We took Lindsay’s Range Rover down the Lookout logging road and hit the smooth tarmac of Highway 395 just about where the Bypass is due to hook up. Lindsay headed south on 395 and ten minutes later, when she slowed to take the Hot Creek turnoff, my stomach turned over. She barreled along the rutted road. There was no barricade to slow her. There was, thankfully, no blue Blazer in the parking lot.
She shut off the engine and swiveled to retrieve her gear bag, a tight weave in bright colors. Guatemalan — the Atitlan caldera. Lindsay not only does field work in the large calderas of the world, she shops the towns. Her turquoise rings come from New Mexico — the Valles caldera.
I thought of the gear in Krom’s pack, the monitor he’d brought in order to impress Len Carow, and wondered if Lindsay knew about Krom monitoring her volcano.
We started walking, bypassing the trail down to the creek, heading out along the tableland above the gorge.
I followed the Guatemalan bag into the calf-deep snow of the desert. A simple field trip, after all. I had been on so many field trips, like this, with Lindsay. I always followed, or we walked abreast. I never led. When I was eleven, not long after I’d begun hanging around Walter’s lab, there had been a particularly nasty quake swarm. I had nightmares. Walter found out and that’s when he introduced me to Lindsay. She took me on a field trip deep into the caldera. She paced in front of me cheerily explaining the difference between ordinary tectonic quakes and low-frequency quakes that mean fluid’s on the move. Her teaching hadn’t moved me — she heaped on too much too fast — but her cocksureness did. I wanted to ape her finesse, the way she coolly took the elemental forces in hand. But I could not take on a volcano. I could fear it, even learn its nature, but I could not stop it. I made no difference. And so Lindsay didn’t lure me into volcanology as she’d expected. She’s never understood my choice of Walter’s lab. There, I have a fighting chance to put things right.
Lindsay pointed. “There’s my little fellow.”
Across a small ravine a finger of steam issued from the snow. Two pinyon pines were in its path and their needles were browned. “How’s his breath?” I asked, using the lingo.
“Tolerable. But it’s his age and location that interest me more. He’s nearly six months old and he’s up here all by himself.”
So he’d been born around the time the volcano started acting up. I wetted my lips, gone dry in the cold air. “So we have activity outgrowing the creek.”
“We have a single vent up here,” she said, easy. “It’s one more thing to consider.” When the volcano does anything worth notice, she grows progressively cheerier but it’s a focused sort of cheer like that of combat pilots in old war movies who joke their way into flak.
I said, not easy, “Should this whole area be fenced off?” This is, after all, the heart of the south moat, a trough in the caldera where the unrest has been concentrated.
She swept a hand, encompassing the creek, the gorge, the tablelands. “How? You could block the road, of course, but anyone on foot can gain access.” She gave me a level look. “I explained this to Adrian, when I told him about my little fellow. He’s making an issue of it nonetheless.”
I gave a glance to the gorge, although we were not close enough to see down to the creek. Nonetheless, I pictured Krom making an issue of it down there three days ago. And then I pictured Krom and his swim that night.
Lindsay nudged me and led the way across the ravine. We stopped just short of the fumarole. “Stop worrying,” she said. “I can handle Adrian.” She knelt and extracted a gas collector from the Guatemalan bag.
I squatted beside her and screwed the gas tube into the pump. I said, “There’s something I should tell you.”
“Oh yes?”
I took in a deep breath, a biathlete breath, and then told her about Krom’s swim at Hot Creek. And the courtly bow. And the extended finger.
Very slowly, she pulled a gas filtration mask from the bag. She said, finally, “That was ill-considered. Following him.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
“Have you told Walter?”
“No.”
“Good. Don’t tell him. He thinks you have good sense.”
I wanted to raise my arms in defense.
She eyed me. “And why are you telling me this? Now?”
“Because of the drill. Because I could just dismiss the swim as…eccentric…until the drill. It’s not the drill itself that gets me — I know we need to drill, I want to drill, but… Adrian was willing to…”
“Sacrifice Stobie.”
I had been going to say, he’s willing to suffer casualties. After the fact. He hadn’t cared. But that’s not the same as sacrifice. Sacrifice implies intention. I shrugged.
“Very well,” Lindsay said, “given Adrian’s ill-considered actions, there’s something I should now tell you. I’ve kept quiet about this because, number one, it was told to me in confidence and I respect confidences and, number two, because I recognize my dislike of the man and I didn’t want that to influence my judgement.” She paused, then said, “Adrian and Georgia were having an affair.”
“What?” I dropped the pump.
“In regard to your case,” Lindsay said, “you might want to consider a lovers quarrel.”
“But they…”
“Sex, dear. I hardly think romance had any play in it.”
“But how do you know?”
Lindsay picked up the pump and checked my fittings. “She bragged.”
“But she had to be twenty years older than Adrian.”
Lindsay snapped, “That’s why she was bragging, one old crone to another.” She yanked the gas mask over her face. Her skin, where it showed, was a deep rose. She snatched up the gas collector and tramped over to the fumarole. She snaked the probe into the vent, shoving it here and there like she meant to ream the little fellow out of existence. She stalked back, dragging off the mask, speaking as soon as she was within earshot. “And don’t think he wouldn’t go after you.”
I said, wary, “Me?”
“It’s not just mature women like Georgia who’ve succumbed. The man’s dishy. I saw that first time I met him at Rainier, although in my eyes he couldn’t hold a candle to Walter. Still, I saw him cut a wake with the local ladies.” Her eyes, quick and bright, held mine. “And he’ll take a pass at you, too, if you have something he wants.”
“Like what?”
“Like information about a case in which he has an interest.”
“So it’s not just my charming self he’s after.”
“I doubt it.”
That stung. And rang real true. “Here’s what he likes about me — the geology. He was impressed when I told him what I could do with it. He wanted to know how I was going to follow it to Georgia. I don’t know what that proves. Doesn’t prove he killed her.”
“Honey, just this — he is not a trustworthy man.”
“You tell Georgia that?”
She said, after a moment, “No. I didn’t have a loving relationship with Georgia.”
All the fight went out of me.
Lindsay turned her attention to the disassembly of the gas collector. “In any case,” she said, “Georgia wouldn’t have listened.”
I picked up the Guatemalan bag and held it open while Lindsay stowed her gear.
“Now,” she said, “in light of our lovers-quarrel scenario, I’m going to show you something.”
Our scenario? I’d only just found out about Adrian and Georgia.
Lindsay shouldered the bag and set off. I moved to catch up. My thoughts skitttered, from midnight swims to sex to sacrifice. I was churning by the time we reached the trail down to the creek. Lindsay, however, had abruptly grown cheery. She led the way down to the bottom. Instead of turning right, as I had with Krom and Carow, I turned left in Lindsay’s wake. I followed her in silence along the creek bank. We rounded a couple of bends and came to a secluded pool, almost hidden behind a massive boulder. Lindsay turned to me. “As a matter of fact, Georgia came to me for advice in her quest to win Adrian’s heart. She wanted to know where to find fossils.”