Mike started down the stairs.
I said, “I know how you feel.”
“You don’t know anything.”
Oh yes I do, I know how it feels to blame yourself for something that happens by accident. Doesn’t matter that you didn’t intend something awful to happen. Death by inattention. Doesn’t hurt any less. I said, “You pull yourself to pieces.”
He kept moving.
All right, I thought, you stubborn shit, don’t take my hand. And I’ll feel no qualms asking you the question I couldn’t ask Jimbo. “Can you help me with something, Mike? How many kinds of biathlon powder are there?”
That stopped him.
It was the question heavy in my mind when Walter and I dragged back to the house yesterday, but one look at Jimbo and I’d held my tongue. In the parking lot, after the race — after the drill — I’d thought Walter was wrong to keep us there. All I’d wanted to do was go somewhere and kick something. But he’d been right. Kicking through snow and digging like a dog had been right. And it worked, for awhile. And it paid off. We’d done a field test right there, sorting under the hand lens with a pocket knife. Dimples was there all right — no surprise — but there were also four other makes. And none of those four matched any of the mystery makes of gunpowder in the evidence, whose silver faces were burned into my memory. It made no sense. Just like it made no sense for Jimbo to lie about having a cartridge.
Mike turned. “What’s this about?”
“Biathlon powder.” I didn’t add ‘in the evidence’ but he was smart enough to make that leap. I didn’t want to risk adding that I was asking him because he used to be on the team. “Mike, is there more than one make?”
“Why do you wanna know?”
“I can ask somebody else if you don’t know.”
“I know.” His coarse skin bloomed with sweat. “O-kigh, there’s half a dozen makes. But only three I think perform when the temp gets down in the teens and I think Fiocchi and Lapua are the best of those and my personal choice was Fiocchi.” He glared. “And your brother thinks so too, I happen to know.”
Dimples.
My confusion deepened. So there are several makes of biathlon powder, and none but dimples matches my evidence. Therefore the unidentified gunpowder is not biathlon powder. Then what is that stuff and where did Georgia pick it up?
Mike was moving down the stairs.
“Wait a minute,” I said. A knot like a fist sat under my breastbone. “How’s Stobie?”
“Coma.” The word echoed up the stairwell.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I said, “Tell me I don’t need to be worried.”
Lindsay and I were in the laser shed, a crude box on stilts hanging on the side of Lookout Mountain, which overlooks the northwest loop of the caldera. I’d managed to blurt it out while she was lining up a shot.
She gave me a cursory glance. “About?”
“A vendetta.”
She aimed the laser, squinting like a sharpshooter. A red beam zapped across the caldera to score a bullseye on the reflector site and zapped back to the instrument monument in our shed. Ten days ago Lindsay had shot the same circuit, and if the beam’s travel time has changed between then and now it means the skin of the earth has stretched.
My heart pounded. “Well?”
She read the monitor. “Oh-point-five parts per million.”
“I meant about the race. The drill.”
She shot me a look, an ice-blue beam: we’re doing volcanology here. “And I mean the change from the background strain rate.”
Strain rate’s a relative thing. The earth’s crust is always straining, pulled this way and that by shifts in temperature, in weather, in tides. It can also be strained by rising magma. My own strain rate was rising fast. I said, “Are you worried?”
“I always worry about ground deformation, honey.”
“That’s not what I mean. You know what I’m saying. Adrian Krom is after you. First he sandbags you at the Inn meeting with his road alternative and then…”
“The Council voted to continue work on the Bypass,” she said. Then added, “They also voted to study his suggestion. Typical political fence-straddling.”
“And then,” I continued, “he sandbagged you at the drill. He didn’t just stick a pin in a map and choose the race for his drill, he chose it because of you.”
“I’m not the victim,” she said, thin. “Stobie is.”
I’d talked to Stobie for an hour, yesterday. Everybody’s taking a turn, in case he can hear us. I’d talked to his blank face about the weather, how construction on the Bypass is going, what I had for breakfast, what I planned to have for lunch. I’d said beer was a lousy idea for Bill, and I expected him, Stobie, to recover before Bill’s birthday with a better idea.
I said, “It’s not just Stobie. Mike’s a victim too. He was doing it for Adrian. You’d think Adrian would have tried to stop him — he’s got to know about Mike’s temper.”
“Well well,” she said. She tapped her fingers on the laser. Her heavy rings pinged its hull. “You appear to have joined the anti-Adrian camp.”
“Is there a camp?”
She smiled her cat’s smile and bent to the laser. She wore jeans and a long sweatshirt and from the back she looked like a young girl.
I felt a pang. When I was a young girl, I would never have questioned Lindsay’s motives.
She straightened, and gave me a level look. “And how is your case evolving?”
About as well as this talk. “It’s not.” Walter and I have been putting in the hours, and going nowhere fast. We’ve got gunpowder that says look where there’s shooting but the Casa Diablo and Lake Mary soils say keep on looking. We’d built the profile on the evidence soil and it damn well didn’t match the Casa and Mary soils. But, then, soil can be tricky. It can concentrate a rock’s trace elements so that a parent rock having a minute percentage of, say, magnetite can yield a soil in which the magnetite concentration is hundreds of times stronger, but you go ahead anyway hunting for a site where there’s magnetite-rich rocks because you just don’t know. And even if you find the magnetite jackpot you can still screw it up because of where you choose to dig. Oh, soil can outfox you. It can show one face in one sample and a totally different face in the next, taken just a few meters away.
She said, “And Walter can spare you this afternoon?”
I suddenly flared. “I make that call. I came out with you because I’m worried about you and Adrian. And because I’m goddamn worried about the volcano, too. And I’ve been putting in a boatload of overtime and so taking off a couple of hours isn’t…” I stopped myself, before I threw a goddamn fit. I produced a thin smile. “And because I enjoy your company.”
She winked. She read me too well. She shut down the laser and shuttered the windows. “Shall we move along? There’s a little fellow I want to visit.”
“Yes,” I said, “let’s move along.”
She locked the shed and I followed her in silence through the snow. She and Krom, I suddenly thought, speak the same language. Little fellow. Unpredictable chum. The volcano’s a he, someone they know personally, someone they’re on intimate terms with. Maybe that’s the way it is when you spend your life wondering if your work’s going to blow up in your face. I don’t do that. I don’t call my soil by name, I don’t give my evidence a gender. Maybe I should. Maybe if I give the bloody red hematite-stained cinders a name, they’ll tell me where they came from.