CHAPTER 19

“Acapulco or bust.”

The excitement of the students resounded in the cheer as Bill pulled away from the restaurant-souvenir shop where they’d stopped for lunch. With history out of the way, only fun and adventure awaited for the next two days.

“So what did Hector say?” Caroline asked Blaine, once the vehicle was underway. “About the guy in the cavern.”

“He informed the manager, and a couple of security officers were sent to sweep the caverns, although the likelihood of finding someone who doesn’t want to be found is small. They didn’t seem terribly concerned, since no one was hurt and the guy did offer good advice.”

Caroline leaned against the bus seat. “Well, at least they know about him.”

“Maybe a little scare will make my daughter have more respect for the rules.” He whistled a breath of exasperation.

“Hey, rebellion isn’t just limited to teens,” Caroline protested. “I read in my devotional this morning about a hotel that sat on the edge of a river. They posted a sign that said ‘No fishing from the rooms,’ but everyone was doing it. Then one employee suggested to the exasperated manager that they take the sign down. He did, and the fishing stopped!”

“A ‘lead me not into temptation’ rule, huh?”

“I guess people never thought of it until they saw the sign.”

Caroline frowned. “I’m sure there’s a message in there for us as parents . . . like, concentrate on dos rather than don’ts?” Her thought process brightened. “It’s basically a standard educational tool that accents the positive.”

Blaine shook his head in wonder. “How do you do that?”

The mental light went out. “Do what?”

“Make connections like that. I’d never have compared a fishing sign to working with kids.”

“That’s because you are left-brained, or linear in thought. Being a scatterbrain, I find the pieces off the beaten path.” Caroline grinned.

“Scattered or not, it’s a gift.” Blaine put his hand over hers and squeezed it.

The compliment made her squirm . . . or was it the kindling of interest in the gaze Blaine locked with hers. He wanted to kiss her . . . and he did. Not with his lips, but with his look. The memory of his kiss the night before played upon her lips as though it were the real thing.

“Mom?” Annie peeked through the crack between the seats in front of them. “Are you going to the beach with us this afternoon?”

Caroline’s heart sighed as the moment disintegrated. “Where?”

“The beach,” her daughter prompted. “You know, swimsuits, water, sand?”

The word swimsuit washed the last away like a bucket of ice water. Blaine hadn’t seen her in unforgiving spandex. She could wear a T-shirt. After all, the tropical sun was vicious on skin like hers.

“I’m thinking about it,” Caroline answered truthfully. Although if this relationship were to go anywhere, her baby-stretched, middle-aged belly was part of the package. And, with the aid of sunscreen, she did enjoy the sun-bathed beach and the rush of ocean. Besides, it was what she came for, wasn’t it?

Four hours later Caroline’s belly did a flip-flop, just as it had on the steep downward ride into Acapulco. Blaine walked out of the high rise Cabana Azul in swim trunks and a matching open front shirt. She watched as he grabbed a towel from the stack provided by the beachfront hotel, then searched the crowded strip of sand for Caroline and the girls. He’d remained behind to make a few business calls, insisting the ladies go reserve a patch of beach for him to join them later.

Lord, I know You have a reason for men aging so well, while we females go to potbelly, but I’d like to go on record as saying it’s just not fair.

Not that she was overweight, she consoled herself, sucking in her abs for all they were worth and waving as he spotted them on the crowded beach.

“Have you tried the water?” he said.

Ignoring the protesting cramp beneath her rib cage, Caroline looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “What, and get my hair wet before going out tonight?”

“You’re one of those dry bathing beauties, eh?” he teased.

“Hey, you’ve seen the lengths I go to for beauty,” she reminded him with a droll twist of her lips. “Besides,” she added, “we decided we wouldn’t have time for all of us to wash our hair and dry it before going to see the cliff diving.”

He squinted at the water, blinding with the glare of the late afternoon sun. Even his crow’s feet looked good, Caroline marveled silently.

“Well, I think I’ll take a dip and let the sun dry me afterward.

Anyone care to join me?”

The girls declined with a sleepy “Nah” from Karen and shake of the ponytail from Annie, whose nose was buried in a book.

“Where’s John?” Blaine asked.

“He left to hook up with his tour group,” Karen answered with a downturn of her lips. “Said he might see us later, if they’re going to the cliff diving.”

Oblivious to his daughter’s melancholy, Blaine gave Caroline a head-to-toe-and-back look that almost made her lose the breath she held. “Sure you won’t change your mind?”

Caroline nodded. Exhaling as he trotted off toward the water, she dropped to the beach towel with a groan.

