Volcano Watch Page 9

  The taste of bile was in my mouth. Relief tastes like poison.

  I took off after Krom. “You can’t continue.”

  He kept walking. “Why not?”

  “Stobie’s why not.”

  “Unfortunate as hell.” The sure-of-itself voice. “But it’s a better drill now.”

  *****

  In the evacuated parking lot, only three cars remained—my Subaru, Jimbo’s Fiat, and Walter’s Explorer, in which he had ferried Lindsay to the race. It was unclear if Krom meant to leave us behind or if it was an oversight, but Walter, Lindsay, Jimbo, and I stood listening to the fading sirens.

  Finally, Walter stirred. He said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. Lindsay, you’ll take Jimbo home in his car and fix the both of you something to eat. Cassie and I are going to remain to take a few soil samples. We’ll keep the cell phone on and you’ll call us if you get any news from the hospital—if we need to come. Otherwise, we’ll meet you at the house within three hours.”

  And do what? I wondered. Make hot cider?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I was going up the stairwell from the parking garage to the hospital when I ran into Mike Kittleman, on his way down. The stairwell was lit like a sunrise with sodium bulbs and the concrete steps had a wet-dog smell.

  Mike sidestepped to go around me.

  “Hang on,” I said.

  His face was sickly in the yellowish light.

  I said, “It was an accident. People know that.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  We stared at each other. The fundamental and unchangeable connection between us was enmity. I thought, Mike wouldn’t take my hand if he were drowning. He wouldn’t offer me his. If I were drowning alongside his cat, he’d save the cat and then think twice about me. It came back—as it always does with Mike and me—to the gondola station, loading mountain bikes. He was fifteen and I was fourteen, and he always bossed me around and I always took it. I could feel the heat of that summer day when Eric dropped by, when the gondola stalled. Smell the hot oil odor of the machinery Mike was fruitlessly trying to fix. Hear myself telling Mike to stop before he broke something. I could see myself sashaying over to Eric like a cat with her tail in the air, telling Mike, you better let Eric fix it. And Mike leapt, face grimed with oil and red with heat, and he got me by the hair and put a screwdriver to my neck, screaming shut up, shut up, shut up until Eric took him down. In the aftermath, it became Eric’s and my problem.

  I regarded Mike, now, and the man on the stairs called up the same image the kid had called up: that of a guy with a need to make the world like him better than it did. With a temper to reciprocate.

  I said, “Everybody saw it was an accident.” Everybody didn’t see it that way, really. Plenty of people blamed Mike, although officially it was indeed declared an accident and no charges were being filed. Plenty of people, actually, blamed Krom for letting things get out of hand. A few people were even muttering about asking the Council to replace Krom. A few people were saying a surprise drill was just what we needed to keep us on our toes. Nobody seemed to notice that Krom had turned Lake Mary into a battleground, and that Lindsay had come out the loser.

  Mike started down the stairs.

  I said, “I know how you feel.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  Oh yes I do, I know how it feels to blame yourself for something that happens by accident. Doesn’t matter that you didn’t intend something awful to happen. Death by inattention. Doesn’t hurt any less. I said, “You pull yourself to pieces.”

  He kept moving.

  All right, I thought, you stubborn shit, don’t take my hand. And I’ll feel no qualms asking you the question I couldn’t ask Jimbo. “Can you help me with something, Mike? How many kinds of biathlon powder are there?”

  That stopped him.

  It was the question heavy in my mind when Walter and I dragged back to the house yesterday, but one look at Jimbo and I’d held my tongue. In the parking lot, after the race—after the drill—I’d thought Walter was wrong to keep us there. All I’d wanted to do was go somewhere and kick something. But he’d been right. Kicking through snow and digging like a dog had been right. And it worked, for awhile. And it paid off. We’d done a field test right there, sorting under the hand lens with a pocket knife. Dimples was there all right—no surprise—but there were also four other makes. And none of those four matched any of the mystery makes of gunpowder in the evidence, whose silver faces were burned into my memory. It made no sense. Just like it made no sense for Jimbo to lie about having a cartridge.

