The Marriage Trap Read online

  ‘Scientists! Writers! Everybody!’ He made it sound like a full-scale invasion.

  By Boca Negra standards, Courtney supposed it was, when shortly afterwards a group of four dusty men appeared.

  ‘Rooms for the night?’ the tallest one asked Consuelo.

  She nodded happily, handing out keys, giving rapid-fire directions to Aurelio who lugged their bags down the hall to the rooms she indicated.

  ‘You be here long?’ she asked while the man signed the ledger.

  ‘Only overnight if we can manage it. We’re doing an ecological study of one of the tributaries.’ He glanced up. ‘We need a good guide.’

  ‘Aidan Sawyer,’ Aurelio said importantly. ‘He’s the best.’

  Courtney glared at him.

  ‘Think he’s available?’ the man asked.

  Consuelo shrugged her ample shoulders. ‘Don’t know. You can ask him. He’s down at the dock.’

  ‘Which tributary?’ Courtney asked suddenly. If the men were only going in the same direction as she was…

  They weren’t. ‘How long will you be gone?’ she asked him.

  ‘A month, I reckon.’

  ‘A month?’ If they took Aidan Sawyer away for a month, chances were she would never get to her parents in time. ‘Aren’t there some other guides, Consuelo?’ she asked a bit desperately when the man left.

  ‘Raimundo Pereira. But I would not like to see you go with him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Consuelo weighed her words before answering. ‘If you say no to Aidan Sawyer, I think he will respect that. He does not want to get, how do you say, “involved” with a woman. He does not want to be…’ She paused, groping for the word in English.

  ‘Responsible,’ Courtney guessed grimly.

  Consuelo nodded at once. ‘Yes. That’s it. He would feel “responsible”. Raimundo, he won’t care.’

  Swell. Raimundo was probably the bandit-rapist-murderer Aidan had in mind.

  ‘I didn’t mean for me,’ she said quickly. ‘I meant for the men. Surely if they said no…’

  Consuelo giggled. ‘Raimundo would not bother them. But he gets drunk a lot. Aidan don’t. They will want Aidan.’

  Courtney thought they would, too. And Aidan would want them.

  ‘I’m going out for a while,’ she told Consuelo. ‘I need to think.’

  She considered all the available alternatives. There weren’t many. She could, of course, turn back. But if the law firm doling out the trust that her grandfather had left to both her father and Uncle Leander wasn’t handed concrete evidence within six weeks that her father was still alive, Leander was going to be able to break the trust that would care for her parents in their old age. And while her parents never seemed to care about that, Courtney did.

  Endicott ‘Chippy’ Perkins and his wife, Marguerite, were in many ways like children. They embodied the best of Christian charity, and they never gave a thought to tomorrow. They were lilies of the field, confident that God’s bounty would be there for them.

  It would be. But only if, while they didn’t worry about the future, Courtney did. She knew that, however much they might like to stay in the jungle for ever, they wouldn’t be able to. Her father’s arthritis had been worse a year ago, when she had last got a letter from them. He was having trouble getting around. Her mother’s eyesight wasn’t good. She knew the time would come when they would have to retire from their missionary activities. And she also knew they fully expected to come back to the States and live on the inheritance that Endicott’s father had left in trust for him and his brother.

  If Leander didn’t get his hands on it first.

  Courtney scowled, remembering that Leander had already put his lawyers to work on it. She had protested. But Leander had merely shrugged. ‘I haven’t heard from Chippy in years,’ he reminded her.

  It wasn’t surprising. Her parents thought in terms of whoever was in front of them and whoever needed their help right then. Leander, being well heeled and in Beverly Hills to boot, was undoubtedly at the bottom of their list. But Courtney had heard from her parents, and she said so.

  ‘That’s nice.’ Leander had steepled his fingers and peered over the top of them at her like a vulture contemplating a meal. ‘But Chippy has to check in with the firm once a year. He hasn’t.’

  Her father would never remember such a thing. Her parents scarcely seemed even to remember her. It had been over a year since her mother’s last letter.

  ‘Maybe they’re missing,’ Leander suggested.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Courtney replied stiffly.

