Quicksilver (The Forensic Geology Series, Prequel) Page 3

  Shelburne flashed a grateful smile and took out his checkbook. Walter went to the file where we keep our brochures and reports and contracts. They sat together at the map table.

  I watched.

  I don’t believe in premonitions—I’m not into the woo-woo stuff—but it seemed creepily pertinent that the contract-signing took place beneath the poster on the wall. It’s a film poster from the Disney flick Alice in Wonderland, the part where Alice is tumbling down the rabbit hole. Walter bought and hung that poster. Walter likes the message: you follow the evidence wherever it takes you, down the rabbit hole if you must.

  And that’s where Henry the wounded soul had evidently gone.

  I’ve never been a fan of Alice, or her topsy-turvy world. And right now I was, in particular, not a fan of that whacked-out character she meets, the Mad Hatter. Back in Chem 101 I’d learned about the effects of mercury—and in a textbook sidebar, the reason the hatter is mad. Back in the day, hat-makers used mercury in the process of curing animal pelts to make hats. Day in, day out, breathing in the vapors. It affected speech. Coordination. It led to mental instability. Hallucinations. Dementia.

  Mad as a hatter.

  And we’re gearing up to go hunting for Henry Shelburne who, according to his brother, suffers the effects of mercury poisoning. Who leaves behind his vial of mercury as a fare-thee-well.

  Who is reminding me of my own little brother, who suffered the effects of a genetic disorder. Who died while I was looking out the window.

  Henry Shelburne and Henry Oldfield, each of them damaged goods.

  So yeah, I’m on board with taking this case. Let’s find Henry Shelburne before he does something stupid.

  But let’s do it on alert. Let’s be cautious.

  4

  The men concluded the paperwork. Walter moved to our mini-kitchen to put the coffee on—coffee being a celebratory ritual he likes to indulge, if the client is amenable—his version of breaking bread together, a symbolic sharing of the basics in life, establishing trust.

  Shelburne packed away the photograph and the mercury kit. Exhibits no longer required.

  I turned to the blue-faced rock.

  ~ ~ ~

  Striking as it was, the blue face was not going get us where we needed to go.

  There was a better clue cemented in the rock. A crackerjack clue. I assumed Henry the amateur geologist had noticed it, as well. Why else grab his microscope?

  I grabbed mine.

  Mine—well, Walter’s and mine—is a bulk-specimen stereoscopic scope. It has an articulated arm that can lift and reach and twist and accommodate a thick object like this chunk of ore. It looks vaguely prehistoric. I’d wager it cost more than Henry’s.

  I placed the rock on the stage and focused in on the angular dark pebble.

  The digital camera built into the scope sent the view to the attached monitor.

  Under magnification, the pebble showed its structure, a mosaic of tiny interlocking grains that made the rock tough, that shouted its name. Hornfels—very very cool. Even cooler was the exquisite crystal with a black Maltese cross piercing its heart.

  Walter brought me a mug of coffee and paused to admire the magnified pebble. He lifted his free hand; we high-fived. He said, “I believe I’ll start with the maps and see if that hornfels can lead us to fat city.” He headed to our map cabinet.

  Shelburne took his place, brew in hand. “Fat city?”

  I said, “The jackpot.”

  “Now you’re speaking my language.”

  I switched to my own. “That pebble is chiastolite hornfels, which...”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Chiastolite from the Greek khiastos, meaning a cross. Hornfels from the German, meaning horn rock, because it’s flinty and sharp-edged.”

  “The names aside—what does it mean for our search?”

  I took a careful sip of steaming coffee. A celebration in honor of the coolness of geological names.

  Shelburne drummed his fingers on his coffee mug.

  I said, “It narrows the neighborhood. Let’s start with the hornfels pebble. Notice the edges are still angular. That means it was not transported far from its source. If a stream had carried and battered it, the edges would be rounded. But they’re angular and that tells us the source was a nearby hornfels zone.”

  “How do we find that?”

  “Hornfels is very site specific—it’s not all over the place.”

  Shelburne glanced at Walter at the map cabinet. “Meaning look at a map?”

