At Fault

by Beth Martin

  He poured himself a cup of coffee and opened the blinds for the living room window. The view was just the street in front of the building. Cars zipped by as pedestrians walked along slowly. There was a single tree planted across the street―the only green thing in view. He took a slow sip from his mug. Grace’s laptop sat on a side table. Maybe he could do his class conference on her computer and go over to his office a little later.

  He could use also her shower. The thought of not having to leave and venture to another building in order to get clean was so wonderful, he had to act on it immediately. Grace had insisted that he could make himself at home.

  The hot, steamy shower felt amazing. For once, he wasn’t in a rush. There was no line of people waiting for his stall like in the locker room. When he lathered up a bit of her shampoo to wash his hair, the whole room smelled of strawberry. He rubbed it all over his scalp and beard, figuring that smelling like Grace for a day wouldn’t be bad.

  Once clean and dressed, he took a seat on the sofa with her computer and logged onto his university account. He went to the class website and created a link for the day’s video conference. Since he was logged in as the lead of the conference, his students would be able to see his video feed, and he could hear his students’ questions. There was also a virtual whiteboard where anyone could write text and draw diagrams to share with the entire class.

  His lecture for the day covered the composition of earth’s interior. His notes on the topic were already posted on the course page, so he was able to open them in the background and go over them in a bit more detail.

  As he was wrapping up the lecture, the door opened, and Grace came in wearing charcoal slacks and a blush-colored blouse. “Oh good, you’re up,” she said.

  “Who’s that?” a student asked over the voice chat.

  “That’s my cue to wrap this up,” Peter said. “Don’t forget you have homework due Wednesday by midnight. Email me if you have any questions. That’s all, good-bye.” He closed the laptop and then turned his attention to Grace. “I was starting to get worried about you. You left your phone here.”

  “Oh, right. I didn’t want any distractions. I left you a note on the fridge.”

  “I didn’t see a note,” he said, turning to look at the bare refrigerator. She didn’t even have magnets on it.

  “Oh, come on! I swear I left a note.” She walked over to the fridge, then knelt down and looked under it. “Of course. It fell off and slid underneath.” She got back up and held out the pink, flower-shaped post-it.

  “I didn’t want to wake you this morning,” she continued. “You looked so peaceful.”

  “Your mattress turned out to be much more comfortable than my sleeping bag on a basement floor,” he said.

  She fixed herself a cup of coffee, adding her signature heap of sugar, before sitting down next to him on the sofa. “I talked to my dad this morning.”

  He nodded, waiting for her to continue.

  “Synergy Power Systems has been funding a bunch of new research projects recently. Geothermal energy, solar energy, hydropower, wind energy, the works. This is public knowledge. It gets them all kinds of good PR. I guess doing all the laser drilling and increasing the US oil output three-fold gave Synergy Power Systems the image that they don’t care about the environment. The last thing that they want is for the fracking activity in Colorado to escalate and cause huge geological impacts like tectonic plates splitting apart.”

  “You think someone is trying to harm their image?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure.” She set her mug on the coffee table, then leaned in close. “When I asked my dad if we could use the survey equipment normally used for finding oil reserves to study the damage caused by the earthquakes, he flat out refused.”

  “I can’t get any tools from SLAU either,” he said.

  “So SPS and Dr. Hall are both trying to hide something.”

  “We just don’t know what.”

  “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” she insisted.

  ···

  It was surprisingly hard to keep focused at his office. Peter’s mind kept drifting off, thinking about last night and what a relief it had been to reconnect with Grace. Every time he took a deep breath, he got a whiff of her shampoo from his beard which sent his mind wandering all over again.

  What he needed was a change of scenery. The ambient noise of a café along with the strong overpowering scent of fresh ground coffee beans would help him keep on task. There was a coffee cart in the student center, but he decided to travel a little farther to The Mug, an independent coffee shop just outside of campus.

