TRAPPED (5 page)

It made her sick to think that on more than one occasion she’d brewed him a fresh cup.

Brody smiled. “My mother always travels with tea bags. Says she can get through anything with a cup of tea.”

“Smart woman,” Mrs. Hardy said.

“Very. Anybody allergic to nuts?” Brody asked.

Everyone shook their heads.

“Okay,” he said, “then I recommend we take a couple breakfast bars and some nuts, divide them up and save the remainder for later.”

Pamela split two breakfast bars into seven equal pieces. It didn’t take very long to distribute the portion, along with a handful of nuts, to each person. It took even less time for everyone to consume the meager breakfast. Still, Elle knew they were lucky to have something. It was supposed to be a short flight and she hadn’t thought to pack any treats. However, she’d been able to contribute the breakfast bars because they’d been at the bottom of her backpack from a school excursion she’d had the prior week.

Brody made a special point to make sure that Angus ate and that he took some more ibuprofen for his pain.

“I’m going to get a fire going,” Brody said.

“How are you going to manage that?” Pamela asked crossly.

Brody smiled congenially, choosing to ignore the testiness of Pamela’s inquiry. “I was a Boy Scout. I know how to create friction and generate a spark.”

Captain Ramano reached into his pocket. He pulled out two matchbooks, tossing one in Brody’s direction. “This might make it easier.”

Elle, who had wanted to shake the man five minutes ago, now wanted to hug him. The ability to make fire could be the difference in them surviving.

“Lots easier,” Brody said, opening up the flap to show a half-f matchbook. “Someone will see our smoke and help will come.”

There was no reaction from the group. Either they were afraid to jinx it by saying anything or they just didn’t want to burst the good doctor’s bubble.

Brody walked back outside. Pamela worked on the knots in her hair and Mrs. Hardy helped Mr. Hardy change his shirt.

Elle smeared some bug repellant from one of the two small tubes in her backpack on her bare ankles, her hands and neck before following Brody outside. She wanted to see the area in the light of day.

There were parts of the Amazon that you dared not venture into without a sharp machete because the massive undergrowth made walking almost impossible. In other parts, the undergrowth was almost nonexistent because of the thick canopy of trees that blocked any sunlight from hitting the jungle floor.

Where they had landed was sort of a hybrid of the two. There were trees of varying heights. Palms with big leaves, some just a few feet taller than her, some stretching another ten to twelve feet. There were kapok trees, one of the few she was familiar with because they grew so extensively in the Amazon. With a relatively skinny trunk, the tree could grow hundreds of feet. There were plants, big and bright green, some with beautiful flowers, ranging from knee-high to above their heads. In the spots where there weren’t plants, the floor of the jungle was a tangle of wet dirt and short, mossy-looking grass.

It was in one long stretch of dirt and grass that Captain Ramano had managed to land the plane. It was a flat-out miracle. She stole a look at Brody’s face and thought that he was thinking the same thing.

“You might want to put some of this on,” she said, offering him the tube.

He looked at it. “Nice,” he said.

“Yeah. I only threw a couple small tubes in my backpack. I thought I was going to be out of the jungle by tomorrow. If we don’t have some on, the bugs will eat us alive.”

He carefully put a little dab in his hand and smeared it on his exposed skin. She watched him rub his neck, watched the smooth motion of the hand that had tickled her in fun, stroked her in passion.

She looked away.

From the corner of her eye, she watched him approach a midsize kapok tree that had fallen, likely some time ago. It had probably been hit by lightning. There were long branches at the end that extended wide on the ground. Working methodically, he started snapping off the twigs from the branches and building a large pile. After watching him for several minutes, she started doing the same. When he saw that she had the hang of it, he moved on to picking up larger limbs.

It was tedious work and she could see the sweat on his face and wetting the back of his shirt.

They didn’t stop until they had a pile of logs and an even bigger pile of twigs. Using a big stick, he drew a circle, maybe three feet wide, and started to dig out the dirt, making a small circular trench.

