by Ponzo, Gary
I heard the yearning in Henry’s voice before I turned and saw it in his face. No? You don’t believe Walter? You, the amateur geologist, don’t believe the evidence before your eyes? Then come the fuck closer and look. Because I saw. Because I believed. Because Walter was talking geology. Not legend. Not wishful thinking. For the love of your soul Henry come and take the pebble from Walter and see for yourself. This is what you’ve hunted since your father fed you the legend with your morning cereal. This is what Camden Shelburne promised. Lured you with. Taunted you with. This is it, Henry. This is where you prove yourself to your father. To the dead man. Alive, I fear, in your mind. You found this mine site. You got here, you got us all here. You pointed a gun at us and hired yourself a couple of geologists. All you have to do is take the pebble that the gold-minded geologist found. And then you can say you won. All that shit with your father and your brother over the failed cleanup company doesn’t matter. You can win now. Take it. You earned it Henry. You really did. You spent your life force hunting this. You want it. I see it in your face. You’re squinting to see what Walter is offering. Come get what you came for. You look like the kid in the Old West photo. You look like a kid.
An aching memory washed over me, a kid in a red cowboy hat playing hide-and-seek.
I shut it down.
“Henry,” Robert said. “My God. We can do this. Together.”
The hesitation was tiny, a clenching around Henry’s mouth.
~ ~ ~
And then Henry stepped back into the grotto and struck the match and flung it into the kindling.
I heard it before I saw it. Heard the crackling, like corn popping. Smelled it before I saw it. Smelled the bitter odor of mountain misery, just curling into the air. And then I saw a black resinous tendril of smoke, and then an orange tendril of fire. The smoke rose thinly, up up up the chimneyed grotto. The fire spread laterally, licking along a plank, probing the jumbled pile of splintery old wood.
Henry squatted and blew on his fire. A fresh match in his hand.
Robert raised his gun hand.
Time turned squirrely. Stretched and slowed.
I was scrambling to my feet, ankles free of the cable tie, hands still bound, swinging my legs behind me to lever myself up, and stumbling up the trough, legs rubber, stampeding into the grotto, a madwoman surprising Robert in the act of aiming the barrel of the Glock in the direction of his brother.
Time turned so stretchy that I had all the time in the world to glance at Henry in the corner and see him smile.
To glance behind me and see Walter struggling to get onto his knees, ankles and hands still bound, an impossible task.
To hear Walter shout, “Blast.”
To stop myself at the edge of the pool and wonder if there was room for me.
To assess the growing blaze, to see the flames heighten, to feel the heat cast off, to swear I could smell the iron pipe heating.
To yank up my parka to cover my mouth, my nose, and collapse into position with my boots over the edge.
And then whoosh I scooted into Henry Shelburne’s pool, crushed between Robert and the bedrock edge.
For a moment all the familiar workings of things were suddenly cast aside.
I sat on top of—on top of—the silver sea.
My knees were bent, my heels cupped into the liquid, and I braced my arms behind me, hands clutching the mercury like I’d clutched the silver heart back at the South Yuba River. Cold and clammy and alien.
The heat from the fire was almost welcome.
Robert’s face was inches from mine. His eyes bitter green. We just gazed at one another, me thinking is this how you gazed at your father as he fell into the river?
I was dizzy. Short of breath from my exertions. Breathing into my parka, re-breathing that air but it was sweet in comparison to the grotto air that was about to go bad.
I hissed, “Cover your mouth.”
Robert could not, not with one hand bound to the spigot and the other holding the Glock aloft.
There came a sound like a gunshot, another match striking.
Robert aimed.
