Quite suddenly, I was furious with her. Indulging her eccentricities to the point that a simple cup of coffee became a ritual and Walter and I had to drink from her cup as solemnly as though we were meeting with the gods.
I waited until the urge to retch had passed, then restored the scene and locked the door behind me and ran through the hallway. Outside, in the cold, I took in a long breath of fresh air but it was some time before I left behind the scent of coffee.
Aged Sumatra. The Toba caldera.
CHAPTER 35
It’s very strange now.
Everything’s gone quiet. Quakes, which built into a swarm in the past week, have all but ceased. Gas emissions in Hot Creek and on Red Mountain have subsided. Strain rate’s dropped. And in the absence of activity there is a vacuum, a stifling feeling like the sky is falling, only very very slowly.
Lindsay described this kind of thing to me once. It’s called premonitory quiescence—a brief interruption in the unrest that often leads to an eruption.
We’re still at alert level WATCH. Volcano watch.
Phil Dobie phoned this morning. Without Lindsay I don’t have a backdoor into USGS anymore and so I’ve been calling Phil and getting noninformation. As Lindsay put it, Phil has to weigh all the variables before he’ll decide whether to order the burger or the chicken nuggets. This morning he decided on the chicken nuggets. He called me. He said something about owing it to me and to Lindsay’s—and then he muttered something I think was memory—to call and give me a heads-up. The Survey is considering declaring alert level WARNING. I swallowed and asked Phil if he thought we were going all the way. He said without a pause to weigh the variables “it’s not out of the question.”
Phil must have phoned Krom as well because Krom has issued his own decree, closing the town to nonresidents, clearing the backcountry of snow campers.
We’re left in town with only ourselves for company.
Meanwhile I’m on watch, in sync with the volcano.
I sit at my bench and stare at the specimen dish of pumice and bark, and I still can’t say how it got into Georgia’s mouth and I still can’t connect it with Adrian Krom. I can’t place him at the scene of her murder. I stare at the specimen dish of gray limestone, which does not place him at the scene of Lindsay’s murder. I know he killed them, but I can only watch the dust gather on my specimen dishes. My evidence exists in a vacuum.
Today, I could stand it no longer and so I fled to Hot Creek. The gate was unlocked. There were two Survey trucks parked in the lot. I parked and got out. I needed to walk. The gorge was swarming with Survey people. I headed out into the tableland above the creek, intending to pay a visit to Lindsay’s fumarole, her little fellow.
The snow was soft and my boots made no noise and in this vacuum I became invisible. This is how he came back from the airport, I thought. Invisibly. Snowstorm postponed his flight and maybe he took that as a sign. Tonight’s the night. Tonight he has to kill her. There must be a reason, of course—nobody kills without a reason. Nobody’s on the street in this storm, nobody sees him. It’s late, her building’s nearly deserted. He wears gloves so he will leave no prints. He wears a cap so he will shed no hairs. He sheds Sears wool but that’s not going to nail him. He brings clean shoes and changes in the hallway so he will leave no soil trace, or maybe he ties plastic bags over his boots. That alarms her, although not as much as the gun in his hand. Maybe he just intends to scare her, some final humiliation, and things get out of hand. She says something, indicates she will not be cowed. Scared of course but even in fear, we are who we are. Maybe it’s just a look from her that does it. The lift of her chin, and he shoots. Then he goes home, gets some shuteye, and rises early to catch the flight out.
I could not breathe well. This thick air. I once went snorkeling in Hawaii and all I could hear underwater was my own labored breathing. This was like snorkeling, just me and an ocean of snow and the faraway horizon where the caldera lip rises. And that crazy sky, blue as the ocean, sitting down on top of me. I walked faster, underwater breathing, and I wanted to scream to break the silence but the feeling of pressure was so great that I was afraid to open my mouth—it would be like opening my mouth underwater.
Her little fellow was steaming.
I turned and ran for my car through the crazy thick air, breathing ragged, heartbeats like gunshots.
CHAPTER 36
Harmonic tremors in the moat, new ground cracking on Red Mountain, and the fissure is belching acid gases.
