It was a moment before I could speak. “Something’s down there.”
“What?”
“It’s not a snake.” I cast about, to explain my reaction. “But it felt… soft. It fit in my hand. About the size of my fist. It felt like…” The word came to me from some primitive zone in a dark corner of my mind. “Like a heart.”
Shelburne went white.
I bent back to the water, leaning farther, angling for a better view of the ledge down there, and now I got a straight-on look and saw the thing for what it was. It sat cupped on its ledge in the crevice. I understood my earlier confusion. It was indeed rounded as a river cobble, but not solid. It was big as a heart and it quivered slightly, fanned by the riffling water.
“Cassie,” Walter said, “what the devil is down there?”
I straightened. “Mercury.” A quivering heart of liquid mercury.
Shelburne sucked in a deep breath, let it escape.
“Well that’s not surprising,” Walter said.
“It sure surprised me.”
Walter said, “Millions of pounds were lost from the sluices. You’ll find it in the rivers and soils. You’ll certainly find droplets in catch-basins like this.”
“Not droplets.” I held my hands apart, to demonstrate the size. A heart.
His eyebrows lifted.
I turned to Shelburne. “Did Henry put this here?”
Shelburne looked taken aback. “Why would he do that?”
“Why would he leave the dimes? His games.”
“No no, he didn’t know I’d hired you — at least not until he saw you on the trail with me. And if he did, how would he have time to set this up? And if he did, how could he possibly know you would look down there?”
I acknowledged the unlikelihood of the scenario but my heart rate had not yet gotten the message.
“Look,” Shelburne said, “you get enough droplets caught in a hotspot, they coalesce. You can thank Mother Nature for that. I’ve heard of guys finding puddles big as pillows. When my dad brought us here panning, we sucked up mercury with a turkey baster. It’s all the hell over the place.”
Big as pillows? Holy hell. A heart was big enough for me. I said, “You know a lot about it.”
“Yes I do. As I’ve explained, Dad marched me and Henry up and down his trail.”
“Here too?” I asked.
“Sure. Here.” Shelburne got to his feet. “As you geologists point out, it’s a natural catch-basin. Good place for panning.”
“Been here recently?”
“Last time I panned for gold I was twelve years old.” Shelburne started to retreat across the gravel bar.
“Hang on,” I said. He’d been on edge from the moment the trail brought us here, even before I’d said heart and freaked him out. “Anything else going on here?”
Shelburne paused. “Like what?”
“Like whatever’s been making you so edgy.”
He turned. “Aside from the fact that my brother is missing?”
“If there’s something else, yeah. Aside from that.”
A shadow passed over his face. “It’s not relevant.”
“I would like to be the judge of that,” Walter said. “Before we proceed.”
Shelburne took a long moment and then he said, “My father died here.”
Walter and I got to our feet. Scrambling to catch up.
“This is news,” Walter said.
“No kidding,” I said, “I thought your father died of a heart attack.”
“Yes. Here. In fact, it wasn’t the heart attack that killed him. It was falling into the water and drowning.” He grimaced. “Animals got to him before the rangers found him.”
I flinched. “That’s awful.”
“Now you understand why this place gives me the creeps.”
I nodded. That made two of us, now.
“What was he doing here?” Walter asked. “Panning?”
“No.”
“Then?”
“It’s not relevant.”
“Indulge me,” Walter said.
Shelburne shrugged. “He was sampling the water.”
“Why?”
“All right.” Shelburne looked at us squarely. “It’s irrelevant but let’s get it out of the way. My father, the auto mechanic, was a handy guy. He developed a piece of technology and brought it to me, looking for funding for a startup. Venture capital, it’s what I do. Dad had a plan to build a super-dredge to suck up mercury, clean up the gold country riverbeds.” He shot me a look. “You saw for yourself what’s down there.”
I nodded. Seen, and felt.
“Environmental remediation is the big-bucks term. There’s your new gold rush. Turns out my firm was already working with a deep-pockets company looking to get into the business. So I hooked Dad up with the company, which I’m going to call Deep Pockets. I helped bring the plan to product. I helped Dad come up with a catchy name for his subsidiary — AquaHeal. And yes, I came out here with Dad and a Deep Pockets guy a couple of times. Site survey, checking out hotspots, up and down the river. We packed in, stayed awhile.” He held up a hand. “By the way, I did mention my site scouting, earlier.”
Walter said, evenly, “You didn’t elaborate.”
“It wasn’t relevant. Don’t know how else I can put that.”
“It involved your father,” I said. “He died and you found the ore sample and that kicked off what’s going on now.”
“He wasn’t out here hunting gold when he died. He was here, on his own, taking water samples — as I said. I was in Sacramento trying to get the permit for a second round of tests. Had a few problems with the first round.”
“What kind of problems?” Walter asked.
Shelburne sighed. “Dredging is a violent process. It sucks up the riverbed — sediment and gravel along with the mercury. Breaks up large drops into smaller ones.”
Relevant or not, I flinched. “It floured? Into reactive mercury?”
“Yes.”
Jesus. “You’re talking methylation.”
“Yes. Bacteria convert the inorganic mercury into the nasty form, and that gets into the food chain.”
I glanced at the river.
“I wouldn’t eat the fish.” He gave a tight smile. “In fact, you can take that advisory all the way downriver to the San Francisco Bay.”
I said, “Methylated mercury is a neurotoxin.”
“Yes. Hence the word problems. Hence the need to tweak the technology. Hence the need for a second round of tests.”
I shook my head.
“By the way, storm waters rile up mercury-laden sediments all the time. Mercury gets methylated all the time. It’s already in the state’s water transport system. We just added to the problem.”
“And Henry?” Walter asked. “Was he involved with the startup?”
“No, of course not. He had no money to invest, no skills to offer. He’s hardly a company man, anyway.”
“But he was aware of it?”
Shelburne shifted. “Actually, no. Henry and I hadn’t been in touch. And then, at Dad’s place, I didn’t bring it up — no point until I knew if the technology would work. As far as Dad goes, he and Henry had nothing to do with one another for years. In any case, once the estate is settled, Henry will inherit half the company.”
I said, “Did Henry know his dad died here? How he died?”
“He read the report. Didn’t seem to rattle him. Remember, he spends his life in the wild. Hey, we Shelburnes are hunters. Dad was a hunter. Dad died as he lived, hunting the new gold rush. And he was hunted, in death.” Shelburne put his hand to his neck, as if there were a tie to adjust. “Admittedly, that’s all too wild-kingdom for me.”
Walter had moved to sample upstream of the gravel bar when he shouted, “Oh dear.”
I sprinted across the bar to the rocky bank.