The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  CHAPTER 40

  Alone, in a cute little motel room in Bishop. Chintz pillow shams, wildflower walls, street view through white ruffles. There was the sound of TV coming through the thin wall from Jimbo’s room next door. When he’d left my room he’d said he was going to get some sleep. Not likely. I heard the tattoo of his fingers drumming a table. I felt the thump-thump-thump of his feet bouncing the floor.

  Unlike me—I was glued to the set and I didn’t move a muscle.

  I watched King Videocable’s live action team on the spot at the intersection of highway 203 and the chasm blasted across it where the bridge had been. Highway 203 had been severed about halfway between town and highway 395.

  On the Mammoth side of that wound there was an endless line of parked vehicles—the vehicles not caught in the pileup, the vehicles blocked by the pileup and forced to reverse direction on Pika and head back into town. They’d fled as far as they could, from town out highway 203 until they were stopped by the chasm. I searched for Walter’s red Explorer but the line of vehicles stretched too far for the camera to capture.

  Refugees swarmed past parked vehicles. Refugees on foot, on skis, on snowmobiles, every one of them laden with bundles and casting ghostly shadows under the intense white of the big CalTrans lights. Refugees pausing to look at the ground when a quake hit, and then moving a little faster. And when the live action team zoomed in for a closeup, the refugees squinted into the cameras and groped for a sound bite. I recognized most of them. Knew them well, or casually, or enough to greet in passing. I didn’t care. Didn’t care that my old high school teacher Jack Altschul was leaving Mammoth with nothing but the pack on his back.

  I waited for Walter.

  On the other side of the chasm, the refugees were hustled into vans and trucks and buses and ferried down 203 to 395, and then the forty miles south to Bishop. If I shifted my view from the TV to the street outside I’d see them rumble through town.

  My eyes stayed on the tube. The next refugee fixed in the lights would be Walter.

  The camera cut to an aerial view of Pika Canyon, the live action team’s eye in the sky floodlighting the pileup of vehicles that choked the narrow throat. Vehicles entangled with vehicles, vehicles on top of vehicles, vehicles looking like they’d tried to crawl up the canyon walls. There was a patch of burnt-out vehicles, where quakes had shaken the unstable edifice and the friction of metal on metal had sparked leaking gas tanks. The smoking skeletons were dusted with Forest Service fire retardant.

  I searched for Walter’s Explorer in the mess.

  The camera cut to an aerial of highway 395. The evacuees had overflowed Bishop and were now on the way to the next towns south, Big Pine and Independence.

  The camera cut to Adrian Krom, as it’s been doing every half-hour or so through the night. He was framed in front of the burnt husk of a truck on its side. He wore the same clothes I’d seen on him twenty hours ago at the intersection of 203 and Minaret. Now he seemed to sag within the big parka. Now the pelt hung loose. His face was washed quartz-halogen pale, his eyes squinty. He looked like he’d had a rough twenty hours. He looked beat.

  He looked beaten. The interviewer, some ingratiating Bishop news anchor, was saying “you couldn’t have foreseen the bears,” and Krom seemed to shrink. He said no but he took responsibility nevertheless. I sat forward on the nubby chenille bedspread and if I could have reached through the screen I would have taken him by the neck and screamed you lost, you were supposed to get all of us out and you didn’t. But I didn’t have to throttle him. He knew. He looked beaten.

  There was a big quake, and the camera jimmied.

  I heard a shit through the wall.

  When the camera steadied again on Krom, he’d changed. Maybe the anchor didn’t catch it, but I did. Krom was rallying. He leaned into the microphone and answered a question the anchor hadn’t asked. “We’ll have them out by dawn,” he said, voice nearly burnt out.

  Then he made a movement, which I’m sure the anchor didn’t catch. But I did. Krom inclined his head, the slightest move—he made a little bow.

  I’d seen that bow eons ago, midnight at Hot Creek, as he bowed to his enemy and gave it the finger.

  CHAPTER 41

  Dawn, and I did not see Walter.

  I spent an hour trying to reach Eric, routed from one command center to another, one official to another. When Eric finally called back I blurted “where is he?”