  With a steaming cup of fair-trade coffee, he took a seat in the busy café and opened his laptop. He started by reading a paper by Dr. Onishi from the most recent Geology Impact Journal. Onishi had set up an enhanced geothermal system in a much deeper well than the one Peter had studied. His theory was that the deeper well would heat the water to an even higher temperature, leading to less heat loss overall as the water came back up. Although this geothermal generator produced more energy per gallon of water than one on the surface, it still wasn’t anywhere close the efficiency Onishi had theorized.

  Peter’s phone started buzzing in his pocket. He should have ignored the interruption, but decided to answer when he saw it was a call from Blake.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, man,” Blake’s cheery voice came through the phone. “You have a good time last night?”

  “Yes, I did,” Peter said.

  “I’m so sorry I stuck you with the check. I was hoping to make it up to you. Let me buy you dinner tonight and we can catch the Lakers game.”

  “Oh, uh, you don’t need to make anything up to me.” After the previous evening, Peter had gotten more than enough interaction with Blake. “Grace settled the check.”

  “Well then, I’ll take her out to watch the game. Anyway, the reason I called is because Grace said you were looking for a new place to stay. I happen to have an extra bedroom at my house. We could be roommates! How does that sound?”

  Peter couldn’t think of a place he wanted to move into less than Blake’s home. He was a nice enough person, but the two had very different lifestyles. However, if one night at Grace’s loft taught him anything, it was that he needed a real bed to rest his head on.

  “You’ll have to help out with rent, of course,” Blake continued. “But until me and Katherine get hitched, you are more than welcome to stay.”

  “All right,” Peter agreed.

  “I’m still taking you out to dinner. Game starts at six, so I’ll pick you up around then.”

  “Sure,” Peter said.

  He hung up his phone and tried to concentrate on his laptop in front of him. Having finished Onishi’s paper, he wanted to find another article to read. Even though he had already looked up all of Dr. Hall’s papers on geothermal energy and its relation to fault lines, Peter did a search for Dr. Hall’s work.

  A new paper was listed on Academic Archive, a website which held papers that hadn’t yet been published, authored by Dr. T. Hall and E. Young.

  He opened the paper and scanned over it. Then he read through the whole thing. No, there was no way.

  “The Split of the North American Plate Influenced by Subterranean Oil Reserves.” The article blamed oil fields for causing instability in the earth’s crust―not the fracking or drilling used to get to the oil, but the simple existence of the oil reserves beneath the surface. Peter knew for a fact that the less-dense cavities underground would have crumbled long ago it they were structurally unstable, and the tremors from something like that didn’t reach anywhere near the magnitude of the earthquakes they had experienced recently. The article never mentioned the drilling tests or explosives Peter had found.

  The most infuriating part was that this paper had already been accepted for publication in a future edition of International Journal of Earth Sciences, which was the premier journal for geology. Who could possibly believe the wild theories
in the paper enough to accept it for publication?

  He slammed his laptop shut, gaining the attention of a few of the other patrons at The Mug. What could he even do? He knew the paper was obviously wrong. Whether or not the North American plate was splitting, he wasn’t sure, but he did know that the earthquakes were somehow linked to the regularly spaced caverns he and Autumn had found in that large well.

  He didn’t want to believe it, but he strongly suspected that Dr. Hall wasn’t the only geologist trying to hide something.

  ···

  “You can put your stuff anywhere,” Blake said as Peter surveyed the interior of the house. “This is the living room, kitchen’s over there,” he pointed to the left, “bathroom’s at the end of the hall. You’re the second door on the left.”

  Peter poked around the house before setting his duffle bag in his new room. The four-bedroom was actually a duplex. It was a long, sprawling house situated on a tiny lot.

  Blake came up to the door and leaned against the frame with his hands shoved in his pockets. “Stay as long as you need, but if you’re still here in the fall, I’ll be moving out and you’ll be in charge of paying the whole amount for rent.”

  There was no way Peter could stay that long. His post doc at SLAU was coming to a close in a few months, and although he didn’t have any plans after that, they certainly didn’t include staying in LA.

