Volcano Watch

by Toni Dwiggins

  Krom raised his hands. “Then just tell me where you plan to go tomorrow.”

  I searched the relief map, my eyes coming to rest at Crater Meadow, settling on the two small cinder cones symmetric as breasts. “Somewhere around Red Cones, most likely.”

  “Why there?”

  “Calcite. Sulfur. Trachybasalt. Pumice.”

  He shook his head.

  “I can give you a lesson in forensic geology if you like. We’ll be here all night.”

  “Look.” Krom hiked his big shoulders. “I need to be able to go out for a beer with John Amsterdam and talk about the case as if I know what the hell is happening. I need your chief of police to see that I’m closely following developments, that I’m ready to respond to whatever you find. Whatever Georgia found. I need John to tell his chums on the Council that I’m on top of things and that I’ll spring for a round of beers. I need to repair the relationships. I need to know what the hell I’m talking about.” His polished brown eyes held steady on mine. “I need your help. Let me be the judge of its worth.”

  I hesitated.

  He gave a slight smile. “I’m an official with a valid interest in the case.”

  “Okay, here’s something new you can tell John. We found cyanide in the soil, which might have come from old mining tailings. And hot springs are associated with the precious ores. So that’s a lead I’m following.”

  Krom considered. “So I can tell John you’re looking for a mine.”

  “Yup. And maybe he’ll spring for the beers.”

  *****

  I followed Laurel Creek, a good three miles east of Red Cones, as the crow flies.

  Two more mine diggings were crossed off my map and a third was ahead. I had widened my sampling field, checking sites farther from the glacier, although the farther afield I went the harder it was to envision hauling the body from the scene of death to the scene of disposal.

  I was going now more on hope than belief.

  I came to a steep bluff, shorn of snow. The face was roughly striped. The layering tilted, striking to the northwest until it bent down and back upon itself in a recumbent fold. It looked like a large striped cat had tucked itself under the face and stretched recumbent upon the snow.

  It brought me a vision of Lindsay. Her cat’s smile when she told me not to worry about vendettas. Her face roughened when she told me not to tell Walter about her role in Hot Creek.

  It brought me a vision of Georgia, writing furiously in her Weight Watchers notebook. No way out. No way out no way out no way out.

  I shivered. What did you find, Georgia?

  All was silence.

  *****

  “What did you find at Red Cones?”

  “East of Red Cones, actually.” I sat on the ledge of the relief map, facing Krom on his split-log bench. “I found nothing of interest.”

  “Cassie.”

  I flipped a hand. “You don’t find something, you move on.”

  “Move on where? I’m running out of time, Cassie. I’m getting phone calls, courtesy of Len Carow. And if you’re thinking you don’t give a damn about my fate, then think about your town’s fate. Remind yourself that Georgia found something important over two months ago and then she was killed and tell me if you give a damn about time.”

  I said, soft, “I give a damn. I want to find it as much as you do. I’m just frustrated. I don’t know where to look next. Walter and I have run out of likely mines.”

  He said, equally soft, “You disappoint me.”

  Surprisingly, that stung.

  He stood, and hiked himself onto the ledge next to me. “Let me help you.”

  “How?”

  “Tell me about your evidence. Tell me what you were looking for out at Casa Diablo that day. Besides calcite. Calcite’s real common.” His eyes shone beneath the heavy lids. “Your own phrasing. You said it that day with a dismissive tone. You wanted me to see calcite as a general example. But now we’re working together.”

  I thought, all right. I said, “Gunpowder.”

  He frowned. “In the evidence?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Casa Diablo…”

  “There’s a shooting range there. The targets are down for the winter.”

  “And that’s why you stayed behind after the drill? To search the biathlon range for gunpowder.”

  “Yes.”

  He was frowning deeply now.

  I thought, he didn’t know. He didn’t know there was shooting in the place Georgia died. I felt a sudden relief. He didn’t know where Georgia died.

  “And Red Cones?” he said. “And the other places you went to? Who shoots there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So where are you going tomorrow, Cassie?”

