Volcano Watch

by Toni Dwiggins

  *****

  We had made our collections on her anterior side—more wool fibers, another horse hair, a few more mineral grains—and we were easing her into the body bag when Walter noticed a bulge in her parka pocket. Eric unzipped the pocket, fishing out a small clutch bag. Shiny vinyl, wild tropical print, pure Georgia. I recognized it. She carried it in place of her big purse, when convenient. Eric unzipped the clutch, dumping the contents onto the ice. Keys, cell phone, comb, lipstick, micro-wallet, pen, small notebook.

  Walter said, “What’s the notebook?”

  I looked. “Weight Watchers—her pocket guide. Calories and all that.”

  Walter indicated the pen. “She wrote in it?”

  Eric picked up the notebook and flipped through it. “Yeah. What she ate, some kind of point system.”

  I asked, “When’s the last entry?” thinking that might pinpoint the day she died because I knew Georgia damn well wouldn’t have skipped a meal or skipped holding herself accountable, and I waited while Eric flipped to the last written entry and read it, while his face closed up tight. “What?” I said. “What?”

  Eric passed it to me. Walter and Stobie crowded in. I read the inked notes, then read them again. It looked like she’d been trying different ways to word something. Mostly cross-outs. Nearly blotted-out, the way you’d slash your pen angrily because you can’t get the words right. I could decipher just found out and then, at the end of the slashed-out section that nearly tore the page, she’d found the words she wanted.

  No way out.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On the way down the mountain Stobie took the lead and Eric roped the sled from behind, holding it in tension. Walter followed and I stayed close on his heels.

  At the last ridge before the final descent, a sled strap came undone and we had to stop. While Stobie fussed with the litter, I went to look at the view eastward, way out in the distance.

  I found what I was looking for: the mountain ranges and ridges that join to erect a giant loop around the high desert floor. The loop closes against the wall of the Sierra, embracing Mammoth Mountain and enclosing our hometown of Mammoth Lakes.

  What it is, in fact, is a cleverly camouflaged volcano.

  Seven hundred thousand years ago it blew the hell up, blowing so ferociously that it sank a fifteen-by-twenty mile block of the earth’s crust a mile and a quarter deep. The eruption left a hole so vast that people passing through today see desert and mountains and don’t recognize it as the bowl and rim of a volcanic caldera. Beneath the bowl, the magma chamber has been refilling. Six months ago, within the span of a day, four big quakes hit this area. With these abrupt shivers, the volcano awoke.

  That was five months before Georgia disappeared. Her last five months were her best. She rose to the occasion. She’d downplayed the volcano through four mayoral terms, as it sporadically stirred. Don’t spook the tourists. She simply told us what we wanted to hear—which was that things would quiet down—and she was always right. But this time was different. This time, seismographs and tiltmeters said time to worry. To our utter amazement, Georgia called in the feds. If an eruption was coming, she was going to get us ready.

  Stobie called “fixed” and I abandoned the view and rejoined the team.

  I said, “About Georgia’s notes…”

  “We keep that quiet,” Eric said.

  I shrugged. That was a given; we don’t discuss case details with anyone not authorized. I glanced at Stobie, the only one of us not involved in criminalistics, but he was official Search, Rescue, and Recovery and I assumed they followed the same code.

  Stobie held my look. “We don’t know jack about what she meant. Who says it has anything to do with anything?”

  “This is what needs to be established,” Walter said.

  “In the meantime,” Eric said, “we don’t need the whole town speculating.”

  We resumed our descent.

  Two switchbacks down, it began to snow. Snow like white cement stuck to the body bag until it looked like we were transporting a snowman. Snow woman. The wind picked up and drove wet slugs into my face. If I cried now, snow would hide the tears. I had no tears. Just cold misery and a hot poker in my gut.

  I stared at the shape on the sled. What did you find, Georgia?

  You mind me talking to you? I talked to my little brother Henry for years after he died. Nothing woo-woo, I don’t believe in ghosts, just in talk therapy. So explain yourself, will you? What did you just find out? And what in the name of all that is logical does no way out mean? Does it mean you couldn’t dodge the volcano issue this time? Couldn’t pat us on the head and say ‘there, there’? You just found out how serious the unrest is? You couldn’t see any way out of that predicament?