“I don’t want to tell you what to do,” Elle said, her tone hesitant. “But if you build the fire there, it’s going to be difficult to protect the fire from the rain that will inevitably fall. If you move over there, under those heavy palms, it might be better.”

Brody walked over to the area she’d indicated. “It’s drier over here,” he said.

She nodded.

He looked at her rather oddly. “If you have a better idea than I do, Elle, speak up. We can’t afford to make any mistakes out here.”

She shrugged, feeling uncomfortable. It was just that in her experience, Brody Donovan didn’t make mistakes. He always seemed to have the right answer, know the right thing to do, make the right choice.

He drew another circle and started digging his two-inch-deep trench. Then he arranged four of the logs, end to end, in a pyramid style, and filled the bottom of the pyramid in with the smaller twigs.

He struck a match and, very carefully protecting it from the wind, held it in the center of the pyramid. After just a second, she could tell that the twigs had caught fire.

Tears came to her eyes and they had nothing to do with the smoke in the air.

And she was reminded of a Tom Hanks movie that she’d seen years ago. He’d been the lone survivor of a plane crash on some island, and she could vividly recall the scene where he successfully managed to get a fire going.

Fire sustained life.

And right now that felt really good.

“Thank you,” she said. “This makes a difference,” she said. “Somebody will find us,” she added, somehow wanting him to know that she believed his earlier statement.

* * *

B
RODY
HEARD
THE
hopefulness in Elle’s voice. He had learned the value of hope in the cold, mountainous terrain of Afghanistan. And the power of fire. He could have gotten a fire started without the matches, but they were definitely a plus. He counted them. Fourteen left. They would have to be careful to keep the fire going in the event that it took some time for rescuers to come.

But he wasn’t going to dwell on that. He turned when his peripheral vision caught Captain Ramano in the doorway of the plane. The man stepped onto the jungle floor and studied the nose of the small plane. It was pretty much trashed, having taken a beating when they’d first skimmed the trees.

The majority of the fuselage remained intact—if anyone wasn’t overly concerned about a two-foot hole in the roof. It was hard to tell if Captain Ramano was concerned or not. He barely looked at the rest of the plane before he wandered off in the jungle to take a leak.

That didn’t make sense. Granted, the man had taken a jolt to the head and no doubt had a slight concussion. But even so, it was his plane.

Brody had dealt with a lot of aviators in the air force, and his friend Ethan had been a helicopter pilot in the army. Fliers were normally take-charge types.

They felt very responsible for their planes and for the individuals aboard. Brody knew that if Ethan had been flying a plane that had encountered mechanical problems, he would have been all over the wreckage, trying to figure out what had happened.

It was almost as if Captain Ramano was trying not to look at it. Which seemed odd. But one thing Brody had learned in recent years, in war-torn countries where no one escaped unscathed, was that everybody coped in his or her own way.

When the man returned to the plane, it was more of the same. He glanced at the fire, at Elle, and finally at Brody. Then he went back inside without a word.

Brody could see the questions in Elle’s pretty eyes, but he ignored them. If Captain Ramano was out of the game, so be it. The plane wasn’t going to fly again. His skills as a pilot were of no use to them.

Almost as soon as Captain Ramano went inside, Mr. and Mrs. Hardy came outside. Mrs. Hardy had raided her suitcase and come up with something sparkly that she spread on the ground. Then she pulled up a log near the fire that Brody had built, and both she and Mr. Hardy leaned back, him with a book, her with a deck of cards, as if the jungle had been a scheduled stop.

As if anyone regularly picnicked in a place where poisonous frogs, tarantulas and jaguars lingered nearby.

Chapter Five

Brody wanted to order the Hardys back inside, where they would have less chance of being bitten or stung by something that could seriously compromise their well-being. But he didn’t say anything. If they could pretend that everything was
just fine,
then more power to them.