Annie glanced up from her book. “Are you okay?”

She rubbed her right side under the rib cage. “Yes,” she said, not nearly as certain as she sounded. This was yet one more good reason why courtship was usually assigned to the young.

Facedown, Caroline unfastened the back of her one-piece suit and tugged the straps off her shoulders. Already protected by the lotion Annie had rubbed on her in the room, she gathered up a lump of sand beneath the towel for a pillow and relaxed on the warm beach. It brought back memories of her youth—napping on the beach, to the massage of the sun’s fingers and the lullaby of rhythmic surf and hawking cries of the gulls. Surely it didn’t get any better than this—this side of heaven.

How long she dozed, or exactly how the slab of ice water that broke over her sun-heated skin got to the tropics eluded her. The water engulfing Caroline’s ears sounded like amplified seashells, muting the distraction around her. Time slowed to an underwater crawl. The startled shrieks of the girls scrambling next to her reinforced her instinct to jump up and do the same, but just as quick to register was the fact that her swimsuit was unfastened. There it was. Expose herself and breathe, or drown in modesty.

Caroline chose the latter. Just when her initial startled gasp, now locked and aching in her lungs threatened to give out, the wave mercifully receded. Swimsuit gathered to her front, she struggled to her knees, at the same time trying to see through the hair plastered over her face if anyone was watching her.

“Where’s my top?” Karen, a soaked towel clutched to her chest in like modesty, crawled around on the wet sand.

“My book!” Annie wailed.

Similar dismay echoed around them in Spanish and English.

Caroline struggled to her feet, tugging and fastening as her fumbling fingers would allow, when Kurt trotted up from the receding water’s edge, the top to Karen’s suit in his hand.

Annie giggled at her scarlet friend. “That’s why I wear a one-piece.”

“I don’t understand it,” Caroline puzzled aloud. “The tide wasn’t anywhere near reaching us when I laid down.” She watched the water come in again, inching onto the beach several feet short of them as before.

Wally walked up, drying his glasses, book tucked under his arm.

“They call ’em rogue waves. Every once in a while a big one will come all the way up on the beach.” He pointed to the beachside snack bar in front of the hotel. “Almost went up to the Cabana Shack.” He beat the sand from his soaked sci-fi novel. “Got my book too,” he commiserated with Annie.

“I’m going to the ladies’ bath house to put this on,” Karen announced, disgusted with all of Acapulco at the moment. “I might as well go rafting, now that I’m already wet.”

Blaine’s voice echoed from behind Caroline. “Looks like you three got it good.” Bending over, he picked up the lump of water-soaked towel he’d left behind. “Want me to exchange yours for a dry one?”

“That would be lovely,” Caroline answered with an involuntary shudder. “I thought the water was warm down here.”

“It is,” Wally spoke up. “But even at eighty-something degrees, your body temperature is 98.6. Factor in the sun’s heat to that, and the difference is enough make it feel like ice water, even if it isn’t.”

Blaine chuckled. “Exactly what I was going to say, Wally.” He gathered all the remaining wet towels. “Anyone up for a Cocabananaberry cocktail?”

“Me,” Annie called out. She’d been wanting to try the frozen concoction of coconut and strawberry.

“What about you, boys?”

Kurt and Wally gave Blaine a simultaneous nod.

“Caroline?” Blaine asked.

Caroline tore her gaze from her shadow on the sand—that of a female with a lopsided Mohawk or a severely deformed head.

Brushing one’s locks away from the face with one’s fingers always worked for the bombshells in the movies, but for her, it just bombed. “I think I’ll head back to the room and get a shower before the girls take over . . . maybe even take a nap before dinner.

A dry nap,” she added with a crooked grin.

“I’ll walk you to the towel stand and get you a dry towel.”

Preempting protest, Blaine put his arm about her waist and ushered her toward the hotel. At the towel cart, he dumped the wet ones and took up a fresh one.

“This is fresh from the dryer,” he told her, wrapping it around her and holding her within the circle of his arms the way she used to do Annie, when her little daughter would come shivering and blue-lipped out of the Atlantic at home. “This ought to warm you up.”

He rubbed her back with brisk strokes, coaxing her against him.

Caroline laid her cheek against his chest, a purr of pleasure in her throat. It wasn’t the dryer-fresh towel or the buffing that warmed her. She put the blame on Blaine.

John Chandler lifted his shoulders in a hapless shrug. “It wasn’t my fault, man,” he told Javier Rocha. “You were there when the lady didn’t come down from the pyramid. Did you expect me to tick off the girl by leaving her friend’s mom stranded?”

