He took a deep breath and threw himself out of the truck, running toward the front porch as hard as he could go. Just before reaching it he remembered to whip off his baseball cap and stuff it into a jacket pocket. No sense in antagonizing her by wearing the wrong colors.
The porch was only five feet deep but stretched the full width of the house. A curtain of rain fell from the eaves, so it wasn’t until Mercer was through it that he could see the house wasn’t white, but a pale blue. The trim was a darker shade in the same family. Flower boxes hung from the windows, but they hadn’t yet been planted. The outdoor furniture was all made of either wood or thick-gauge steel and looked like it had been there since the Dust Bowl. He saw no lights and assumed her power was out. Mercer swung open a screen door with a coil spring return and rapped on the jamb. With no answer he hit it harder. But to no avail. Next time he kicked the door with the toe of his boot, and it swung open in a flash. The shotgun barrel came at him with the speed of a striking cobra. He just managed to get a hand on it to deflect it away from his head.
“I told you, goddamnit, that I ain’t leavin’.”
“I’m not asking you to,” Mercer said, still holding the shotgun barrel high and to his right.
Veronica Butler was probably in her eighties by now, but she looked a decade younger. She had her fair share of wrinkles and crow’s-feet, but she stood tall and proud. Back in the day she would have been a stunner and even now was still attractive, with dyed red hair that swirled around her neck in permed curls. She was busty and curvy and fiery as hell, and Mercer knew if Harry were here the old letch would be tripping over his tongue.
“You aren’t one of Sherriff Conner’s boys.” She eased her grip on the Mossberg pump-action, and Mercer let her take it back so it hung in the crook of her arm.
“No, Mrs. Butler. My name is Philip Mercer. Sherman Smithson at the Hoover Library was supposed to call you and tell you I was coming.”
“He mentioned it yesterday, but I didn’t think anyone would be damned fool enough to drive out in this.”
“I surprise myself sometimes with what damned fool things I do,” he admitted.
She gave him a critical look. Her eyes were an almost identical gray to his own, and she must have seen something in them. “I don’t think there’s a whole lot that surprises you, Mr. Mercer. Come on in out of the rain and tell me why you’d risk your neck to talk to an old broad like me.”
Mercer followed her into the house. He loved the temerity of women who referred to themselves as “broads.” It told him they were comfortable enough in their own skins not to care what others thought.
She didn’t ask him to remove his wet boots, for which he was grateful, but waited so he could hang his bomber jacket on a peg next to her coats. She led him through a dim living room to the kitchen at the back of the house. A big picture window overlooked a backyard now dominated by the overflowing stream. They had maybe another eighteen inches of elevation before the water seeped into the house.
She must have read Mercer’s mind. “We’re one foot higher than Blair Creek’s ever crested. My grandfather was an amateur geologist and figured that record goes back well over a thousand years. That’s why he built on this bluff.”
“I’m actually a geologist myself and I’d agree with his assessment, but that was before they started putting levees along the Mississippi, and God knows what other flood control measures upstream of your house.”
She suddenly looked a little less sure of herself and her grandfather’s geologic insights. “There’s a dam about ten miles from here.”
“Concrete?”
She nodded and Mercer relaxed. So long as the dam held, they could drive west through the fields faster than the river rose, so there wasn’t any real danger. Still, he said, “I told you earlier that I’m not here to ask you to leave, but I think it might be a good idea.”
She set the shotgun in the corner of the kitchen and fired up the gas stove with a wand lighter. “You’re welcome to shove off, but I am not going anywhere. The dam’s been there since the thirties, and I’ve seen storms a lot worse than this. Coffee? I only have instant.”
“We should drink it fast,” he said to prompt her to rethink her position.
“Sherm said you were looking into some rock samples President Hoover once owned.”
Mercer assumed wryly that Roni Butler was probably the only person in the world Sherman Smithson allowed to call him Sherm. “That’s right.”
She didn’t let him elaborate and went on, “I hate to disappoint you, Mr. Mercer, but I know nothing about rock samples. When I worked for the president we were living in New York, and he was working on his greatest book, Freedom Betrayed. He was a top-notch mining engineer when he was a younger man, but by the time I started as his secretary in the late 1950s he considered himself an elder statesman and historian. Other than a few tales of adventure he’d tell me from time to time, I know almost nothing about that earlier part of his life.”
She said this last line looking over her shoulder as she fiddled with the copper teapot atop the blue ring of burning propane. Mercer imagined that her convincing delivery was enough to deter most everyone who ever asked, but not him. Hoover had to have coached her on what to say and she’d likely practiced it in the years following his death, but that had been many, many years ago. With so much time having gone by, she couldn’t have expected to be asked about this any longer. She had to feel the secret was comfortably in the past.
Her smile seemed a little forced, and she turned back again to unnecessarily adjust the stove’s burner.
“Roni,” he said over the rattle of wind-driven rain against the window and shutters, “you knew someone would come along eventually. Hoover knew it too. That’s why he told you about it in the first place. It’s too big of a secret to have died with him and it’s too big to die with you either.”
That flustered her, and she stammered, “I–I don’t know…what you’re talking about. I think maybe you should leave me be.”
She turned back to him and they looked at each other across the simple kitchen. In the background came the serious voices of broadcasters on an emergency radio talking about the storm. “I’ve been to the cave, Roni,” Mercer said and he saw her resolve start to crack. She’d carried this burden for fifty years, and she wanted so badly to pass it along. “I was in Afghanistan two days ago. I know Mike Dillman went back there and cleared it out, but I found a sliver of Sample 681 he overlooked.”
A crack appeared in Roni Butler’s decades-long resolve. “That’s what the president labeled it for his collection, though he called the mineral electricium. I liked Mike Dillman’s name more. He said they were called the lightning stones. I don’t know if he made that up or heard it from natives living around the cave.”
“A single sample of these lightning stones ended up with a friend of mine, who was murdered along with several other people when the crystal was stolen.”
“Murdered? Stolen? What are you talking about?”
“It’s no longer all that secret,” he informed her. “But I need to know the rest of it if I’m going to stop the killers.”
She sagged further, and in a symbolic gesture of which she herself was probably unaware, she set down a dishrag as if throwing in the towel. “Like I said, President Hoover named the gems electricium, because of how it attracted lightning, and also how it changed the way magnets worked. It had other strange properties, but I honestly don’t remember what they were — it’s been too long now.”
“That’s fine. Just tell me what you do recall. Who was Mike Dillman, for example?”