“One more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Whose idea was it?”
She put a finger to her lips.
A secret? Her bare ass is on the cover of the homtown paper and my brother’s bragging his ass off, so who’s ass is she trying to cover for now? I said, “Tell me who fucking planned it, Jeanine.”
She eyed me. “Your guru.”
I didn’t get it.
“Lindsay.” She replaced her lipstick. “Lindsay who’s-cooler-than-you-thought Nash.”
I froze. I did not believe her. And then I did.
“See, your brother and some of the guys wanted to beat the shit out of him for the Stobe. I mean, if Mister Bigshot hadn’t surprised us with his drill at the race then nobody would have got shot.” She gave her braid a yank. “But this fixes him. Lindsay’s sending the paper straight to FEMA. This is gonna get Krom’s ass fired. This shows he doesn’t give a shit about safety — I mean, he takes me to the creek, where he’s putting it off-limits?” Her voice edged up. “Shows Mister Safety Dude doesn’t take his job seriously.”
When I unfroze, I raised my hands to my temples, which felt as though they were going to explode.
“So,” she said, sliding the check across the table to me, “what do you think?”
I could not begin to say.
“Find out what you wanted?”
More.
She narrowed her eyes. But she was looking beyond me, and she took on that watchful look, that anxious hometown tic. Glance around, straining to catch what’s in the offing. Then she snapped back. “It’s cool, Cass. We’re all cool. Krom’s the one in deep shit.” She swung her legs out of the booth. “See ya.” She moved away, trailing past the Guardsmen’s table, catching a round of whistles.
I watched her, numb. Her take on men, men’s take on her. Maybe it would work. It sure made Krom look reckless enough. What it made Lindsay look was, to me, beyond reckless. It made her into someone I don’t know.
I thought of Krom, in the creek, bowing, giving it the finger. And then with Jeanine. What was that? Playing at sacrifice? Like he’s challenging the volcano.
Only, how do you win a duel with a volcano?
You don’t. It’s not an even match.
My headache erupted into nausea. There is, of course, one arena in which Krom and Lindsay are evenly matched.
Us. The town. We depend on them both. They each hold our future in their hands.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I watched Walter lay aside the Mammoth Times and then square his face to begin the day, and I just couldn’t tell him. Reading about Adrian Krom’s night in the creek had disturbed him. Learning about Lindsay’s role would stun him.
So I sat dense as rock and kept my mouth shut.
There was a jolt. I grabbed the test-tube ring on my workbench and secured the glassware. Mag four, if I had to guess, and it jolted me out of my stupor. I hoped it would jolt Lindsay, as well — to her senses. Sitting at her desk, no doubt, with the newspaper and a mug of coffee and her cat’s smile. But of course a mag-four jolt would raise, at most, her eyebrow. What she’s on the watch for are quakes you don’t feel. Anonymous little buggers with a low-frequency motion, like a bell ringing, which means fluid’s on the move. That’s the kind of quake that rings Lindsay’s bell. That’s what she should be planning for — not sordid setups in the creek to take down her enemy.
“Mag four?” Walter hazarded. He’d been jolted out of his stupor, as well.
I said, “We don’t have time for this.” I went to his bench and took the newspaper and tossed it in the trash. I said, “I have a new lead.”
He straightened. “Tell me.”
I explained my theory that the calcite and sulfur in the evidence might indicate a hot spring.
“That’s hardly a new lead. Hot springs are certainly one source, but there are other candidates.”
“What if we knew that Georgia had an interest in hot springs?”
“Do we?”
I told him about Krom and Georgia and crinoids and Hot Creek.
His eyebrows lifted. No comment. Decorous Walter.
“So you didn’t know. Well neither did I. Lindsay told me. Georgia confided in her.”
He said, peevish, “And there is a reason Lindsay confided in you?”
“Yes. She has a theory.”
“Which you are about to tell me.”
I explained Lindsay’s theory, the one I’d deconstructed in the shower yesterday evening. I explained that I’d come in early this morning and put the soil I’d gathered with Lindsay under the comparison scope, next to the evidence soil, and found no match.
He said, even, “So you’ve ruled out the site at Hot Creek.”
“Yes.”
“And the lovers-quarrel theory?”
I mulled that one over. I gave a glance to the newspaper in the trash can. No question Adrian Krom had some bizarre thing going with the creek. With women at the creek. But the jump from there to murder was a very large one. “Sure, could have happened somewhere else. But we have no evidence that it did.”
“I must admit,” Walter said, “I have trouble considering Adrian a cold-blooded killer.”
“What about hot-blooded? In a fit of passionate anger?”
Walter shrugged. Shook his head.
“Despite the thing with Jeanine?”
“That was rash.”
“And?”
“That does not make him a killer.”
“So you think Lindsay’s theory is a crock?”
Walter said, even, “Lindsay has distrusted Adrian for a very long time.”
“You chalk up her theory to prejudice?”
“I’m not blind to her faults.”
“I kind of thought you were.”
Walter gave a thin smile, a crack in his seamed face.
I thought, Walter’s greatest strength — and his greatest weakness — is loyalty. And that’s why people value his good opinion so dearly — if he thinks you’re a prince, you’re set for life. Whatever you do, short of a capital crime, you’re still a prince. And you want to live up to that. When I took psych in college I thought I had Walter figured. He’d told me about his own undergrad days; he’d gone through a rough spell, drinking, cutting classes. As misspent youth goes, his sounded tame, but he judged it harshly. Then in his early twenties he straightened out and found his calling. I’d asked what made him change and he said ‘I got tired of being a bum.’ So when I got into Psych 101, I psyched Walter. My theory went: he’s so fiercely loyal because he doesn’t want others to judge him by his years as a bum. Now, I think my theory was a crock. Walter is loyal because it’s his nature. And I think it’s a good thing I escaped the murky waters of psych for the bedrock of geology.
The truth was, neither of us was a forensic genius when it came to reading people.
“Well then,” Walter said, “shall we just do the geology?”
“Sure. If we had some geology to do.”
“We have your new lead, Cassie.”
“But…you don’t buy that.”
“I most certainly do. I buy the fact that we can now connect Georgia with a hot spring, at the creek. I certainly accept that we have sulfur and calcite in the evidence, which could have come from a hot spring, somewhere. Irrespective of why Georgia might have gone there.”
“So you think it’s worthwhile following the hot spring lead.”
“Yes, dear.” He slapped his thigh. “Let’s do the acid test.”
I put a pinch of evidence soil in a test tube and droppered in hydrochloric acid.
There were bubbles, and a nasty smell.
The acid test is a quick way to find out if your samples have certain minerals. In the presence of acid, calcite gives off carbon dioxide and the soil fizzes. Sulfur gives off the odor of hydrogen sulfide.
We already knew we had calcite and sulfur but the question was: in what concentration? High would suggest the sample came from a site near a volcanic source. Like a hot spring.