  “To begin with. But hornfels zones can be small, and not always mapped.”

  “So we could be shit-out-of-luck?”

  “Not necessarily. We can look for the birthplace. Hornfels gets born when a dike of hot magma intrudes sedimentary rock—call that the parent rock. The dike cooks the parent rock, metamorphosing it. And then the magma cools and hardens into igneous rock. In our case, that’s probably an igneous rock called diorite, since we have diorite in the specimen.”

  I paused to give Shelburne the chance to look at the diorite cobbles in the ore. He didn’t bother.

  He said, “What about the cross?”

  “That’s a gift. That tells us the nature of the parent rock. The chiastolite is a carbon inclusion, which suggests that the parent rock contained organic matter which became the carbon. So that parent rock is likely a carbonaceous slate that got cooked into chiastolite hornfels when the magma intruded.”

  “Could Henry have figured that out?”

  “You said he’s an amateur geologist.”

  “He’s also a romantic. He’d follow that cross and call himself a crusader.”

  “You want romance?” I set down my coffee and cupped my hands. “Here’s the metamorphic contact zone: rings around the intrusive dike. The outer ring is the slate. The inner ring, more cooked, is the hornfels. So I can freaking well say that we’re looking for a contact of diorite and slate. If we’re lucky we’ll find the inner ring—the hornfels aureole sheathing the dike.” I picked up my coffee. “There’s romance for you. Geology gets downright sexy.”

  Shelburne winked. “You put on a good dog-and-pony show.”

  “It’s not...”

  “It’s a compliment.”

  I shrugged. It was really more of a petrology-and-geochemistry show, but never mind.

  “Yoo hoo!” Walter called, from the table beside the map cabinet. “Come on over and let’s see where we are.”

  I trailed Robert Shelburne to the map table. Along the way he detoured to the kitchen sink and dumped his coffee, whispering to me, “Can’t stand the stuff.”

  I didn’t know what to think of that. Of him. He’s considerate of Walter’s need for the coffee ceremony. Unwilling to decline the offer. Unwilling to drink the stuff. Willing to let me in on it. I didn’t know what to think.

  We flanked Walter. He was hunched, hands pinning a map to the table. It was a geologic map of the gold country, with lithologic pattern symbols showing the major rock units. Walter’s crosshatched hands were weathered symbols in and of themselves. Walter’s a seasoned pro, with rocks and clients. If he’d noticed the coffee dump, he ignored it. If he’d paid mind to the dog-and-pony comment, he didn’t mention it. He lifted a hand, patted my arm. Don’t take it to heart.

  I hadn’t.

  “This is the Mother Lode,” Walter said. “It’s roughly three hundred square miles. If we narrow that to likely hornfels neighborhoods, we’re looking at many dozens of square miles.”

  “I can do better than that,” Shelburne said.

  Walter looked up, from map to client.

  “I can narrow the neighborhood down to about twenty square miles.” Shelburne ran his finger across a slice of the gold belt. “That’s where my father searched. That’s where he dragged Henry and me searching. What you need to do is figure out where in the ‘hood this rock came from. That’s where Henry will be searching.”

  “Then we’ll want a larger-scale map.” Walter
moved to the map cabinet. “Meanwhile, help yourself to more coffee, Mr. Shelburne. We have donuts, as well.”

  The coffee ceremony was history, I saw. Donuts now. Walter had just welcomed Robert Shelburne onto the team.

  Shelburne threw me a wink and said to Walter, “You have any glazed?”

  ~ ~ ~

  Walter and I spent the remainder of the day on more sophisticated analysis, while Robert Shelburne went out for a long lunch and last-minute errands. Normally we would have spent more time on the labwork but Henry Shelburne set our timetable.

  Find Henry before he finds the source. Hunt for the source to find Henry.

  Out there in the wild. Missing. Looking like the Henry in the photo because I could not conjure up an alternative. Squint-eyed, on some mission, suicidal or not. In need of finding, or not.

  Either way, we’d signed on to find him.

  5

  The following day we left at dawn, taking Shelburne’s pricey Land Rover.

