Earthquake Games

by Bonnie Ramthun

  “Hello,” Marcia said uncertainly. “Are you Lady Jane? I mean—er?” She felt like a fool, but it seemed the right thing to say. The woman’s fierce glare dissolved into a grudging smile.

  “That’s me, although the Brits wouldn’t like me claiming a title just like that,” she said, in a rich, throaty voice. Her voice was beautiful, like music. “Daniel told me he’s lent you the spare room.”

  “I hope that’s all right,” Marcia said uncertainly. “I had planned to camp for this vacation, and the motels are so expensive this time of year . . .”

  “Oh,” Jane said, and the line of her shoulders relaxed a trifle. She came into Daniel’s study, filling it to bursting. She had her daughter’s solidness, draped in that wildly woven shawl, and as she came into the light, Marcia realized she wasn’t a whole lot younger than herself. She was perhaps fifty, with the radiant skin of a woman who’d spent a lot of time outdoors, with no makeup at all. Lines bracketed her eyes and mouth, lines of a life well lived. Her hair was a pumpkin orange shot with gray, rich and coarse and spread over her shawl like a cloak. She was absolutely beautiful, and Marcia understood instantly why Daniel Grantham loved her. And perhaps why Lady Jane wouldn’t marry her young and handsome schoolteacher.

  “I can go back to the motel, if you feel uncomfortable,” Marcia offered. “Truly, I don’t want to be a bother.”

  “You’ll have to get a motel in Pueblo, if you want one,” Jane said dryly, dropping into an ancient armchair wedged into the corner. “The Rabble’s here.”

  “Oh, shit,” Marcia said. “Er, I’m sorry.”

  “No problem,” Jane said, with a shake of her head and a wave of a sturdy hand. “I mean real rabble. The news organizations. Sightings. The Skeptical Enquirer. And every MUFON member who can get some time off work.”

  “Because of Krista?” Marcia asked. “This is awful. Daniel and I think we’ve determined this isn’t UFO-related. That’s what I was reading about, news reports of rapes and murders in the Front Range. I didn’t—”

  “Daniel told me you found the body. You really did, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Marcia said, and then understood. “You thought I was a reporter, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Jane said. “But I can see you’re not now. Daniel is a brilliant man, but he lacks the cynicism he needs in his chosen field of . . . expertise. I was prepared to bounce you out on your arse if you’d fed him some cock-and-bull story just to worm your way in here for a story.”

  “Why do you think I’m real?” Marcia asked, fascinated.

  “Your aura. Your honest face. Your politeness. I’m the true cynic in this family, Miz Fowler. I make judgements based on a thousand clues and call it intuition. But I’m never wrong.”

  “I’m glad I’m not a reporter,” Marcia said humbly, and Jane laughed. She laughed the way she looked, a full-bellied lioness roar that brought Sara stomping to the doorway.

  “Hey Marcia,” she said happily. “The whole town is going nuts. Did you see?”

  “I’m clueless,” Marcia sighed. This was going to be much more difficult now that someone had tipped off the media. Who it was, she’d like to know. That might point in a direction that would be interesting. She clicked off her Web browser and disconnected from the phone line.

  She’d traveled back to Daniel’s house early that morning after checking out of her motel room, not stopping for breakfast. She was right in her guess; Sara had fixed breakfast for her, an enormous plate of eggs and toast. The eggs were scrambled badly and were rather rubbery, but the toast was hot, and Sara provided homemade chokecherry jam. Thus she had missed what was undoubtedly the beginning of a media circus. She’d spent the whole day buried in Daniel’s books and computer. She hadn’t turned on the little television at all. Daniel took himself and Sara off to school not long after her hoped-for breakfast. She was amazed and gratified at his trust in her, leaving her alone at his house all day. She’d have to leave the valley, otherwise. She lived off a pension and limited social security, and she really couldn’t afford to spend nights in a motel and eat at restaurants all the time. Not if she still wanted to make that trip to Stonehenge at Christmas.

  “So what’s that in the oven?” Sara demanded. “Did you make supper, Marcia?”

