Volcano Watch

by Toni Dwiggins

  “Together?”

  Eric gave me a flat look. “Together. Come on, Cass, you don’t need me to spell it out.”

  I opened my mouth. Shook my head. “But Adrian’s not…”

  “Looks like he goes both ways.”

  I closed my mouth.

  He cuts a wake with the locals, both ladies and gents.

  Georgia and Mike.

  I thought, tight, looks like Krom would go whatever way would get him what he wants. What did he want from Mike? Loyalty? He’s lining up the troops, those he can count on in time of need? And Mike—there’s a sitting duck. Mike’s last guy stuck with him only a few months before Mike’s temper blew that up. At least according to Jimbo. So there’s Mike, and there’s Georgia. And there’s Krom going after the lovelorn and he even uses the same trysting place. The sonofabitch. He didn’t need to go after me, although I was as much a sitting duck as they were—he found another way in with me, he found the geology.

  Eric said, “You okay, Cass?”

  I stared at my off-kilter floor. Not really. Tired of being a sitting duck. Tired of stories about Krom’s sex life. Wondering how to balance the scales—sleaze and weirdness on the one hand, and on the other hand the certificates of honor on Krom’s office wall.

  I said, “What did Georgia say?”

  “Nothing. Neither did Mike. But, the two of them—if looks could kill.”

  “What about Adrian?” I asked.

  “Real cool, I’ll give him that, he kept things from escalating. At least enough for us to get Georgia out of there.”

  “And then?”

  “Then she drove us back to the Chevron station. Told us why she was so upset—that she’d had a thing with Krom. She figured we’d caught the drift. We had. We told her it was none of our business and we’d keep our damn mouths shut.”

  “Jimbo too?”

  Eric gave a dry laugh. “Yeah, he can keep a secret. Believe it or not.”

  I found I could believe it.

  Eric came off the table. “I’ll take that beer now.”

  I got two. We drank halfway down.

  Eric said, “Here’s another straight answer for you—about me being a jerk on the retrieval. You’re right about me wanting a first look at the evidence. I was a jerk, Cassie, because I wondered whether things had escalated between Mike and Georgia.”

  I went rigid. “You think Mike killed her?”

  “I think Mike’s basically a good guy only he’s got a problem with his temper.”

  “A problem? He had a problem back in the gondola station when you pulled him off me.”

  Eric made a sound—inhaling, exhaling, the calm-before-you-shoot cadence.

  “And then,” I said, “you just let it go.”

  “I had a talk with him.”

  “Wasn’t enough, Eric. If you’d gone to the cops or his dad—someone in charge—maybe he wouldn’t have had the problem with Georgia.”

  Eric said, tight, “So you buy it? Mike and Georgia at Gold Dust?”

  “How do the two of them end up there? What, Mike drives them to the Lake Mary parking lot and then they companionably take a ski up to Gold Dust?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Let’s say you’re right.” I had to caution myself. I didn’t want to see Krom as the killer. I liked Mike as the killer—I could see that. But just take it one step at a time. “If Mike killed her at Gold Dust, why not bury her there? Why transport her all the way to the glacier?”

  “You know Mike. He’s not cold-blooded.” Eric held up a hand. “He’s hot-blooded, Cass, and if he killed her in a fit of temper, he’d be in shock afterward. Take awhile for him to figure out what the hell to do next.”

  “A day, you mean. Long enough for livor to settle in her backside and rigor to come and go.”

  “Yeah. Long enough to work out that he’d be a fool to bury her at Gold Dust, not knowing if anybody else knew she was going there. Long enough to consider alternatives—he’s backpacked all over the place so I’d guess he knew the glacier. Long enough to figure he’d need a horse to transport her.”

  “Speaking of the horse… What’s the lab say about that hair?”

  “Lab says it’s horse. That’s as far as they’ve gotten.” Eric drained his beer. “There’s still one hell of a lot we don’t know about this case.”

  “You know enough to want to cover for Mike.”

