“I want you to keep me in the loop. Because Georgia found something that alarmed her. No way out. It’s almost a saying, isn’t it?”
“Could mean something personal.” I sounded like a broken record.
“You’re after a hot spring,” he said. “What does that say? Aside from your little black dress. It says volcanism.”
“You saying she did go looking? You thinking she found a new spring?” Hot springs live off the roots of past eruptions, or new dikes of magma, but one new spring wouldn’t herald an eruption. Then again, it would certainly be of interest.
“Whatever she found, I want to know when you find it. But I want more than that. I want you to tell me where you’re looking, where you’re even speculating about looking, so that I can report to the Council, and to Len, that the mayor might have found something noteworthy and that I am being kept apprised of the progress of the search.”
“You mean you want something to spin? To play politics?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. So that I can get the focus back where it belongs. You give me the heads-up and I’ll take it from there. All I need is the spin, because I’m fighting the spin your chum cooked up at Hot Creek.”
I took that in. “And what’s your end of the bargain? How do you help me?”
“I stay on the job. I save you. You and your town.”
“And what if Georgia didn’t find anything? What if it doesn’t matter?”
“Then I need time to prepare.”
“Prepare for what?”
“Foretelling the future.”
I thought, in wonder, my God he is nuts.
He came out of his chair and leaned against the desk beside me. He unbuttoned the right cuff of his brown flannel shirt and folded the sleeve in neat packets to the elbow. He rolled his arm so that the inner forearm showed. It was a remarkably graceful gesture.
I stared at his forearm.
The scar was white and raised, as Jeanine had described, and covered with a swirling tattoo. I understood why she couldn’t have read it in the dark at the creek. Hard enough with his office light ablaze to follow the trail of words snaking round and round in ever tighter circles. He held his arm still, rigid as the family on his wall burned into spasm. He gave me the time to read.
In the fourth gulf of the eighth circle of hell are those who presumed to foretell the future, their heads fixed face-backward on their necks.
“Dante,” he said.
“I know.”
Our eyes fixed on each other.
He said, “I’ve been in that circle of hell.”
“At Rainier.”
“Yes.” He dropped his arm. “Know this, Cassie — I won’t go there again.”
I was in my own maze, trying to find the right path. Keep the emergency-ops man in the loop, so he can save his rep? I stared at the swirly tattoo. And save us in the process. I glanced at his wall of merit, at the sincere thanks from the folks of Homer, Alaska.
“By the way,” he said, “you could take ‘foretelling the future’ as a metaphor. But it’s damn close to my job description.”
I thought, Lindsay’s too. I said, “Anything I find that has to do with the volcano I’ll report first to Lindsay.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything else.”
I said, “I’ll want to run this past Walter. He’s doing field work too.”
“Good idea.” Krom stuck out his hand.
I took it. We shook.
I intended to keep my part of the bargain but with eyes wide open. In fact, I intended to undertake this hunt with my head fixed face-backward on my neck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I entered the fog.
At times it clung so low I could see no more than the red slick of my skis, and at times it peeled from canyon walls to reveal iron-oxidized cliffs. It was the fog that darkened the red stain of the cliffs and put me in mind of blood.
Of course it was hematite, not blood — soft earthy iron oxide that colors soil and rock red. Hematite, from the Greek for blood, loosely translated as bloodstone. I squinted at the cliff rock. A kind of purplish red color, really. Come to think of it, a color much like the livor mortis on Georgia’s skin, where the blood pooled.
She died on her back and lay there long enough for livor to fix.
Wherever there was.
I heard a sound and turned my face to look backward. Nothing to see. Could have been a whitetail jackrabbit, shusshing through the snow.
Getting a little jumpy, lady? Nobody around but you and the bunny.
When I’d parked in the lot near Lake Mary, there were no other cars. As I’d looped the lake, there were no other skiers. When I’d left the lake and begun the climb up Coldwater Canyon, I’d encountered the fog. Fog wrapped and hid me and then capriciously lifted to reveal me. Every time I turned, I saw shapes through gray veils. Tall thin-trunked shapes that could be nothing but lodgepole pines and the smaller shapes that were likely young hemlocks whose droopy tips put me in mind of hands.
No Jeffrey pines here — I was climbing above their range. At any rate, the Jeffrey-pumice mix I’d found in Georgia’s mouth had tested negative for cyanide, which deepened my conviction that it was of a different origin from the rest of the evidence. It was a mystery, to be put aside and taken up later, like the gunpowder.
I headed up the canyon which glaciers had long ago bulldozed between Mammoth Crest and Red Mountain. Red Mountain, beneath its snowcap, is in places lava-patched granite.
Gold country.
Over the years I’ve picked up a few sayings of Walter’s, regarding the metallic ores. He says, where two different kinds of rock meet, that’s a clue that precious ore might be found. It was, here, a century ago. Tunnels were dug, ore was crushed, and for awhile some got rich.
I too was on a treasure hunt, only the treasure I was after was liquid and steaming.
My talk with Krom had bolstered my theory that Georgia went hunting for a hot spring, a good source for the sulfur and calcite in the boot soil. And the cyanide suggested that spring was in the neighborhood of a mine.
I halted and pulled out my compass and maps. Walter had downloaded a map of mine sites from the net, and we’d compared it with a geologic map of the region, and marked sites where mines intersected with deposits from hot springs. We’d split the sites, each of us canvassing a different neighborhood.
I checked the next mine on my half of the map, got my bearings, and pushed on.
The fog-hung canyon narrowed and I had to stop again and again to dig out snow clots that wedged between my boots and skis. As I knelt, I looked back. I could not help but leave tracks, which anyone with a pair of skis could follow. Even in fog.
I told myself once again to get a grip. There is no other skier. There is nobody, nothing, not even the rabbit. All was quiet.
The silence up here was palpable as the fog, giving this country a funereal feel.
I said, “I have nothing of interest to tell you.”
Krom motioned me to join him on the split-log bench overseeing the relief map. “Where did you go?”
“Up Coldwater Canyon.”
“What took you there?”
“Pumice. Sulfur. Calcite. Granite. Trachybasaltic cinders…”
“What’s trachybasaltic?”
“Extrusive rock intermediate in composition between basalt and…”
“Never mind the geology lesson. What did you find?”
“Nothing of interest.”
“No hot spring?”
“Nope.”
“What about Walter? Where did he go?”
I told him where Walter went and what Walter found. Nothing of interest.
“Christ, Cassie, give me something.”