Quicksilver (The Forensic Geology Series, Prequel)

by Toni Dwiggins

  As I passed into the mouth I heard Henry call to me, “Go all the way.”

  15

  All the way where?

  The tunnel was black as a catacomb.

  I snapped on my headlamp and the bedrock lit up. Bedrock walls, bedrock ceiling, bedrock floor, a sturdy incursion into the mountainside, a strong tunnel that needed no timbering, a tunnel with drill holes in the ceiling to ventilate, the only sort of tunnel I felt remotely comfortable traversing. When my eyes had adjusted and my nerves settled, I identified the bedrock as metamorphic slate.

  As far ahead as I could see, the tunnel ran straight.

  Perhaps somewhere farther ahead there were side branches, offshoots, whatever it was they were called in a mine, a term Walter would know. But Walter was outside facing a Glock and counting on me to return with something shiny and pretty to satisfy Henry. A nice nugget. Sure thing.

  All I need do was go all the way, wherever that way led me.

  I was breathing more rapidly, leg muscles working a little harder, and I realized that the tunnel was angling upward. I assumed the tunnel-builders had done that on purpose so that any water that seeped in through the rock would drain out.

  Good idea.

  My body settled into a rhythm, releasing my mind to dwell on the question at hand.

  How did Henry know where all the way led? He didn’t like enclosed spaces. And how would he know how far I went?

  And, further, what did he expect me to find?

  Quite clearly this tunnel was working its way into the hillside toward the buried river channel whose upper gravel reaches I had glimpsed on the ridge top. Clever, those miners. If you can’t hose out a mountain to get to the gold, tunnel your way. One way or another they’d found the way. One way or another those ancient Eocene river channels had condemned this countryside to an extreme makeover.

  And that bugged me, because it should have bugged Henry.

  Presumably he wasn’t looking for hosed-out mine pits or well-tunneled hills. Presumably he was looking for a site lost since his grandfather’s time, a site that nobody but nobody had since seen. Was he not disappointed to find that Notch Valley had already been mined? Walter sure was. And Henry, I thought, should have been beyond disappointed. Should have been devastated.

  Another failure for Quicksilver.

  So why was he so anxious to have me go into this well-tunneled hill? If there was something legend-worthy in here, it would already have been found.

  Poor Henry.

  Henry with his peeling pink palms gripping the black and silver Glock.

  My sympathy evaporated.

  Several hundred feet into the tunnel, the walls abruptly changed.

  The bedrock was now overlain by gravel. I played my light upon the stuff. It was mostly quartz and slate, cemented in clay and sand. I ran my fingers along the rough face.

  I had entered the lost river channel.

  There were pebbles and cobbles and even a few boulders—the well-rounded rocks of milky quartz that were legend in and of themselves, the defining characteristic of the blue lead, carried by long-ago rivers, carried to this place. Here right now.

  I lost my bearings.

  For a moment I forgot that I’d been sent in here. For a moment it seemed I’d chosen this hunt.

  The tunnel drifted into a bend.

  I halted and stared at the wall. Gravel sitting upon bedrock. Gravel the basal layer of the ancient channel. The basal layer being the deep blue lead.

  Only, it wasn’t blue.

  It was reddish, the iron pyrite in the clay oxidized.

  I set my field kit on the floor, fumbled it open, and grabbed the hammer and chisel. Aiming my headlamp at the wall, I went to work on the cemented gravel, gouging my way through to the virgin blue.

  And then I had to stop and stare.

  It was blue as the wings of a jay.

  Something like a fever took hold of me. Right here in front of my nose was the deep blue lead. I’d listened to Walter and Robert Shelburne rhapsodize about it, I’d read up on it myself, I’d contemplated the geology of it, but right now what made my pulse pound was the sheer reality of it, and I had to admit that I felt a thrill. If I had to name the feeling perhaps I’d call it romance.

  Walter should see this.