His dark-haired roommate shook his head. “I don’t know, man.

Tío Jorge is really steamed.”

John paced back and forth in the bargain version of the hotel where the bus had dropped the Edenton tour group earlier. How could Rocha think he’d pull a double cross after the things John had seen in the organization? He wiped perspiration-damp palms on his slacks. Was it nerves, or had the air conditioner gone on the blink?

“I kept my eye on the girl with the stamp. That’s what’s important. I can’t help it if my cell phone went dead. My charger was on the bus with you.”

“You could have called collect.” Javier tore open a bag of pizza-flavored pretzels and shoved a handful in his mouth.

John cut him a sharp look. “And you could have explained about the pyramid rescue deal and my missing the bus. What, was there a sale on pizzeria rolls to distract you?”

The jibe rolled off the easygoing Javier like water off a duck. “I told him, man, but you know how my uncle is. He trusts no one after . . .” He didn’t need to finish. Javier had seen the beating too.

“Anyway, you could have called from the orphanage. Surely there are phones there.” He offered John the bag of treats.

John pushed them away. His head hurt, and he felt a little nauseated. “Easy for you to say, amigo. You weren’t traveling with a group of religious strangers, dependent on them for your food and lodging.” It simply hadn’t occurred to John to call collect. It should have, but it didn’t. He plopped down on the bed, looking at the phone as if it might bite. “So is he going to call or not?”

Javier gave a short humorless laugh. “Oh, Jorge will call . . . as sure as the rooster rises in the east.”

“What’s the hype all about any—”

The phone rang as though on cue. John picked it up.

“Hola?”

“Where have you been, chico?”

John felt a cold sweat begin to form on his forehead. He’d heard that tone before. It was loaded with disappointment—packing consequence. But everything was cool. All he had to do was convince Rocha. That he was here was a good start.

“With the goods, where else?” At least his voice was steady, even if his nerves weren’t. He waited for the silence to break at the other end of the line. It became intolerable.

“I’m sure Javier told you what happened at the pyramids, why I missed the bus. I knew I could catch a ride with the little courier.

Just as well, too, since their tour broke from the usual route.”

“You have talked to no one?” Rocha said.

“No one,” John assured him. “Not even Argon.” He scowled at the out-of-the-blue question. “Why would you even ask that?”

“Because we have a mole in our midst . . . on one of the buses, according to my source.”

The pulse in John’s head ceased to pound, then resumed with gathered power. “You mean an informer?” He fished the aspirin tin out of his pocket and motioned for Javier to get him some water.

“Well, if there is an informer, he would have been on Javier’s bus.

There’s no one on the tour but kids and their parents. I doubt the feds would put kids on something like this.”

“You doubt my source?”

“Hey, I’m just thinking out loud here. I guess it could be the driver or the guide.” With enough relatives to populate a small country, it was no surprise when John found out that Rocha had a brother-in-law in the criminal investigation department in the Servicio Postal. He’d be privy to knowledge of ongoing investigations.

But who was the plant? John groaned inwardly. It figured that something would go wrong on his last gig.

“I want you to pull the goods. We’ll deliver them when this problem is taken care of.”

“Take back the letter?” Dubious, John blew breath through his lips. What reason could he come up with to tell Karen? That he found something he wanted to add to it? His thoughts raced ahead through the throbbing fog assaulting his brain. At least it would be a relief to un-involve Karen and her family.

“Tonight, if possible,” Jorge said on the other end of the line.

“We can put it away until this investigation is over. Your mother can wait for her card, no?”

John didn’t want to know to whom the card was really going.

The less he knew, the better chance he had of making a clean break from all this. “Right. I’ll give the girl a call and tell her I need to put something else in the card.”

“Then you and Javier return to Mexico City on the next bus with it. Entiende? ”

“Got it. See you tomorrow.”

“Eyes are watching you.”

John grimaced. “I have no doubt.” He hung up the telephone.

“Well?”

“There’s a plant in the tour group, watching us. We need to pull the item and secret it away until the heat blows over,” John explained to his friend.

“So we are not in trouble?” Javier looked relieved.

John exhaled, as though to rid himself of worry, but it still felt as if a cinder block lay wedged in his chest. “No, not yet.”

He gave his buddy a friendly clap on the arm. “Piece of cake, hermano,” he declared, not nearly as certain as he wished. “Piece of cake.”

“Speaking of cake—” Javier handed him the glass of water. “I could scarf up some pizza. How about you?”

John downed the aspirin, refusing to let the picture his friend conjured take shape in his mind. Aspirin was bad enough going down, much less the opposite.