  ‘Or maybe they’ve been eaten.’ He was warming to the idea. ,

  ‘Uncle Leander!’

  ‘Just kidding.’ He smiled, but it was a crafty smile, and she knew quite well he probably wouldn’t have cared if they had been or not. Money was the only thing that interested Leander.

  ‘I’ll find them,’ Courtney promised.

  ‘Do that,’ her uncle said, but he didn’t sound as if he hoped she would succeed.

  She would though, she vowed. Her parents had spent their lives in service of others. It was time someone looked out for them.

  And the someone was going to be her.

  It wasn’t an entirely unselfish motive that drove her, she acknowledged. She knew only too well that if she didn’t save their inheritance and their independence, someday they would move in with her. And the simple knowledge that if they gained a toehold in her life, they would pick out a husband for her, rearrange her furniture, and name her children, was enough incentive to send her to South America at once.

  It was not just their future she was saving, but her own.

  But that meant getting Aidan Sawyer to guide her. Back to square one.

  ‘Bunnies and stuff,’ she muttered wryly. If he only knew! She wrote children’s adventure fiction and fantasies, and while she might not have tangled with every sort of beast in her books, she had kayaked every river, climbed every mountain, and hiked every trail that her protagonists had. She was probably in better shape than he was, did he but know it.

  But he didn’t. Aidan Sawyer thought she was a namby-pamby who would require an infinite amount of coddling. And Leander thought he would be able to bust the trust without her stopping him. Neither of them knew that for obvious reasons her father had nicknamed her ‘Mule’.

  Well, they would learn. Leander, hopefully, within a month or so; Aidan Sawyer, far sooner than that.

  ‘They are going in the morning,’ Consuelo told her that evening as she washed the dishes in the back of the café.

  ‘With Aidan?’

  ‘Yes.’ Consuelo gave her a sympathetic glance.

  ‘He got his engine fixed, did he?’

  ‘Must have. They leave at dawn.’

  ‘Dawn? When’s dawn?’

  Consuelo’s eyes narrowed. ‘Just past five this time of year. You’re not thinking of stowing away, are you?’

  ‘Me?’ Courtney laughed. ‘Not on your life. They’re going in the wrong direction, remember? The last thing anyone knew of my folks they were east of here.’

  Aurelio came in just then, his pet sloth, Slow Hand, casually draped over his shoulder. ‘I take you,’ he offered.

  Consuelo shuddered. ‘You will not.’

  Aurelio’s face fell.

  ‘Maybe when you’re older,’ Courtney consoled him.

  ‘Better me than Raimundo,’ Aurelio said to his mother.

  She grunted, then reached over and patted Courtney on the arm with a soapy hand. ‘Maybe you not meant to go.’

  Courtney shook her head. ‘No. I’m going all right.’

  ‘But—’

  She wrapped her fingers over Consuelo’s dark hand. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll work something out.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Nancy Drew, where are you when I need you?’ Courtney muttered as she surreptitiously lifted the holey screen off the hotel room window and prepared to drop to the ground below.

&nb
sp; She had always taken the adventures of the teenaged fictional detective with more than a grain of salt, skimming rather than reading them with the thoroughness they had obviously deserved. If she had paid attention, she would not be having such a difficult time sneaking around now.

  Thank heavens it was only a one-storey building. If it hadn’t been, her parents might have done without their inheritance. But the ground was soft when she landed, and she looked around, breathing a sigh of relief.

  Why she felt relief, she had no idea. The hard part hadn’t even started yet. Wiping damp palms on the sides of her trousers, she loped along quietly in the shadows of the buildings down towards the dock.

  She ought to have asked Consuelo where Aidan Sawyer lived. As it was, he might pop up at any second. But a careful look around reassured her. No one in the entire town seemed to be moving. Even the birds were quiet. Only an occasional loud shriek rent the air.

  Ducking down just in case someone did happen to be looking, she crept quietly out on to the dock. Aidan Sawyer’s boat was still tied up at the end, its engine now firmly in place.