  Mike turned. “What’s this about?”

  “Biathlon powder.” I didn’t add ‘in the evidence’ but he was smart enough to make that leap. I didn’t want to risk adding that I was asking him because he used to be on the team. “Mike, is there more than one make?”

  “Why do you wanna know?”

  “I can ask somebody else if you don’t know.”

  “I know.” His coarse skin bloomed with sweat. “O-kigh, there’s half a dozen makes. But only three I think perform when the temp gets down in the teens and I think Fiocchi and Lapua are the best of those and my personal choice was Fiocchi.” He glared. “And your brother thinks so too, I happen to know.”

  Dimples.

  My confusion deepened. So there are several makes of biathlon powder, and none but dimples matches my evidence. Therefore the unidentified gunpowder is not biathlon powder. Then what is that stuff and where did Georgia pick it up?

  Mike was moving down the stairs.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. A knot like a fist sat under my breastbone. “How’s Stobie?”

  “Coma.” The word echoed up the stairwell.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I said, “Tell me I don’t need to be worried.”

  Lindsay and I were in the laser shed, a crude box on stilts hanging on the side of Lookout Mountain, which overlooks the northwest loop of the caldera. I’d managed to blurt it out while she was lining up a shot.

  She gave me a cursory glance. “About?”

  “A vendetta.”

  She aimed the laser, squinting like a sharpshooter. A red beam zapped across the caldera to score a bullseye on the reflector site and zapped back to the instrument monument in our shed. Ten days ago Lindsay had shot the same circuit, and if the beam’s travel time has changed between then and now it means the skin of the earth has stretched.

  My heart pounded. “Well?”

  She read the monitor. “Oh-point-five parts per million.”

  “I meant about the race. The drill.”

  She shot me a look, an ice-blue beam: we’re doing volcanology here. “And I mean the change from the background strain rate.”

  Strain rate’s a relative thing. The earth’s crust is always straining, pulled this way and that by shifts in temperature, in weather, in tides. It can also be strained by rising magma. My own strain rate was rising fast. I said, “Are you worried?”

  “I always worry about ground deformation, honey.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You know what I’m saying. Adrian Krom is after you. First he sandbags you at the Inn meeting with his road alternative and then…”

  “The Council voted to continue work on the Bypass,” she said. Then added, “They also voted to study his suggestion. Typical political fence-straddling.”

  “And then,” I continued, “he sandbagged you at the drill. He didn’t just stick a pin in a map and choose the race for his drill, he chose it because of you.”

  “I’m not the victim,” she said, thin. “Stobie is.”

  I’d talked to Stobie for an hour, yesterday. Everybody’s taking a turn, in case he can hear us. I’d talked to his blank face about the weather, how construction on the Bypass is going, what I had for breakfast, what I planned to have for lunch. I’d said beer was a lousy idea for Bill, and I expected him, Stobie, to recover before Bill’s birthday with a better idea.

  I said, “It’s not just Stobie
. Mike’s a victim too. He was doing it for Adrian. You’d think Adrian would have tried to stop him—he’s got to know about Mike’s temper.”

  “Well well,” she said. She tapped her fingers on the laser. Her heavy rings pinged its hull. “You appear to have joined the anti-Adrian camp.”

  “Is there a camp?”

  She smiled her cat’s smile and bent to the laser. She wore jeans and a long sweatshirt and from the back she looked like a young girl.

  I felt a pang. When I was a young girl, I would never have questioned Lindsay’s motives.

  She straightened, and gave me a level look. “And how is your case evolving?”

  About as well as this talk. “It’s not.” Walter and I have been putting in the hours, and going nowhere fast. We’ve got gunpowder that says look where there’s shooting but the Casa Diablo and Lake Mary soils say keep on looking. We’d built the profile on the evidence soil and it damn well didn’t match the Casa and Mary soils. But, then, soil can be tricky. It can concentrate a rock’s trace elements so that a parent rock having a minute percentage of, say, magnetite can yield a soil in which the magnetite concentration is hundreds of times stronger, but you go ahead anyway hunting for a site where there’s magnetite-rich rocks because you just don’t know. And even if you find the magnetite jackpot you can still screw it up because of where you choose to dig. Oh, soil can outfox you. It can show one face in one sample and a totally different face in the next, taken just a few meters away.

