Hood set down his bags and looked out at the volcano. It was green and verdant around the base, tapering into a bare lava cone that ended in a ragged maw. Wisps of smoke rose into the blue sky while orange-tinted lava crawled down the blackened tip.
The Arenal Volcano View lobby had been busy when Hood checked in. There were German birders, serious and well organized. The quetzal, Hood gathered, never found in zoos, was the hot bird. The trogon ran close second. There were French butterfly fanciers and two California frog and toad hunters on their way to Monteverde to find the golden toad in its only habitat on earth.
While checking in, Hood had met the owner, Felix, and his son Eduardo, the boy with the monkey and the half middle toe visible through the sandal on his right foot. The primate was a local squirrel monkey whose father had been killed by a car. Eduardo had found the baby clinging to its father's back, miraculously unhurt. It was now nearly eight inches tall, Hood estimated, and had a wide-eyed, can-do expression. It roamed a decorative wrought-iron birdcage in the lobby when it wasn't mounted on Eduardo's shoulder. Eduardo had named him Pepino.
Now through his screened window Hood watched the volcano for a few more minutes but he didn't unpack his bags. Instead he went back down and convinced Felix to let him see the registration forms for July. He showed his U.S. Marshal's badge but said he was on a mission of friendship. He sat in the fan-cooled lobby and drank a cold beer and easily spotted Father Joe Leftwich's signature. July eighteenth, seven nights, room twenty-four. He found Ozburn's Sean Gravas on July twentieth for four nights, room seven.
Hood handed the forms back to the owner and asked if he could move into room twenty-four. Pepino eyed him with a bright curiosity, cracked a seed in his teeth and dropped the shells to the cage bottom. His hands were tiny, perfect, black. The owner checked his computer and said he would be happy to make the room change for Hood.
"Thank you very much, senor," said Hood.
"It is not a problem."
"Do you know Father Leftwich?"
Felix worked the registration slips back into the rectangular cardboard box. He looked at Hood dubiously. "Yes, of course. Why?"
"I'd like to meet him. We have mutual friends."
"He left here in July."
"Where did he go?"
"He said nothing to us. We were relieved that he finally left here."
"Why?"
"He enjoyed provoking trouble. He inflamed our Germans with stories about Hitler. And the French with comments about Vichy. Once, he caused a fight between Spanish and Mexican businessmen, right in our dining room. There were two large beautiful Americans who bought him far too much alcohol and they shouted and argued and laughed very loudly for two straight nights. This hotel is for ecotourism, not fighting and drinking."
"Was he belligerent?"
"No. Always polite. Always happy. Never having the appearance of the drunken man. It was always the people around him who suffered most."
Eduardo ran into the lobby and swung open the cage, and Pepino crawled up his arm to his back. The monkey looked wide-eyed at Hood.
"Nobody understood Father Joe," said Eduardo. "He is a good man and interested in everything."
"But you are eleven years old," said his father. "So you don't see how he makes people angry."
The boy shrugged and the monkey picked at something on the back of its tiny paw. "You and Itixa are superstitious about him because he's a man of God."
"I am not superstitious, Eduardo," Felix said with a smile. "I am realistic about unhappy guests. This is our business. This is what pays us for your food and clothes and your TV."
"And for yours."
"Of course." The owner looked at Hood. "My father built this lodge. I am very proud of it. Because he is young, Eduardo thinks all things will come easy to him forever."
"Have you seen the library that Father Joe was building?" asked Hood.
"No. It is between here and Tabacon."
"I have!" said Eduardo. "The Quakers are building it. Father Joe helped them. But that isn't why he came to Costa Rica."
"Why did he come here?" asked Hood.
"To cause trouble in my dining room and bar," said the father.
"No! To study wild things!"
He looked at his father, then at Hood, and ran out. Pepino spread his arms and clung to the boy's shoulders, turning back for a bug-eyed look at Hood. He looked like a tiny man on a big motorcycle.
"He's a good boy," said Hood, smiling.
"He's a good boy," said the owner.
"I wonder what wild things Father Joe was studying."
"If you can catch Eduardo, I'm sure he will tell you." Hood moved his bags into room twenty-four and unpacked. He still had the great volcano view. He ran a hand over the bedspread, then got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed. There was dust and two dead flies and that was all. His cell phone had worked when he landed in San Jose but now there was no service. He turned it off and put it in a dresser drawer beside a Bible.
That evening he tried to eat alone in the dining room but the German birders asked him to sit with them. Hood spent the next hour eating his dinner and looking at the various cameras that were pressed upon him. The trogons and toucans were stunningly beautiful but no one had seen a quetzal as yet. The Germans were chipper and all of them spoke English precisely. They were off to try for quetzal again the next day.
After dinner Hood found Eduardo in the lobby, cleaning up Pepino's cage. The monkey clung to the boy's back and stared at Hood.
"Can you show me Father Joe's library tomorrow?"
"There is no school tomorrow, Detective. Yes. My studies will be done by four."
"I'll pay you as a guide."
"I guide for free but thank you."
"Can we see his wild things, too?"
"We can see them after the library. We need the dark for those."
Hood sat on his observation deck and drank bottled water mixed with bourbon from his duty-free bottle. He saw the great black hump of Arenal against the lighter black of the sky, watched the red crawl of the lava. Insects clung to the screen behind him and the frogs built a wall of sound in the jungle beyond. He turned and looked through the room at the bed where Sean Ozburn had snored and at the foot of that bed where Father Joe had sat and spoken quietly to Sean and then at the screened window through which Seliah had watched and mistaken this strange behavior for prayer. The moths and beetles fluttered on the screen, and the ceiling fan sectioned the room with moving shadows as Seliah had remembered. And I said, "Well, that's all fine and dandy, Joe, and pardon my French, but what the fuck were you doing with his toes?" The late afternoon was cool and the volcano was shrouded in clouds and silent. Eduardo led the way down the road with Pepino on his back.
