Toni Dwiggins
Volcano Watch
MAPS
PROLOGUE
Twice, the mayor of my hometown gave me advice.
The first time was when she joined my third-grade class on a snowshoeing trip to chop a Christmas tree. She was nobody’s mom — just the town’s busybody mayor who volunteered for everything. Her name was Georgette Simonies. Call me Georgia she’d boom to any kid who addressed her otherwise, and since she was barely five feet tall, kid-size, we could do that. Out in the wilderness that day, I got myself lost. Trees suddenly thick, shrouded. That snow-blanket silence. Georgia was the one who found me. Next time wear a bell, she boomed.
The second time Georgia Simonies advised me, I was eleven. My little brother Henry had recently died. He had hemophilia, wherein the blood refuses to clot. He’d gotten sicker that year, bleeding out again and again, and my parents stockpiled pressure bandages and I fed him pureed broccoli to replace the lost iron, but his luck ran out when he bumped his head and bled into his brain.
I had night terrors for weeks until my parents, cartoonists, did the only thing they really knew how to do. My mother drew me a cartoon-brother snugly dead in his box. My father wrote the caption: death by God.
My older brother added a comma: death, by God.
I knew better.
A week later Georgia dropped by our house and studied the cartoon and then took me aside. She asked: You feeling guilty? I nodded. You couldn’t watch him every minute. But I was in charge. Nobody blames you. Nobody lets me say I’m sorry. She went and picked up the cartoon and put it on the table in front of me. Gave me a pencil. Say it that way.
It took me over a week, and an hour with a thesaurus, but I finally added my own caption: death by inattention.
When I turned thirty, it was halfway through Georgia’s fifth mayoral term. She’d been in and out of office for twenty-five years, mostly in.
She’s been missing almost five weeks.
I’ve been catching the talk around town. People grumble that she can’t disappear on us now, when it’s a question of the town’s survival. A couple of jerks have made bets: accident, or foul play? A couple of wits say she’ll be back, she wants a sixth term.
As for me, I’m paying relentless attention.
CHAPTER ONE
It was an icy dawn.
The four of us huddled at the Red’s Meadow trail head, nursing coffee, inhaling steam, hands stealing warmth from the mugs. Seemed like we’d continue nursing that brew until hell froze over, which appeared imminent. I drained my mug, slushed it out with snow, and gave the three men a look. They cleaned their mugs. I collected the mugs and stowed them in my pack along with the thermos. Always the female who brings the coffee.
And then there was nothing for it but to snap boots into bindings and get going.
There’s a body up the mountain, and from the report made by the ice climber who’d found it, the body had been there awhile. Until proven otherwise, the police had to treat it as a suspicious death. This mission had already been delayed three days because of bad weather, and another storm was forecast for tomorrow.
The corpse, according to the ice climber, was female.
Could be Georgia.
Nobody wanted to postpone.
The climb was too steep for snowmobiles and the weather too iffy for choppers. We had to ski it.
The four of us strung out on the trail, packing yesterday’s snow. We were a silent group but I chalked that up to the weather, to the stress we’ve been under with a missing mayor and our hometown existence touch and go. No need for talk, though, because I knew this team down to the ground. Detective Sergeant Eric Catlin took the lead, cutting trail the way he worked a crime scene, muscular and precise. Recovery team volunteer Stobie Winder followed, ski patrolman in winter and horse wrangler in summer, thickly muscled as one of his pack horses — and that’s why he was hitched to the sled we’d use as a litter. I followed the sled: Cassie Oldfield, meeting although not beating the local athletic standards, gloomy for a time in adolescence and now only in her dreams, good with rocks like Stobie’s good with horses, precise as Eric in her work, once-student and now associate forensic geologist to the persnickety old man following her: Walter Shaws, the backbone of her life.
Eric set a climbing pace but I set mine by the rasp of Walter’s skis. I had to slow, and slow again, to pace his fitful stride. A gap opened between us and the others and within an hour Eric and Stobie had left Walter and me behind.
Georgia would have been slower, still, had she come this way.
It was a wicked climb. When the old sea floor lifted to become the Sierra Nevada range it tilted sharply westward, so this eastern flank rises without mercy. We live on a plateau of eight thousand feet at the base of an eleven-thousand-foot peak, and we consider a pass of nine thou low. But this climb goes up to twelve. There are those of us who’d hike it or ski it just for the thrill of it, but Georgia tackled the outdoors only by necessity. To take a school group snowshoeing, to ski to the market when the roads weren’t plowed. She fought off her extra pounds on a treadmill, not on a mountain. It took three million Pliocene years to raise this range and it would take three mill more to convince Georgia Simonies to climb up here for fun.
Which could argue that it wasn’t Georgia up the mountain.
Walter and I turned up the next switchback, a pleat of a trail that would lift us another hundred or so feet.
I glanced up. Eric was positioned on the cliff edge above, watching our progress.
We topped the switchback and found Stobie with folded arms, poles dangling from his wrists.
Eric edged down from the cliff. “Listen up folks, I phoned for a weather update and that storm’s moving in faster. We’ve got to make time. Stobie and I talked about it and we can handle this. Cassie, Walter, why don’t you two head back down.”
Walter stiff-armed his poles for support, recovering his breath, eyeing Eric.
When my own breathing had steadied, I said, “What the hell?”
“Hey babe,” Stobie chimed in, “getting snowed-in up there’s no joke. Eric and I can boogie-woogie it a whole lot faster.” He shook his rump, waggling the sled.
I regarded Stobie, who’s called me babe since we were kids, me being two years younger than Stobie and Eric, the two of them part of my older brother’s group. Stobie’s always quick with a smile, kidding around, more a big brother than my own flaky brother. Now, he smiled but without any warmth. Perhaps it was the cold. I turned to Eric. Eric’s always slow to make a joke, although easily amused. He has inky blue eyes, the left one glass. There’s a delicate network of scars beneath that eye and when he’s amused the skin there crinkles like crystallized ice. The skin stayed taut.
No, I thought, nobody’s kidding.
“I’ll bag your evidence for you,” Eric said, even. “Don’t be territorial.”