  “I cobbled a lasagna together,” Marcia said. She’d taken a lunch break earlier that included making lasagna for supper. There were no lasagna noodles, but there was an old bag of egg noodles, so she used those, along with some deer burger and mozzarella cheese and canned spaghetti sauce. It wasn’t real lasagna, more like Italian food in layers. “I hope you don’t mind. I thought I could fix you dinner.”

  “Fine by me,” Sara said. “Have to do homework. Later.” She left, and Marcia heard every step as she thumped her way upstairs. She looked at Jane and smiled at the bemused look on the other woman’s face, a look of love and exasperation and happiness.

  “You couldn’t make me do homework when I was her age,” Jane said with a shake of her head. “I had to be dragged. My room was always a disaster. Sara’s room looks like a magazine photo. If she hadn’t come from my body right in front of me, I’d think the fairies brought her.”

  “Very solid fairies,” Marcia remarked. Jane grinned.

  “Exactly!” she said, but her look faded quickly into worry. “Daniel told me a few things, enough to send me back from Maria’s house without finishing the weave. We talked a Navaho weaver into coming up from the reservation, and we’ve spent the last week working with him. I’ll just have to catch him some other time, if ever,” she said, and chewed her lip.

  “Krista was murdered by a human,” Marcia said firmly.

  “Daniel is sure of it,” Jane replied. “After he spent the evening with you, and listened to your account, and after sleeping on it, he’s sure. So I drove Sara home today instead of letting her catch the bus.”

  “Can Daniel talk to the principal? The administration?” Marcia asked, then bit her lip as Jane gave her an I-thought-you-were-smarter-than-that look.

  “Of course, and he has, and he’ll be talking to Sheriff Gonzalez today. A very nice pig, as pigs go,” she said. “Even with Beth, that fat, pampered witch of a sister he’s saddled with. He doesn’t believe, but he’ll work with Daniel. Grudgingly. Maybe not so grudgingly now, since he’s not talking abduction but some kind of bad human.”

  “Very bad human,” Marcia said, her mind supplying her with a fresh image of Krista, crumpled and dead on the sand.

  “So,” Jane said, standing up in a swirl of shawl and hair, “let’s go open some wine to go with that lasagna, which smells wonderful. You can tell me about yourself, and I’ll tell you about myself, all those girlish things. And if Serial Killer comes through the door, I’ll be Scarlett O’Hara and shoot him in the face, and you can be Melanie and faint in the doorway.”

  “Melanie didn’t faint in the doorway,” Marcia said primly. “She’d gotten that god-awful heavy shotgun and she was ready to use it. Besides, why do you get to be Scarlett?”

  “Because I’m bigger than you,” Jane said, as solidly as her daughter. Marcia giggled like a girl and followed Jane to the kitchen.

  Briargate Subdivision, Colorado Springs, Colorado

  When the doorbell rang, Joe realized he hadn’t brushed his teeth all day. And they’d had garlic on their pizza last night, and he’d sweated right through his T-shirt at least twice, leaving dried salt rings under his arms and down the front of his chest. He jumped for the bedroom and grabbed a fresh shirt, snatched his toothbrush from the bathroom and tried to stick the toothbrush in his mouth while pulling his old shirt over his head. The doorbell rang again before he untangled himself. Cursing under his breath, he pulled the fresh T-shirt over his belly and opened the door with his toothbrush still in his mouth.

  “Hey, Joe,” Eileen said, smiling. She looked tired, more tired than he’d seen her for a long time. There were shadows under her remarkable blue eyes and her mouth looked pinched. She was gorgeous.
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  “Hey,” he said, “Let me finith with my teef.” Eileen followed him inside. He gestured at his computer study and rinsed his mouth in the bathroom. He quickly swabbed at his armpits with his deodorant, much like pouring perfume over a great big dead skunk, but it was worth a try.

  “Wow, what’s this thing?” Eileen asked. The Thing was sitting on his second desk, and was the reason he smelled like roadkill and hadn’t brushed his teeth. He hadn’t eaten today either, he suddenly realized. Well, whatever. The Thing was an old laptop personal computer, re-wired extensively and running Linux, the personal computer version of Unix. Extra battery packs were duct-taped to the bottom along with an extra hard drive. A special fan he’d salvaged from a very old Macintosh whirred off the rearranged guts of the back end. It was portable still, barely, though he wouldn’t try to take it on an airplane. The extra battery packs made it look like a computer timing device wired to a bunch of C-4 plastic explosives.