  “He’s gotta be out. His car was parked with everybody else’s, along 203. But I gotta tell you I did not personally see him leave. I blew that. I owe you, Cassie. Hang in there, okay? There’s nobody left in town.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You sound beat.”

  “Beyond.”

  “Please take care of yourself.”

  “You better believe it.”

  I called Walter’s cell phone. Then I dialed, for the fifteenth time since midnight, the motel down the street where Walter was booked. The desk clerk was beginning to worry.

  I went out to the Soob and unloaded the Lindsay and Georgia boxes and parked them in my room. I wrote a note to Jimbo. Antsy. Driving down to Big Pine & Independence. Check motels. Maybe got signals crossed with W. Got my cell on. I left the note on my dresser then locked the door. Jimbo has a spare key.

  I didn’t turn southbound on highway 395, as my note promised. The worried Bishop desk clerk had already phoned every motel and B&B in Big Pine and Independence for me. She promised to keep trying. She promised to call on my cell if she located Walter. I promised her a fancy dinner for her efforts, when this was all over.

  I promised, in my heart, to apologize to Jimbo for my lie, when this was all over.

  I turned northbound on 395, heading home. There was no traffic, just me following the long Sierra scarp. And then in the distance, just spilling over the lip of the caldera, which sits on the Long Valley plateau above Bishop like a hanging lake, came a National Guard truck down the highway grade. The last of the evacuators were now evacuating.

  And above and beyond was the unchanged bulk of Mammoth Mountain. The old mountain looks me in the eye: coming back?

  The Guard truck and I passed each other and I craned to look. The back end was half open and the guys in camouflage were slumped.

  I hadn’t really thought he’d be in there anyway.

  At the top of the grade there was a barricade. Nobody in sight. I went around it on the median. Just past the Hot Creek turnoff, I reached another barricade. This one was manned.

  I pulled over and checked in with my motel clerk. Nothing new.

  If a call came on my cell and caller ID said it was the clerk, or Walter, or Eric, I would answer. If a call came from any other number, I would not answer. I counted on Jimbo to sleep until noon. If he woke earlier, I counted on him to try calling a few times and conclude I was in a no-service zone, and then decide to try later. I counted on him to be Jimbo and go hook up with Bobby or the deMartinis. I counted on him not to alert someone that I’d gone missing, because I intended to be back before he put two and two together. I did not intend to have someone come after me and stop me. And if I encountered a problem, I did not intend to have someone come share the risk.

  I hadn’t really expected the guys at the barricade to let me through. Didn’t matter. I had a Plan B. I headed southbound, as if going back to Bishop. Around a curve, out of anyone’s sight, I took the unmarked turnoff. I knew this Forest Service road—I’d taken it in summer, on field trips, and I knew where it accessed another lateral that would put me in the neighborhood of the Lakes Basin. I wondered, briefly, if Krom had walked that lateral in his quest for an alternate route. If he had, he would have rejected it because it would put evacuating traffic in the neighborhood of Red Mountain. I didn’t reject it. There was no other choice. Two miles uphill I turned onto the lateral, just wide enough for a snowplow. I crept along, fingers crossed, but within a few hundred yards the road ended. Hadn’t been plowed. Every available snowplow, I guessed, had been di
verted to Krom.

  That much farther to ski. So I’d better get going.

  As I was stepping into my bindings I gave a glance to Lindsay’s doll. She has porcelain skin like Lindsay’s and a proud chin, and she brought me Lindsay’s voice, which I had lost in the crime-scene horror of her office. She says, sharply, don’t do anything foolish, honey.

  I promised to be wise.

  I followed the unplowed road, which banded the mountainside, and then began a gentle descent. The snow was slow but once the slope steepened I kicked into a smoother stride and picked up speed.

  Within two hours I’d reached the Lakes Basin. I came downcanyon in a tuck, trying not to think about the lay of the land, about the rift up on Red Mountain. There was no other way in. It was just that simple. Just ski. Don’t fall, don’t break an ankle. I tried not to think about Walter lying off the road someplace with a broken ankle. I tried not to think at all.

  The cell phone in my pocket was silent. Jimbo was sleeping, or he’d gone straight to breakfast without checking my room. I didn’t blame him.