  She said, “And Walter can spare you this afternoon?”

  I suddenly flared. “I make that call. I came out with you because I’m worried about you and Adrian. And because I’m goddamn worried about the volcano, too. And I’ve been putting in a boatload of overtime and so taking off a couple of hours isn’t…” I stopped myself, before I threw a goddamn fit. I produced a thin smile. “And because I enjoy your company.”

  She winked. She read me too well. She shut down the laser and shuttered the windows. “Shall we move along? There’s a little fellow I want to visit.”

  “Yes,” I said, “let’s move along.”

  She locked the shed and I followed her in silence through the snow. She and Krom, I suddenly thought, speak the same language. Little fellow. Unpredictable chum. The volcano’s a he, someone they know personally, someone they’re on intimate terms with. Maybe that’s the way it is when you spend your life wondering if your work’s going to blow up in your face. I don’t do that. I don’t call my soil by name, I don’t give my evidence a gender. Maybe I should. Maybe if I give the bloody red hematite-stained cinders a name, they’ll tell me where they came from.

  We took Lindsay’s Range Rover down the Lookout logging road and hit the smooth tarmac of Highway 395 just about where the Bypass is due to hook up. Lindsay headed south on 395 and ten minutes later, when she slowed to take the Hot Creek turnoff, my stomach turned over. She barreled along the rutted road. There was no barricade to slow her. There was, thankfully, no blue Blazer in the parking lot.

  She shut off the engine and swiveled to retrieve her gear bag, a tight weave in bright colors. Guatemalan—the Atitlan caldera. Lindsay not only does field work in the large calderas of the world, she shops the towns. Her turquoise rings come from New Mexico—the Valles caldera.

  I thought of the gear in Krom’s pack, the monitor he’d brought in order to impress Len Carow, and wondered if Lindsay knew about Krom monitoring her volcano.

  We started walking, bypassing the trail down to the creek, heading out along the tableland above the gorge.

  I followed the Guatemalan bag into the calf-deep snow of the desert. A simple field trip, after all. I had been on so many field trips, like this, with Lindsay. I always followed, or we walked abreast. I never led. When I was eleven, not long after I’d begun hanging around Walter’s lab, there had been a particularly nasty quake swarm. I had nightmares. Walter found out and that’s when he introduced me to Lindsay. She took me on a field trip deep into the caldera. She paced in front of me cheerily explaining the difference between ordinary tectonic quakes and low-frequency quakes that mean fluid’s on the move. Her teaching hadn’t moved me—she heaped on too much too fast—but her cocksureness did. I wanted to ape her finesse, the way she coolly took the elemental forces in hand. But I could not take on a volcano. I could fear it, even learn its nature, but I could not stop it. I made no difference. And so Lindsay didn’t lure me into volcanology as she’d expected. She’s never understood my choice of Walter’s lab. There, I have a fighting chance to put things right.

  Lindsay pointed. “There’s my little fellow.”

  Across a small ravine a finger of steam issued from the snow. Two pinyon pines were in its path and their needles were browned. “How’s his breath?” I asked, using the lingo.

  “Tolerable. But it’s his age and location that interest me more. He’s nearly six months old and he’s up here all by himself.”

  So he’d been born around the time the volcano started acting up. I wetted my lips, gone dry in the cold air. “So we have activity outgrowing the creek.”

  “We have a single vent up here,” she said, easy. “It’s one more thing to consider.” When the volcano does anything worth notice, she grows progressively cheerier but it’s a focused sort of cheer like that of combat pilots in old war movies who joke their way into flak.

  I said, not easy, “Should this whole area be fenced off?” This is, after all, the heart of the south moat, a trough in the caldera where the unrest has been concentrated.