  Eric set down the bottle. “Let’s go back to the gondola station.” The edge in his voice cut to the bone. He moved to my brick-and-board bookshelf and picked up a chunk of wormhole sandstone that I use as a bookend. My books slumped over. He anchored his fingers in the stone. “I’ve gone over this for fifteen years. How it could have turned out different. What one little thing I could have done to change things. Or you could have done.”

  I held his look.

  “Yeah Cass, maybe I should have gone to the cops but I thought I had it covered. I thought I could guarantee Mike’s behavior.” He raised the rock and sighted through one of the wormholes. “It was like this for me—framed. The way things are framed when you’re fifteen. Mike’s a buddy, Mike’s got a problem, Mike’s listened to me in the past, he’ll listen again. Real simple. And maybe it would have worked.” He lowered the rock and gave me a hard look. “But what you did, Cassie, was hang me out to dry.”

  I said, “I was scared.”

  “You didn’t trust me.”

  “You were a kid. It wasn’t a kid’s problem. And I got left with it.”

  He took a long time with that, then nodded. “Why’d you go to Georgia?”

  “Because Georgia was the one you go to when you’re scared.”

  Eric nodded. “Gotta admit, you went to the big kahuna. And you got results.”

  “All I did was ask her to straighten Mike out.”

  “So she kicks him off the team. Would have been better to send him to juvey.”

  “She was trying to help him. Shock some sense into him.”

  “You have any idea how fucking big a deal it was for Mike to be on the team? He wasn’t exactly anyone’s first choice. He took some grief, you know, for being gay. And, yeah, he picked a couple of fights.”

  “A couple?”

  “Kicking him off was the worst call she could have made.”

  I said, mulish, “It worked.”

  Eric’s good eye widened. “Did it? I’d say it turned him into a time bomb.”

  “He was already a time bomb.”

  “And the kicker was, Mike never bought that I didn’t sell him out.”

  The beer soured in my stomach.

  Eric looked away, staring at the photos on the wall as if he were cataloging a crime scene. Mike with the others on the peak, back when he was one of the guys. Eric said, finally, “You didn’t warn me. That you were going to Georgia. You blindsided me.”

  I fixed on the rock in Eric’s hand. Was that the one little thing I could have done to change things? Tell Eric I was going to Georgia? Tell him I thought he’d hung me out to dry? And then it would have turned out different. I said, finally, “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Is that why you’re trying to protect Mike?”

  “I felt…responsible for him. I had it in my head I’d check out the evidence and if it looked bad I’d get him to confess. Maybe he’d get a lighter sentence.”

  “Why don’t you just ask him?”

  “I did. He denied it.”

  “But you’re still covering for him.”

  He passed a hand across his eyes. “I guess I thought you and I and Mike started something back in the gondola station that ended up with a body in the ice.”

  A saying came to me, some biblical phrase—you reap what you sow.

  Eric moved to the bookshelf and replaced the sandstone, refitting my books until they packed in tight as sediments compressed by the weight of the earth’s crust.

  I said, “Can we ever get past the past?” And then I honked out an embarrassed lau
gh because that sounded so utterly idiotic.

  Eric stood. Turned to face me. He came across the room in his cop stride—no smile, no laughs certainly. I started, at the last moment, to meet him but he reached me first, and so it was Eric who took the lead and kissed me.

  And it was Eric who broke away first. “I don’t know, Oldfield.”

  I took in a breath. “So what was that, Catlin?”

  “Trial run?” Now he smiled, fleeting. But the scarred skin beneath his glass eye remained taut. “The past is biting us in the butt. This case is toxic. We’re not done with the past yet.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Next morning at dawn Walter and I made the journey to Gold Dust.

  On the way up, I told him the story of boys testing gunpowder. It was a hard ski and we didn’t have the breath to say much more. When we got to the draw, Walter was agog at the hidden old mine site.

  We agreed to postpone speculation until we did the geology.

  We sat on our skis and ate breakfast—oranges and trail mix—cataloging the lay of the land.