  I focused on my stomach. It was hollow. Nothing to eat since last night in Bishop, and that was toast forced down me by Jimbo. Now, I was hungry. I fantasized swinging by the house and grabbing something. It’s on the way. Jimbo cleaned out the fridge but what about the freezer? Last time I looked there was a sweet potato pie, microwaveable. God, I wanted that pie. So creamy, like a sweet cloud in your mouth.

  The canyon road dipped below a ridge and the slope fell into shadow. I hit deeper snow, and had to work. My stomach growled.

  Jimbo ate the pie. I just knew it. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to the house because Walter was not there waiting for pie.

  There was something. I stopped. A rumbling, deep within the mountain. I waited, but detected no movement. The sound trailed off as the earth settled itself. Another quake. So what’s new?

  There was thunder and I looked up to the clear sky, and then to the ridge above me. Even as the thunder died another sound came—a thick sucking. In utter amazement I watched an entire section of snow detach from the bowl beneath the ridge and slide in a great slab downhill toward the road. The leading edge wrinkled over a cluster of boulders and loosened and slurried ahead of the main body of the avalanche.

  In slow motion, taking forever, I bent to release my bindings.

  Wind hit me, roared past me. The snow in front of my skis humped up and I felt the ground below me move. Snow exploded up and the crust under my skis crumpled. I was ripped off my feet. I gasped, inhaling needles of snow.

  Swim.

  But the snow’s got its own agenda and it’s tumbling me along like I’m a load of wash and I can’t see and can’t breathe and all I want in the world is to get my head above the snow. Then without knowing how I do it I’m swimming all right, fighting for the surface. Something hard bangs into my leg. My ski. A rock. I’m swimming, dog-paddling to beat all hell but I don’t know which way is up.

  And then the snow and I slow and finally come to rest and the snow, which only seconds ago had been liquid, turns to cement.

  I lay pinned. I could see nothing but my mind was free to roam and it dived down into the crevassed glacier, blue walls closing around me. I screamed.

  There was snow in my mouth. I spat but it was already dissolving on my tongue, creamy as sweet potato pie. I stuck out my tongue, tasting cold air. Free air. There was a hole in the snow around my face. Hope surged.

  My muscles convulsed, futile, but then my hand moved and I realized that my entire left arm and shoulder were free, encircling my face. I located the rest of my body. Right arm pinned across chest, legs bent at knees, toes wiggling in boots. Intact. With my free hand I probed the cavity. Walls were solid, cement. I pushed, panicking, then willed myself to stop and clamped my mouth shut. Don’t waste air. Slow small breaths. Get the cadence.

  So dark. I’d never seen such darkness with my eyes open.

  I clawed at the snow, digging until my fingers stung.

  Oh you fool, which way is up?

  Well flip a coin. Just dig, what else can you do? I clawed one side of the cavity, fingers on fire, then clawed the other. I put my fingers in my mouth and tasted blood. And a thought came, a gift. I dug out a chunk of snow and put it in my mouth and mashed it, melting it, then opened my mouth and let it out. Snowmelt ran down my right cheek. I’m lying right-side down. Up is to my left.

  I dug. For minutes—hours? although it couldn’t have been hours because there wasn’t enough air to survive hours—I dug, and the cavity filled with loose snow and I compacted it into the downhill wall. Trying not to breath too much, trying not to think. And then came a time when I was digging mechanically, hope long since gone, just digging because it was something to do. Finally it hurt too much to continue.

  Fear got me around the throat and I cursed myself for that note to Jimbo—such a clever note making sure he wouldn’t worry—and if he could have heard my scream right now I’d scream my head off.

  I did not have the air to scream.

  So cold. So dark. There was a part of me that was already so cold and tired I thought I was approaching an accommodation to death.

  You fool, you reap what you sow.

  Fear seized me again, and I began yanking my right arm, which was pinned to my ribs. The arm moved, snow scraping the back of my right hand. It moved, millimeters at best, but that was something and I yanked and yanked and my arm moved back and forth. Skin stung. I yanked, and torqued my body just enough to give the arm clearance. I moved it up my breastbone and felt my heart pounding on the other side of that hard wall. Arm was coming free.

  Two hands free. One was on fire and the other was numb.