And time that bitch speeded up. The velocity of a fired bullet. The speed of liquid mercury heating and particles vibrating faster and faster until they escape their fluid bonds and form a gas. I cried out stop and the speed of sound beat me to it, reached Robert’s ears and made him curse before I could reach him myself. And then at last I hit his chest, threw myself upon him, losing the grip on my parka in the process, my parka mask slipping down leaving my face naked, my nose and mouth unprotected as I sent Robert spinning, me spinning with him, together we spun on the mercury it seemed forever without friction, Robert’s free arm whipping out, and at last Robert’s hand opened like a flower and lost its hold on Henry Shelburne’s weapon.
~ ~ ~
Walter shouted.
Walter was on his elbows and knees crawling, bound feet lifted, an eternity to go before he reached Henry.
Henry the kid playing with matches.
“The gold, Henry,” Robert shouted. “You and me. We can do it.”
Henry didn’t answer. The only sound was the thunder of the fire and the hiss of streaming mercury.
I yanked my parka back up. Yanked Robert’s Club One fitness T-shirt up over his mouth, his nose, because Robert was desperately yanking his bound hand trying to get free.
I fumbled at the cargo pocket of my pants. Fumbled it open. Fumbled out my field knife.
It took forever to move to the spigot, it was like a dream where you’re swimming through molasses, where your feet run but your body remains in place, and damn me but I calculated the time, how long it was going to take me to cut Robert free, for the two of us to slither our way out of this hideous pool and escape the fire and the heating quicksilver. And I thought, hey lady you could slap the knife into his hand. You could leave him to it, you’ve opened the knife yourself one-handed and surely Mister Gearhead can open a knife one-handed so just get yourself the hell out and tackle Henry and stomp out the fire, no, stomp out the fire first and then tackle Henry because all he could do was light another match and if you got the fire out first he could do no….
There came a sound like salvation. Henry stomping out the fire, kicking apart the pile of wood.
And then another sound, a broken sound that was Henry’s own. “No we can’t, R.”
~ ~ ~
By the time I cut Robert loose, by the time we fumbled ourselves out of the quicksilver pool, by the time I stumbled to meet Walter and cut his ties loose, Henry had walked away.
By the time we reached the campsite and found our day packs and retrieved our water bottles and filled them in Skinny Creek, in order to douse the embers of the dying fire, Henry was nowhere to be found within Notch Valley.
He took his backpack. Left behind his tent.
EPILOG: elements 79 & 80
Henry Shelburne vanished.
A search party was organized.
Of course I hoped they’d find him—as Search and Rescue nearly always does. Find him and bring him home, well not home, not to the boarding house, not to his father’s house, home most likely being some mental health facility.
But there was a part of me that wished him to find a niche out there in the wild, someplace far from a world where he was not an asset, some place not enclosed.
It was romantic, no doubt, to wish the Henry Shelburne of the Old West photo, the squint-eyed teenager, to disappear over the horizon.
I could not condone what he’d done. If anyone was asking.
In time I would bury the pain, a technique I was perfecting. Encompassing all Henrys.
~ ~ ~
Robert Shelburne returned to his own gold country.
Even if Henry could be found, even if Henry testified as to what he saw that day on the Yuba, Robert Shelburne saw it differently. He panicked. There was no legal penalty for that. End of story.
Still, there was harm. There was a foul.
Robert ha
d watched his father have a heart attack, watched him fall into the river. He’d just watched. And then he’d left. And then, the animals got to Camden Shelburne. If Robert Shelburne had, say, experienced a measure of guilt and come back to retrieve his father’s body, it would have been way too wild kingdom for him. But he hadn’t. Rangers found Camden Shelburne.
No wonder Robert concocted the story of being in Sacramento the day his father died.
I supposed it was analogous to concocting a ‘front’ company, a dog-and-pony-show green cred for the money guys.
A couple of weeks after the conclusion of the Shelburne case, as Walter was at his workbench analyzing a feldspar from our current case, I suggested a coffee break. Walter was up for it. I poured two mugs and Walter grabbed the pink donut box and we settled in at the map table.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, sliding the day’s newspaper closer. I opened it to the business section.