  I can almost raise your voice Georgia, but, sad to say, I can’t put answers in your mouth. All I can do is read the message you left behind. I’m not talking about the notes, now. I’m talking about the bits of the earth embedded in your boot soles. I’ll track that soil and find out where you died, how you died. And why you wrote no way out.

  So long, Georgia. I swear we’ll find whoever did this to you.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A small crowd watched through curtains of snow as we dragged into Red’s Meadow. Eric had radioed ahead and it looked like the entire police department had mobilized—and a few town officials, to boot.

  Afternoon was fading but the scene was lit with huge police department lanterns.

  We halted and I knelt to unfasten my iced bindings, fumbling with cold gloved hands. There was such a din that I jumped when someone touched my shoulder. I turned. A man stood over me, so close I had to crane my neck. I couldn’t make out his face, which was recessed in the depths of a parka hood. I must have shown my shock, for he dropped to a crouch like a large animal making itself smaller so as not to cause alarm.

  “Hell,” he said, “it’s me, Adrian Krom.” He threw back his hood and showed his face. “I don’t bite.”

  “You just startled me.”

  “Cassie, right? You work with Walter.”

  “Right.” I’d seen Adrian Krom in meetings—the emergency-ops guy sent by the feds—and a few times in the Ski Tip cafe, where everybody in town gathers at one time or another. I’d never actually spoken with him. I said, “Hello Adrian.”

  “Adrian, good. Some people call me Mr. Krom. I hate the formalities.” He folded his arms, still in a crouch. “I prefer to be chums.”

  It struck me that he was like Georgia, insisting on first name only. Maybe it was a politics thing.

  “Cassie, tell me if that’s Georgia. Have we lost our mayor?”

  Ours? Adrian Krom has been in town only two months. We looked in unison at the snow-packed body bag, and I nodded.

  “Hell,” he said, voice thickening. He bowed his head.

  All I could see was his brown pelt of hair. I hesitated, then patted his shoulder. He reached up and grasped my hand. After a decent interval, I slipped my hand free. He came out of his crouch and stood, looking down at me. “You know what Georgia would say right now?”

  I thought, this guy likes his drama. I got to my feet. “What?”

  “We’re all in this together.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I had to park in the Community Center lot and walk four blocks up Minaret Road threading my way through the crowd on the way to work. Feeling I should say something to these people. Some kind of cautionary thing.

  Always park your car facing downhill for a quick getaway.

  They acted like nothing was wrong, like this was a normal Saturday in January after a good snowfall. The town of Mammoth Lakes in boomtown gear. Every other car carried skis or snowboards and now, before the lifts opened, there wasn’t a parking spot to be had. The road pooled with slush and the snow was embedded with grit and mashed pinecones and shards of styrofoam cups and it rasped underfoot but that didn’t slow the jostling snow crowd.

  No, I amended, they acted like they knew something was wrong and t
hat’s why they came. Ever since the volcano stirred, the snow crowd has swelled along with the ground. That’s what got to me. We could get hit, so we’re edgy. Extreme sports. We’ve never been edgy before—we’ve just been slopes and condos and kitschy shops a half-day’s drive from Los Angeles. Now we’re hot.

  And the hometown crowd has been riding the boom. People up and down Minaret Road cleared snow from the paths in front of their businesses. Motels flashed No Vacancy and condos were renting by the week. However, for anyone who cared to see, the signs said otherwise. Sierra Properties windows were plastered with HOMES4SALE. Mountain Hardware screamed CLEARANCE! And new signs were welded to the traffic light poles: orange evacuation arrows that pointed the way out.

  Nobody cared to see.

  I passed Uphill Sports where guys were unloading snowmobiles from a flatbed truck and I asked how’s it going and one of the guys cupped his palms and intoned “biiig bucks.”