  I was at a loss. I’d checked all the mines on the map that were anywhere near a hot spring. I could move on to mines without springs, which is what Walter wants to do. Put the hot spring aside. We don’t know the calcite and sulfur came from a spring. We do know we’ve got cyanide. Follow the cyanide angle until we hit paydirt, or until it stalls. The way we did with gunpowder.

  “Cassie. What are you going after tomorrow?”

  “The truth.”

  He laughed, soft. “I was right about you. You have belief. Not hope. Hope won’t get you out the door.” He slid a look at me. “Am I right? You still have belief? You’ll find what Georgia found?”

  I gripped the ledge. I didn’t know.

  He said, thoughtful, “Are all mines mapped?”

  *****

  I went north, driving Highway 395 the sixty miles along the Sierra scarp to the county seat at Bridgeport. In the old clapboard Victorian, with the cupola sitting atop the second story like an old lady’s hat, I spent half the day reading microfiche. Notices of location filed by the scavengers who’d picked over sites after the big mines played out. They located claims by landmark. One mile south of Deer Creek bridge and ninety feet northwest of the tunnel adit, and…

  Claims so ephemeral they never made it onto a map.

  Five claims were described as being near hot springs.

  Three for me, I thought, and two for Walter.

  Thank you, Adrian Krom.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I was up Coldwater Canyon again.

  I skied past the turnoff I’d taken two days ago and paused to check behind me. No fog today, just sunshine. Nobody in sight, just me and my visions.

  Ahead was a stand of lodgepoles with their trunks snapped off above snowline, unlucky enough to grow in an avalanche trough.

  I kicked up my pace and didn’t slow until I left the canyon trail behind. I was concealed now, in the hemlocks and silver pines. The climb steepened and my muscles burned. I topped a ridge and followed the map I’d made around an outcrop of granite, finding my way to the little fold in Red Mountain. Here was the nearly hidden draw that that I’d read about at county records, that its claimant had expectantly named Gold Dust.

  I skied in.

  The draw backed into the mountainside, to a tunnel whose entrance showed a reddish cinder face. The adjoining rockwall showed another face, gray granodiorite.

  It was a place where two different kinds of rock meet.

  Looked like someone, sometime, found something here worth scavenging.

  There was the stone foundation of a building, still timbered. A stream bisected the old camp, and frozen into the waterway was a rusted contraption of gears and teeth. Slightly uphill were snow-covered mounds that looked for all the world like sand dunes. That was likely the dump, boneyard of discarded ore. Below that was a circular depression—the cyanide pond where someone had leached the remaining gold from the tailings. I’d seen its like before, couple of days ago, at two other sites on Red Mountain. I didn’t know precisely how much cyanide the leaching process left in the soil. Way too much for the good of the environment. Ironic, that it would bode well for my case.

  But not here, because this cyanide pond did me no more good than the
others, because the snow of this draw spread sparkling and unbroken. There was no hot spring.

  Still, my eye fixed on the stream, where several bushy trees bent beneath the weight of snow. Mountain willow—dwarfish at this altitude.

  Georgia had picked up a willow leaf somewhere.

  I decided to sample the draw.

  Because the soil would be bared in the tunnel, I began there. Exchanging skis for a flashlight, leaden with cold, I went in, stopping just inside. The tunnel was a skinny incursion into the mountain, high-ceilinged at the front end. At the far end, it closed down to a narrow throat. I played the flash over the rock face, half-expecting to see lusters of gold, but the only luster my flashlight caught was in the flattened cans of Mountain Dew that littered the floor. The floor was hard rock dusted with a thin soil, which not surprisingly looked cinder-red. Here and there it was studded with dark nodules. Upon closer examination of the nodules near the entrance, I identified them as animal scat. Alpine chipmunk or pika, I figured, at this altitude.

  I took a soil sample near the entrance and went out into the light to see what I had.

  I spread a tarp, laid out my tools, and put a hand lens to the dish of soil. Oxidized cinders, bits of pumice. A wink of mica, duller hornblende, milky quartz, pinkish feldspar—granite. I assumed the nearest source was the gray rockfall, chunks of which had weathered and crumbled, and that decomposed granite had fed into the soil.

