Volcano Watch Read online

  “Dante,” I said. Ye, who enter.

  “Oh yeah.” She held up her hand, took a bite of chili and a swallow of Coke.

  I said, “And that didn’t spook you, Adrian quoting that?”

  “It weirded me out but then he smiled like he’s joking, and anyway if he did anything I didn’t like all I had to do was yell and the guys would be on him.”

  “Jimbo and Bobby.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, we only go in ass deep. The whole idea is to keep near shore, I mean the location was important. So I stop and give him the chance and for a minute there I’m thinkin the guy’s wasted after all cuz he’s just not takin the bait. But that’s not it.” She stopped.

  “What is it then?”

  “He wants us to swim.”

  The knot formed, behind my breastbone. “What’d you say?”

  “I’m like, no way. It’s steaming, where he wants to go.”

  “Where did he want to go?”

  “The bench—that big slab of rock where everybody used to hang on, drink beer and grab ass. You know?”

  I nodded.

  “I say the fuckin volcano’s made the water squirrely out there. I say let’s just stay right here, it’s nice and warm, let’s do it here. Know what the dude says? Says what do you think’s making the water warm right here? Like I needed to hear that. Then he smiles. Says, how far will you go? Will you go out there?” She took on an almost thoughtful look. “It was like he was giving me the choice? Where you put someone on the spot and see what they’re gonna do? And there’s a good choice and a bad choice?”

  I said, mouth dry, “What did you choose?”

  She gave me a flat look. “He wasn’t giving me the choice after all.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He says yes, real soft, and he takes my hand and starts pulling me. We’re going in. And he knows I’m freaked cuz he leans real close and says you think I’ll let him win?”

  We stared at each other. Him, again. The volcano.

  Someone in the room began to sing My Old Kentucky Home and the Guardsmen picked it up. Jeanine suddenly grinned. She tapped her index finger on her chili spoon, keeping time, the grin fixed. Her eyes stayed on mine.

  “And?” I said.

  “I got him.”

  “You got him how?”

  “The plan.” Her finger stilled. “I mean, I’m not gonna go where he wants to go, so I just jumped him right where we were. Just wrapped myself around him and he’s still trying to pull me out there—and he’s got his hands all over me so the guys think this is it…and kapowie!” She sat forward, face alight. “Now we got him. The lights go on. Big spots, Jimbo’d snagged a couple of those emergency lanterns from the road crew and he’s on one bank and Bobby’s on the other. I mean the creek is lit, like we’re on stage. God did the guys get pictures.”

  I said, “What did Adrian do?”

  “Nothing. Just stands there watching me, and I’ll tell you I got out of there fast.”

  “And then?”

  “Then nothing. He does nothing. We got him. You saw the paper.”

  Oh, I saw it. In the photo, Jeanine has her back to the camera. We see her long ponytail wetted halfway, snaking down her spine, and the spreading of her hips, slick with creek water. We see Krom’s big hand hovering, like it’s heading for her behind but her behind is submerged and there’s nothing patently obscene at the moment the shutter closed. We can see just a hint of Jeanine’s left breast. Over her shoulder is Krom’s naked torso, his groin obscured by Jeanine’s round hip. This is what makes the shot so perfectly composed—it’s printable, and we think we know what’s going on. Krom’s face is quite identifiable. The camera catches him at the moment of understanding. He’s looking coldly toward the camera but he has yet to let her go. And then, lifting the photo beyond the realm of a grab-ass party in the creek, is the sign. We can see it at shoreline, a slab on a post just beyond the nudes in the foreground. It has replaced the old sign Lindsay had installed, warning that swimming is inadvisable. This new sign is blunter. Extreme Danger! it says. Hot Creek Geological Site OFF-LIMITS.

  It’s the sign Krom had installed, as the accompanying text points out.

  I said, “Didn’t it occur to you he might try to finish what you started?”

  “You mean, like, rape? Nah.”

