But not here, because this cyanide pond did me no more good than the others, because the snow of this draw spread sparkling and unbroken. There was no hot spring.
Still, my eye fixed on the stream, where several bushy trees bent beneath the weight of snow. Mountain willow — dwarfish at this altitude.
Georgia had picked up a willow leaf somewhere.
I decided to sample the draw.
Because the soil would be bared in the tunnel, I began there. Exchanging skis for a flashlight, leaden with cold, I went in, stopping just inside. The tunnel was a skinny incursion into the mountain, high-ceilinged at the front end. At the far end, it closed down to a narrow throat. I played the flash over the rock face, half-expecting to see lusters of gold, but the only luster my flashlight caught was in the flattened cans of Mountain Dew that littered the floor. The floor was hard rock dusted with a thin soil, which not surprisingly looked cinder-red. Here and there it was studded with dark nodules. Upon closer examination of the nodules near the entrance, I identified them as animal scat. Alpine chipmunk or pika, I figured, at this altitude.
I took a soil sample near the entrance and went out into the light to see what I had.
I spread a tarp, laid out my tools, and put a hand lens to the dish of soil. Oxidized cinders, bits of pumice. A wink of mica, duller hornblende, milky quartz, pinkish feldspar — granite. I assumed the nearest source was the gray rockfall, chunks of which had weathered and crumbled, and that decomposed granite had fed into the soil.
My interest stirred.
Not lab conditions, but in the field under the hand lens this soil looked a close match to the evidence from Georgia’s boots.
I sat back on my heels and thought it through. What was missing? Well, cyanide for starters, although there was the obvious source. I debated whether to dig a sample near the ore dump but the snow there was deep. I decided to put that off. As for the hot spring minerals, there was no visible source of sulfur and calcite.
And then the obvious hit me. I felt like a fool.
What if Georgia had found a spring here — the spring the prospector described in his claim — and it had subsequently died? She’s been dead over two months now. In two months, a hot spring can die too. And then the snow comes and buries the corpse.
For my purposes, dead’s just as good as alive.
I scanned the draw. A grid search of this place would take well over a day. If need be, I’d come back with Walter and do the work. For now, I was willing to stipulate that there was a spring here somewhere, dead and buried.
Okay then, move on to the next missing bit. Gunpowder.
I looked at the tunnel. Soil was bared there so it was worth another search. I went back in, pausing again at the mouth. This time, playing my flashlight over the soil, I was looking for bootprints. There was some scuffing here and there but nothing identifiable. Might have been animals, might have been the Mountain-Dew drinkers, but the thin soil wasn’t saying. I went further inside the tunnel and did a thorough sampling.
Outside again, spreading my haul on the tarp, my eye was drawn to the mouth of the draw and I stared until every shape resolved itself into a tree.
I bent to work and was rewarded in the second dish. I stared, in disbelief. I took the twenty-power hand lens and looked again. And then, feverish, ransacked all the dishes. Strike after strike: the mother lode. Not dust of gold but disks of silver. Their faces burned into my memory. Including dimples, my old friend.
Gunpowder.
My hand was shaking. I set down my lens.
Somebody did a great deal of shooting in the tunnel — or in the draw and then somebody or a lot of somebodies tracked the powder around.
Somebody who used biathlon powder.
Shit.
What happened here? And why was Georgia involved?
And who was here with her?
I went very cold. Georgia, den mother to the biathlon team, indefatigable booster who brought the biathlon World Cup to Mammoth.
But I could not make the leap from the biathlon course up here to Gold Dust. I couldn’t even venture an onageristic estimate on that.
Wait. Back up. There were still all those unidentified grains of powder, that were not biathlon powder.
I didn’t get it. I was ninety percent convinced I’d found the place she last walked — I’d bump that up to one hundred percent in the lab — but I had no idea what she was doing here.
Okay, so back up again. How in hell did she come here in the first place? Did she go to county records and find the Gold Dust notice of location? And if she did, why? Well maybe she wasn’t after a hot spring, after all, maybe she was looking for a mine and the spring was secondary. But why?
And what in the name of all that is logical did she find so compelling here? Enough to write no way out.
If indeed she wrote it here.
Well, there was the hot spring. The stipulated hot spring. Although a hot spring — one that was so ephemeral that it died — was hardly enough to set her heart racing. Was it?
I shrugged. Just go back to the lab and do the analysis.
As I was packing my field kit, I thought about the quirky mix of Jeffrey pine bark and pumice that was in her mouth. No Jeffrey pines here — it’s too high for Jeffrey, too far from the nearest Jeffrey forest for an animal to ferry in enough bark to mix in any significant proportion with the soil here.
I thought back to Georgia’s body on the tray in the medical examiner’s lab. The bruising around her mouth had led to my assumption that someone had opened her mouth and dumped in the pumice-bark mix.
No wild-ass guesses necessary to conclude that whoever was here with Georgia brought that quirky mix.
I gritted my teeth, and I thought about Adrian Krom. I thought about Lindsay’s theory, and I could concoct my own corollary — Georgia finds a new hot spring here, a new place for a romp — and brings her lover but he’s not as impressed as she’d hoped. He says something in his brusque way, and she responds in kind. Or maybe he gets weird. Maybe he invites her for a dip and quotes Dante and even if she’s lovestruck she’s not stupid and she says what kind of nonsense is this? She fears we’ve put the town in the hands of a nutcase. She decides what must be done — get him fired. No fooling around like Lindsay with reputations, she’s the goddamn mayor and she’s got clout with everyone who counts, when push comes to shove. And it does, because Krom sees her react. She tries to cover but she’s Georgia and she’s lousy at evasions. She manages to steal a moment alone — maybe in the tunnel — to write her quick notes in the Weight Watcher’s. But in the end, Krom finds her.
The sun dipped behind the rockwall and Gold Dust fell into gloom.
Suddenly in a hurry, I finished packing and geared up.
In the process, my corollary to Lindsay’s theory fell apart. If Adrian Krom killed Georgia here, why in the name of all that is logical was he trying to help me find this place? If it wasn’t for Adrian Krom, I might not have thought to check county records.
I pushed off. I skied full-out to the mouth of the draw but when I skirted the granite outcrop, my skiing turned awkward. I was following the tracks I’d made on the way in and it took me two or three glides to figure out what was wrong.
I bent to the tracks.
Too many basket holes, too close together. When you ski cross country you don’t break new trail if there is already a set of tracks going where you want to go. You take advantage of the first skier’s labor. You’ll set the tracks a little deeper. Hardly noticeable. But it’s nearly impossible to ski and set your poles in someone else’s basket holes. By the progress of the baskets, the skier had come just to the bend, just far enough to sight up the draw. He’d done a kick turn and headed downhill in the same tracks.