  My interest stirred.

  Not lab conditions, but in the field under the hand lens this soil looked a close match to the evidence from Georgia’s boots.

  I sat back on my heels and thought it through. What was missing? Well, cyanide for starters, although there was the obvious source. I debated whether to dig a sample near the ore dump but the snow there was deep. I decided to put that off. As for the hot spring minerals, there was no visible source of sulfur and calcite.

  And then the obvious hit me. I felt like a fool.

  What if Georgia had found a spring here—the spring the prospector described in his claim—and it had subsequently died? She’s been dead over two months now. In two months, a hot spring can die too. And then the snow comes and buries the corpse.

  For my purposes, dead’s just as good as alive.

  I scanned the draw. A grid search of this place would take well over a day. If need be, I’d come back with Walter and do the work. For now, I was willing to stipulate that there was a spring here somewhere, dead and buried.

  Okay then, move on to the next missing bit. Gunpowder.

  I looked at the tunnel. Soil was bared there so it was worth another search. I went back in, pausing again at the mouth. This time, playing my flashlight over the soil, I was looking for bootprints. There was some scuffing here and there but nothing identifiable. Might have been animals, might have been the Mountain-Dew drinkers, but the thin soil wasn’t saying. I went further inside the tunnel and did a thorough sampling.

  Outside again, spreading my haul on the tarp, my eye was drawn to the mouth of the draw and I stared until every shape resolved itself into a tree.

  I bent to work and was rewarded in the second dish. I stared, in disbelief. I took the twenty-power hand lens and looked again. And then, feverish, ransacked all the dishes. Strike after strike: the mother lode. Not dust of gold but disks of silver. Their faces burned into my memory. Including dimples, my old friend.

  Gunpowder.

  My hand was shaking. I set down my lens.

  Somebody did a great deal of shooting in the tunnel—or in the draw and then somebody or a lot of somebodies tracked the powder around.

  Somebody who used biathlon powder.

  Shit.

  What happened here? And why was Georgia involved?

  And who was here with her?

  I went very cold. Georgia, den mother to the biathlon team, indefatigable booster who brought the biathlon World Cup to Mammoth.

  But I could not make the leap from the biathlon course up here to Gold Dust. I couldn’t even venture an onageristic estimate on that.

  Wait. Back up. There were still all those unidentified grains of powder, that were not biathlon powder.

  I didn’t get it. I was ninety percent convinced I’d found the place she last walked—I’d bump that up to one hundred percent in the lab—but I had no idea what she was doing here.

  Okay, so back up again. How in hell did she come here in the first place? Did she go to county records and find the Gold Dust notice of location? And if she did, why? Well maybe she wasn’t after a hot spring, after all, maybe she was looking for a mine and the spring was secondary. But why?

  And what in the name of all that is logical did she find so compelling here? Enough to write no way out.

  If indeed she wrote it here.

  Well, there was the hot spring. The stipulated hot spring. Although a hot spring—one that was so ephemeral that it died—was hardly enough to set her heart racing. Was it?

  I shrugged. Just go back to the lab and do the analysis.

  As I was packing my field kit, I thought about the quirky mix of Jeffrey pine bark and pumice that was in her mouth. No Jeffrey pines here—it’s too high for Jeffrey, too far from the nearest Jeffrey forest for an animal to ferry in enough bark to mix in any significant proportion with the soil here.

  I thought back to Georgia’s body on the tray in the medical examiner’s lab. The bruising around her mouth had led to my assumption that someone had opened her mouth and dumped in the pumice-bark mix.

  No wild-ass guesses necessary to conclude that whoever was here with Georgia brought that quirky mix.