The premonitory quiescence has broken, like a fever.
~ ~ ~
Walter and I were at the open door. The storefront window, cracked by quakes and secured with duct tape, rattled until its protest was drowned by the roar of oncoming trucks. I moved out for a better look and all along Minaret Road others were stepping out of doorways, the lot of us like prairie dogs popping from our burrows in alarm.
There was a line of trucks from here to the horizon, and although it’s seven in the morning they came into town with their headlights switched on as though dark had already fallen in Mammoth.
The noise grew insufferable and we retreated inside.
It’s as if burglars have been at work in here. The lab’s stripped bare, most everything moved to Bishop. What’s left is now boxed and waiting by the door—the bare-bones equipment we’ve been using the past few days, and current cases. Los Angeles, Costa Rica, a new one from Tucson, and of course Georgia and Lindsay. The small lab television plays with the sound off. It’s tuned to King Videocable, which keeps playing the same tape with a crawl updating the evacuation schedule. I’ve been watching for two hours. I switched the TV on at home at five A.M. when the civil defense alarm went off and shocked me awake. Jimbo and I knew the drill and we’d moved in sync packing last-minute stuff, and then Walter phoned and we agreed to meet at the lab to pack our skeletal equipment. We were packed and ready to go by six-thirty but Minaret was closed in anticipation of the National Guard convoy. When it passes and officials open the road again, we can bring around our cars, load up, and head home.
Plan is, we evacuate by home address. My street’s in the second-to-last group and Walter’s is in the last. So far, everything is going stopwatch perfect. It’s a perfect day, clear and no storm forecast. There are no visitors in town to burden us, to clog the exit. Plan is, last I heard, to evacuate out highway 203—with Pika Canyon as backup in the case of flat tires or engine trouble or fender benders or anything else to slow 203—but either way we should all be out within four hours.
We sat waiting. The workbenches and catchall table and metal shelves were too heavy to be worth moving—moving twice should we return. The stools on which we sat were too cheap to bother with.
I thought of Lindsay’s leather chair. A real waste. We’d packed nothing from her office, although it was no longer sealed, no longer a worked crime scene. We’d packed nothing from her house. We leave her things alone, Walter said. I asked about her personal stuff—didn’t he care about that?
He said, never love anything that can’t love you back.
So all we have of Lindsay is what’s in the box. A gold filigree ring and some grains of limestone. She would be pissed, I thought. She was a shopper, she valued things. What a waste.
I stared at her carton. She’s in limbo, like Georgia. The two old crones boxed up, one on top of the other. Village elders sitting in judgment. Both royally pissed with me. I could have gone into volcanology but I’m a failed forensics chick who can’t nail one guy for two murders in my own backyard. Stop whining, Georgia snaps. Lindsay just raises one fine eyebrow. Honey, what a waste.
I spun on my stool and said to Walter, “It just royally stinks. We know he did it.”
Walter said, dully, “There is no evidence.”
“There’s the crinoid she put into her ring. Why’d she do that if not to tell us it was him?”
Walter didn’t reply. There was no reply, and we both knew it, and we were both royally sick of this dead-end
talk, and so he just sat quietly waiting, his shirt untucked, two fingers bandaged from paper cuts, old fellow beaten and lost in the attic.
He got up and walked over to the TV and flipped up the sound.
We’d seen the tape three times already.
Jeanine, our local TV star, wearing a prim sweater dress, is standing at a lectern. Jeanine, of all people, has been tapped to read the USGS hazard alert, the WARNING declared this morning. A mouthful for anyone and for Jeanine the laid-back queen it’s the challenge of a lifetime. But it was somehow comforting to have Jeanine on the tube with the official word.
“...indicates that a volume of maaagma,” she read, “is being injected into the shallow crust with a strong possibility...”
I knew it by heart.
“...still possible that the maaagma may yet stop short...”
I knew at precisely which point Jeanine’s hand was going to wander to her hair. I knew how her hand was going to stop short and that—given the gravity of the situation—she would stifle the need to tug on her ponytail.