  “This is Frankenputer,” Joe said. “And you are going to love what she’s going to show you tonight.”

  “Your theories were correct?” Eileen asked eagerly.

  “My theories were correct. Let me show you,” Joe said. “You are not going to believe this. I don’t believe this, and you know what I do for a living.”

  “Yes I do,” Eileen said absently. She sat down in his guest chair. Joe took his own well-used office chair and put his arm around her. She did not smell like roadkill. She smelled faintly of apricot soap and faintly of something which was really just Eileen. She was warm and soft, and he kissed her temple.

  “You okay?” he asked. “Want to get right to it, or do you want food? Water?”

  “Let’s get to it,” Eileen said, making Joe adore her all the more. Unlike most female types, who seemed to have to go through elaborate dances of drinks and snacks and conversation, Eileen could cut directly to the point. Food, sex, work—she knew what she wanted.

  “Here we go, then,” he said, and hit the Enter key with a flourish.

  The screen, dark at first, changed to a globe, almost exactly like the simulation globe from the War Gaming Center. Eileen, who’d seen her share of war simulations a year ago, gasped in surprise.

  “This is from Schriever?” she said. “Isn’t that illegal? I mean—”

  “This isn’t all from Schriever,” he said dryly. “I pirated certain parts to get my world display, but only the unclassified ones. I suppose I’d get in trouble if I tried to sell this as some sort of commercial package, but I’m not violating any rules. So don’t worry. I like my job too much to risk it.”

  “Good,” Eileen said. “That’s a relief. So—why did you need to do this?”

  “I had to build this laptop today to power my software,” Joe said. “Incredibly complicated stuff, simulations. I have eight CPUs working in here and a different operating system, Open Linux, that makes your usual personal computer operating system look like garbage, and—well, I won’t go into boring, computer-geek detail. Let’s just say I’ve got a good simulation of the earth, right here.”

  “Okay,” Eileen replied intently. “Show me.”

  “Here we go,” Joe said, clicking on a pull-down bar that showed a series of names. “Here are all the girlie pictures that Jim Leetsdale took such care to store on his disks. I’m going to click on this one, Tia.” He did so, and the pull-down bar disappeared. “Here we go.” He clicked on another series of controls that dropped their point of view from a near-earth orbit down to an airplane-level view of Central America.

  On the earth in front of them, a rainbow band of colors appeared on the green and brown tones. The colors were jagged and thickly drawn, like paint strokes. Suddenly the color bands moved, bumping against each other and sliding up and down on the map. The colors stopped moving. Joe let out his breath. He hadn’t run the simulation enough to know if it would run perfectly every time. Usually software decided to go belly-up when it was first demonstrated to a new person.

  “Wow,” Eileen said. “Okay. What the hell was that?”

  “An earthquake,” Joe said. “That was an earthquake that took place in Colombia this morning at 4:40 A.M. Mountain Standard Time. A 4.2 on the Richter scale, not a big one. I looked it up on the Internet.”

  “An earthquake,” Eileen said.

  “Yes indeed. Jim Leetsdale’s girlie pictures are all earthquake simulations. Now let me show you an interesting one.” Joe pulled down the menu of girl’s names and clicked on “Celeste.” He pulled his world angle back to a low earth orbit and then dropped toward the United States. He hovered over Colorado, and felt Eileen go tense and still next to him as the strange pattern of colored lines appeared. The lines humped and crawled and then disappeared.

  “The Colorado earthquake,” Eileen said.

  “Our earthquake,” Joe agreed happily.

  “So his girlie pictures are earthquake simulations. That tells us what the project is all about, I guess,” Eileen said heavily. She leaned into him, slumped against him, really. She really was tired. She hadn’t made the connection.

  “Leetsdale was killed the morning of the Colorado earthquake,” Joe said gently.