Walter’s eyebrows lifted. “Since when did you start following the stock market?”
“Since today.”
Actually, since several days ago when I’d googled it and found the salient abbreviation. They ID stocks with numbers and letters, like elements on the periodic table. But when it came to following the market Walter was still an ink-and-paper man—he liked newsprint on his fingers to go with the donut crumbs—and so I did it his way. I pointed out the salient abbreviation.
He read. “Deep Pockets?”
“Yup.”
“You’ve been tracking it?”
“I figure I might buy a share. Attend the next shareholder meeting. They let you ask questions, right?”
“They do,” he agreed.
“Tells them the shareholders are paying attention, right?”
“It does.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll have a few questions about AquaHeal.”
“Such as?”
“Along the lines of, do you intend to invest enough to get the technology right, and if not, why don’t you get out of the way?”
He rubbed his chin.
“Because if you let AquaHeal fail, you’re souring this market for clean tech.”
Because I’d become a numbers chick, googling to find the salient number—how much mercury was deposited into the watersheds of the Sierra during the gold rush. Because that number blew my mind. Fifteen point two million pounds. Because I’d grabbed hold of fifteen or so of those pounds, cupped on the ledge in the crevice, that day on the Yuba. Looked like a river cobble, felt like a heart.
Walter reached for the newspaper. “What was today’s quote…”
“Hundred and twenty-four dollars and thirty-one cents. Per share.”
He sampled his coffee, nodded his approval. “I’m in.”
~ ~ ~
Walter said, one day, apropos of the Shelburne case, “We did what we set out to do. We prevented Henry from committing suicide.”
I nodded. And added, “And you found the gold.”
Walter smiled.
“Didn’t you?”
Up at Notch Valley, in the confusion of events, Walter had lost the conglomerate pebble he’d found in the trough. Never got the chance to bring it back to the lab and put it under the stereoscopic microscope. Certainly never got the chance to put the hand lens to it at the scene. Still, in my estimation, Walter should know. If anyone could eyeball a grain in a pebble and ID it as gold, or not gold, Walter Shaws was the man.
In any case, for Walter, it was a moot point whether or not there was a hidden pocket of gold in that hillside. The land, Walter discovered, was leased. A widow in Burbank California held the mineral rights. Inherited from her late husband, who’d himself inherited the rights, several generations of rights holders who didn’t have the capital to do exploratory drilling. Walter had paid the widow a visit. She’d served him a good whiskey and thanked him for the information and said she’d consult with her financial advisor. The widow, Walter said, had played her cards close to the chest.
So when I asked, not for the first time, if Walter judged that grain in the pebble to be gold, he said, to stop me asking, “I might take a jaunt one of these days back to the gold country. Find the blue lead somewhere, in situ. Somewhere fresh.” He winked. “While I’m still able.”
Old man, my ass.
~ ~ ~
The next day I asked, “And if there is gold?”
“Ah.”
I got the coffee and donuts and we sat at the map table.
When he didn’t speak, I asked, “How does it feel to want something that people have crippled the land to obtain?”
He shot me a quartz-eyed look. “Conflicted.”
I said, again, “And if there is gold?”
He blew on his steaming brew. Circled the mug on the table, creating cooling air currents. “Let us say that I come across a sizeable grain embedded in the blue gravel.” He sampled his coffee, nodded his approval. “I would get out my rock pick.”
“Just the one grain?”
“In this scenario.”
I sipped my coffee.
He asked, “And you, Cassie? If you came across that grain of gold?”
A vision rose, along with the steam from my coffee. Me, walking the bedrock tunnel up at Notch Valley, the tunnel walls changing to cemented gravel. Me, entering the lost river channel. And then stopping in my tracks, chiseling my way to the virgin blue, the bright blue indigo wings of a jay. I shivered, feeling again the chill of the tunnel, the thrill of the blue. And now I envisioned another color, a bright sunrise. I envisioned a grain of gold in that gravel. A coarse grain, water-worn from its rough travels in the ancient river. About the size of a kernel of wheat—a description I’d found and liked while reading Lindgren. I saw it now clearly. That one grain. Shining gold.