  Courtney didn’t know a lot about engines. If she had been asked to fix one, she would have been quite sure she couldn’t do it. But breaking one, at least temporarily, didn’t seem beyond her capabilities. All she had to do, she figured, was remove something vital.

  If she had stopped to think, she wouldn’t have been doing it at all. It was against every moral precept she had ever met. But so was what Leander was trying to do to her parents. And if she had to justify it, she supposed she would mutter something about the lesser of two wrongs.

  Fortunately no one was asking for a justification.

  She knelt down on the dock next to the boat, grabbed the stern which swayed a few feet away, and drew it up against the split-tyre buffer that lined the boards of the dock. Then she eased herself over into the boat and pulled the engine up out of the water.

  A screwdriver wouldn’t have been amiss. But while she carried a lot of things in her bag, she didn’t have one of those. And Aidan Sawyer hadn’t left his tools lying around. She searched her pockets for a dime, and, finding one, she set to work.

  Removing the engine casing took longer than she liked. Her fingers fumbled, she swore under her breath. The boat bobbed, making her hand slip time and time again. But at last she had it off.

  A sudden scuffling and noise from the street above made her freeze, then crouch as low as she could. The voices were loud and slurred. Peeping up carefully, she caught sight of two men weaving their way towards the dock. She held her breath, praying that one of them wasn’t Sawyer.

  Her prayers were answered. The men were both too short, and neither of them spoke like a Harvard graduate. They weaved off at last and went into the side door of the general store that she had passed on the way down. Perhaps one of them was the proprietor. She hoped so. That meant he wouldn’t be coming back out again. She didn’t need any more interruptions. It was already past two. If Aidan Sawyer and his entourage thought they were going to leave at dawn, they would be down at the boat by four to load it. Taking a quick look over her shoulder, she set back to work.

  In the end it wasn’t too difficult. She simply removed a screw here and a screw there, and for good measure she took a rubber belt and something that she suspected would whirr round and round once you got the engine started. If it worked with all those parts gone, she guessed divine providence was telling her not to meddle in Uncle Leander’s affairs.

  Then she and her dime set to work replacing the engine casing. That, unfortunately, took even longer than it had to take it off.

  It was five minutes past three when she climbed back into her window at the hotel. She narrowly missed running into one of the scientists who was just coming out on to the porch, obviously getting ready for an early start.

  ‘Whew.’ She sank on to her bed in relief, and was horrified to hear a resounding clank.

  ‘Damn!’ She got up again and very carefully buried her noisy treasures beneath her mattress. Then she undressed and slid silently under the sheet, rolling on to her side and waiting for the sounds of morning.

  In fact, she missed them. The sleepless night that had followed two miserable days on the bus, followed by her pre-dawn assault on Aidan’s boat, had finished her off. She was asleep before the scientists left. And she was still sleeping when Aurelio knocked on her door at ten o’clock in the morning.

  ‘I bring you some chocolate, all right?’ Brown eyes and a wide grin took in her befuddled expression. ‘You sleep a long time.’

  Courtney blinked, lifting herself on one elbow. ‘Huh? Oh, er, yes, I guess I did.’ She glanced at her watch. Ten o’clock! Merciful heavens! ‘D… did the, uh, expedition leave, then?’

  ‘The scientists, you mean?’

  She nodded, taking the cup of steaming chocolate from him and sipping it carefully.

  ‘Not yet,’ Aurelio said cheerfully. ‘They got a problem with the boat.’

  Courtney tried to look amazed. ‘Oh?’

  ‘It don’t work again. Aidan, he is mad. He says that rat Raimundo sabotage it.’

  ‘Does he?’ Better and better. She allowed herself another sip and followed it with a smile.

  Aurelio put a plate of fried bread on the rickety table beside her bed. ‘Sim. He thinks Raimundo do it to get the job.’

  ‘Did Raimundo get the job?’

  ‘If Aidan don’t get the boat fixed by noon. And,’ he added with a grin, ‘if the men get Raimundo sobered up by then.’

  ‘May the Lord help them in their noble efforts,’ Courtney intoned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I hope they do,’ she translated for him.

  ‘Aidan don’t,’ Aurelio said frankly. ‘He says he madder than spitting nickels.’ He looked at Courtney to confirm whether he had got the colloquialism right or not.