  “I appreciate all this,” Peter said. His bedroom already had a bed, desk, and dresser. The tiny room was everything Peter would need.

  ···

  Peter settled into a new routine. He’d get up and ready at seven, followed by coffee from the student center. In his office, he would check his email and also look up Eileen’s Facebook page. Her travels and activities through winter seemed almost random, but he hoped to figure out something that would lead him to Dr. Hall.

  One morning, she made a post which seemed promising. “Spring break with my favorite person!” Attached was a picture of a bus ticket from Aspen to Denver.

  Peter barely made it through his online lecture. All he could think about was going to Last Chance to find Dr. Hall and confront him, and he knew Grace would be anxious to help.

  He ended his class fifteen minutes early, then locked the door to his office. He pulled up Grace’s work number on his phone and called her.

  “Thank you for calling Synergy Power Systems, where a bright today leads to a bright tomorrow. How may I direct your call?”

  “Hi, Grace.”

  “Hey, Peter. What’s up?”

  “Did you make plans for spring break?”

  “I was going to spend the week at my parents’ vacation house in Malibu working on my tan.”

  “You want to come with me to Last Chance?” he asked.

  “God, why would I ever want to go there?” He smiled at the obvious sarcasm in her voice.

  “I’m pretty sure Dr. Hall is going to be there.”

  “Why do we need to be there?” she asked.

  “Everything that I’ve seen and calculated indicates that the North American Plate hasn’t actually split. In order for him to secure his fame, he’s going to need another earthquake. I’m thinking we might be able to catch him in the act of planting the next series of explosives.”

  “I’m buying the plane tickets right now. We’ll leave Friday after work.”

  “Great,” Peter said.

  “I’ll see you tonight at your place for dinner.”

  “See you.” Peter hung up. He needed to stop Dr. Hall, and this was his chance. However, not only was spring break the perfect time to get away and prevent geological catastrophe, but it also marked the end of Peter’s time at SLAU. He still didn’t have a job lined up, and all of the geology postdocs and staff positions were already filled. On top of that, he now had a huge balance on his airline credit card from his travel between California and Colorado, and he needed to come up with next month’s rent.

  But his personal problems seemed insignificant compared to the North American plate splitting apart. And with Grace by his side, he felt confident in his ability to not only prevent future damage to the continent, but also to protect the integrity of geological research.

  ···

  “Should we try to keep hidden from Dr. Hall, or just go storming in?” Grace asked from the passenger seat of Autumn’s car. Peter sat in back with the piles of camping gear Autumn’s boyfriend was graciously loaning them.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Autumn said, glancing at Grace. “I thought you two were just going to collect rocks and stuff, not confront a geo-terrorist. How do you even know he’ll be there?”

  Peter began explaining, “Dr. Hall has a paper getting published which states that the plate has split, and that the cause was fracking. But the plate hasn’t split―”

  “Yet,” Grace interjected.

  “And we already know that explosives were the cause,” he said.

  “There’s no way Synergy Power Systems is behind this. There’s nothing to gain by bombing middle-of-nowhere Colorado,” Grace added.

  “So, he’s blowing up the US for what? An academic paper?” Autumn asked.

  “A discovery like this would be huge,” Peter said.

  “I’m sure there’s an easier way to make an impact,” Autumn said.

  “He’s just taken it literally,” Grace said.

  Autumn stopped her car next to the cracked foundation that had once held Peter’s lab. “I don’t see an RV, or any other evidence that someone else is already here.”

  “It’s only Saturday,” Peter said. “He’s got all of spring break to carry out his plan.”

  ···

  The next few days went like a typical camping trip. Peter, Grace, and Autumn spent their days hiking up and down the side of the chasm, taking pictures, and making notes of any signs of other people having been there. They ate dinner by campfire and slept in Jared’s enormous three-season tent.

