with a senior role in the running of it, tasked with co-ordinating the rangers who ran the midline between the biologists, ecologists and the local communities.

As if sensing her scrutiny, Jed’s dark eyes met hers briefly in the mirror. He smiled back at her warmly, her old friend.

‘Hey! Was that a jaguar?’ Zac asked excitedly, twisting in his seat beside her. ‘Did you see that, Twig?’

She shook her head apologetically. ‘Afraid not.’

‘I just saw a pair of, like, yellow eyes, between the trees.’

Tara looked back but, even if it had been there, the creature was already lost in the trees. Like putting a foot in the river, the rainforest never stood still.

‘Sorry to disappoint but it was a margay, more likely,’ Jed said over the wind, glancing at Zac in the mirror. ‘The jags don’t come this close to the coast.’

Zac sat forward in his seat, gripping the back of Miles’s headrest. ‘Shame. I’d love to see one.’

‘Well then, we can arrange that for you, for sure.’

‘Really? You could find me a jaguar, just like that?’

‘They’re getting harder to find but we know their most common routes. It’s just about knowing where to look, and being patient.’

Miles twisted back to look at his husband. ‘I keep telling you – whatever you want, Jed can make it happen. He’s the man.’

Jed kept his gaze dead ahead. They were approaching the junction where the track met the single main road. ‘Of course. Nothing’s a problem. Whatever you need.’

Jed looked in both directions and pulled out. Tara knew they were only a few minutes from the town and that soon the strains of music would become audible and her holiday would begin.

They accelerated, Jed’s eyes flicking quickly between the road and the rear-view mirror as they picked up speed. He was watching someone behind them, his eyes instinctively narrowing to slits as a dazzling brightness suddenly washed over their vehicle. She glanced around to see the beam of headlights from the other Jeep. Only it wasn’t the other Jeep – these were higher up, and advancing fast.

Too fast.

She looked back at Jed, seeing how his grip had tightened around the wheel, hearing the engine growl as he pushed his foot flatter to the floor. They sped up so that her hair blew about her face, making it hard to see anything clearly.

But the other vehicle was still gaining on them, catching them up. What was happening?

‘Jed?’ she asked, a tremor in her voice that made even Miles turn around. As if in response, the lights behind were flicked to full beam and he winced, automatically raising his arms to his face.

‘What the fuck?’ her brother cried.

The vehicle behind honked loudly and insistently, bearing down with frightening speed and compressing the distance between them to just a few metres. Tara gasped, unable to process what was happening. The lights were blinding. In the space of mere moments they had gone from holiday vibes to being run off the road. They would hit the trees! She screamed as she saw the truck get to within six feet of the back of them, before it suddenly, violently, swerved. In the next instant, it was overtaking them so closely that the truck’s running board missed the side of the jeep by mere inches.

‘Holy shit!’ Zac yelled, his eyes wide and mouth open wider as the truck sped past and into the distance. ‘Who the hell was that?’

In her panic, Tara had clocked nothing but the set profiles of two men in hats in the front seats. Jed was quiet for a moment, his grip still tight around the wheel so that his knuckles blanched. ‘No one. Just some local fools,’ he said finally, in his calm, steady voice. ‘Not everyone here knows how to drive properly.’

‘That’s putting it lightly,’ Miles muttered, looking and sounding shaken.

But Tara, watching him still in the mirror, saw how Jed had looked away before speaking. One of the clearest signs he was lying. All doctors were trained to read the clues by which people give themselves away, in preparation for dealing with the teenage girls who would swear blind they were virgins even as they heard their baby’s heartbeat on the monitor, to winkle out the abusive partner speaking on behalf of a ‘shy’ patient . . . Why would he lie about who those people were? And why had they tried to run him off the road?

Everyone was quiet now, their initial excitement at being here suddenly diminished by the unsettling incident. Jed turned on the radio, the songs drifting into the night as they sat in uneasy silence.

Within minutes they were coming into Puerto Viejo, long-familiar wooden shacks lining the road, brightly painted signs advertising beers or beans and rice bowls, craft stands shuttered up for the night, bars dimly lit with hanging lanterns, surfboards outside hire shops stacked in storage racks like whale ribs, ready for the first dawn riders . . .

Over the wind, Tara could hear reggae beats, glimpsed people seated on rickety chairs and smiling at them with easy hospitality as they sped through the small town. It had only six streets in total, which was precisely why her family loved it here. Low-key and off the well-heeled track, its isolation had been almost entirely protected until 1979 when the road had been built, opening it up to the