Quicksilver (reissue)

by Toni Dwiggins

  And then she shook off the hypnosis and pulled the gun out of the pool.

  The mercury slid off the gun like a shedding snakeskin.

  She pointed the barrel downward. Silver ran out of the muzzle.

  A tiny stream, and then drops. Silver bullets.

  “Who are you?”

  Gail Hawkins stiffened, jerked, tried to scramble to her feet, tried to see through the sudden blaze of red coloring her vision, tried to understand how she could have been taken unaware again, and she turned then, swiveling on her knees because she could not rise to her feet, and she saw the shadow of the man standing in front of the hollow and she squeezed her eyes shut for just a moment, long enough to clear her vision, and when she looked again she saw Robert Shelburne standing there, haloed in her golden vision.

  He'd surprised her.

  Never ever again would someone surprise her.

  She pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTER 41

  The Forest Service ranger apologized, explaining that his helicopter was not immediately available, but promising to lead a party on horseback to launch the search, and cautioning that could take a few hours to reach us.

  I told him I understood.

  I told him I'd keep the sat phone handy, and explained that getting a signal up here was touch and go. Indeed, I'd had to go halfway down Skinny Canyon to find a spot where the high walls did not interfere.

  I pocketed the phone and headed back up to the notch.

  Entering Enchantment Valley, this second time, was vaguely unsettling. All that had occurred here was already hardening into memory. Over there at the tunnel mouth was where Henry lined us up, holding that gun in his pink peeling hands, and hired us to hunt for his gold. Over there, toward Skinny Creek, damned if Henry's campfire didn't still give off a whisper of greasy smoke. And inside the tunnel, and up in Sluiceway Canyon, and at the grotto...all of that was past tense. It all felt like it had happened ages ago, and like it was happening right now.

  I guessed I was at sixes and sevens, a phrase Walter liked to use to describe that feeling of disarray when one thing comes to an end and the next thing has not yet begun.

  I shrugged and headed for Henry's tent in the woods.

  Nobody there, at least outside.

  It was conceivable that Walter and Robert had gone into the tent and crashed in exhaustion on Henry's sleeping bag. That did not sound like a bad idea. Tight fit, though, all three of us recovering in there.

  I came to the tent and said, “Hey.”

  Silence.

  Were they actually sleeping in there?

  I spotted Walter's dirty sodden socks crumpled near a tent peg. I pushed aside the tent flap and peeked inside. Nobody there.

  Where, then?

  Was it possible they had gone into the tunnel? Time to kill, and Walter figured he might as well put his eyes on a slice of that deep blue lead?

  No. Not now. Not after everything.

  Then was it possible they had gone off in search of Henry? Maybe they caught a glimpse. Heard a sound. And had no time to write me a note in the dirt. Had time only to dash off and try to catch him.

  That did not sit well with me. But it was the only explanation I could come up with.

  Which way, then?

  Given the direction Henry had gone when he left us at the grotto, my best guess was that he'd reached Enchantment Valley and turned to the right, up the valley, up toward the far end where it narrowed and Skinny Canyon continued up toward the higher ridges. He certainly hadn't gone to his tent. Or, I amended, maybe he had. To get something. And left all that other stuff behind. And then off he went.

  I abandoned the tent and shouted “Hey!”

  No reply. From anybody.

  Not yet alarmed, but beginning to feel unsettled, I set off with the intention of exploring the upper reaches of Skinny Canyon.

  Along the way I came of course to the intersection of Enchantment Valley and Sluiceway Canyon, and I just had to look in that direction, the way a rubbernecker just has to look at the grisly scene of a car accident—not expecting to see Walter and Robert because I could dredge up no reason they would return there. Up where the grotto waited.

  Something caught my eye.

  Something was on the ground.

  I did not yet scream, I did not yet panic, I did not yet abandon the idea that an exhausted Robert Shelburne would have decided to stretch out and take a nap although for the love of everything good and right, why would he choose to sleep on the rough ground there outside the grotto of hell instead of taking his nap in the damned tent?