Elle offered the Hardys some bug repellant. Mr. Hardy took some and put it on his wife. Then Mrs. Hardy reciprocated. It was sweet.

Five minutes later, Mrs. Hardy was jawing on Mr. Hardy for breathing too loud.

Hell, maybe he ought to thank Elle from saving him from marriage. She had found a big walking stick and she was using it to poke around at various plants. She was smart to be careful. Everything in the jungle sort of blended in, and grabbing hold of a snake was guaranteed to make a bad day even worse. He watched her for about five minutes before he approached. “What are you doing?”

“The husband of the couple that I worked for in Peru was a scientist, and one of his hobbies was studying plant life in the jungle. He loved to talk about plants, to show the pictures that he would take on his jungle trips. I learned a few things while I was there. The berries on this evergreen tree are allspice. They’re edible. On the other hand, this is a curare plant. Very poisonous.”

He was impressed. He knew next to nothing about jungle fauna. Her knowledge might come in very handy.

“I’m not as worried about our food supply as I am our water,” Elle said. “We barely have enough to last a day. But fortunately, there are multiple ways to access water in the jungle. Come here.” She motioned him over to a plant with long green-and-white leaves and a brightly colored flower in the middle. It was literally growing out of the trunk of a tree. “This species is a bromeliad. The leaves overlap and when it rains, water is captured in the little pockets at the base of the flower.”

He thought about what he had with him that they could use to gather water. “Probably some of us have small plastic bags in our luggage that had our liquids in them. Maybe we could use that.”

“Good idea. Once it rains, which it undoubtedly will, we’ll capture the water then. The other thing we can do is get water from those bamboo trees,” she said, pointing off to her left, where there was a whole stand of tall, skinny bamboo plants. “It takes some patience but it’s relatively easy. All we have to do is bend the bamboo stick, somehow tie it down, and cut it at the bottom. The water inside the bamboo will drain out.”

“And we can drink that?”

“Yes. Probably even without boiling it. We might also find water in a nearby stream. That could be dangerous to drink if we don’t boil it first. That’s why I’m so darn happy to see the fire.”

He studied her. He wasn’t surprised at her knowledge. It was one of the things that he’d always really appreciated about Elle. She knew a little about a whole lot of things. How to make a good Hollandaise sauce. How to grow orchids in pots on their small patio. How to build a model airplane. How to dance the tango. His mother had once described her as very eclectic and she’d meant it as a compliment.

Elle had always dismissed her knowledge, saying that she knew a bunch of really useless things that were good for starting a conversation at a party but for little else.
I’m just a cocktail waitress,
she used to say.

“Should we boil all the water we gather just in case since we have a fire going?” Brody asked.

“I think so. Better safe than sorry.”

“Perhaps Mrs. Hardy will want to brew herself a cup of hot tea?”

“How are your parents, Brody?” Elle asked, evidently remembering his earlier comment about his mother and tea.

“Good. Dad is still writing. Mom has cut back on her consulting and is doing quite a bit of volunteer work at their local hospital.” He paused. “How’s your mom?”

Elle looked startled, as if she hadn’t expected the question. “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to her since shortly after I left the States.”

She had not just walked away from him. She’d walked away from her family, too. What the hell?

“It’s sort of pretty, isn’t it?” she asked, changing topics quickly. “I mean, if we were here sightseeing, we’d think that.”

They would. The plant and flower colors were vibrant and he’d probably already seen ten different types of birds. When he first came out of the plane earlier, there’d been a couple monkeys in the trees, cackling. Probably laughing their asses off at them.

He saw motion out of the corner of his eye and realized that Mr. and Mrs. Hardy were already gathering up their things and heading back inside. He waited a few minutes and followed them. They’d started some kind of domino game with Pamela. Brody knelt down next to Angus. The young man was awake and definitely running a low-grade temp. The first-aid kit had not contained a thermometer, so Brody couldn’t get a true reading. A low temp could be a reaction to the injury—the body giving a shout-out that hey, all is not right. Or it could mean something much worse. If that was the case, the young man needed to be in a fully equipped hospital where they could pump some antibiotics into him.