  “What about the guys?” I asked, tight.

  She reached into her shirt front and pulled a lipstick from her bra. “What’s he gonna do, beat ‘em up? Land his ass in jail? He doesn’t want any more bad press than he’s got.” She glossed her lips.

  “One more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Whose idea was it?”

  She put a finger to her lips.

  A secret? Her bare ass is on the cover of the homtown paper and my brother’s bragging his ass off, so who’s ass is she trying to cover for now? I said, “Tell me who fucking planned it, Jeanine.”

  She eyed me. “Your guru.”

  I didn’t get it.

  “Lindsay.” She replaced her lipstick. “Lindsay who’s-cooler-than-you-thought Nash.”

  I froze. I did not believe her. And then I did.

  “See, your brother and some of the guys wanted to beat the shit out of him for the Stobe. I mean, if Mister Bigshot hadn’t surprised us with his drill at the race then nobody would have got shot.” She gave her braid a yank. “But this fixes him. Lindsay’s sending the paper straight to FEMA. This is gonna get Krom’s ass fired. This shows he doesn’t give a shit about safety—I mean, he takes me to the creek, where he’s putting it off-limits?” Her voice edged up. “Shows Mister Safety Dude doesn’t take his job seriously.”

  When I unfroze, I raised my hands to my temples, which felt as though they were going to explode.

  “So,” she said, sliding the check across the table to me, “what do you think?”

  I could not begin to say.

  “Find out what you wanted?”

  More.

  She narrowed her eyes. But she was looking beyond me, and she took on that watchful look, that anxious hometown tic. Glance around, straining to catch what’s in the offing. Then she snapped back. “It’s cool, Cass. We’re all cool. Krom’s the one in deep shit.” She swung her legs out of the booth. “See ya.” She moved away, trailing past the Guardsmen’s table, catching a round of whistles.

  I watched her, numb. Her take on men, men’s take on her. Maybe it would work. It sure made Krom look reckless enough. What it made Lindsay look was, to me, beyond reckless. It made her into someone I don’t know.

  I thought of Krom, in the creek, bowing, giving it the finger. And then with Jeanine. What was that? Playing at sacrifice? Like he’s challenging the volcano.

  Only, how do you win a duel with a volcano?

  You don’t. It’s not an even match.

  My headache erupted into nausea. There is, of course, one arena in which Krom and Lindsay are evenly matched.

  Us. The town. We depend on them both. They each hold our future in their hands.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I watched Walter lay aside the Mammoth Times and then square his face to begin the day, and I just couldn’t tell him. Reading about Adrian Krom’s night in the creek had disturbed him. Learning about Lindsay’s role would stun him.

  So I sat dense as rock and kept my mouth shut.

  There was a jolt. I grabbed the test-tube ring on my workbench and secured the glassware. Mag four, if I had to guess, and it jolted me out of my stupor. I hoped it would jolt Lindsay, as well—to her senses. Sitting at her desk, no doubt, with the newspaper and a mug of coffee and her cat’s smile. But of course a mag-four jolt would raise, at most, her eyebrow. What she’s on the watch for are quakes you don’t feel. Anonymous little buggers with a low-frequency motion, like a bell ringing, which means fluid’s on the move. That’s the kind of quake that rings Lindsay’s bell. That’s what she should be planning for—not sordid setups in the creek to take down her enemy.

  “Mag
four?” Walter hazarded. He’d been jolted out of his stupor, as well.

  I said, “We don’t have time for this.” I went to his bench and took the newspaper and tossed it in the trash. I said, “I have a new lead.”

  He straightened. “Tell me.”

  I explained my theory that the calcite and sulfur in the evidence might indicate a hot spring.

  “That’s hardly a new lead. Hot springs are certainly one source, but there are other candidates.”

  “What if we knew that Georgia had an interest in hot springs?”

  “Do we?”

  I told him about Krom and Georgia and crinoids and Hot Creek.