  I came to the Ski Tip Cafe and there was a crowd out the door, eager to grab breakfast before heading up to the slopes. Once they’d filled their bellies and bolted, the locals would drift in. The Tip’s owner Bill Bone appeared in the doorway, juggling a clipboard, all elbows and knees, looking like a gawky middle-aged busboy. He called a name and a group cheered and elbowed forward and Bill shot me a gloomy nod. Worrying about running out of eggs, no doubt. I felt a pang of affection for Bill and the Tip, even for its hokey chalet decor. I’d had my first milkshake there, my first legal beer.

  I studied the place, with a sudden need to burn it into my memory.

  And then I crossed the street to the lab—Sierra Geoforensics big and bold and authoritative on the door—and like everyone else I acted like this was a normal Saturday. Through the lab’s big streetside window I saw Walter inside at his workbench. Entirely normal for us to work on a Saturday on a big case.

  This case qualified. Oh yes.

  Walter threw me a thin “good morning, dear” as I walked in.

  We’d returned yesterday from the glacier too spent to do more than sort our samples. I’d slept badly, dreaming of Georgia. Georgia, I saw, was wearing on Walter as well.

  I grabbed a cup of coffee and set to work. On my workbench was the culture dish I’d prepared last night—soil plugs from the left boot. I put the first plug on the stage and bent to the scope. I imagined Georgia at my shoulder, angling for a look. Busybody was her middle name. I took the scalpel and teased apart the clumps of soil. Weathered red cinders and fluffy bits of pumice—volcanic. Yellow sulfur crystals, which could come from fertilizer or pesticides or, more likely, volcanism.

  At my shoulder, Georgia cackled. Sulfur was known, in Biblical quarters, as brimstone. Georgia would run with that, I thought: fire and brimstone awaiting the perp.

  It didn’t do much for me. Georgia had picked up volcanic soil but that was the norm around here.

  I poked further and saw shiny mica, black chips of hornblende, milky quartz, pink feldspar—the stuff of granite. Well, the Sierra is granite country. And now I found grainy white stuff with a rhombic cleavage—calcite. Calcite’s common as furniture.

  I told Walter what I’d found. He grunted.

  Cinders, pumice, sulfur, granite, calcite: not a telling mix. And not necessarily acquired at the same place, or the same time. Collect a bit of pumice here, a pinch of calcite there.

  Still, it was the same mineral suite as the grains Walter had plucked from her clothing, on the ice. Hat, gloves, jeans, parka, front and back. I thought that over. She not only walked in the stuff, she appeared to have rolled around in it.

  I turned the scalpel to a nut of compacted soil. It cracked open. Here was something—a wink of silver. It was a disk, concave, with parallel striae. Unmistakable. I let out a soundless whistle. “Walter,” I said, “I’ve got gunpowder.”

  Most gunpowder that comes out of a firearm comes out burned and it takes a scanning electron microscope to find that residue, but a few particles usually emerge unburned and those are large enough to be easily seen.

  “How many?” he asked at last.

  “Just one.”

  “Don’t fall in love.”

  “Well I haven’t.” A single disk was not significant. Soil is a collector; it likes to latch onto foreign elements. A particle of gunpowder could have blown in on the wind or been ferried on an animal’s fur. Georgia could have picked it up miles from where she died and ferried it herself. It didn’t necessarily say that she last walked in the vicinity of firearms. But, then, maybe she did.

  I said, “You finding anything of note?”

  He looked up from the glacier basin soil he’d been examining. “Noteworthy, so far, in that it doesn’t match the soils from the clothing or the boots.”

  “So she didn’t walk at the glacier. The final place she walked was … elsewhere.”

  “Preliminary, but so it appears.”

  I said, “What do you think made her write no way out? That’s strong stuff.”

  “That it is.”

  “You know,” I said, “that could mean something personal.”

  “As opposed to something involving us all?”

  I said, tight, “Meaning the volcano, you’re saying?”

  “Meaning the volcano,” he said.

  I said, tighter, “What could Georgia have possibly found out about the volcano?”

  “I’ve wondered that, myself.” Walter glanced out the window. “That’s why I’ve asked our volcanologist to drop by.”

  Not a bad idea, I thought. Although the need of it sent a chill down my spine.