  And then I regained my senses. Legend-worthy to Walter, yes, but to Henry Shelburne? I recalled what Robert had told us, back at the lab, back when he was spinning the legend of the deep blue lead. He’d said Henry was hunting not only gold but something more fundamental. And since Henry had been hunting his entire adult life, could he not have encountered the blue somewhere, sometime? Hacked into some forgotten gravel outcrop? Maybe. As long as it wasn’t buried in a mining tunnel. In any case, this patch of the blue lead was not the patch he sought.

  To be certain, I took my hand lens and had a twenty-power look. Nope, no visible gold. There was no visible treasure here. Perhaps there was microscopic gold somewhere within this seam but surely what was economically recoverable had already been recovered. There was certainly no diorite dike, no cross-studded hornfels sheath, no intrusion acting as a giant riffle, entrapping a secret pocket of gold.

  The bedrock here was unviolated.

  Nevertheless, I picked up the chunk of gravel ore I’d gouged out and put it in my field kit. Better to return with something than nothing at all.

  And perhaps there was something worth seeing around the tunnel bend.

  Go all the way.

  I wondered, again, if Henry knew where all the way led.

  The tunnel was bending like a U, and there now appeared on the bedrock floor the broken remains of iron tracks. I understood. The miners had not hauled the gravel out in backpacks. They’d used rail cars.

  The tunnel now straightened into the second leg of the U. The tracks continued as far as my light could penetrate.

  I continued, as well, following that deep blue lead.

  Even oxidized, even rusty reddish brown, it held my attention.

  Within a few dozen yards, the gravel receded. Within a couple dozen more yards, the walls were pure bedrock. And then up ahead I saw the faint glow of daylight.

  Another exit.

  Now what?

  I thought it over. I found that I knew two things.

  First, Henry had been camped in Notch Valley, perhaps for a couple of days. Henry would have had time to crawl all over this place and would have found this second tunnel mouth. Which meant he already knew what was out there.

  Second, what was out there could not be what he sought. What he sought must be in here, or so he must believe. Otherwise, why send his brother into the tunnel searching? Why send me? At gunpoint, no less.

  I took in a deep tunnel breath. It tasted like stone.

  Okay. I knew one more thing.

  Third, I knew that Henry Shelburne was not going to shoot Walter, while they waited. There was no possible need. Walter was not hot-headed enough to go for the gun. Walter was Henry’s insurance, guaranteeing my cooperation.

  I exhaled, in a hiss.

  I had not yet gone all the way.

  It could not be more than a couple dozen yards to the exit.

  ~ ~ ~

  I stepped out of the tunnel into silvery light. While I’d been underground the sun had begun to burn through the fog. The sky was now a thin pearl shell, ready to crack. Aching for warmth, waiting for the pearly light to penetrate my skin, I took in the lay of the land.

  The tunnel opened onto another slim canyon, thickly vegetated. I stood on one side of the canyon and opposite me the wall rose to a high ridge. This canyon’s slim floor angled downhill in a steep incline and put me in mind of an unrolling carpet.

  Other than the works of nature, this place was all business.

  The rail tracks exited the tunnel at the high end of the canyon. The tracks fed into the skeleton of a building that held the rusted guts of some sort of machinery. Walter would know the name, would know the mechanism, but I hazarded a guess
that the cemented gravel had gotten crushed in there. Running downhill was a long ditch littered with boulders and cobbles and pebbles—a sluiceway, artery of the gold country. I could see its bones surviving here and there, stretches of wood planking forming the walls and huge riffle blocks crisscrossed along the bottom, stepping downhill in the gut of the sluice box. At the head of the sluice, just uphill from me, sagged a rusting metal tank. Quite clearly it was a water tank, to store the water to hose the crushed gravel down the sluice. To free the gold. I had certainly gotten the hang of sluicing.

  It appeared that this slim canyon might feed into Notch Valley, which, if I had my bearings straight, was downhill from here.

  I ventured farther outside to see what I could see.

  What I now saw was another building of sorts, more a bunker nestled into the side of the hill, just uphill of the tunnel. Its door was rust-patched iron, secured by a heavy iron latch with a heavy iron padlock.

  The latch hung open, the padlock unhooked.

  How far was I supposed to proceed? All the way in there?

  I went to the door and knocked, calling out hello, feeling monumentally foolish.

