After David and Kate untied their raft and unloaded their gear from the jetboat, Odegard roared away. They moored the raft and made a pile of their supplies. Parties of rafters had again claimed most of the beach. David and Kate asked guides and passengers if they’d seen a young brown couple or a man hobbling around. They’d seen no one going up the path along the creek or coming down.
Once again, David and Kate pitched camp on the east side of the beach at the creek’s mouth. It was a cheerless evening, the air clammy with the foretaste of rain. They ate dinner out of cans and crawled into the tent before daylight had completely disappeared.
“Ruby’s probably dead,” Kate said forlornly. “Troy found and killed her.”
“He can barely walk, Kate. He has no idea where they went. The kid he bamboozled, Mr. Odegard says he’s okay. Ruby can outrun and outwit him. Quinn is young and strong. You have to believe,” David added, surprised by his own conviction.
Kate lay in her sleeping bag, trying to quiet her nightmare thoughts. When she finally drifted into sleep, it was fitful. No more than an hour passed before she awoke. She’d heard movements near the deep channel of the creek. She listened, trying to hear above the noise of the river. There was a rustling in the brush and a high, almost human groan.
“Bear,” she shook David’s arm.
“Bear?” David was sleepy, muddled with dreams.
He pulled on a pair of sweats and grabbed his glasses and flashlight. He advanced from the tent toward the creek with a heavy branch. Kate heard him shuffle away. There were his steps and another animal, a cry, a moan, even words.
“David!” she whispered, staring out at the darkness, listening for shouts and scuffles, resistance or retreat.
He emerged, stepping over the uneven ground with something in his arms. Following him was a young woman in a long skirt and quilted vest.
Carefully, he laid the bundle on top of his sleeping bag. “Lucas, Lucas,” he said, palpating the child’s stomach while Lucas cried in feeble protest. His lips were cracked, his belly hard, his tongue enlarged. The lymph nodes in his neck, armpits, and groin swollen and his pale sere skin blotched with even paler dots.
Hazel stared wide-eyed at David and Kate. She was afraid. She had left the Realm of Truth and reached the perimeter of what her husband called the Kingdom of Doubt.
“What’s wrong with him?” Kate asked.
“God’s will,” Hazel said weakly.
“How much water has he taken?” David asked.
“He can’t keep none down,” Hazel said.
“Hydrate,” David pronounced.
“You licensed?” Hazel asked in a girl’s voice, trying to sound grown-up.
“I am,” he said humbly.
“Then you have to save him! Save him, doctor, save him!”
Her pleas only raised David’s doubts. He had not always been able to save.
“Can you save him?” she yanked his elbow.
“I’ve got to think what’s best.”
Kate reached for her medicine bag. “Comfrey tea?”
“Make the tea,” David agreed.
He wrapped Lucas in a wool sweater and wiped his head with a wet rag. After the comfrey tea had cooled, Hazel dipped her finger in a thermos cup and slipped it into Lucas’s mouth. He sucked, then gagged.
“Try it, baby,” she begged.
“Come with me,” David said to Kate.
They moved across the beach. Gumdrops of sap stuck to the bottoms of their shoes, their Tevas lifting in slow-motion as if glued to the sand. At the raft, David loosened the hoopie from a black rubber bag. Kate held the flashlight as he rummaged until he found his first aid kit. Inside were packets of syringes, lengths of rubber tubing, needles both 25-gauge and butterfly, and plastic prescription cylinders marked in pink block letters, HER and FEN.
Kate’s eyes fell on a baggy labeled hm. “That was your shit that almost killed Ruby?”
“Those days when I believed dealers had raided my house, looking for shit and taking my daughter, it was your shit?”
“I know, Kate.”
“You let me believe that.”
“We didn’t know anything, Kate. She could have been taken.”
Her hand rose to slap him.
“A few things went missing,” David said. “I guessed it was teenagers.”
“But you saw the baggy and admitted no part.”
“Kate,” he pleaded. They were lame, his excuses.
“Shut up,” she said.
At the tent, they boiled water for a saline-glucose solution. When it was cool, David filled a water bottle. He placed a section of duct tape over the opening of the bottle and jammed a two-foot tube through a nick in the tape, sucking the end to start the drip flowing. After tying off Lucas’s arm, he thumped the crook of his elbow for veins. With the butterfly needle’s small bore, he calculated he could make the hit but as he eased the needle into a vein, Lucas jerked. Hazel pinned down the arm and held it steady. David eased the needle in again. He waited for the flashback of blood and pressed the needle in place until he was certain blood was flowing. Then, securing the needle, he taped it down and fastened the tubing to the butterfly’s tail.
His hands worked deftly but he was shaky. He feared whatever he tried would fail. Once, in California, he failed and the child died.