  His eyebrows lifted. No comment. Decorous Walter.

  “So you didn’t know. Well neither did I. Lindsay told me. Georgia confided in her.”

  He said, peevish, “And there is a reason Lindsay confided in you?”

  “Yes. She has a theory.”

  “Which you are about to tell me.”

  I explained Lindsay’s theory, the one I’d deconstructed in the shower yesterday evening. I explained that I’d come in early this morning and put the soil I’d gathered with Lindsay under the comparison scope, next to the evidence soil, and found no match.

  He said, even, “So you’ve ruled out the site at Hot Creek.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the lovers-quarrel theory?”

  I mulled that one over. I gave a glance to the newspaper in the trash can. No question Adrian Krom had some bizarre thing going with the creek. With women at the creek. But the jump from there to murder was a very large one. “Sure, could have happened somewhere else. But we have no evidence that it did.”

  “I must admit,” Walter said, “I have trouble considering Adrian a cold-blooded killer.”

  “What about hot-blooded? In a fit of passionate anger?”

  Walter shrugged. Shook his head.

  “Despite the thing with Jeanine?”

  “That was rash.”

  “And?”

  “That does not make him a killer.”

  “So you think Lindsay’s theory is a crock?”

  Walter said, even, “Lindsay has distrusted Adrian for a very long time.”

  “You chalk up her theory to prejudice?”

  “I’m not blind to her faults.”

  “I kind of thought you were.”

  Walter gave a thin smile, a crack in his seamed face.

  I thought, Walter’s greatest strength—and his greatest weakness—is loyalty. And that’s why people value his good opinion so dearly—if he thinks you’re a prince, you’re set for life. Whatever you do, short of a capital crime, you’re still a prince. And you want to live up to that. When I took psych in college I thought I had Walter figured. He’d told me about his own undergrad days; he’d gone through a rough spell, drinking, cutting classes. As misspent youth goes, his sounded tame, but he judged it harshly. Then in his early twenties he straightened out and found his calling. I’d asked what made him change and he said ‘I got tired of being a bum.’ So when I got into Psych 101, I psyched Walter. My theory went: he’s so fiercely loyal because he doesn’t want others to judge him by his years as a bum. Now, I think my theory was a crock. Walter is loyal because it’s his nature. And I think it’s a good thing I escaped the murky waters of psych for the bedrock of geology.

  The truth was, neither of us was a forensic genius when it came to reading people.

  “Well then,” Walter said, “shall we just do the geology?”

  “Sure. If we had some geology to do.”

  “We have your new lead, Cassie.”

  “But…you don’t buy that.”

  “I most certainly do. I buy the fact that we can now connect Georgia with a hot spring, at the creek. I certainly accept that we have sulfur and calcite in the evidence, which could have come from a hot spring, somewhere. Irrespective of why Georgia might have gone there.”

  “So you think it’s worthwhile following the hot spring lead.”

  “Yes, dear.” He slapped his thigh. “Let’s do the acid test.”

  *****

  I put a pinch of evidence soil in a test tube and droppered in hydrochloric acid.

  There were bubbles, and a nasty smell.

  The acid test is a quick way to find out if your samples have certain minerals. In the presence of acid, calcite gives off carbon dioxide and the soil fizzes. Sulfur gives off the odor of hydrogen sulfide.

  We already knew we had calcite and sulfur but the question was: in what concentration? High would suggest the sample came from a site near a volcanic source. Like a hot spring.

  The sample fizzed madly. The air stank of rotten eggs.

  And something else.

  Walter grimaced.

  I leapt. Snapped on the hood fan. Grabbed Walter’s arm and yanked him off his stool and the two of us scrambled back, covering our faces. I could detect the unexpected smell of bitter almonds.

  Jesus.

  Before either of us could recover our dignity, the smell dissipated. I took in an exploratory breath. The gas was gone.

  Walter returned to his stool, throwing me a speculative look.

  “You tell me,” I said, when I could trust my voice, “what’s cyanide doing in the soil?”

