Page 51 of Toy

11

Mason

“This is fucking useless,isn’t it?”

I slouched on an old wooden bench and exhaled deeply, raising my hand to shield my eyes from the warm sun.

Beck and I had been through nearly every town and village in Talamanca Canton over the last three days, along with a few in Limon as well, and we weren’t any closer to discovering the exact location of the cult.

My once-confident belief that we were getting closer and closer to Jolie was slowly waning with every knockback we encountered. I wanted it to be unshakable, and I fucking hated myself for letting it fade even the slightest bit, but it was difficult to keep believing we’d come out on top when all I could picture in my mind’s eye with each failure was Jolie, bleeding and beaten. Raped and tortured. Dead and buried. The terrible images drove me crazy, robbing me of my ability to sleep or think straight more and more with every hour that passed without any answers.

Despite it all, I couldn’t give up. I knew that much. I would never, ever back down, no matter what.

I would die searching for Jolie if that’s what it came down to.

Beck and I had initially gone to visit some local policemen who’d investigated the disappearance of the young girls over the last decade, and they were happy to speak to Beck about the cases once she told them she was a cop back home. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything they could tell us that we hadn’t already learned from the OIJ files. All of the girls had vanished without a trace. No suspects, no evidence.

After speaking with the police, we’d spent every waking hour going around to stores, street vendors, bars and cafés in the small towns so we could talk to the locals and ask questions. We also showed them old photos of known cult members, like Jacob Chastain, to see if they’d ever spotted any of them in or around the area. That was a dead end. No one seemed to have seen any of them, and a lot of them said that even if they had, they probably would’ve assumed they were tourists and never given them a second glance.

Just in case they remembered something later, we gave them all a cell number to contact us on. So far the cell had remained inactive.

“Surely someone has to know something,” Beck said, sitting next to me as she gazed out over the water. We were currently in Puerto Viejo, a tiny but relatively popular tourist town on the coast. “These guys aren’t ghosts. Someone has to have seen or heard something at some point, right?” She glumly lowered her gaze. “We don’t have any other ideas, anyway.”

“I know.” I nodded grudgingly, then sighed heavily and leaned forward, rubbing my temples. “It’s just so shitty knowing what they’re probably doing to Jolie while we just sit here wondering what the fuck to do,” I muttered.

The thought of Jolie screaming in pain while the cultists abused her made my stomach lurch. What terrible torture methods had they dreamed up for her? Was she even alive, or was I already too late?

I looked back up. “Maybe it’s time we get the authorities involved. They won’t let us kill the fuckers, obviously, but at least they might be able to help find them.”

Beck opened her mouth to reply to me, but then her cell phone rang in her pocket. She fished it out. “Hello?” she said. Her eyebrows drew together. “Yes, that’s us.” She paused for a moment, listening to the person on the other end. “Okay, sure. We’ll be there.”

She ended the call and turned to me. “See? What did I tell you?”

“We got a lead?” I sat upright, shoulders tensing.

She nodded excitedly. “Yes. That was one of the guys we talked to earlier. He said he mentioned us to his grandfather, and he wants to talk to us about the missing girls. They want us to meet them at that little coffee shop we passed on the way down here.”

We arrived at the café ten minutes later. I recognized the guy who called Beck—we’d talked to him at a gas station earlier. He was tall with olive skin and dark eyes. A much older man with dark skin and gray hair sat next to him, hunched over a white and blue coffee cup.

The younger man smiled briefly at us as we took our seats. “I’m Gabriel. My grandfather is Leonel. He doesn’t speak any English, so I’ll need to translate for him.”

I nodded. “That’s fine.” We were used to that at this point. Not many people around here spoke English, so we’d actually hired a translator to follow us around for the majority of the last few days. Unfortunately, he’d developed some sort of stomach bug, so he’d gone back to his hometown early this morning. We’d been relying on a translation book ever since.

Beck pulled out a notepad. “What did Leonel want to talk to us about?”

Gabriel turned to his grandfather and rattled off the question in Spanish. I knew a bit of the language from high school, but the old man replied so rapidly that I couldn’t pick up on any of it, as had been the case with many people we spoke with so far.

“He says he’s lived here all his life. This region hasn’t had the best luck in the past compared to others, in many different ways, but the one thing we always had was safety for our children. It was simply unheard of for a child to go missing… until the last seven or eight years.” He tightened his jaw. “Now almost every town in this region has a story of a girl vanishing on her way home from school.”

I nodded gravely. “It’s terrible,” I said. “Considering the number of missing girls in comparison to the general population, we’re quite surprised it hasn’t received more media attention.”

The younger man relayed that to his grandfather, listened carefully to his response, and then turned back to me. “Like he said, this region hasn’t always had the best luck. We’ve started getting a lot of tourists now, especially in the coastal towns like this one, but there’s still quite a lot of poverty. The police have done what they can for the missing girls, and the OIJ has sent people down to investigate in the past as well, but there are no leads, and no more attention is given after that. If the child of a wealthy foreign tourist went missing… well, that would be another story. Imagine newspaper articles with titles like: American girl disappears on dream vacation or British toddler snatched from hotel room in tropical paradise. That sort of sensationalism is what attracts international attention. It would be discussed and dissected everywhere—on the internet, in the papers, on the radio. But people don’t care as much when local children and teenagers disappear. People from outside this region, that is.”

“He’s got a good point,” Beck murmured, leaning over to me. “I see stuff like that all the time in my job.”

Leonel leaned over and spoke to his grandson again.

“He wants to know if anyone has mentioned the volcano to you yet,” Gabriel said, turning back to us with raised eyebrows.

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