  I gritted my teeth, and I thought about Adrian Krom. I thought about Lindsay’s theory, and I could concoct my own corollary—Georgia finds a new hot spring here, a new place for a romp—and brings her lover but he’s not as impressed as she’d hoped. He says something in his brusque way, and she responds in kind. Or maybe he gets weird. Maybe he invites her for a dip and quotes Dante and even if she’s lovestruck she’s not stupid and she says what kind of nonsense is this? She fears we’ve put the town in the hands of a nutcase. She decides what must be done—get him fired. No fooling around like Lindsay with reputations, she’s the goddamn mayor and she’s got clout with everyone who counts, when push comes to shove. And it does, because Krom sees her react. She tries to cover but she’s Georgia and she’s lousy at evasions. She manages to steal a moment alone—maybe in the tunnel—to write her quick notes in the Weight Watcher’s. But in the end, Krom finds her.

  The sun dipped behind the rockwall and Gold Dust fell into gloom.

  Suddenly in a hurry, I finished packing and geared up.

  In the process, my corollary to Lindsay’s theory fell apart. If Adrian Krom killed Georgia here, why in the name of all that is logical was he trying to help me find this place? If it wasn’t for Adrian Krom, I might not have thought to check county records.

  I pushed off. I skied full-out to the mouth of the draw but when I skirted the granite outcrop, my skiing turned awkward. I was following the tracks I’d made on the way in and it took me two or three glides to figure out what was wrong.

  I bent to the tracks.

  Too many basket holes, too close together. When you ski cross country you don’t break new trail if there is already a set of tracks going where you want to go. You take advantage of the first skier’s labor. You’ll set the tracks a little deeper. Hardly noticeable. But it’s nearly impossible to ski and set your poles in someone else’s basket holes. By the progress of the baskets, the skier had come just to the bend, just far enough to sight up the draw. He’d done a kick turn and headed downhill in the same tracks.

  The tracks didn’t say how long he’d stayed.

  I got out my pocket knife and opened the blade, listening to my own sharp breathing, and then because I couldn’t ski with an open blade I put the knife away. I ran on my skis until the slope angled enough to take the downhill in a tuck. Drops ran down my spine—not the sweat of exertion but the cold oi
ly trickle of fear.

  *****

  When I reached the Lake Mary parking lot I saw Mike Kittleman changing the tire of his Explorer.

  I saw his skis racked on top, caked with snow.

  Mike Kittleman was on the biathlon team as a kid, before Georgia kicked him off.

  I watched him a moment. Thinking, he’s such a runt but he’s wiry and strong. I recalled that day in the gondola barn when the machinery broke and Eric came and I told Mike to let Eric fix it, and I recalled just how wiry and strong Mike had been when he grabbed me by the hair and put the screwdriver to my neck—and I wondered if I needed to be afraid now. But there were other cars in the lot, and there was a family unloading a sled and the dad was big and burly.

  I took off my skis and approached Mike.

  He saw me. He pretended not to, his head bent to the job.

  I said, “Mike.”

  He looked up. Feigned surprise. Spoke, at last. “Yeah?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  I waited for him to say what does it look like, I’m changing a tire. Mike is unrelentingly literal. He said, instead, “Just came back from a ski.”

  I was blunt. “Did you follow me?”

  He lifted the spare tire onto the wheel studs. He screwed each lug nut back on, slowly and meticulously, by hand. He said, finally, “No,” like he was so unaffected by my question that he nearly forgot to answer.

  “Then what were you doing out skiing? Where did you go?”

  He picked up the tire iron and tightened the first lug nut. He shot me a glance. Face set in naked hatred. “It’s a free country.”

  “Yes it is,” I said. “And I’m free to tell the chief of police my unfounded suspicion that you’ve been following me. And you’re free to prove me wrong.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I went straight home after my trip to Gold Dust. No reporting in to Krom, no chats on the split-log bench.

  I ate an apple and cheese for dinner and had little appetite even for that. I took a steaming hot shower. I went to bed early. I had a nightmare in which Krom followed me to the hidden draw and barged in and dug a hole in the snow and when the steam licked up, he forced me into the hot blue pool. I awoke sweating and went outside and stood for two minutes in the snow to cool off. Went back to bed, back to sleep, and had another nightmare, in which Mike followed me only this time he had the nerve to confront me while I was pondering the gunpowder under my hand lens, and Mike knocked me over and put a screwdriver to my throat.