  No answer. No surprise.

  There was nothing for it but to have a quick look inside. I grasped the iron handle and pulled the door open. Daylight streamed in but nevertheless it took a moment for my eyes to adjust, to penetrate the gloom inside. No need to step in. From the doorway I could ID this room as a storage space. It was cluttered with equipment, stuff jammed in so tight that I could not tell the armature of one from the leg of another. Some stuff quickly recognizable: shovels, a wheelbarrow, buckets. Other stuff Walter could name. All of it in a state of rust and disrepair, dense with history. A maze of a pathway wound through the room.

  And then my attention shifted to the shelves carved into the bedrock walls. Half a dozen mercury flasks sat on one thick shelf.

  I felt a sudden relief.

  Only half a dozen. I had expected more. I had expected a shitload.

  That is, if this was where Henry had obtained the flask he took to the river, where his father died.

  So was this the place? The door latch was open, the padlock unlocked. He didn’t like enclosed spaces but with the light streaming in, surely he could have brought himself the few steps necessary to take one of those bottles off the shelf.

  And then rent a horse or lash it to a backpack and transport it. And then open the flask and dump it.

  Jesus Henry.

  I envisioned his peeling nose, peeling palms, pink skin, some sort of rash. Contact dermatitis? Hyper-sensitive, surely, from a lifetime of messing around with mercury, dancing with the vapors.

  I backed out of the doorway and shoved the damn door shut.

  Henry Shelburne’s mania was not my problem.

  His Glock was my problem.

  I turned my back on the bunker, spinning around to return to the others and give Henry what I’d found, a chunk of the deep blue freaking lead, and pray that satisfied him.

  Rather than retrace my journey through the tunnel I decided to go downhill and take what I judged a shortcut.

  As I moved, something at the base of the opposite hillside caught my eye. It was a bald spot in the vegetation where black rock cropped out. In this pearly light I thought I detected a wink of mica and quartz. My heart jumped. This was it, right? This was the door to fat city.

  I charged across the little canyon, using the wooden riffle blocks in the ditch as steppingstones, and put my hand lens on the outcrop. It took no time at all to identify the rock as flinty hornfels. It took a little more time to locate the squared crystal faces speckling the rock. In some faces the carbon inclusions were muddied, unfinished. In some faces the carbon formed crosses so distinct it looked like they’d been drawn with a pencil.

  I fingered a perfect specimen, a flared Maltese cross that suggested obsession, crusade.

  If I were Henry I would take a hammer and chisel and pop that talisman out.

  But I wasn’t Henry and I decided not to take the time or invest the effort to hack off a sample. If he’d explored this canyon, surely he found the outcrop. And if he had, I cursed him. He could have steered me here to begin with. But I got it. I knew why he’d sent me into the tunnel. If he’d found the hornfels, he’d have filled in the rest of the story.

  By now, so could I.

  This hornfels was formed a long time ago when magma had punched into an ancient river channel. Subsequently—still a long time ago—during a period of uplift, that intersection got exposed and eroded. And the auriferous gravels mixed with broken-off chips of hornfels, and in the due course of time and travel downstream, the stuff got re-cemented by river sand and clay. And chunks of that conglomerate got scattered hither, thither, and yon.

  And that was the source of the chunk of ore Robert Shelburne brought to our lab.

  I pictured Henry standing here, telling himself the story. Yesterday? Day before? And then in a fever hunting around for that magical junction, that giant hornfels riffle in the old blue lead, that collector of gold.

  Reburied, over the course of the years. Volcanic eruption, landslide, who knew?

  Perhaps buried right here in this slim canyon, or in the hillside before me, or somewhere in the tunneled hillside behind me.

  Perhaps right beneath our feet.

  Right Henry? How’s it feel? To be so near, and yet so far. You can’t just haul a water cannon up here and hose away the mountain.

  So you look to the likely. To the drift tunnels.

  You can’t go in there yourself. Your brother disappoints. So you send me in, in hopes that the junction has been breached, in there. Tough luck Henry. It wasn’t. Although it’s quite likely to be around here somewhere.