  Walter was smiling now.

  The liquid in the tube, I saw, had gone flat like old ginger ale. I knew what must have happened. When I added acid to the soil it found cyanide, lowered its pH, and drove it into its vapor phase. I just didn’t know what that meant. “Walter,” I said, “I’m not in the…”

  “Mines.” His eyes were blue as day.

  Mines. I waited. His eyes always gleam when he’s puttering around with the geology of ores. It’s his one vice, in Lindsay’s eyes, wasting time prowling old ruins. Treasure-hunting in her view, although he’s in it for the history—the treasure no longer being economically recoverable. I’m not inspired by old mining tales but I take a guilty pleasure in being the one Walter confides this passion to. Lindsay and I share a passion for shopping flea markets that totally excludes him. My shopping guru. I waited, stewing, for Walter to explain.

  He did not disappoint. “Miners around here sometimes used a dilute solution of cyanide to leach the metals from slag ore.”

  The meaning fizzed up. We’d got another new lead—mines. The metallic minerals are often picked up by hot water circulating deep and precipitated out near the surface.

  By hot springs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The de-icing sand laid down on Minaret Road had mixed with slush and grit to form a startling brecciation along the sidewalk and I walked it with dread and care.

  I had an appointment in half an hour with Adrian Krom.

  On the way there, I planned to drop in on Lindsay.

  My gut churned.

  *****

  I said, “How could you?”

  Lindsay lifted one fine eyebrow.

  “Hot Creek,” I said.

  She swiveled her creamy leather chair around to the credenza below the window, and bent to open a drawer.

  What was she after? I glared at the landscape of her desk, littered with the detritus of expeditions in the field and the shops. The brass pot-bellied fertility goddess. The tiny Japanese teapot. The bowl made from the skin of a dried orange. The pink tourmalines set like teeth in a bed of pegmatite. The delicate sea lily crinoid in a bed of gray limestone—Georgia’s gift, I assumed. Why’d Lindsay display that? Some kind of memorial for the dead?

  Lindsay swiveled to face me with a gun in her hand.

  “Oh God,” I said, “that’s a gun.”

  She laid the pistol beside the teapot. “Here’s how.”

  I gaped.

  “I was on the right bank, upstream of them.”

  I found my voice. “You were going to shoot him?”

  She lifted her chin. “I was going to keep Jeanine safe. As far as the creek goes, I took measurements at the site before they arrived. Gases were stable. No tempe
rature fluctuations.”

  “But you were going to shoot?”

  “I would have winged him. If need be.”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t known she knew how to shoot. I wondered if she’d shot targets out at Casa Diablo, to practice winging people.

  “In any case, there was no need.” She held my look. “And further, honey, he saw me there after they all left. I made certain he saw me.”

  “Waving a gun.”

  “No,” she said, deadly calm. “Holding it steady.”

  “And that helped how?”

  “It clarified where he should direct his wrath.”

  My chair hit the floor and I was moving with a sudden laser fury and I didn’t know where to aim first, didn’t know if it was directed at Jeanine and Jimbo and Bobby for being so dumbass stupid or at Lindsay for using them like that or at Krom for taking the bait.

  She said, “I’m sorry you’re caught up in this.”

  “You going to tell Walter?”

  Her face roughened. “No.”

  Me neither, I’d cut out my tongue before I laid this on Walter. And then I wondered just whose secret I was keeping because it was, after all, me who had given her the ammo. I had, after all, told her about Krom’s midnight swim.

  *****

  It was after six when I left Lindsay’s office.

  I followed Minaret to Forest Trail and took a right and came to the Community Center.

  Lights were ablaze. It’s a huge octagonal building, half windows. Inside looking out, it’s like you’re in a clearing in the woods. Expensive to heat. Georgia got a variance on the building code when she was pushing plans for the center. She wanted a building that mirrored her vision for the town: hub of the known universe. She got it.