  “So he was—oh!” Eileen straightened. “He knew it was going to happen?”

  “He knew it was going to happen. He didn’t simulate earthquakes that had occurred, he simulated earthquakes that were going to occur. That’s why I had to wait until 4:40 this morning.”

  “The Colombia earthquake.”

  “The Colombia earthquake,” Joe said. He grinned at her. “I can think of lots of ethical reasons why a project like this would be kept a big secret.”

  “If they can predict earthquakes, why don’t they warn people?” Eileen asked.

  “That’s the ethical dilemma, yes. If you warn a population of an impending earthquake, do the resulting deaths from panic outnumber the deaths from the quake itself?”

  “So logical,” Eileen murmured, scrubbing at her forehead. “But so true.”

  “Maybe Leetsdale couldn’t handle the pressure of watching people die in earthquakes he knew about in advance. What if he decided to go public with this?”

  “They’d fire him and discredit him,” Eileen said. “The government doesn’t make hits on people and stage suicides. They can just make him appear to be mentally unstable, crazy. Or they’d arrest him before he had a chance to get his information out.”

  “Well, maybe,” Joe said. He held his own opinions on what the government was capable of doing. “But he hid a bunch of very interesting data in a bunch of girlie pictures. Why, if he wasn’t going to go public with it?”

  “It’s a good premise,” Eileen said. She reached forward and slid her hand under Joe’s, which was still resting on the little touch mouse pad on his laptop. The feel of her hand under his palm sent forks of electricity down his arm. He wanted to make love to her immediately.

  “Let me try one,” she said. She pulled down the menu of girls’ names and picked one halfway down the list. Juanita. The date of the file, which Leetsdale had changed to mean the date and time of the earthquake, appeared on the upper left corner of the screen. Eileen looked, puzzled, but there were no jagged lines.

  “We don’t know where this one is,” Joe said, and moved her hand on the mouse like a father guiding a child’s hand. He adjusted the picture so that their view rose and hovered at earth orbit, and he ran the simulation again. The squiggles appeared, very faintly, in the middle of North America. Joe dropped them towards the earth with tapping motions on the mouse pad. They were suddenly hovering over the Midwest of the United States, Missouri perhaps. The squiggles appeared roughly along the Mississippi River.

  “Wow, those are big,” Joe said. He felt a small chill, different from the one he felt when Eileen’s hand crept under his palm. This one was centered in his back and was cold.

  “They’re really big,” Eileen said. “But there’s no—is there a fault line in the Mississippi Valley?”

  “Let me consult the mach
ine,” Joe said. He spun around in his chair and duck-walked himself and the chair over to his main computer desk. He ran an active Web site from his home, so his computer was always on and always on the Web. With a few quick keystrokes, he opened a search window on his computer screen.

  “Earthquakes, fault lines, Mississippi,” Eileen murmured, duck-walking her chair over and reading his rapid typing.

  “Let’s see,” he said, leaning back and putting his arm around her. She nestled into his chest with a sigh and closed her eyes while the machine hummed. Joe began to think of food for the first time that day. Would Eileen mind pizza again? A big wheel of pepperoni and mushroom would taste just right . . . his stomach awoke and growled furiously, right below her ear. She sat up straight and started laughing.“You’re hungry,” she said. “Did you eat today?”

  “No, I forgot,” he said, thinking that if he had a choice between lovemaking with Eileen and a pizza, he would be hard-pressed.

  “Let’s order a pizza,” she said. Joe pressed both hands to his heart and rolled his eyes.

  “My woman! You read my mind.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said dryly. “Pizza is the only delivery food out here, and we’re not leaving for a while.”

  “Nope,” Joe said, “you are correct. But I still adore you.”

  Eileen laughed and leaned forward for a quick, hard kiss. Then she spun her chair around and reached for the phone.

  “Hey, it’s coming up,” Joe said, as Eileen speed-dialed the pizza.

  “The usual,” Eileen ordered into the phone. Their pizza service knew their address from caller-ID on their phone, and knew their usual order from their computer system. Joe loved that. He supposed there were pizza ingredients other than pepperoni and mushrooms, but he couldn’t imagine what they might be.