“...and an assessment of its implications for possible...volcanic...hazards.” She looked directly into the camera, her eyes slitting.
I knew Jeanine had acquired a new war story, a companion piece to her battle with Krom in Hot Creek.
I knew I should be fixing my attention on details at hand—I help Walter load the Explorer and keep room in my Subaru because Jimbo called and said there’s more boxes waiting at home—but I could not help wondering what Krom was thinking. He’s won. He’s built his road, he’s vanquished his human foe, and his nonhuman foe—that nasty-tempered unpredictable chum—is about to be vanquished as well because by noon Krom will have whisked us all beyond its reach.
On TV the tape rolled and Jeanine began again.
And then there was a blast and then another and another, one blast rolling into the next and the window crack widened and the door sucked open and my ears buzzed and Walter and I hit the floor and rolled beneath our workbenches and I began to pray.
CHAPTER 37
This is it, I thought, already through the door.
The road was clogged with people. The convoy was stopped, the gray-green line broken as trucks had veered to avoid rear-ending each other. Drivers hung out windows, people ran out their doors, and we all gaped east, down Minaret Road, in the direction of the caldera.
It’s what we all expected, what I’d dreamed of, a dark cloud rising.
A neon-yellow fire truck came screaming down Minaret, the driver blasting the horn in fury but the convoy could not get out of the way because there was no room in the road. The fire truck came halfway up onto the sidewalk, screaming a warning, and people scattered as it passed.
“I’m going to see,” I told Walter, and set off at a run before he could stop me.
I ran down Minaret to the intersection with Highway 203 and followed others who made the turn onto the road out of town. Down 203, I could see flames rising above the tops of the Jeffrey pines.
This was wrong.
A horn blasted and I threw myself out of the way to let the ambulance scream by.
I ran until my muscles seized then slowed to a limp and finally stopped and crouched over my cramping thighs. It’s too far. I’d made it as far as the ranger station on the edge of town. Close enough to smell the acrid smoke and hear the snap of flames but not close enough to see the damage. Others caught up, gasping. The foolhardy. We were a small panting crowd, the kind that races toward the scene of an accident only none of us had the wherewithal to make it. Bo Robinson was in my face, yelling “where do we go?” and I shook my head. I didn’t know where to go.
Screams. Fire trucks. Ambulances. Police.
I started back to the lab, no longer wanting to witness this accident.
At the intersection of 203 and Minaret, I ran into Krom. His blue Blazer was stopped at right angles to the stalled Guard convoy, its uniformed crew looking ready to stampede. The driver’s door of the Blazer was open and Krom stood in the road with a cell phone to his ear. “Calm it down,” he was saying to someone. He held his big frame straight and wore the heavy parka and thick corded pants like a pelt. Calm, sure of himself.
I listened to the sirens scream.
He lowered the phone and told me to go home.
“What happened?”
“It’s under control. Go home and be ready to evac.”
The yellow fire truck careened by and then an ambulance and I glimpsed inside something blackened, and I turned to watch, I’d become an accident junkie, and then from another direction an amplified voice rose over the sirens. Remain calm, proceed to your homes in an orderly fashion, tune in to KMMT for further instructions.
Krom got in his Blazer and peeled off.
I ran.
CHAPTER 38
“Where you been?” Jimbo swung the door wide and pulled me inside.
He was white. His eyes, which like Mom’s are the color of lichen that grows on the north-facing shank of tree bark, were showing the whites. He wore his portable radio with the earphones around his neck and I could hear its tinny voice.
“Traffic’s a mess,” I said. “There was an explosion.”
He nodded.
I felt the hairs rise on my forearms. I stared at the radio. “It’s on the news?” The radio in my car doesn’t work. Hasn’t for a year. Should have gotten it fixed. “What happened?”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know.”
My brother said, “Somebody blew up 203.”
I could no longer hear the radio’s tinny whisper because blood was pounding in my ears. I’d thought it was an accident. Guard truck carrying explosives. Something like that.
