This was familiar turf; lies he'd lived before.
He took two Tylenol and covered his exposed skin with sunblock. In the lobby, a Christmas show was on the television but no one was watching, no one was there. The young lady behind the counter smiled and said good morning. The heavy, sticky heat wafted in through the open glass doors. Nate stopped for a quick shot of sweet coffee. The thermos was on the counter, the tiny paper cups stacked neatly beside it, waiting for anyone to pause and enjoy an ounce of cafezinho.
Two shots, and he was sweating before he left the lobby. On the sidewalk, he tried to stretch but his muscles were screaming and his joints were locked. The challenge was not running; rather, it was walking without an obvious limp.
But no one was watching. The shops were locked and the streets were empty, as he'd expected them to be.
After two blocks, his shirt was already sticking to his back. He was exercising in a sauna.
Avenida Rondon was the last paved street along the bluff above the river. He followed the sidewalk next to it for a long way, limping slightly as the muscles reluctantly loosened a little and the joints stopped grinding. He found the same small park he'd stopped at two days earlier, on the twenty-third, when the crowd gathered for music' and carols. Some of the folding chairs were still there. His legs needed rest. He sat on the same picnic table, and glanced about for the mangy teenager who'd tried to sell him drugs.
But there wasn't a soul. He gently rubbed his knees and looked at the great Pantanal, expanding for miles, disappearing on the horizon. Magnificent desolation. He thought of the boys-Luis, Oli, and Tomas-his little buddies with ten reals in their pockets and no way to spend it. Christmas meant nothing to them; every day was the same.
Somewhere in the vast wetlands before him was one Rachel Lane, now just a humble servant of God but about to become one of the richest women in the world. If he actually found her, how would she react to the news of her great fortune? How would she react when she met him, an American lawyer who'd managed to track her down?
The possible answers made him uncomfortable.
For the first time, it occurred to Nate that maybe Troy had been crazy after all. Would a rational, lucid mind give eleven billion dollars to a person who had no interest in wealth? A person practically unknown to everyone, including the one signing the hand-scrawled will? The act seemed insane, much more so now that Nate was sitting above the Pantanal, looking at its wilderness, three thousand miles from home.
Little had been learned about Rachel. Evelyn Cunningham, her mother, was from the small town of Delhi, Louisiana. At the age of nineteen, she moved to Baton Rouge and found a job as a secretary with a company involved in the exploration of natural gas. Troy Phelan owned the company, and during one of his routine visits from New York, he spotted Evelyn. Evidently she had been a beautiful woman, and naive in her small-town upbringing. Ever the vulture, Troy struck quickly, and within a few months Evelyn found herself pregnant. This was in the spring of 1954.
In November of that year, Troy's people at the home office quietly arranged for Evelyn to be admitted to the Catholic Hospital in New Orleans, where Rachel was born on the second. Evelyn never saw her child.
With plenty of lawyers and lots of pressure, Troy arranged for the quick, private adoption of Rachel by a minister and his wife in Kalispell, Montana. He was buying copper and zinc mines in the state, and had contacts through his companies there. The adoptive parents did not know the identities of the biological ones.
Evelyn didn't want the child, nor did she want anything further to do with Troy Phelan. She took ten thousand dollars and returned to Delhi, where, typically, rumors of her sins were waiting for her. She moved in with her parents, and they waited patiently for the storm to pass. It did not. With the cruelty that is peculiar to small towns, Evelyn found herself an outcast among the people she most needed. She rarely left the house, and with time retreated even farther, to the darkness of her bedroom. It was there, in the hidden gloom of her own little world, that Evelyn began to miss her daughter.
She wrote letters to Troy, none of which were answered. A secretary hid them and filed them away. Two weeks after his suicide one of Josh's investigators found them buried in Troy's personal archives in his apartment.
As the years passed Evelyn sank deeper into her own abyss. The rumors became sporadic but never went away. The appearance of her parents at church or at the grocery always prompted stares and whispers, and they eventually withdrew too.
Evelyn killed herself on November 2, 1959, on Rachel's fifth birthday. She drove her parents' car to the edge of town, and jumped off a bridge.
The obituary and the story of her death in the local paper found their way to Troy's office in New Jersey, where they were also filed away and hidden.
Very little had been learned about Rachel's childhood. The Reverend and Mrs. Lane moved twice, from Kalispell to Butte, then from Butte to Helena. He died of cancer when Rachel was seventeen. She was an only child.
For reasons no one but Troy could explain, he decided to reenter her life as she was finishing high school. Perhaps he felt some measure of guilt. Perhaps he was worried about her college education and how she would afford it. Rachel knew she was adopted, but had never expressed an interest in knowing her real parents.
The specifics were unknown, but Troy met Rachel sometime in the summer of 1972. Four years later, she graduated from the University of Montana. Gaps appeared thereafter, huge voids in her history that no investigation had been able to fill.
Nate suspected that only two people could properly document the relationship. One was dead; the other was living like an Indian somewhere out there, on the banks of one of a thousand rivers.
He tried to jog for a block, but quit in pain. Walking was difficult enough. Two cars passed, people were stirring. The roar approached quickly from behind and was upon him before he could react. Jevy slammed on the brakes next to the sidewalk. "Bom dia," he yelled above the engine.
Nate nodded. "Bom dia."
Jevy turned the switch and the engine died. "How do you feel?"
"Sore. And you?"
"No problem. The girl at the desk said you were running. Let's go for a ride."
Nate preferred jogging in pain to riding with Jevy, but the traffic was light and the streets were safer.
They drove through downtown, with his chauffeur still thoroughly ignoring all lights and stop signs. Jevy never looked around as they sped through intersections.
"I want you to see the boat," Jevy said at one point. If he was sore and stiff from the crash landing, he didn't show it. Nate only nodded.
There was a boatyard of sorts on the east end of town, at the foot of the bluff, on a small inlet where the water was murky and oil-stained. A sad collection of boats rocked gently in the river-some had been scrapped decades earlier, others were rarely used. Two were obviously cattle boats, with their decks sectioned into muddy wooden pens.
"There it is," Jevy said as he pointed in the general direction of the river. They parked on the street and walked down the bank. There were several fishing boats, small and low in the water, and their owners were either coming or going. Nate couldn't tell. Jevy yelled at two of them, and they retorted with something humorous.
"My father was a boat captain," Jevy explained. "I was here every day."
"Where is he now?" Nate asked.
"He drowned in a storm."
Wonderful, thought Nate. The storms get you both in the air and on the water.
A sagging sheet of plywood bridged the dirty water and led to their boat. They stopped at the edge of the bank to admire the vessel, the Santa Loura. "How do you like it?" Jevy asked.