“And you?” Walter repeated. “Would you get out your rock pick?”
I nodded. Who wouldn’t?
THE END
About the Author
Bestselling author Toni Dwiggins is a third-generation Californian who migrated from southern Cal to northern Cal. What she likes most about her state is that one can go from the ocean to the mountains in one day, with a lunch stop in the desert. She likes it so much she has chosen those settings for her forensic geology books.
~ Other books in The Forensic Geology Series:
(the books are stand-alone, and can be read in any order)
BADWATER (Book One)
(you can read chapter one here)
Forensic geologists Cassie Oldfield and Walter Shaws embark on a perilous hunt--tracking a terrorist who has stolen radioactive material that is hotter than the desert in August. He threatens to release it in America's most fragile national park, Death Valley.
But first he must stop the geologists who are closing in.
As the hunt turns dangerous, Cassie and Walter will need grit along with their field skills to survive this case. For they are up against more than pure human malice. The unstable atom--in the hands of an unstable man--is governed by Murphy's Law. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.
And it does.
VOLCANO WATCH (Book Two)
NO WAY OUT--so says the note in the pocket of the murdered mayor.
The volcano beneath her town is seething, and the fate of Mammoth Lakes now rests in the hands of emergency planner Adrian Krom.
But Krom has his own agenda.
Investigating the case, forensic geologist Cassie Oldfield tracks mineral clues to discover how the mayor died--and what she found. As the volcano moves toward red alert, Cassie races to prevent 'no way out' from becoming a prophecy.
SEA CHANGE (Book Three)
Coming soon.
BADWATER excerpt
Chapter One
There was something odd about the figure coming down the dark road and I was not going to be happy until I could put my eyes on the details.
Walter, stowing the donut bag in his field pack, had not yet noticed.
Uphill of the figure, emergency spotlights cracked
the deep night and more could be seen. Big vehicles clogged the road. Adjacent to the road, yellow rope zoned off a large chunk of desert where a tractor-trailer lay on its side. Well uphill of the crash was another roped and spotlit area, occupied by a hulking crane. What was the crane doing off on its lonesome?
I refocused on the figure. “Somebody’s coming. A man, I think. But odd.”
Walter looked, straining to see. “You have young eyes.”
“It’s more a question of what jumps out at you.”
“Cassie, what jumps out at me in the dead of night belongs in the realm of bad poetry.”
I smiled. He would know.
“However,” he said, still peering, “that is an odd gait.”
That it was, perhaps due to the muddied condition of the road. I glanced at the sky, where a cloud roof glowed faintly beneath a hidden moon. Summer thunderstorm—local, wherever precisely local was. It had been clear twenty minutes ago in Mammoth, our home base in the Sierra Nevada mountains. We run a two-person lab called Sierra Geoforensics and what we do for a living is read earth evidence at the crime scene. We’d headed for this scene truly in the dark. The FBI sent a helicopter but provided few details. We’d flown east from the Sierra and crossed another range, which meant we’d passed from California into Nevada, then bellied down to the dark desert.
And here we waited, speculating. All too often, the geological evidence at the scene gets overlooked. This time, though, the FBI considered it urgent enough to bring us by chopper, and that impressed me deeply.
The oncoming figure, I now decided, was bulky. And yet tall.
“Ahhh,” Walter said, “I know that walk. That’s an old man’s gait.”
My heart gave a squeeze. In the dark, Walter could charitably be described as craggy. In the brutal light of day, his face is eroded—compressed by the forces of the years and folded by the weight of the job. Not that I’m keeping watch. I linked my arm through his. “Yeah, you predate the dinosaurs.”
“At times I feel I do.” Walter’s voice was night-thin.