He didn’t.
I leapt onward. “If it were me, I’d want to, I don’t know, repeat the encounter. If I were in love, or in lust or whatever.”
“She didn’t.”
“She sure liked it. Enough to tell Lindsay.”
“She liked the experience. But Hot Creek was too public for her.”
“Then why’d she bring you there?”
“She didn’t. I brought her. After she told me where she got the crinoid, I wanted to have a look. I collect. And there we were. I like the place.” He looked hard at me. “As you well know.”
I held his look. I thought, if a shrink got hold of him there was probably a diagnosable condition. The intense need to control. The over-compensating ego. The delusions of grandeur. The almost symbiotic relationship with the volcano and its offshoots.
I said, raising my question again, “Well then, if she liked the experience, I’m wondering if she went looking for another hot spring. Less public.” A place, I thought, where the soil was rich in sulfur and calcite and pumice and cinders and granite. And gunpowder. And where in the Sierra was that?
Krom suddenly reached for me.
I flinched.
He grazed the small of my back and turned me to face the relief map. “Have a look. You tell me where she went.”
I looked down at the map. It was eerily real. If you flew over over the actual landscape in a small plane, it would look a lot like this relief map. The flat oval of the caldera is ringed by mountain ranges, like a broad barrel. It always puts me in mind of that carnival ride where you’re spun inside a barrel and the floor drops out, which is pretty much what happened when the old magma chamber vented and the valley floor dropped a mile. The mapmaker had pinched up the mountains into folds so that you can look down upon the topography and feel the climb in your legs. The lakes and streams are so blue they splash. Mammoth Mountain’s broad summit and muscular slopes are sculpted to ski, and beneath, the town in tiny jewels clings to the brawny land.
But the mapmaker could not show change.
There was no indication of the rapid swelling in the caldera, where magma’s forcing its way up. There was no depiction of the churning evolution at Hot Creek. Hot Creek was just a slash of pretty blue.
I turned back to Krom. “I don’t see anything.”
“You don’t?” He pointed. “There’s Casa Diablo, where you taught me how it’s done.”
It took all the will I possessed not to look down.
“And just to the south is Hot Creek. Where the safety of your town is being toyed with.”
“That’s a bit over-dramatic.”
“Is it?” He pressed his hand again into my back, like a dance partner, turning me. “Let’s go to my office. I want you to see what’s at stake.”
He escorted me to a corridor and we passed closed doors — Georgia’s office, still unoccupied, Parks and Rec, Senior Volunteers, the men’s room — and came to the office at the end of the hall. Door was open. I looked in. Prime real estate, double size, the back wall a window with a view of the woods.
He said, “Georgia set me up here.”
We went in.
Busy office, big desk, phone bank, in-box stacked to the roof. Computer hutch. Storage cabinet. Maps on the wall, calendar filled in. Aerial photos; roads highlighted with black marker. Sketch of Pika Canyon, the new escape route he pitched at the Inn. On top of a bookshelf was a display of rocks — obsidian and lapilli and Pelee’s tears and all the other stone faces of volcansim. Tucked in amongst disaster was a fossil sea lily, the crinoid gift I assumed.
He turned me to the near wall.
Photographs. A mural of death. Aerial shot of three bodies in the bed of a pickup, composition in gray, landscape and truck and bodies fuzzed in ash. Mount Saint Helens; I’d seen that shot before. Other things I hadn’t seen. Closeup of an arm, carbonized, the hand terminating in stubs. Another closeup, mummified face cooked to the color of sunset. Medium shot of a charred family — about to run? — frozen in motion. I’d heard of that, when volcanic fire burns so hot the muscles go spastic at the moment of death. More photos, closeup, long shot, group, color, black-and-white, and that hard to tell from ash gray. Melted flesh, arms, legs, feet in shoes, not one part connected to the other. A lone head, open mouth plugged with ash.
He said, “A reminder.”
He didn’t have to turn me again. I moved as far from him as I could and came to the wall flanking his desk. Another mural, a wall of framed certificates. In grateful recognition of. For outstanding devotion to. In appreciation for. Service. Professional conduct. Excellence in Management. Courage. Courage was the one that held me. No gold seals, no Gothic font, no long-winded dedication. Just a plain paper that read in block letters To Adrian Krom. For His Courage. From the people of Homer, Alaska.
He said, “That’s what I bring to your town.”
I turned.
“And now my reputation is on the line.” He stuck his hands into the pockets of his brown cords. “You see, Cassie, I got a phone call this morning, early, from Len Carow. You remember Len, the man who wants to achieve nothing more in his professional life than to take my scalp. He’s back in D.C. Lindsay emailed him a copy of your newspaper and he’s emailing it up and down the line. Doesn’t matter I was set up by a small-town slut. My side of the story won’t carry. Len’s concerned, Cassie. Len fears I’ve made light of my own safety measures. Made light. And I’ve been getting calls from the Council as well. Instead of deciding escape routes, they’re diverted by gossip. So your little town might just get what it’s after. You know the saying — be careful what you ask for.” His hands formed fists in the pockets, deforming the drape of his trousers. “So, Cassie, you see enough at the creek the night you followed me? Enough to tell your chum Lindsay?”
I flinched, yet again. “I’m not sure I understand what I saw.”
“You saw a man who challenges his enemy.”
“The volcano’s your enemy?”
“Yours too.”
“Okay,” I said. “But my problem is, you see our volcanologist as the enemy too.”
He laughed, mirthless. “And how would you describe her? The architect of that fiasco in the creek.”
“I don’t approve of that,” I said. “And I don’t approve of you trying to undermine her.”
“Enough.” He circled the desk and sat in his chair. “Let’s repair the damage. Let’s snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Another saying. Something you should know about me — I like sayings.”
I knew. Abandon hope, ye who enter.
“Let’s strike a bargain. You help me and I’ll help you.”
“Help you with what?”
“Find me what Georgia found. If that involves hunting a hot spring, go hunt your hot spring. But find it.”
“I plan to. It’s my job.”
“Oh it’s more than that, with you. I’ve watched you. I see you.” He assessed me, the way I’d assessed his wall of merit. “You look again and again, you keep going, against all odds. I understand that about you. Never say die. Right?”
I nodded, stiffly. He got that right.