“Why don’t you be forthcoming, Hap? Why don’t you tell them all about the nickname you got when you worked at the nuke plant?”
Hap rolled his eyes.
Ballinger turned to us. “They called him Doc Death.”
Scotty stared. “Wait a minute…he’s that guy?”
26
We had a new vision, glimpsed in a spilled glass of water.
After dinner we’d returned to Walter’s room and downloaded USGS reports on the leak from the Beatty dump. The hydrologists had been having a cow, as Hap might say.
And then I had to wonder how I could have any idea what Doc Death might say.
I shook that off. Right now, it didn’t matter what Hap did at the nuke plant.
It mattered what Roy Jardine had done with the radwaste.
It mattered whether we could follow the trail he’d left.
I stared at the coffee table I was using as a workbench. Dishes of fender soil lined up, layer one through layer six. Walter and I had built ourselves a new map — patchy, riddled with unconformities. It took us where we’d been two days ago, considering a dozen or so candidates. And there we’d be right now if not for the new vision. It was one part onageristic estimate and three parts hydrology.
And I liked it. Not least because it pared the candidates down to two.
Which one, Brother Roy? Where’d you go? Either way, I’m with you from the get-go. You leave Chickie’s talc mine with your offroader rig and its nasty cargo and at some point you abandon paved road to drive up a fan across a wash into a canyon. You follow that canyon until you pick up layer six, the final layer. Point D, we’re calling it, for destination. And then you do your dirty deed, and then drive back to the talc mine. You make the trip again and again, dozens of times. I can’t say precisely how many because of the patchy nature of the layers. But ultimately, Roy Jardine, you left us a freaking map.
Once we find Point D, we’ll see where we go from there.
There was the sudden clatter, outside, of hard rain. I looked up. More hurricane spinoff? Still, come hell or high water, we’re going into the field tomorrow. We’re going to find your address, pal.
“I read about a mine over in the Tucki Wash,” Walter said. “The story goes that the owners quarreled and shot each other and the skeletons are still there, arms extended.”
“They’re gone now,” Pria said.
I thought she’d fallen asleep — she’d been silent for so long. She was folded into a wicker chair and her head rested on its broad arm but her eyes were open. She met my look and then her black eyes skated back to Walter. We’d found her stationed outside Walter’s room when we returned from dinner and Walter invited her in for a lemonade. Isn’t someone expecting you at home? he’d asked. Nobody’s home, she’d said, and asked if she could stay awhile. He didn’t appear to know how to refuse.
She said, now, in that high girlish voice that seemed too young for her, “Grandfather, you wanna go see where Walter Scott had his hideout up a canyon?”
“You’re talking about Death Valley Scotty?”
“That’s a bad name. His name was Walter, like you. You wanna go?”
“I certainly do,” Walter said, watching the soils settle out in his test tubes. “When I’m not quite so pressed for time.”
“He never found any gold. He was a faker.”
“That could be said of a good number of people who came here.”
She giggled.
He smiled.
“You wanna go see where a prospector cut his name on the rock where there’s old drawings that tell stories?”
Walter said, “We appear to be concocting a tour of killers and frauds and petroglyph-desecraters.”
Well you started it, I thought, you just had to bring up those skeletons.
“A lot of them’s came here,” Pria said.
Walter turned to look at her. “You know the area well?”
“I got coyote eyes.”
“Do you?” He thought a moment. “I may want to go see a mine but I haven’t quite figured out where it is. If I could describe the surrounding territory, could you help me?”
Her head lifted. “Really?”
“Really.”
She raised a clenched fist, pinkie extended. “Roger, Grandfather.”
He did not smile. “I’ll tell you what. Let me finish my work here and then tomorrow after I’m back from the field, we’ll look at some maps together.”
“I could come along,” she said. “To your field.”
I took in a breath. I used to say something like that. Come on Walter, take me with you. It would be fun.
He said, “I’m afraid not, Pria.”
“There’s mines not on maps,” she said. “I need to come.”
He rubbed his chin.
I held my breath. She had a point. What if Jardine had chosen a mine that’s not on the maps? How many dozens of unmarked prospects and shafts and adits were there in Death Valley? Nobody knew. Did she? I came over to Walter and whispered, “She’s a kid, we can’t take her.”
Pria shot me a look with those black coyote eyes and then seized hold of her large feet and tucked herself deeper into the chair.
Walter whispered, “You were just a kid.”
I said, “You should start a club.”
27
Midnight at the pool.
The thermometer on the stone wall beside the stacked lounge chairs read ninety-one and the underwater thermometer read eighty-eight. The silky water left the faint taste of minerals on my lips and dissolved the ache from my shoulders.
I corked along under stars so bright they radiated haloes.
The night was mine. The rainstorm of two hours ago had vanished. Pria had vanished. Walter had called it a night and tucked in. Everyone at the Furnace Creek Inn appeared to have called it a night. Sunburns and bellies full of rattlesnake and soft beds. No stargazers, no lovers, no partiers. Just me and the sky and the water.
A coyote screamed.
I dove, dolphining underwater.
There was an explosion.
I saw a water-sheathed torpedo and then flailed for the surface and came up gasping and seconds later the torpedo surfaced and assumed the features of Hap.
“Nice suit, Buttercup.”
Treading water, heart pounding, I reflexively looked down at my bathing suit. Big flowers. Small suit. I’d borrowed it from the maid. When I could speak with a steady voice, I said, “Why are you here?”
He flipped on his back and crossed his hands beneath his head. “Get me some exercise.” His trunks were long and loose and floated like purple jellyfish around his pale legs.
“You said you were going to bed. When you left dinner.”
“Couldn’t sleep.” He righted himself, treading water. He was so close our feet brushed. His wet hair was hematite red, already curling in the hot night air. He smiled. “Next question.”
All right. “How’d you get your nickname?”
“Youse is curious as the cat.”
He tucked and dove under and surfaced at the far end of the pool. He climbed onto the deck and I thought he was going to leave. He didn’t. He took a diver’s stance. Despite the ludicrous purple trunks, he had the look of a real athlete, long and leanly muscled. He dove, easing into a smooth crawl that took him the length of the pool in the time it took me to reach the side and hang on. He jackknifed and went under and emerged halfway and backstroked to the far end, then came back my way in a butterfly. I watched, mesmerized, as he did his laps.
On the eighth lap he angled over to me and hooked an arm onto the tiled ledge. “So,” he said, barely winded. “My nickname.”