It was infuriating. He’d saved the young man’s leg and he could still lose him to infection.

Captain Ramano was sitting in one of the seats, his head back, his eyes closed. His breathing was steady. Brody didn’t wake him.

He stepped outside the plane, expecting to see Elle.

But there was no one there.

His heart started to beat very fast. Maybe she’d stepped away to go to the bathroom. He waited.

He didn’t hear or see anything.

“Elle,” he called.

No response.

“Elle!” This time he really yelled.

He heard rustling off to his left. She appeared. “What?” she asked, her tone anxious.

Relief flooded his body. And that irritated the hell out of him. “I couldn’t see you,” he said, sounding very much like a petulant six-year-old. “I don’t want to have to go chasing after you in the jungle.”

“I wanted a better view,” she said. “I didn’t go far. I just walked up that hill,” she said, pointing to a rise about two hundred yards out. “I would not expect you to chase after me, Brody.”

Oh, really? He should just let her die in the jungle? “I tried that once,” he said. “You know, the chasing, and it didn’t work out so well for me.”

Her heard her quick inhale and knew that his verbal punch had landed. Maybe not a knockout, but it had been a solid left hook. It should have made him happier.

Unfortunately, it made him feel like scum.

And it made him feel even worse when she didn’t come back with something but rather just took the punch. As if she deserved it.

“Well?” he asked, after a very awkward moment of silence. “Were you able to see anything?”

To her credit, she didn’t march off and refuse to talk to him. Instead, she stood her ground. “Not really,” she said. “It’s not high enough. We probably need to get at least that high,” she said, pointing to her right. Off in the distance, he couldn’t tell how far, was higher ground. Having grown up in the Colorado mountains, in Crow Hollow, Brody couldn’t call it a mountain. At best, a small foothill. But she was right. It would probably give them a good view in every direction.

Getting there would be a bitch. Walking in the jungle wasn’t like walking on the treadmill at the gym.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“About what?”

“About next steps,” she pushed.

Even though he’d known better than to hope for a rescue plane last night, he’d still spent the night listening for engine sounds. He’d been doing the same this morning. Unfortunately, he’d heard nothing like that. He was just about to give her some glib reassurance, but he saw the look in her eyes. The message in them was clear.
Be real, Brody.

“I don’t know what to think,” he said. “If Angus’s distress call went through, somebody should be out looking for us. I know the Amazon is huge, but they don’t have to search all of it. How tough is it to identify the potential area where the plane crashed? They hear the call, they look at their radar, and somebody ought to be smart enough to figure out where our particular blip fell off the screen.”

“Maybe the distress call never went through?”

“Even so, air-traffic control should have been tracking us. I assume there is some regular communication between them and a pilot. When Captain Ramano didn’t answer, that should have made somebody sit up straighter in their chair. Even if that didn’t happen, somebody surely noticed when our plane didn’t land as expected. It’s been light for several hours. What’s taking them so long?”

“I guess that gets back to the sheer magnitude of the jungle. Even with some idea of where we are, it’s probably like looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack.”

He nodded. “Then we have to hope for the best.”

“So we wait?” she asked.

“For now,” he said. “But I think we should start to gather and boil water. Just in case.”

“What are we going to boil it in?”

“I think we can use the first-aid kit. It’s probably twelve inches by eight inches and several inches deep. I’m going to build a grate to go over the open fire.”

“I’ll gather up things that we can use to collect the water in,” she said.

He nodded. It was good to have someone else in the group to count on. Pamela didn’t seem all that steady. Mr. and Mrs. Hardy were too elderly and Angus was out of the race. Captain Ramano was the unknown. So far, he’d been distant, not even intellectually curious about their predicament. The one good thing was that he wasn’t complaining about pain anywhere except his head, which was a good sign that he’d managed to escape internal injuries.