  She swept a hand, encompassing the creek, the gorge, the tablelands. “How? You could block the road, of course, but anyone on foot can gain access.” She gave me a level look. “I explained this to Adrian, when I told him about my little fellow. He’s making an issue of it nonetheless.”

  I gave a glance to the gorge, although we were not close enough to see down to the creek. Nonetheless, I pictured Krom making an issue of it down there three days ago. And then I pictured Krom and his swim that night.

  Lindsay nudged me and led the way across the ravine. We stopped just short of the fumarole. “Stop worrying,” she said. “I can handle Adrian.” She knelt and extracted a gas collector from the Guatemalan bag.

  I squatted beside her and screwed the gas tube into the pump. I said, “There’s something I should tell you.”

  “Oh yes?”

  I took in a deep breath, a biathlete breath, and then told her about Krom’s swim at Hot Creek. And the courtly bow. And the extended finger.

  Very slowly, she pulled a gas filtration mask from the bag. She said, finally, “That was ill-considered. Following him.”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  “Have you told Walter?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Don’t tell him. He thinks you have good sense.”

  I wanted to raise my arms in defense.

  She eyed me. “And why are you telling me this? Now?”

  “Because of the drill. Because I could just dismiss the swim as…eccentric…until the drill. It’s not the drill itself that gets me—I know we need to drill, I want to drill, but… Adrian was willing to…”

  “Sacrifice Stobie.”

  I had been going to say, he’s willing to suffer casualties. After the fact. He hadn’t cared. But that’s not the same as sacrifice. Sacrifice implies intention. I shrugged.

  “Very well,” Lindsay said, “given Adrian’s ill-considered actions, there’s something I should now tell you. I’ve kept quiet about this because, number one, it was told to me in confidence and I respect confidences and, number two, because I recognize my dislike of the man and I didn’t want that to influence my judgement.” She paused, then said, “Adrian and Georgia were having an affair.”

  “What?” I dropped the pump.

  “In regard to your case,” Lindsay said, “you might want to consider a lovers quarrel.”

  “But they…”

  “Sex, dear. I hardly think romance had any play in it.�
��

  “But how do you know?”

  Lindsay picked up the pump and checked my fittings. “She bragged.”

  “But she had to be twenty years older than Adrian.”

  Lindsay snapped, “That’s why she was bragging, one old crone to another.” She yanked the gas mask over her face. Her skin, where it showed, was a deep rose. She snatched up the gas collector and tramped over to the fumarole. She snaked the probe into the vent, shoving it here and there like she meant to ream the little fellow out of existence. She stalked back, dragging off the mask, speaking as soon as she was within earshot. “And don’t think he wouldn’t go after you.”

  I said, wary, “Me?”

  “It’s not just mature women like Georgia who’ve succumbed. The man’s dishy. I saw that first time I met him at Rainier, although in my eyes he couldn’t hold a candle to Walter. Still, I saw him cut a wake with the local ladies.” Her eyes, quick and bright, held mine. “And he’ll take a pass at you, too, if you have something he wants.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like information about a case in which he has an interest.”

  “So it’s not just my charming self he’s after.”

  “I doubt it.”

  That stung. And rang real true. “Here’s what he likes about me—the geology. He was impressed when I told him what I could do with it. He wanted to know how I was going to follow it to Georgia. I don’t know what that proves. Doesn’t prove he killed her.”

  “Honey, just this—he is not a trustworthy man.”

  “You tell Georgia that?”

  She said, after a moment, “No. I didn’t have a loving relationship with Georgia.”

  All the fight went out of me.

  Lindsay turned her attention to the disassembly of the gas collector. “In any case,” she said, “Georgia wouldn’t have listened.”

  I picked up the Guatemalan bag and held it open while Lindsay stowed her gear.

  “Now,” she said, “in light of our lovers-quarrel scenario, I’m going to show you something.”

  Our scenario? I’d only just found out about Adrian and Georgia.