  I ran.

  Fear.

  Relief.

  It was indeed Robert. It wasn't Walter sprawled on his back with a gunshot chest.

  Fear again.

  I spun around, looking for the shooter.

  Nobody.

  I wanted to scream and shout and then I wanted to be small and silent.

  Where was the shooter?

  Panic.

  Where was Walter?

  Twisting, turning, scanning the ridgetops, looking upcanyon, I stumbled over to Robert and dropped to my knees and put my fingers to his neck to feel for the carotid artery although I had no expectation whatsoever of finding a pulse. His open green eyes held no pain, no life. His soot-streaked face was slack. The wound on his chest was not actively leaking blood. It had done, though. Drying blood smeared across his green Club One Fitness T-shirt. The shirt was rucked up to reveal his lower abdomen. There was no rise and fall, no sign of respiration.

  There was, though, the tooled leather belt with the big silver buckle.

  I crouched lower, as if that would make me a smaller target, and turtled my head around, looking in the depths of desperation for some sign of Walter.

  Where was Walter?

  I looked back at the belt buckle circling Robert Shelburne's lifeless body.

  Quicksilver.

  CHAPTER 42

  I got to my feet and ran.

  Shouting.

  Up Sluiceway Canyon to look for him in the storage shed or the water tank and then into the tunnel, all the way through following my headlamp and my memory, and then exiting back into Enchantment Valley and circling back to where I had begun.

  To the grotto.

  To Robert Shelburne's corpse.

  ~ ~ ~

  I wanted to keep going, keep shouting for Walter, I was dizzy with the need to keep going and find him.

  Go where?

  Nowhere until I could draw enough breath to see straight.

  It took a full minute and an act of monstrous will to calm my heart rate and focus my mind, to get a grip.

  Okay.

  What do you know?

  To begin with, wherever Walter had gone, he had surely gone with Henry. I looked at the wound in Robert's chest and knew that Walter had not gone voluntarily.

  What I needed to do now was understand what Henry wanted.

  Soul-wounded Henry Shelburne.

  Okay, he had lured his brother here, seeking revenge. He had played out his revenge in the grotto. And then he had walked away. And then, I figured, the hatred for his brother still raged, it had not been quenched in the quicksilver pool, it had driven Henry to come back and finish the game.

  And Walter tried to interfere?

  He would.

  But if he had, he would be lying here beside Robert Shelburne.

  So let's say Walter was still at the tent, pleased with his dry socks and maybe poking around for something to eat because he had surely worked up an appetite. And then he heard the gunshot. And he'd gone to investigate.

  And met up with Henry.

  And then the two of them left together. Walter, at gunpoint.

  So why would Henry want to take Walter along, wherever Henry was going?

  I thought again of the lure Henry used to bring his brother here—a legendary chunk of ore spritzed with gold, showing a deep blue face.

  Henry's grandfather's ore. The family legacy.
/>   Henry had gotten his revenge. Now he wanted to get his gold?

  I went very cold, putting my fear for Walter on ice, putting the clues under the microscope. I pictured the tunnel and the cemented gravel and the blue lead. I pictured the hornfels outcrop studded with crusader's crosses. I pictured the pebble Walter had found in the trough that exited the grotto, the pebble he'd displayed and used to try to lure Henry away from lighting that fire.

  Henry had been lured. And then he had turned his back on the promise of gold.

  Not any longer, I thought. Now, there was nothing to distract him from finishing the family crusade. His brother lay dead. He could turn his needs to impressing the other dead man, his father.

  And for that, he needed to hire a geologist.

  And one was right at hand. The geologist who'd lectured him about old channels intersecting older channels. The geologist who'd lectured him about a fracture spring in the hillside.

  Henry figured that Walter would know where to go next.