  We had to cross the spine of the Sierra Nevada range, traveling from the austere eastern side to the lush western flank, deep into gold country, deep into the heart of the Mother Lode.

  Walter, in the back seat, was re-reading Waldemar Lindgren’s Tertiary Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California. I’d never read it but I knew it was a classic. An original copy would fetch a price in the hundreds. This morning I’d asked what Walter was downloading to his tablet. He’d said, “The bible of the deep blue lead.”

  That took me aback. I’d thought he used his tablet strictly for online research or sharing docs with colleagues on the other side of the world. But books? He read his books on paper—biographies, poetry, and mysteries, from the current crop all the way back to Sherlock because, he liked to point out, Sherlock Holmes was the first forensic geologist. As for technical books, he owned a worn paperback of Lindgren that would have served him perfectly well in the field. Instead, he was reading the freaking bible of the deep blue lead in pixels?

  I’d said, “Since when did you start reading your books in pixels?”

  “Since I looked in the mirror and saw an old man.”

  “You’re not old,” I’d said firmly. “You’re just an ink-and-paper man.”

  “Old dog can’t learn new tricks?”

  And now, as I rode shotgun in Shelburne’s Rover, I could not help glancing into the side-view mirror, spying on Walter in the back seat. Hair grayer than when I’d last paid attention?

  Funny thing: Walter had looked old to me when I first met him. I was eleven and he was in his forties. To a kid, that was old. Over the following years as I worked in the lab—part-time after school and full-time in the summers—the only aging I paid attention to was my own, particularly when I crashed into my teens. Then, during my college years, I would come home for the summers and grace the lab with my learning, spouting textbook tidbits like they were tweets. During that stretch I didn’t notice either of us aging. I was too busy proving myself. By the time I’d completed grad school and took my book-learning back into the field what I finally noticed was the authenticity of Walter’s skills.

  Old? He’d perhaps grown a bit vain, fretting over his thinning hair and creasing face.

  I turned from the mirror and firmly directed my attention to the scenery.

  Right now, the road we traveled was unknown to me. In fact, the Mother Lode was mostly unknown to me. Not my country. It was pretty enough, and I never met mountains I didn’t love, but I was a stranger here.

  The road worsened. Ungraded, now.

  In the back seat, Walter was stone silent, still deep in Lindgren.

  I turned to look at him.

  Head bowed over his tablet. Finger swiping the touch screen, onto the next page.

  Swipe.

  Swipe.

  On the hunt. Nothing old about that old dog.

  I returned my attention to my own tablet. I’d downloaded Lindgren as well, taking my cue from my mentor.

  ~ ~ ~

  Shelburne parked the Land Rover on a nearly hidden fire road, jarring Walter out of Lindgren.

  Walter shut his tablet and looked around. “Where are we?”

  “At the start of our hike,” Shelburne said.

  Walter said, “Pass me the road map,” and after receiving and perusing it he said, “Two miles up the road we’ll find a proper trailhead.”

  “This is the way we always came. My dad blazed this trail with his ego.”

  I said, “That’s some whacked-out reason to take it.”

  “And,” he said, “it’s faster.”

  Walter folded the map and returned it to Shelburne. “Your call.”

  We geared up and Robert Shelburne took the lead.

  And so we embarked upon Shelburne’s father’s rogue route, unmarked on the map, sign-less at the head, steep at the get-go, infested by brush, scented by that odd vegetative smell. Fifteen minutes into our climb we came upon the silver bandana littering the ground. Flagging our trail. Thirty minutes into our climb we got hit by falling talus.

  What the hell, Henry?

  In hurried consultation—Shelburne up above on the bedrock ladder, me three switchbacks below, Walter still down on the traverse—Shelburne urged us to hurry, swore that if it was Henry up on the ledge then we had the chance to catch up to him, assured us that the rocks had been an accident.

  We might have debated the issue but Shelburne quickly pushed onward, upward, and it was a shorter pitch to the top than to turn around and traverse back across the rock field.

  I picked up my pace.

  Walter picked up his.

  Shelburne shouted his brother’s name twice and when there was no reply he saved his breath.

