Page 34 of The Deepest Lake
——————————
———————
———
Rose doesn’t want to eat, but it’s the only way to blunt her hangover. Twenty minutes after ordering, she is served breakfast on the guests’ verandah, halfway between the cabins and the reception building. She’s unable to eat more than two spoonfuls of yogurt, mango and granola, but she makes up for it by sucking down vast quantities of water and caffeine.
Other participants from the cabins puzzle over the breakfasts delivered to them. One woman’s request for eggs somehow yields a delivery of French toast, while another woman’s request for dry toast results in the production of a perfect omelet, topped with orange slices.
Isobel stands with hands stretched over her head, working out the kinks aggravated by her bad mattress. “Nothing can be as perfect as Casa Eva. We wouldn’t be able to appreciate her standard of luxury if we got it here, in town.”
“Contrast,” Scarlett agrees. “That’s what I love about travel. When you’ve been pedaling through rain all day and you’re starving, that free grilled cheese a person gives you at a campground tastes like heaven.”
Rose has interacted with Scarlett only briefly, in the cabin and at last night’s party. Avoided her, in fact. But now she allows herself to look, long and hard.
There’s no question. Scarlett is beautiful and fit. Though she started her cross-country cycling trip seventy pounds overweight, as her manuscript explained, she lost the extra pounds, leaving only curvy muscle. Today she’s wearing close-fitting exercise tights and a high-necked T-shirt. Her hips are wide but her waist is tiny. All of her skin is covered, from ankles to collarbone, but her body is so naturally shapely that even the waiter can’t help staring as he sets a plate of pancakes in front of her.
“I ordered chilaquiles?”
Scarlett doesn’t seem to notice the waiter blushing.
“Did you really get free food from people?” asks Diane, a woman with chestnut-colored hair pulled back in a dressy ponytail, the top artfully backcombed in a poufy sixties style Rose would never dare attempt.
“All the time.”
“Weren’t you worried about depending on people’s spontaneous charity?”
“Never.”
“But what if you got to the end of the day and no one invited you to their campsite to share some soup or whatever?”
“Then I didn’t eat. But that was okay. I started the trip a size twenty. I had a good safety margin.”
Five women are seated at their table, with another four from their workshop at a second table across the veranda, looking at photos posted from last night’s party on Eva’s social media. K is the only one of them who hasn’t signed the waivers. K browses, taking a surprisingly long time.
Does Ana Sofía really post that much? Does Eva really have that many different feeds? Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and maybe there were others. Jules never mentioned that, but why would she? Jules didn’t care for social media very much. Even so, Rose thought she’d studied all the mainstream platforms in the weeks after Jules’s disappearance. But she might have missed something.
The self-criticism stings, reminding her of the fight with Matt, who was willing to lob even sharper attacks. Rose resents the way he disregarded every new piece of information she gathered from Dennis. She still thinks it might be worth paying a visit to Chief Molina herself, but she has to figure out what to say. Accusing authorities of lying about a drug dealer’s arrest will not make her any new friends.
But maybe Rose could mention to Molina that she now has a hunch Jules had a Guatemalan boyfriend. If she could just find an image of him, or of Jules with any man who looked Guatemalan, or anything else new that won’t make the police defensive, then she’d have a good reason for stopping by. But how would she explain her presence at the workshop and her use of a false identity?
When Rose pulls out her phone, Isobel steps closer, pausing from her stretches to look over Rose’s shoulder.
Isobel says, “You’re not looking at the right Facebook Group.”
“Eva has more than one?”
“Different one for every Atitlán session cohort.” Isobel is breathing in Rose’s ear. “You’re still on the wrong page.”
“Okay,” Rose says, needing some room. Because now that she understands there are different groups, it isn’t this session’s opening party that interests her. She stays on the page from three months ago. But she sees no images of Jules.
Rose pauses her scrolling at a video titled “Last Gasp, Still Great.” When she hits play, the video judders forward, but only for a second, stuck on an image of a paperback copy of Eva’s first memoir, sitting atop a mosaic-inlaid table with blue water and volcanoes behind.
Rose’s throat tightens. It looks like Jules’s copy of the paperback—the same copy the backpacker somehow got hold of. The paperback Rose now has in her bag.
Then she catches herself. Every paperback looks the same. Even the crease on the cover means nothing.
The video starts and stops and freezes again, the audio failing, the camera still focused on the book cover, with only forty-six seconds left.