  That's what I needed to know. I needed to become the expert on mining and the legends and the old channels and the blue lead. I'd already done a quick study of Lindgren. I'd already seen and felt and experienced the legends in the field.

  I'd found the miserable blue lead.

  But despite all that I feared I was not good enough.

  I wasn't Walter. I was a Dogtown facsimile of a mining geologist.

  So what are you going to do, lady? Go wandering around the mountains yelling for Walter, hoping that chance will lead you to the man who is the backbone of your life?

  That's not good enough.

  You need a plan.

  Do what Walter taught you to do. Look at the evidence. Think.

  First, I walked away from Robert Shelburne.

  Second, I moved to the sluiceway and took a seat on one of the rough riffle blocks. I sat there and wondered where I would be hiding, if I were a gold-bearing seam in this neighborhood, a seam that had not yet been mined to oblivion.

  A seam that had produced a chunk of ore that caught Grandfather Shelburne's eye.

  If I were a diorite dike intruding an ancient river channel, cooking up a sheath of chiastolite hornfels—in the process creating a giant pocket where gold collected—where would I be likely to do such a thing?

  I stared at the canyon wall that encased the grotto. How about in there? That's where Walter said I would be. Somewhere in that hillside, a fracture spring eroded the material in the riffle I created. And some of those bits and pieces of rock flushed out. And Walter plucked up a piece of it—a magic pebble to distract Henry.

  I shifted my attention upcanyon, up toward the outcrop of chiastolite hornfels that I had found.

  Outcrop.

  It was, I thought, just that—the visible exposure of bedrock, the rest of which was buried in the hillside. The outcrop was a hornfels aureole, the outer ring created by the diorite dike.

  The dike and the riffle were buried.

  I knew where I was.

  I knew where the pocket of gold was.

  Somewhere in that hill.

  Okay I didn't know precisely where but I didn't give a shit.

  All I needed to know was where Walter, at gunpoint, would take Henry to find that pocket of gold.

  Well, they weren't down here.

  So they must have gone up there. Up to the ridge above, where miners dumped mercury into the ground, mercury that seeped down into this hillside.

  Miners had been at work up above.

  Had Henry Shelburne's grandfather been at work, up above?

  I got to my feet. There were two obvious routes to the ridge up above. Go to the upper end of Enchantment Valley and follow the continuation of Skinny Canyon. Or, go up Sluiceway Canyon.

  If I were Walter, which way would I go?

  I didn't really have to ask that. Sluiceway Canyon was the shorter, more direct route. Walter liked short and direct. He might be wearing Henry Shelburne's clean dry socks but he was surely in no mood for a longer trek than necessary.

  I considered, and then rejected, backtracking out of Enchantment Valley and going down to the spot where I'd got sat phone reception in order to phone the rangers again, because that would eat up time and I did not figure I had time to spare. The rangers were already coming. What more could I ask?

  Meanwhile, I did it Walter's way. Short and direct.

  I started my trek up Sluiceway Canyon, determined to be good enough.

  The alternative was unthinkable.

  CHAPTER 43

  “I've been watching you for years,” Gail said.

  She was watching him right now in front of her on the rough path. He'd already stumbled twice. She had to tell him to slow down. If he fell and broke his leg he would be of no use to her.

  She wondered if he thought he could out-hike her. Out-run her. He couldn't see her bandaged arm underneath the shirt but maybe he thought her bandaged head meant that she was weak. It didn't. She was younger and fitter than Walter and even wounded, even recently bled, she was cunning on the hunt. He had to see that. Nobody in their right mind tries to out-run a lioness.

  And she had the gun and he couldn't out-run a bullet.

  He'd paid attention to the growl in her voice. To her warning. He hiked steadily now.

  She had one more warning to give him—if he gave her any trouble—but she was saving that.

  He kept hiking, no trouble, but he didn't say anything about what she'd just told him.

  She snarled, “Did you hear me?”