  I mentally paced it off, to the southeast of the tunnel. Ten yards, fifteen, twenty. Just snow and a wall of rock. On this visit, though—unlike my last visit—I knew with certainty there had been a spring. Dead and entombed now, but presumably alive back when Georgia came here. Presumably Georgia saw it. Then Georgia died, then the spring died. All I had to do was find it.

  I carved an orange, studying the rockwall.

  It was a fine example of exfoliation. Big hunks of granite, like this dome that borders Gold Dust, build up internal pressures and every so often shed their skin. It falls in slabs. At the base, the slabs crack into smaller chunks. Over the years—it looked to have been years—the rocks had nearly mortared themselves into a solid wall. There were chinks, where one hunk jutted askew of another, and presumably there were small bits of granite beneath the snow, decomposed by years of weather.

  Walter got to his feet, hefted his field kit, and waded through the snow to the ore-tailing mounds. He settled happily in at the cyanide pond.

  I sucked the juice from an orange section. Trying to decide where to dig. Ten, fifteen, twenty yards from the tunnel, Eric had said. Twenty yards put it inside the rockfall. I chose fifteen.

  I stowed my orange peels, hefted my field kit, and went to work.

  Half an hour in, I straightened and stretched and took a breather. Walter was still at work. I glanced, reflexively, at the mouth of the draw, checking for visitors.

  I glanced, idly at the stream, which trickled beneath a thin ice roof. A water ouzel was playing there. I watched him. Funny little bird, the ouzel, gray and round as a tumbled stone. He bobbed up and down on a rock with a game eye on the water—insects for breakfast. Or not, for the ouzel suddenly took flight and shot over my head and disappeared into the rockfall.

  That was odd.

  The ouzel is a water bird. He nests above streams and waterfalls. Even his nickname, the dipper, comes from his habit of bobbing as if preparing to cannonball into the water. What was so attractive to a water bird in that pile of rock?

  I went over for a look.

  In the flat morning light, chinks and crevices threw no shadows so that I had to inch my way along the wall to find the ruptures. One drew me close: a vertical cleft that flared at the base, like a door opening. The door was sealed along most of its length but there were cracks through which the dipper might have fit. Lower down, the cracks widened. The door became a Dutch door, with the bottom half ajar. A wedge of snow filled the space. I kicked it free. I got my flashlight, sank to my knees, and peered inside. One slab had come to rest against another, leaving a shallow cavity.

  I’m not a spelunker. I like my enclosed spaces tall and wide, with a healthy structural integrity. I sat back on my heels. There was no reason in the world to go in. There was every reason not to.

  Walter called out, “Success!”

  I called, “High five!”

  “What are you doing?”

  I called, “Come on over.”

  He joined me, on his knees. I explained the dipper. He said, “Let’s have a look.”

  We stuck our heads into the cavity and I shined my flashlight around. The soil was the red cinder of Gold Dust, with a flouring of decomposed granite. I would have backed out then, and gladly, but for the sound that caught my ear—running water. Soil was dry, yet I heard water.

  As did Walter.

  We looked at each other.

  I said, “This is worth some speculation.”

  Walter lifted a hand to me.

  “Suppose,” I said, “way back when the guys came to Gold Dust to test their powder, this exfoliation hadn’t yet occurred. Meaning, the rockfall didn’t block access—suppose that’s where their spring was. Back there, about twenty yards from the tunnel. About where Eric said the spring would be.” I listened to the sound of water. Sounded like snowmelt over rock. “And we got lucky. Thanks to the ouzel.”

  “And Georgia?” Walter said.

  I shrugged. She sure didn’t get lucky. Not in the end. I said, “Turns out she’d seen this place. So she remembered the spring. So she probably poked around until she found this break in the rockwall.”

  “Which begs the question of why she came here looking for the spring.”

  “I have a theory.” I swallowed. I told Walter what Eric had told me about Georgia finding Mike and Krom together, another sordid Hot Creek story.

