Don't Look Back Read Online Free PDF Page B

and cooking utensils. Paper plates and cups came out of a nylon compression dry bag that had been wedged under one of the raft tubes.
    “Our famous zip line.” Neto pointed to a taut cable stretching from bank to bank, disappearing into the tree line on either side. “Not for the faint of heart.”
    As the others prepped the fire for lunch, Gay Jay ran off toward the line, and seconds later he exploded out of the foliage ten feet above the river, hanging from a hand trolley. He backflipped into the water and reared up, eight-pack flexed, arms spread in Rocky victory. He called them over, and Will and Claire came and gave it a go while the others skewered fish on branches and roasted them over the fire like hot dogs. Lulu put on a pot of river water and boiled the giant brown crayfish until they turned red. Eve noticed Neto kneeling in the moist sand at the river’s edge, watching for bubbles and digging up translucent shrimp. She helped, dropping squirming fistfuls into the pot. Sand chafed her fingers and knees, scales coated her hands, sweat matted her bangs beneath Jay’s cap—she was a comprehensive mess, and yet she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had this much fun. It struck her that for the past few hours she had thought about nothing except precisely what she was doing. She’d been—as the yoga types at her gym called it— present. And she felt a stab of gratitude that she’d pushed herself to come here to this hidden place.
    They finished prepping and gathered to eat.
    “Where should I go to the bathroom?” she asked Neto.
    “If you’re a guy ?” He gestured to the river, the bank, all around, and the men laughed. “For women there’s some privacy up there. And a camping toilet. Look for ticks under the lid. This is not your Four Seasons.”
    A trail led from the shoal through a rise of orchids with white flowers the size of Frisbees. Eve stepped through into the jungle itself, which breathed around her. Philodendrons climbed toward the canopy. Bromeliads sprayed spikes. Giant tree ferns rose Jurassically. The trail twisted upslope. She ducked beneath a witchy dangle of hanging moss.
    A fallen tree had left a hole in the canopy, the resultant halo of sunlight giving rise to a contained world of color. Petite purple daisies and morning glories described a near-perfect circle on the jungle floor in which, centered like a holy relic, sat a stained plastic toilet. She almost laughed at the beatific presentation.
    As she moved into the light, a swarm of zebra butterflies stirred from the carpet of blossoms and whirled around her. Enchanted, she lifted her arms, half expecting them to perch as in a cartoon. They seemed to carry her across the clearing. She was captivated, lost to the beauty. She followed them or they her through the fall of warmth to the dark edge where the ground sloped precipitously away.
    That was when she heard the thud.
    Crunching footsteps.
    Another thud.
    Man-made sounds.
    Tentatively, she drew to where the fallen trunk rimmed the lip before the sharp drop. Through a web of branches and leaves, she could see a dwelling at the base of the small canyon beyond. Truck tires formed a retaining wall, buttressing the humble house against the rise. Vines devoured the slab concrete roof and walls, hacked off over the windows, which seemed to peer out of the hill itself.
    Something streaked into sight through the branches, and the thud echoed again through the canyon. A burly, bearded man followed patiently in the hurled object’s wake, his footsteps packing down dead leaves. Eve shifted along the log, straining to see what he was doing as he flickered behind tree trunks. The spot provided an excellent spying vantage down on him and the house. Tracking him, she picked out a rusted Jeep Wrangler languishing beneath a carport rigged up from interwoven fronds inside a copse of close-packed trees. Like the house, the vehicle blended into the jungle.
    He stopped. His broad back wiggled