Выбрать главу

For a moment all the familiar workings of things were suddenly cast aside.

I sat on top of—on top of—the silver sea.

My knees were bent, my heels cupped into the liquid, and I braced my arms behind me, hands clutching the mercury like I’d clutched the silver heart back at the South Yuba River. Cold and clammy and alien.

The heat from the fire was almost welcome.

Robert’s face was inches from mine. His eyes bitter green. We just gazed at one another, me thinking is this how you gazed at your father as he fell into the river?

I was dizzy. Short of breath from my exertions. Breathing into my parka, re-breathing that air but it was sweet in comparison to the grotto air that was about to go bad.

I hissed, “Cover your mouth.”

Robert could not, not with one hand bound to the spigot and the other holding the Glock aloft.

There came a sound like a gunshot, another match striking.

Robert aimed.

And time that bitch speeded up. The velocity of a fired bullet. The speed of liquid mercury heating and particles vibrating faster and faster until they escape their fluid bonds and form a gas. I cried out stop and the speed of sound beat me to it, reached Robert’s ears and made him curse before I could reach him myself. And then at last I hit his chest, threw myself upon him, losing the grip on my parka in the process, my parka mask slipping down leaving my face naked, my nose and mouth unprotected as I sent Robert spinning, me spinning with him, together we spun on the mercury it seemed forever without friction, Robert’s free arm whipping out, and at last Robert’s hand opened like a flower and lost its hold on Henry Shelburne’s weapon.

* * *

Walter shouted.

Walter was on his elbows and knees crawling, bound feet lifted, an eternity to go before he reached Henry.

Henry the kid playing with matches.

“The gold, Henry,” Robert shouted. “You and me. We can do it.”

Henry didn’t answer. The only sound was the thunder of the fire and the hiss of streaming mercury.

I yanked my parka back up. Yanked Robert’s Club One fitness T-shirt up over his mouth, his nose, because Robert was desperately yanking his bound hand trying to get free.

I fumbled at the cargo pocket of my pants. Fumbled it open. Fumbled out my field knife.

It took forever to move to the spigot, it was like a dream where you’re swimming through molasses, where your feet run but your body remains in place, and damn me but I calculated the time, how long it was going to take me to cut Robert free, for the two of us to slither our way out of this hideous pool and escape the fire and the heating quicksilver. And I thought, hey lady you could slap the knife into his hand. You could leave him to it, you’ve opened the knife yourself one-handed and surely Mister Gearhead can open a knife one-handed so just get yourself the hell out and tackle Henry and stomp out the fire, no, stomp out the fire first and then tackle Henry because all he could do was light another match and if you got the fire out first he could do no….

There came a sound like salvation. Henry stomping out the fire, kicking apart the pile of wood.

And then another sound, a broken sound that was Henry’s own. “No we can’t, R.”

* * *

By the time I cut Robert loose, by the time we fumbled ourselves out of the quicksilver pool, by the time I stumbled to meet Walter and cut his ties loose, Henry had walked away.

By the time we reached the campsite and found our day packs and retrieved our water bottles and filled them in Skinny Creek, in order to douse the embers of the dying fire, Henry was nowhere to be found within Notch Valley.

He took his backpack. Left behind his tent.

EPILOG: elements 79 & 80

Henry Shelburne vanished.

A search party was organized.

Of course I hoped they’d find him — as Search and Rescue nearly always does. Find him and bring him home, well not home, not to the boarding house, not to his father’s house, home most likely being some mental health facility.

But there was a part of me that wished him to find a niche out there in the wild, someplace far from a world where he was not an asset, some place not enclosed.

It was romantic, no doubt, to wish the Henry Shelburne of the Old West photo, the squint-eyed teenager, to disappear over the horizon.

I could not condone what he’d done. If anyone was asking.

In time I would bury the pain, a technique I was perfecting. Encompassing all Henrys.

* * *

Robert Shelburne returned to his own gold country.

Even if Henry could be found, even if Henry testified as to what he saw that day on the Yuba, Robert Shelburne saw it differently. He panicked. There was no legal penalty for that. End of story.

Still, there was harm. There was a foul.

Robert had watched his father have a heart attack, watched him fall into the river. He’d just watched. And then he’d left. And then, the animals got to Camden Shelburne. If Robert Shelburne had, say, experienced a measure of guilt and come back to retrieve his father’s body, it would have been way too wild kingdom for him. But he hadn’t. Rangers found Camden Shelburne.

No wonder Robert concocted the story of being in Sacramento the day his father died.

I supposed it was analogous to concocting a ‘front’ company, a dog-and-pony-show green cred for the money guys.

A couple of weeks after the conclusion of the Shelburne case, as Walter was at his workbench analyzing a feldspar from our current case, I suggested a coffee break. Walter was up for it. I poured two mugs and Walter grabbed the pink donut box and we settled in at the map table.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said, sliding the day’s newspaper closer. I opened it to the business section.

Walter’s eyebrows lifted. “Since when did you start following the stock market?”

“Since today.”

Actually, since several days ago when I’d googled it and found the salient abbreviation. They ID stocks with numbers and letters, like elements on the periodic table. But when it came to following the market Walter was still an ink-and-paper man — he liked newsprint on his fingers to go with the donut crumbs — and so I did it his way. I pointed out the salient abbreviation.

He read. “Deep Pockets?”

“Yup.”

“You’ve been tracking it?”

“I figure I might buy a share. Attend the next shareholder meeting. They let you ask questions, right?”

“They do,” he agreed.

“Tells them the shareholders are paying attention, right?”

“It does.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ll have a few questions about AquaHeal.”

“Such as?”

“Along the lines of, do you intend to invest enough to get the technology right, and if not, why don’t you get out of the way?”

He rubbed his chin.

“Because if you let AquaHeal fail, you’re souring this market for clean tech.”

Because I’d become a numbers chick, googling to find the salient number — how much mercury was deposited into the watersheds of the Sierra during the gold rush. Because that number blew my mind. Fifteen point two million pounds. Because I’d grabbed hold of fifteen or so of those pounds, cupped on the ledge in the crevice, that day on the Yuba. Looked like a river cobble, felt like a heart.

Walter reached for the newspaper. “What was today’s quote…”

“Hundred and twenty-four dollars and thirty-one cents. Per share.”

He sampled his coffee, nodded his approval. “I’m in.”

* * *

Walter said, one day, apropos of the Shelburne case, “We did what we set out to do. We prevented Henry from committing suicide.”