“You know the bridge? Over the culvert? It’s gone. Whole thing went.” He bounced a fist against his thigh. “You know what that means? Means we’re not getting out that way.”
I could only nod.
“But it’s gonna be okay.” His eyes pinned me. “Pika’s okay. Explosives there didn’t go off.”
“There?”
“Yeah, there too.”
“There too?”
He grinned, a ghastly pleading grin. “But they said it’s gonna be okay. On the radio. Said it was all ready to blow only it was, like, wired wrong. Said they’re going over it with dogs to be sure it’s okay.”
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t take this in.
“We still got a way out. So it takes a little longer.”
A little longer? How about three times as long—it’s a one-lane road. I said, “Who did it?”
“They’re not saying.” He raked back his hair. “What do you think?
I couldn’t think.
He said, “I think it was Mike.”
“Mike?”
“Hey, he’s been a real case ever since Stobie. He thinks we all blame him. He thinks everybody’s against him. He’s sure had access to explosives on the road crew, I mean, we all have, but shit nobody but Mike’s crazy enough to do something like this.” Jimbo stared at me. “You think it could be Mike?”
Yes. And then I was thinking of Krom, the way I think of him every time we plunge deeper into shit. But it couldn’t be Krom, Krom’s drilled this evac into us for weeks—it’s his plan—and if we don’t get out in time his rep’s gone. And the man I saw in the street half an hour ago was scrambling to hold it together. Calm it down. I felt a surge, the drill-reflex kicking in. It’s okay, we can do it. Would have been better to have two evacuation routes, sure. But we don’t need 203—in fact, ever since Krom’s simulation of a pyroclastic flow taking out that highway I’d considered Krom’s route, Pika, as the safer way out. We’ve drilled on Pika and even though we’ve never gone all the way and emptied the town, we’ve gone far enough that we know what to do. It works. The drill works. Just follow the arrows, just do what you’re told. Do it in your sleep. We can get out Pika. Hasn’t snowed for a week. Nothing’s erupting. Krom can do it. I’m on his side today.
; Jimbo said, “Cass?”
I focused on my brother. “You do a good job on Pika, Jimbo?”
He nodded.
“Then it’s going to be okay. What time do we go?”
He searched my face. “Radio said keep listening for revised times.” He clapped the phones back to his ears. Half-on, half-off, a jet jockey dividing his attention.
I headed for the stairs.
He was on my heels. “Where you going?”
“See if we missed anything important.” Keep moving. Focus. Be ready.
“We got it. Stuff to go’s in the garage so let’s get down there. You said you got room? My heap’s full.”
I took the stairs, snapped on the hallway light, wove in and out of rooms. We’re not taking everything. We’ve prioritized. Mom and Dad are trusting us to take care of things. They’ve picked up a cartooning gig in Scotland and they can’t afford to fly home and then return. And what if they fly home and nothing happens? We’ve e-mailed packing lists back and forth. Dad wanted us to take it all but Mom prioritized. Take the good china, leave the Sears set. The good china’s in Bishop now.
I dropped to my knees and looked under my parents’ bed. The safe was gone.
“I got it.” Jimbo checked his watch. “Come on.”
“All right let’s go.” I moved along the hallway, whose walls were now bare of photos, thinking this is what this room looks like and this is what that room looks like, thinking I might forget. I passed the laundry room that used to be Henry’s room, where I was babysitting my little brother and staring out the window, and that was one room I would not miss. I snapped off the hall light and followed Jimbo down the stairs and through the family room and into the garage.
The garage runs half again the length of our house. Three cars can park in here, with room left over for Dad’s workshop. There are walls of shelves and a loft jury-rigged from the rafters. The unshelved wall is planked with pegboard and hung with hoses, lawn furniture, flashlights, power cords in orange braids. Half the space is devoted to old sports gear: skis, snowboards, bikes, camping stuff, ropes, pitons, and at least a dozen helmets that look like giant shellacked insect heads. A lot of it’s junk. Mom had e-mailed if it’s worth over $500, take it. Leave the rest. She’s expecting to return.
The Forensic Geology Box Set Page 66