Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet (classic fiction txt) 📕

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In the morning he walked out in front of the hotel and got a car to Belmopan, about an hour away.

It was a small town, the capital, and nothing else—grass, palms, scattered pastel-colored buildings. Less slumlike than the city, but with a feeling of vacancy. The embassy was a two-story white, wooden edifice with a porch all around, columns in front, palm trees, a flag and a bright-green, well-kept lawn.

Inside a woman rose from her desk when he came through the door.

“There’s an American citizen who was arrested,” he told her without preamble. “A businessman. Down in Placencia, but they brought him up to Belize City last night. I have to find him. Get him immediate legal aid. He shouldn’t be in there.”

“Give me his name,” she said. “I’ll make some calls.”

The secretary went into another room. While he waited he sat in a teak chair and jiggled his leg. The floor was wood and a wooden fan turned on the ceiling; beside him sat a shiny, tall plant whose leaves brushed against his shoulder. He heard the sound of a fax machine dialing. Then the front door opened and two red-faced men came in wearing loud, floral-print shirts. They seemed to be familiar with the premises and moved past him into a back room, talking about sportfishing. One said he’d caught a wahoo, the other a snook.

After a while the secretary came back. She had a man with her, thin and balding, with glasses.

“Jeff Brady,” he said. “Public affairs section chief. We don’t have staff attorneys, but we do refer out. Not clear yet whether we need a lawyer though. Need to appraise the situation, put out feelers. Be on our way?”

“You found him?”

“We know where they’re holding him, yes. Taking my own car, Sarah. Binadu’s got the VW. Later.”

He drove a small, open jeep, making swift, jerky turns until they got out onto the highway. Hal held onto the door handle. The exhaust of other cars made him cough.

He resolved to act as T.’s staunchest ally. He would tell the diplomat a story that would raise his sympathies.

“He was obviously deeply affected by the death of his girlfriend. I’m not saying he’s in great shape emotionally. But he has no history of violence or anything like that. Not even a misdemeanor or an unpaid parking ticket.”

“Uh huh?”

“He’s a conscientious boss-type guy, my wife’s devoted to him. Right now, you’ll see, he’s unshaven, he looks like a mountain man, but the guy I know wears three-thousand-dollar suits and drives a high-end Mercedes. So yeah, was he depressed when he came down here? Sure. Anyone would be. But that’s it. He needed a change. Decided to do some backpacking, so he hired a local guide to take him up the river. I think they were headed for some trailhead near the jaguar preserve.”

“Ways up there. Cockscomb? Past the confluence with the Swasey Branch? You can drive there in an hour. Tourists don’t tend to take the river route.”

“Their first night out the guide apparently died. Out of the blue. He suffered a heart attack or something. Stern said he found out in the morning, because they were each sleeping in their own tents. He went into shock or something, the death of the guide really threw him.”

“I bet.”

With his left hand on the wheel, Brady fumbled with his right to shake a cigarette from his pack and light it off the dash. He seemed distracted. Hal needed to get his attention.

“I mean here he was, this young guy from L.A., up a jungle river with just this one person who was his lifeline. And that lifeline suddenly disappears. Plus the fact, this guy Stern, over the past few months, is like a death magnet. Everyone close to him dies. Or gets debilitated. My wife told me the father left the mother—this aging frat boy left the mother, you know, his wife of so many years, to be a gay stripper in Key West. Then the girlfriend dies, of some heart condition he didn’t even know she had. This woman, by the way, was twenty-three and ran marathons. His mother tried to O.D. but ended up losing her mind. She’s got dementia or something. His dog gets hit by a car. Even his business partner ditched him.”

“Rough year.”

A spark of interest. Either the cigarette or the drama was putting Brady in a better mood.

“So anyway, after he found the guide dead Stern went into shock I guess, and eventually he dragged the body back down to the boat. We’re talking, for miles. I did that hike, looking for him. It was exhausting even without a 200-pound dead weight to haul. I guess he wrapped it up in the tent and got it all the way down to the river, where he put it back in the boat. But then later the boat’s propeller snapped and he ditched it against the bank, body and all, and tried to hike out. He almost died too. It was a close call for him.”

Brady nodded, negotiated a pothole. The car jumped.

“The guide was older, in his sixties I guess? It was a freak thing, but there’s no way it was anything other than natural causes. A couple days later the boat floated down to the ocean, but by then there was no body in it.”

“No body,” said Brady. “At all? Huh. Problematic.”

“The guide’s brother, I met him, I mean he isn’t bringing charges or anything. It was called in by some neighbor lady or something who has a beef with Americans. I don’t even know what they’re holding him on.”

“We’ll find out. Don’t worry.”

They drove in silence for a minute or two. Cars were smaller here than at home, smaller, older, more banged-up. The road was called a highway, but as in Mexico there was no fencing alongside to keep out stray animals. The corpses of roadkill appeared every few hundred yards, here a