  I’ll give him this—he didn’t look shocked. He did shake his head.

  “So,” I said, “once Georgia gets over the shock of seeing her lover with Mike, how about she decides to win back her lover? And get even with Mike in the process. And a fitting place to do that is bring Krom here, to the spring the guys used to soak in—that Mike used to soak in.”

  “Which begs the question of who was with her here when she died.”

  Neither one of us speculated further.

  I said, “Let’s go see what she found.”

  We went into the cavity, me first.

  I had to go on hands and knees. It took me no more than half a minute to crawl the length, flashlight clamped in my teeth. At the far end, where I had thought the slabs joined in a seam, there was in fact another crack. The sound of water was quite definite, and another sound now mixed in: birdsong. I bellied around the corner, my heart in my ribs.

  And finally there was light, and space, and I could stand.

  Walter followed, and grunted to his feet.

  Here, the exfoliated slabs had fallen like open leaves of a stiff old artichoke. We were in a small grotto, bounded by the outer leaves. Through the leaves I saw that the rockfall backed against the steep lava western slope of Gold Dust. The water we’d heard was indeed snowmelt, running down the slope. The dipper’s song was just outside.

  Something was melting a lot of snow.

  We wove through the rock leaves and came out into a pocket of land wedged between the lava slope and the granite dome.

  And we saw what Georgia must have found.

  We saw the outcrop where the dipper played in snowmelt, and saw that the melt was indeed a consequence of steam lifting from a blue hot spring to the slope above. Water so hot I felt heat from where I stood shivering. The boys’ spring, the plum Georgia sought, my long-sought holy grail, my nightmare.

  Not dead after all.

  Walter gasped.

  But not at the spring. And surely it was not this spring that Georgia had written about in her notes because the spring in all its three-alarm heat was merely peripheral. What was central—what made it inconsequential, what was stopping my heart like it must have stopped hers—was the rip in the earth.

  The little pocket of land was split nearly in two. Steam rose from the fissure and laid bare the reddish soil of the banks so that it looked like an open wound.

  An old nightmare rose, in which I’m running through the caldera as the ground beneath me rots.

  And now, up here in this hidden place o
n the outermost lip of the caldera, where the crazy dipper bathed in snowmelt and sang its happy demented song, the ground was, it seemed to me, rotting away.

  Walter gripped my arm.

  I could not move. I had the urge to run but, unlike in my nightmare, my feet were rooted. I told myself I should measure the fissure but I could not move.

  If you made a list of the phenomena that raise a volcanologist’s blood pressure, ground cracking is right up there along with quake swarms. When magma rises it forces rocks apart and deforms the ground and if the magma gets close enough to the surface the crust cracks open. And the question then becomes, is it an old crack wherein the magma subsided and there is only residual heat? Not too old—it wasn’t here back when the boys were soaking in a hot spring. It’s more recent. How recent? Is there seismicity? Because, then, we have a new worry. We have activity where there has not been activity detected before. All the activity that has been detected, that spooked us and brought Adrian Krom to town, has been in the caldera’s south moat.

  Georgia came in search of a hot spring but what she found was truly new.

  “No way out?” Walter said.

  “From here?” I said. “For her? For us?”

  “Lord knows.”

  Get Lindsay, I thought. Get her now. I said, “We need to get Lindsay.”

  And it was speaking her name—like cold water in my face—that got me moving. Got Walter moving.

  We paced the fissure, keeping clear of the steaming mud, measuring the displacement across the crack. This thing was measurable in meters.

  I wanted Lindsay. I wanted a temperature probe; I knew it was hot down there but was it volcanically feverish? I wanted a tape measure and a gas collector and a camera but most of all I wanted Lindsay.

  The dipper gave a fluting cry and funneled back into the rockfall.

  We followed, pausing just long enough to scoop handfuls of the soil near the spring and dump it in our pockets. Then we bolted. I was burrowing back through the rockfall in the dark when I had a moment of clammy fear that someone would be waiting when we crawled out.