If Brody and Elle could remain civil to each other, they had a chance of making it out of here. So far, she’d shown amazing strength. She’d been calm, resilient and had come up with good solutions.

Of the two of them, he’d been the bigger ass.

It wasn’t something to be terribly proud of.

* * *

T
WO
HOURS
LATER
, Elle sat inside the plane, looking out one of the small windows. The rain had come, forcing them all inside.

Just as it dampened the earth, it seemed to dampen everyone’s spirits. No one was talking. Not even Mrs. Hardy.

And the silence gave Elle plenty of opportunity to think.

She’d been so stupid earlier when she asked about his parents. But she’d really liked Mr. and Mrs. Donovan. They were super nice to her and always made her feel welcome in their home. They were so smart, so successful, yet they treated her as an equal.

She’d honestly been curious about them, but she’d never have asked if she’d thought that that would prompt Brody to ask about her mother. Brody had never met her mom. She didn’t figure he lost much sleep thinking about it.

If he’d been startled by her announcement that she hadn’t spoken to her mother for thirteen years, he’d hidden it well. For only a second, she’d again debated lying and saying something innocuous, such as she’s fine. But the truth had popped out.

She was done lying and especially done with lying to Brody Donovan. She didn’t have any reason to tell him the whole ugly truth; nothing would be gained by that. But she wasn’t going to compound her errors and continue her lies.

When they had been dating, Elle was able to explain away Catherine Rivers’s absence from her life. Whenever Brody had asked about her family, she’d made up some crazy excuse about her mom living in Utah and not liking to fly.

She had no idea whether her mother liked to fly. They’d never discussed it during their brief telephone conversations that occurred two or three times a year, whenever Elle forced herself to dial the damn phone and endure the stilted, forced exchange that passed as mother-daughter bonding.

After they became engaged, Brody had insisted that he needed to meet her mother, to officially ask for permission to marry Elle. He said that he did not want their first meeting to be at the wedding.

How could she tell Brody that she hadn’t planned on inviting Catherine to the wedding? It would have spurred all kinds of questions that she didn’t want to answer, didn’t plan on ever answering.

Elle had tried to convince him that it wasn’t necessary to ask permission, that she’d talked to her mom and the woman was on board. But Brody had worked like crazy to arrange a couple days off and had purchased two round-trip tickets from Boston to Salt Lake City. She’d left the country four days before the trip was to occur.

And to this day, had very little contact with Catherine.

The conversation about parents had left her shaken. After Brody had gone back inside the plane, she’d had to do something to expel the anxiety that had flooded her system with the mention of her mother.

Sure, she’d wanted a better view, but what she’d really needed was a little space, a little time to compartmentalize her thoughts about Catherine. She’d practically run up the small hill and, once there, had stood at the rise, her breath coming hard. By the time he’d come back outside and had been yelling for her, she was back in control.

So he didn’t want to have to chase after her.

She didn’t want him to. Had never wanted that. Had hoped he wouldn’t and had made it as difficult as she could if he actually tried.

She’d had to. She hadn’t been sure that she was strong enough to walk away a second time.

Now, as they all huddled in the aircraft and listened to the afternoon rain hit the outside of the plane, she covertly watched Brody. He was looking out one of the small windows. She knew he was worried about the fire.

She thought it would likely be okay. He’d built a grate out of bamboo that traversed the circumference of the fire circle and then had hung the wire hanger of the first-aid kit over one of the long bamboo sticks. The first-aid kit swung freely over the fire and they’d successfully managed to boil a small amount of water and saved it in one of the empty water bottles.

He’d also constructed, over the fire, a crude-looking tepee that was about four feet high at the apex. He’d covered the sides with thick palm leaves, giving the fire even more protection.