  Nothing more fell from the ledge above and in the course of my climb I began again to entertain the theory of the squirrel or the bear.

  I soon caught up with Shelburne, hiking so close I had the leisure to examine his red backpack. I distracted myself with the question of his pack. It was an Arcteryx Altra, latest model, one I admired and would not afford. Made sense, I supposed, that Shelburne had a state-of-the-art pack because the backpack he would have used as a kid being dragged along by his father would not fit him now, as a grown man. I also took note that the floating-top lid of the Arcteryx was stained and one side water-bottle pocket had a small rip. Perhaps he’d rented it.

  His boots were Asolos, top of the line. Creased at the toe break, slightly worn around the edges of the vibram soles. Broken in.

  I wondered where he’d done his hiking.

  In another five minutes we topped the climb, which leveled onto the narrow ledge.

  Nobody was there waiting.

  It was a false ridge, because the bedrock climbed another couple hundred feet to the true ridge, sky-silhouetted above. A couple of yards westerly, beneath the slaty cliff, a rotten patch spilled talus onto our ledge and fanned out to the rim.

  We stood rooted.

  Looking. Listening. All of us winded. Catching our breath.

  Walter finally said, “I would like to sit.”

  “If it was Henry he’d have gone that way.” Shelburne pointed easterly, to the far end of the bedrock intrusion, where the ledge disappeared into the woods. “I’ll have a look.” He set off.

  Walter and I shucked our packs and sank to the rock. It was chilly. We retrieved our parkas. We grabbed our water bottles and drank. The water was sweet cold eastern Sierra water, bottles filled back at the lab. Cold water down my gullet. I was now doubly chilled. The rock beneath my butt was stone cold. Not enough sun to warm the phyllite. Even its golden sheen was dulled in this gray light. I shivered. I drew up my knees, hugging them.

  Walter got out the trail mix. I freed one hand, opened my palm, and he filled it. I nibbled like a squirrel.

  The breeze that had been coming and going now came stronger, more consistent.

  I sniffed for the odd odor but smelled nothing other than salty peanuts and sweet dried pineapple.

  And then Shelburne retu
rned, shucked his pack, and sank to the rock beside me. He shook his head.

  I said, “So you think it was him? Or not?”

  “He’s gone now.”

  Shelburne hadn’t qualified that with an if, if it was Henry. I said, “Maybe we should get moving.”

  “We won’t catch him now. He’ll be hiking fast. No pack—he’s likely made camp somewhere. He’s got the edge. We’ll need to keep tracking him.”

  Walter nodded. “I’m content to rest here another moment.”

  I studied my partner. Face still slightly flushed, even in the growing chill. Hair mussed and, yeah, graying. He still wore his sunglasses. His eyebrows—gray flecked with brown like feldspar in granite—bushed above the rims of his shades. He caught my scrutiny and lifted his brows.

  I said, “Yeah, feels good to sit.” The rock was warming beneath my butt. Sit here much longer, though, and I’d start asking questions.

  I watched Shelburne retrieve his water bottle from the side pocket of his backpack. He chose the narrow-mouth bottle. The other bottle, in the torn pocket, was a wide-mouth, more suited for carrying extra water. At least, that’s the way we did it, although I carried two spare bottles in my pack pockets and the quick-grab drinking bottle clipped to my belt with a carabiner. Then again, I’m something of a gear-head.

  So was Shelburne.

  I watched him drink from his sleek silver bottle emblazoned with the word titanium; major cool factor; no price tag attached but none needed; if you had to ask, you would not want to pay it.

  Shelburne was a gear-head with expensive tastes. Still, you had to know what you needed in the field before you laid out good money. And if you were going to lay out good money, you’d want to get plentiful use of your gear.

  I watched him replace his titanium bottle in the pocket of his Arcteryx pack. I said, “Been up here recently?”

  “Here? Not since I was a kid.”

  “But you still do some backpacking?”

  He saw me looking at his grown-up pack. “My job takes me afield now and then. I’ve had to site-scout a location or two in this general neighborhood. Investment opportunities.”

  “Gold?” Walter asked.