  Ten minutes later the door opened and Lindsay Nash, our volcanologist, swept in.

  “Let me have your coat,” Walter said, ushering her inside, “and you’ll want coffee?”

  “It’s not a coat and I’m still chilly.” She wore a gray and black wool poncho that set off her hair, which was gray with flecks of black like biotite mica in granite. She produced a bag from beneath the poncho. “Use this. It’s fresh. Garuda.”

  Walter said, “We have fresh Kona.”

  I’ve known them to spend an hour spatting about who should have made dinner reservations, or whose work was more crucial. They’ve danced this dance for over twenty years, spatting like an old married couple although they never got around to marrying. They’d give each other anything—their lives if necessary—but they wouldn’t give an inch without making a point.

  I relaxed an inch, at the sheer normality of it.

  Walter took the bag and went to the workbench we used as a kitchen. We have, on Fridays, a supply of donuts, which Lindsay doesn’t touch and I try mightily to avoid. Since Walter and I were on the mountain yesterday, we have Friday’s leftovers today. We always have coffee. Walter dumped out the Kona in the carafe—a good two cups worth—and ground Lindsay’s beans.

  Lindsay came to me. “Working hard?”

  I went for the light tone. “Always something.”

  “If you’d gone into volcanology, it would be something finer.”

  She gave me a hug and I smelled perfume in the fine merino wool of her poncho. She’d given me a sweeter version of that scent for my twelfth birthday. That, and a gas mask for a tour of her volcano sampling fumarole emissions. And so it began, Lindsay grooming me as an acolyte. I’d met her via Walter. I’d met Walter the previous year, taking refuge in his lab when my brother Henry stubbed his toe on a rock and was rushed to the hospital. I came back to the lab again and again. Walter taught me how rocks could be used to solve crimes and offered me an after-school job doing scutwork, and that was that. I acquired a new, and mixed vocabulary: fumarole, lightscope, tiltmeter, exemplar. I showed off at home. My father joked that I’d acquired a smarter set of parents. He missed the mark. Even before Henry’s death, my cartoonist parents drew themselves into a closed circle. Walter’s and Lindsay’s lives also revolved around their work, but the difference was that they drew me in.

  Lindsay pulled up a stool, blew a patch of my workbench clean, and rested h
er arm. “Walter says you two need a consult about Georgia.”

  I shifted back to uneasy. Lindsay had detested Georgia. I said, “Yeah.”

  “This note of hers…. No way out. Very dramatic.”

  I took a moment. So Walter had told Lindsay about the note. We’d all agreed on the ice to keep it quiet. But, then, since he’d asked for a consult, I supposed it made sense to tell her everything.

  “And why,” Lindsay asked, “do you think this note involves my volcano?”

  “Because she said she found something. Because she’d picked up volcanic soil, likely where she died. Because your volcano is a hot topic.”

  Lindsay shrugged, acknowledging the truth of that. “Very well, where did she pick up this soil?”

  “We don’t yet know.”

  “Then give me one of your wild-ass guesses.”

  I preferred to call them onageristic estimates; an onager is a wild ass. I said, “Wouldn’t be useful.” At this point.

  Walter set a mug of coffee on the workbench in front of Lindsay. He’d siphoned off the first of the brew for her.

  “Thank you, honey.” She waited until he’d scooted his stool over to my bench, to join us. She said, “If you don’t know where Georgia died, I don’t see how I can tell you anything about what she may or may not have found.”

  “What might you find,” Walter asked, “that would be a new threat?”

  “Good heavens, I’ve been trying to teach you two volcanology for decades, and now you want to listen?” She sampled her coffee. “I can tell you this. I keep a close eye on my volcano. Anything Georgia might think she found would be as useless as tits on a boar.”

  Walter’s eyebrows lifted.

  I smiled. “Just give us a wild-ass guess.”

  “Wouldn’t be useful.” She raised her mug to me. “But touche.”

  “Here’s the thing, Lindsay,” I said. “Georgia found out something that spooked her so much she damn near ruined a page of her Weight Watcher’s notebook writing it down. And yeah, it could have been some personal trouble, but…”