"Father Joe was a good man," said Eduardo. "He knew everything about nature. I've lived here my whole life and he was only visiting but he knew more. He could name all of the different types of scales on the head of any snake. He knew all the Latin names of the animals of Costa Rica. He was a true expert on birds. He said his favorite Costa Rican animal was the sloth, because it is one of the seven deadly sins and the one he enjoyed the most. This was a joke because he was a priest. He was always joking about things. It's true that he caused trouble in the dining room. He liked to stir up people and see what they did."
"Your father didn't like him much. Was it only Father Joe's dining room behavior?"
"No, that's not the only reason. My father says it's the reason, but it has more to do with superstition than science."
"Explain that, Eduardo."
"Detective, superstition is belief without proof. Science is belief with proof. Older people like you and my father come from the age of superstition. But the young know better. We believe in science and technology. For example, my father hates his computer even though he learned to use it. Father Joe was very young in his heart. He showed me many shortcuts on the computer. He knew it very well. And other things. For example, he told me that the theory of evolution and natural selection is absolutely true. He said creation is also true. He said that what God created was the place where life could begin and evolve. It was a place with a few basic elements but that is enough. So, creation and evolution actually go together."
"Okay, then what superstition does your father have about Father Leftwich?"
"He thinks he's evil."
"Why?"
"He doesn't have a reason. That's why it is superstition."
Hood thought about this. Pepino looked back at him, bright-eyed, head bobbing.
Eduardo set off down a trail that ran east from the road. The jungle was high and dense around them but the trail was good. It was cooler here in the shade and the vegetation was so varied and diverse that Hood quickly exhausted his knowledge of the splendid living things around him.
"If you ask my father, he will have reasons," said Eduardo. "For example, my father thinks he has a sense about people. He calls it intuition. Which sounds very much like superstition, doesn't it? His intuition is that Father Joe is not a real priest at all. Another intuition is that Father Joe has committed crimes. What kind of crimes? My father can't say what kind. Then there's Itixa. Itixa is in charge of all of the resort housekeeping. She is full of superstitious Mayan blood. She whispers and gossips without stopping. She claims to see the dead and talk to them. She believes in werewolves, and in asema, which are vampires. When she believes there is an asema nearby, she makes the cook add extra garlic to all meals. The asema hates garlic, she believes. She drinks a bitter herb tea so that her blood will not taste good to a vampire. She told my father some things about Father Joe but my father didn't tell them to me. He only told me to stay away from the priest. And when I asked Itixa what she said to my father, she would not tell me. She said some things are not for a child to see and know. She is all superstition and no science. She drinks more beer than a whole football team. She is afraid to touch a cell phone because she felt one vibrate once and believes they are alive."
Hood stayed close behind Eduardo as the boy hustled along the trail. Through the occasional breaks in the tight vegetation, he could see Arenal looming in the clouds ahead of them.
The trail opened to a clearing dotted with grazing cattle and small, neat homes ringing the perimeter. The homes were painted yellow and blue and green and pink, and smoke rose from the chimneys of some of them. Hood saw corrals and a large American-style barn, and there were chickens and pigs in pens and horses and cattle roaming free. The northern field was thick with brown corn-stalks dying back after harvest, and the southern field with coffee.
"This way," said Eduardo.
Near the cornfield they came upon four men framing the outside walls upon a concrete foundation. They were big-boned Caucasian men, strong and diligent. They waved or nodded at Eduardo and Pepino, who now sat ramrod straight on Eduardo's shoulder. Hood guessed the new library at twelve hundred square feet.
"The libraries are important," said Eduardo. "Many towns and villages have no high school. And many poor students don't have the time or the travel money to make a two-hour trip to a faraway high school every day, and then another two-hour trip home. The village libraries are the only place where these children can find things to read. You have to read your book right there in the library. You can't take them home with you. Or there wouldn't be enough books. Father Joe brought books in his minivan. Boxes and boxes of them in Spanish and English. They are children's books on science and history and nature. Many pictures. I helped him carry some of the boxes into the barn. When the library is finished they will have hundreds of books that he brought. I told him he should have brought computers, too, and he said he would try to do that the next time he comes here."
"Where did he go?"
"He didn't tell me. He just wasn't here one day. I was sad. He was the one who gave me advice on what to feed Pepino, and how warm to keep him, and he told me that squirrel monkeys love their fathers very much and I would become Pepino's father if I was gentle and slow with him. He taught me that a diet heavy in bananas would make him die. I asked him if Pepino's species could evolve into human beings someday and Father Joe said no, because monkeys and humans have common ancestors but many years ago monkeys evolved one way and humans another way."
Hood heard melancholy in the boy's voice. Pepino looked up at him and pursed his lips.
"So, that will be our library someday," Eduardo said quietly.
"Will you use it?"
"No. My family has enough money to send me to high school. Because of ecotourism. I'm an all-A student. I want to be a film director or astronomer."
Hood walked over to the workers and asked the Quakers if they knew Father Joe Leftwich and where he had gone. The younger ones looked to the oldest one and he set down his hammer and measured out his words. Yes and no, he said. Father Leftwich had been here and worked very hard with them; he had brought good books from Ireland, where he lived; then he had simply not appeared for work one day and that was that. He was gone. Such are the blessings of the Lord, he said, offered and withdrawn according to a plan we cannot know.
Hood nodded and returned to Eduardo, who was looking up at the volcano. Some of the higher clouds had cleared and now the great black cone rose majestically into a blue sky from a downy base. Smoke rose steadily.
"Ready for the wild things, Detective?"