  I shrugged.

  Not my problem.

  I turned to go.

  There was a path on the tunnel side of the sluiceway, an access route I guessed, reinforced with occasional rock steps. I crossed the ditch and took the miners’ route down.

  As I descended, all thoughts of cross-studded rocks and ancient gold went by the wayside.

  I saw smoke.

  16

  At the bottom of the sluiceway the land leveled out.

  I was back in Notch Valley.

  Several yards beyond was the campfire ring. Sitting around the campfire were the three men I’d left at the main tunnel entrance. Robert and Walter sat side by side on a log on one side of the ring. Henry sat on a low boulder on the other side. Around his waist he wore a belt bag, which pouched next to the holster. His Glock hand rested on the belt bag.

  The little fire struggled.

  As he watched me approach, Henry picked up a ferny spray of dried mountain misery and tossed it onto the embers and the fire leapt to life and Henry explained in his fragile soulless voice, “The odor repels insects.”

  Holy hell it was some kind of bizarre camp-out.

  Henry nodded at an unoccupied boulder and I came over and took a seat. So chilled that I hunched toward the fire and held out my hands.

  My eyes caught Walter’s eyes and I read caution there.

  Henry watched me intently, the way a kid who’s built a campfire in the woods waits for Mom’s approval. Mom nodded, cautious. Good work, Henry. Now let’s go home and by the way you’re grounded for life.

  Henry spoke. “What did you find?”

  I cast about. Where to begin?

  He said, “You came all the way.”

  “How did you...?”

  Walter cut in. “We heard you.”

  Oh yeah. Back up at the bunker. Knocking at the door. Shouting hello.

  “What did you find?” Henry repeated.

  I swallowed. Whatever I said in answer was going to have consequence.

  “What did you find?” he said again, Henry the fixated kid who keeps on asking asking asking...

  Be very careful, lady. You’ve got to give him something.

  As I hesitated I noticed Robert’s keen attention. Nearly
as keen as his brother, it seemed, to learn if I’d found something worthy in the tunnel.

  What could I say? The gravel was not blooming gold. The miners had stopped, given up, run out of money to cover the costs. All I’d found in there was the ancient bearer of treasure—the deep blue lead. Henry awaited my answer. I thought, it’s deeply risky to bullshit this life-long seeker of legends. Very slowly, very carefully, I put my field kit on the ground and opened it. I withdrew the chunk of cemented gravel that I’d hacked free.

  I held it up so that all three men could see it.

  In the pearly light the rock face looked blue-gray, like the face of an ice crevasse. For a flash I thought I saw Walter respond, thought I glimpsed the Dogtown boy who fell in love with painted nuggets and grew up to thrill to the geology of the deep blue lead. But Walter just jerked a shoulder in the direction of Henry and the gun, and gave me a look. Focus, dear.

  Henry focused. He was examining the rock with a disciple’s concentration. His face twitched, like a fly had buzzed him. Shoo fly. His hands began to shake. The gun bobbed on his knees. He said, “Please give it to me.”

  I could not reach him. I’d have to stand and take three steps to hand the rock to him. I thought that over.

  “Please bring it to me, Cathy.”

  “It’s Cassie,” I said. Like that mattered.

  “Cassie Cassie Cassie Cassie.” He nodded to himself. “Cassie.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Robert and Walter on alert. Waiting for something? Waiting for me. I leaned forward and tossed the rock to Henry. It landed behind him.

  He did not turn to look. His hands steadied on the gun. “Only a child falls for that trick.”

  “It wasn’t a ...”

  “I’m not your brother Henry.”

  I twitched. Hard. Like I’d been punched.

  “My brother told me about your brother who died. We have the same name. It’s only a name, Cathy.”

  “Cassie,” I said, automatically.

  “I have trouble with names,” he said.

  So the fuck did I.

  Still having trouble with Henrys. It was more than a name that linked the two Henrys, it was the fragility of a boy with hemophilia and a man with mercury poisoning, and it was guilt, Robert’s guilt about his brother and my guilt about my brother, and isn’t that a kicker that guilt trumps logic every time?