  ‘I’ll bet he is,’ she murmured. She gave Aurelio a smile. ‘Thanks for the chocolate.’

  ‘De nada.’ He started to turn when he frowned suddenly, looking down at the floor. ‘What’s that?’

  Courtney looked over the side of the bed to see him bend down and pick up one of the larger screws that had been part of her booty. ‘I—uh, I can’t imagine.’

  Aurelio squatted down, scowling at the bed frame. ‘Too big for here.’ He considered the worn, slightly rusty screw in his hand, then he tipped his head up and looked wide-eyed at Courtney. ‘Don’t look like a bed-frame screw.’

  ‘It don’t? I mean, it doesn’t?’

  He stood up and grinned, tossing the screw up in the air and catching it. She held her breath. Then he stretched out his hand and gave it to her. ‘I never tell,’ he said.

  * * *

  ‘I suppose Aurelio tell you,’ Consuelo said to Courtney half an hour later, scarcely glancing up from the huge stewpot into which she was flinging all manner of chopped vegetables.

  ‘About the expedition, you mean?’

  ‘Sim.’ She shook her head. ‘That Raimundo!’ Courtney felt a brief pang of guilt at having Raimundo blamed by all for her own deviousness. But moments later when she saw the scruffy man, now mostly sober and chattering away a mile a minute as he walked with two of the scientists towards the dock, she felt better.

  For one thing, he didn’t look any better than Aidan Sawyer had led her to believe he was, and she knew she didn’t want to go out in the jungle with him. For another, she thought the scientists might handle him admirably. They would daunt him instead of the other way around. And he definitely looked as if he could use the money.

  Aidan Sawyer, she noted as she glanced out into the café, looked somewhere between furious and grim. She was glad it was Raimundo he was angry with, not her.

  ‘What a pity,’ she said brightly. ‘Want me to help you with the vegetables?’

  Consuelo gave her a shrewd look. ‘The better for you I would think.’

  Courtney knew better than to pretend she had no idea what Consuelo was getting at. ‘Only if
he changes his mind.’

  Consuelo grunted. She handed Courtney a knife and nodded at the heap of vegetables on the table. They worked in silence. After the spicy meat and vegetable feijoado was simmering on the stove, Courtney helped Consuelo make up beds, sweep floors and hang washing. Nothing was said about her dogging Consuelo’s footsteps; nothing was said about the way she vanished when one of the scientists came back to announce that they were leaving with Raimundo; nothing was said about the way she smiled with relief when Raimundo’s boat, laden so heavily that it barely had three inches of freeboard, disappeared upstream.

  Nothing was said at all until that afternoon when Aurelio came back into the hotel, Slow Hand draped over his shoulder again, ‘You going now?’ he asked Courtney.

  ‘Going where?’ his mother wanted to know.

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Going to see if Aidan take her.’ Aurelio had no qualms about discussing it apparently, now that the scientists had gone. ‘She is very tricky, Mama.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t going to tell.’ Courtney gave him a dark look.

  Consuelo gave her an assessing one. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Very tricky.’ Aurelio winked. He reached up and scratched the sloth’s back.

  ‘I don’t think I will just yet,’ Courtney said. ‘I have some things that need doing in my room.’ And so saying she vanished down the hallway. It wouldn’t do, no matter what Aurelio thought, to pop out the moment Raimundo had disappeared upstream. Discretion was the better part of valour, after all.

  It was also the better part of staying on Aidan Sawyer’s good side. Presuming, of course, that he had one. So she kept to the background, wondering, as she did so, how she was going to be able to contrive to get the engine parts back to him.

  It wouldn’t do simply to show up with them and claim to have found them. She might have been able to outwit him once, but she wasn’t going to try to make a habit of it.

  As it happened, though, she didn’t have to try. Aurelio did it for her.

  ‘I jus’ tol’ him I find them when I’m taking out the trash,’ Aurelio explained that evening when he poked his head in her door and gave her a thumbs-up sign. ‘So tomorrow you can maybe ask him again?’ His grin was conspiratorial.