  He looked over his shoulder at her.

  His eyes, she thought, were the color of the blue lead.

  “Eyes straight ahead,” she said. “Don't trip.”

  He looked straight ahead and kept going.

  And finally he said, “Watching me on the forum, I assume.”

  He'd heard her, all right. And she was glad he couldn't see her now, see her surprise. He'd known right away what she meant, where she watched him. She had wanted to surprise him, to make him wonder how she could have been watching him all that time, to make him jumpy, to make him ask. To show him how weak he was. How blind he was. But he knew right away. She said, “Yes.” She snarled the word. She curled her lip.

  He didn't ask how. He didn't ask what her identity on the forum was. Had he been watching her, her flaming gold G?

  They hiked without saying anything else for a long time.

  She decided it didn't matter what Walter knew about her, on the forum.

  She only needed him to know one thing, now.

  And then she wouldn't need him any more.

  They were hiking along a ridgetop now, following an animal trail. Deer scat. She kept an eye out for movement down below, in the canyon and the valley. She watched for the others, for Henry and Cassie. She didn't know where they went after the craziness.

  But she was sure she knew where Cassie was right now—following. She knew that by the way Walter had looked around, all worried, when she told him what she needed from him. He wasn't worried about Robert, dead on the ground. He was worried that Cassie would not find out where he went.

  Or maybe it was the other way around—he worried that Cassie would find out.

  Either way, that made him weak. And it made Gail stronger.

  The ridge and the trail bent and then bent again and now she saw that they were up above Robert Shelburne's valley. Walter was looking. She was looking. Robert was the only one down there that she could see. It was his valley, now.

  She had to admit that it still felt strange. The kill. It felt different than shooting a deer. A pig. She wasn't sure why. Maybe it was because she'd stalked Robert beforehand, and learned something about him. But she stalked deer and pigs beforehand, and learned about them. They weren't all the same. Some were stronger, some were weaker. Some were smarter. It didn't matter. In the end, blood was blood. Life was life and death was death. After that, everything rotted.

  She finally decided it felt different because Robert w
anted what she wanted. Gold. They shared that. That was a bond.

  Well, not any more. Robert was rotting now. Already a Level-0.

  She fixed her golden eyes on Walter.

  He was the center of her world now. A Level-1.

  She had never had a Level-1 before and she thought about how that felt, having one. Strange. Was that a different kind of bond? She wondered what Walter felt about her, what level he put her on. She knew that he would run away if he could. Take the gun and shoot her, if he could. But he couldn't. He was hers, now. He was smart—she'd learned that watching him on the forum—and so he had to understand. He had to know that she was his Level-1 now.

  Just like he had gotten inside her head, he said, “We can do this together, Gail. As a team.”

  Her eyes clouded. She blinked.

  “Whatever we find, you take what you want. And then I'll take what I can.”

  “What if it's in a ledge?” she asked.

  “Hammer and chisel.”

  She had those tools in her pack.

  “Nuggets,” he said.

  His voice, she thought, was strong and clear for an old man.

  He wasn't weak.

  She'd thought he was weak when she first tracked him yesterday, climbing up the rocky part of the slope. Now she had to change her thinking. Now she knew him better.

  Walter turned to look at her, his blue-lead eyes searching.

  She said, “Maybe.”

  But she knew it was impossible. He was bluffing about sharing, hoping to trick her into trusting him. Maybe he even thought she would put away the gun. That didn't make her mad. She would have done the same thing. Pretend to trust, pretend to be a team, pretend that they could share the gold.

  She said, “And then what?”

  “And then we each go our own way.”

  We each go back to Level-4, she thought.

  The wound on her head throbbed. There was no level where trust lived.

  She said, “Eyes forward. Don't trip.”

  They hiked along the ridge that on one side dropped down to Robert Shelburne's valley and on the other side flared out into an upper valley. A high spur led down from their ridge into the upper valley.