  Shifting my shoulders, I placed both palms against the snow roof and shoved. Pounded. Nothing moved. I screamed, clawing and digging, calling myself every name in the book and foolish was the kindest of the lot.

  There was a rumbling and my icy bed was ever so gently rocked.

  Quake. I froze. What’s the effect of a quake on snow? Loosen it, right? I began to pound again, digging now with my knuckles.

  Snow avalanched onto my face.

  The roof had cracked and there was light. I cried out and reached up to widen the crack and more snow came loose and I was laughing and crying and, now that there was light, finding it very funny that I had drooled my way to digging in the right direction.

  Cold dry powder drifted in. Snowing outside. How long had I been buried? I enlarged the fist hole that had let in light and snowfall. Indeed it was snowing and the flakes landing on my raw hands tickled uncomfortably. The light was dawn gray. How long? I tore at the remaining snow roof and pushed up onto my right elbow, trying to see above ground.

  And then I screamed for Lindsay.

  CHAPTER 42

  Ash peppered into my mouth.

  In a thin and silky rain, ash was falling, ash so finely scattered that it appeared to have been sieved, and it seemed that this sieving could never cover the ground, but it had, for the ground and snow and trees and rocks were all the uniform pearl gray of that desiccated rain.

  There was noise, the fitful roar of a faraway crowd. Ash congealed in my mouth like paste.

  Dreams do come true.

  There’s blood everywhere and I’m tearing at the ground and fighting the snow. My hands are finished but I’m out, and I get to my knees and then to my feet. My legs are mush but I can stand on the rigidity of terror.

  This looks like a dream world in which the sun is in eclipse and trees and rocks have familiar shapes but no definition, as though they are in danger of dissolving and disappearing from sight altogether.

  I couldn’t find a horizon.

  My parka was gone. My cell phone was gone. My watch was gone. My yellow sweatshirt was wet and gray, growing woolly with ash. My hands were gray and ash clumped where the flesh was torn and it looked as though I’d grown thick gray scars.

  An observation formed itself like a cloud at the top of my head
: this is a very light ash fall. This ash is the consistency of dust. This ash is cold, light gray. There is no yellow tinge of sulfur. What do I do now, Lindsay?

  She says the obvious: Find shelter, honey.

  I took a few steps upcanyon but upcanyon was veiled in falling ash. Can’t walk through this to the car. Too far. Ash veils everywhere. Where’s it coming from? Red Mountain. I stood stunned, in the helicopter’s flight path, waiting for the worst.

  But the ash above Red Mountain was the same as the ash everywhere else.

  What’s erupting?

  She won’t say.

  I decided to go find Walter.

  There was no trace of skis or poles, nothing but an annular depression in the snow where I had lain. I set off on foot downcanyon. The ash was shallow; I’ve skied deeper powder than this. Ash kept falling and I couldn’t keep it out of my mouth. I turtled inside my sweatshirt, setting my hands on fire, and got my bra free and tied it like a surgical mask around my face. I descended through the dream world and when the ground shook I braced for another avalanche, but here the canyon had broadened and its walls held their cover. There was just the incessant feathering of ash, blurring the topography, turning hemlocks into people. There was no reason Walter would have come this way, so far from Pika Canyon. Nevertheless, I scrutinized each hemlock as I passed. The forest thickened, and in time I came to a great round empty field. Lake Mary: site of the 20K biathlon race, site of Krom’s evacuation drill. What foresight. I didn’t need a drill. I knew the way. Three miles to home. I hugged the lake’s shore, coming around the east side until I hit the wide gray ribbon that was the Lake Mary Road. As I have done a thousand times, I headed down the road toward town.

  The road edged the eastern slope of Mammoth Mountain, which humped its ash-softened shoulder at me: still here?

  The faraway roar lowered in pitch.

  Ahead, I could make out chairlifts in the sky. Beginner runs there. Watertank, Christmas Tree, Lupin. Skied them almost before I could walk. The road ahead tucked into a tunnel that cut beneath the ski runs. There is a viewpoint just before the tunnel, from which one can see all the way down into Long Valley, into the caldera. I turned, thinking maybe the ash fall will be thick enough to block the view.