So, she was doing drugs, something I'd always secretly feared. Well, maybe she was still having flashbacks of some kind; maybe that explained why she was off in another world when she came out of her coma.

"What . . . kind of 'hallucinogenic substance'?"

He sighed then shrugged and answered. "Here in the rain forest there's an ugly three-pound toad the Bufo marinus—you'll see them around, near sunset—that has glands down its back that excrete a milky white poison."

I knew about them. They were migrating north now, even into Florida. They were huge and looked like Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars. I hate toads of all varieties, but the thought of those monsters made me shudder.

"My God, isn't their toxin lethal?" Was Sarah trying to destroy herself? Was that why her mind was so blitzed? "I've heard—"

"Yes, it can kill you, but it can also—if processed cor­rectly, with fermented honey—give you truly supernatural visions. The classical Maya used it for ceremonial purposes. I'd managed to reconstruct how they prepared it, and—some­thing I now deeply regret—I showed the shamans here how to replicate the procedure. At the time it was just a minor part of my research into traditional pharmacology, but she heard about it and persuaded them to give her a vial. Then more and more."

That did sound like Sarah. Always out on the edge, testing new realities. But then I thought a moment about what he'd actually said. Some of the people here in his "place of mir­acles" were doing heavy drugs, and she'd got caught up in it.

"But why didn't you stop her?" You unfeeling bastard.

"I tried, believe me. But I'm afraid she was far past lis­tening to me. By then she was learning the Kekchi Maya dialect, becoming totally immersed in their world. She began having episodes of complete non-rationality, and then one day she told the women in her compound she was going over to Palenque, the Maya ruins in Mexico. It's where the classical Maya held their last kingship ceremony. Before anyone re­alized she was serious, she stole one of their cayucos, their mahogany dugout canoes, and headed down the Rio Tigre." His eyes had turned completely dark, the way he used to blank them out. "She just went missing. Everyone here was devastated. We all loved her."

I stood there weighing his story. It didn't ring true. I sup­posed she was capable of something that crazy, but would she have actually done it? I didn't think so.