  Peter began to lose hope that Dr. Hall and Eileen would be coming to Last Chance. He checked Eileen’s social media pages frequently. She was posting pictures of restaurants and parks in Denver, but didn’t mention anything about her travel companion or plans to come out to Last Chance.

  By Thursday, he was totally demoralized. Grace seemed to have an endless sense of adventure, but Autumn was also starting to get tired of their trip. Peter checked his phone for anything new as they cooked yet another dinner of veggie dogs on the fire. Yet again, the chasm remained unchanged, and the only footprints they saw were their own.

  As he scrolled through the new post on his Facebook feed, an image caught his eye. “They’re here!” he said.

  Grace hopped up and ran up to him, looking over his shoulder to see the screen of his phone. “Really?” The screen showed a selfie of Eileen and a man wearing a safari-style hat and large sunglasses followed by a picture of the sun setting behind the Rocky Mountains.

  “Is that Dr. Hall?” she asked.

  “Definitely.”

  The caption said, “Enjoying the sunset with my favorite person!” The details on the photo indicated it had been taken at a hotel in Limon, a small town a hundred miles south of Last Chance.

  “So what should we do?” Autumn asked.

  Peter tucked his phone back in his pocket. “We wait.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Grace had volunteered to stay up late and keep an eye out for anything suspicious. Peter didn’t think it was necessary, but she had seemed so happy when he conceded to the idea.

  “Peter,” she whispered, shaking his shoulder to rouse him from a deep sleep. “Peter, wake up. They’re here.”

  He jolted upright. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “A red sports car. It went driving by super fast. It was them―I know it. We should follow them.”

  “Is Autumn up?”

  She gave a little frown. “No.”

  “I’ll go wake her, then the three of us will go find them.”

  She sighed. “I’ll wake her up
. Just get your shoes on, we need to head out.”

  With Autumn awake, they piled in the Jeep and sped through the desert, following the tracks made by the red sports car.

  “Maybe you should turn off the headlights,” Grace suggested.

  “I turn off the headlights, I can’t see their tracks. They stay on.”

  “But they’ll see us coming,” Grace complained.

  “They’re going to know we’re there when we stop them from igniting any explosives,” Peter pointed out.

  Grace sighed, settling down in her seat in the back. She looked nervous. She kept alternating between wringing her hands together and tapping her fingers against the seat beside her.

  When they saw the red car parked ahead, Autumn dimmed the headlights to the daytime running lights as she slowed down.

  “Turn them back on,” Peter said.

  “I don’t see them,” Grace said, sitting up straighter to get a better view.

  “Oh my God!” Autumn exclaimed as she slammed on the breaks. Right in front of them was a gigantic hole. It was easily three hundred yards across and much larger than any of the others they had seen.

  “Holy shit,” Grace said as she jumped from the Jeep and dashed toward the edge of well.

  “Do you see them?” he asked softly from behind her, not wanting to get too close to the edge in the dark.

  “No,” she whispered back.

  “Hello!” Autumn called out in a shout. Grace hissed at her to be quiet, but it was too late. Their presence was now obvious.

  Peter heard the whirring of the blades from a drone. “Autumn, turn on the headlights.” She dashed back to the car and turned on the brights. As she did, they got a brief glimpse as the drone, loaded down with a heavy box, descended into the well.

  “You’re too late,” Dr. Hall’s voice came from a distance. He was around the side of the well to their left, holding the controller for his beloved flying toy.

  “You need to stop right now!” Grace shouted.

  “Wait,” Peter whispered, holding Grace’s arm to prevent her from running up to Dr. Hall.

  “I had hoped the first two earthquakes would be enough,” Dr. Hall said as the trio walked cautiously toward him. “See, I was afraid of hurting the CEO of Synergy Power Systems’ daughter. But when you ensured Peter’s stupid geothermal energy project got funding, that left less money for me. So, I didn’t really care if you got hurt. Now you’re actively trying to get in the way. But great scientific discovery doesn’t happen without a little collateral damage.”