Eric made a sound — inhaling, exhaling, the calm-before-you-shoot cadence.
“And then,” I said, “you just let it go.”
“I had a talk with him.”
“Wasn’t enough, Eric. If you’d gone to the cops or his dad — someone in charge — maybe he wouldn’t have had the problem with Georgia.”
Eric said, tight, “So you buy it? Mike and Georgia at Gold Dust?”
“How do the two of them end up there? What, Mike drives them to the Lake Mary parking lot and then they companionably take a ski up to Gold Dust?”
“Don’t know.”
“Let’s say you’re right.” I had to caution myself. I didn’t want to see Krom as the killer. I liked Mike as the killer — I could see that. But just take it one step at a time. “If Mike killed her at Gold Dust, why not bury her there? Why transport her all the way to the glacier?”
“You know Mike. He’s not cold-blooded.” Eric held up a hand. “He’s hot-blooded, Cass, and if he killed her in a fit of temper, he’d be in shock afterward. Take awhile for him to figure out what the hell to do next.”
“A day, you mean. Long enough for livor to settle in her backside and rigor to come and go.”
“Yeah. Long enough to work out that he’d be a fool to bury her at Gold Dust, not knowing if anybody else knew she was going there. Long enough to consider alternatives — he’s backpacked all over the place so I’d guess he knew the glacier. Long enough to figure he’d need a horse to transport her.”
“Speaking of the horse… What’s the lab say about that hair?”
“Lab says it’s horse. That’s as far as they’ve gotten.” Eric drained his beer. “There’s still one hell of a lot we don’t know about this case.”
“You know enough to want to cover for Mike.”
Eric set down the bottle. “Let’s go back to the gondola station.” The edge in his voice cut to the bone. He moved to my brick-and-board bookshelf and picked up a chunk of wormhole sandstone that I use as a bookend. My books slumped over. He anchored his fingers in the stone. “I’ve gone over this for fifteen years. How it could have turned out different. What one little thing I could have done to change things. Or you could have done.”
I held his look.
“Yeah Cass, maybe I should have gone to the cops but I thought I had it covered. I thought I could guarantee Mike’s behavior.” He raised the rock and sighted through one of the wormholes. “It was like this for me — framed. The way things are framed when you’re fifteen. Mike’s a buddy, Mike’s got a problem, Mike’s listened to me in the past, he’ll listen again. Real simple. And maybe it would have worked.” He lowered the rock and gave me a hard look. “But what you did, Cassie, was hang me out to dry.”
I said, “I was scared.”
“You didn’t trust me.”
“You were a kid. It wasn’t a kid’s problem. And I got left with it.”
He took a long time with that, then nodded. “Why’d you go to Georgia?”
“Because Georgia was the one you go to when you’re scared.”
Eric nodded. “Gotta admit, you went to the big kahuna. And you got results.”
“All I did was ask her to straighten Mike out.”
“So she kicks him off the team. Would have been better to send him to juvey.”
“She was trying to help him. Shock some sense into him.”
“You have any idea how fucking big a deal it was for Mike to be on the team? He wasn’t exactly anyone’s first choice. He took some grief, you know, for being gay. And, yeah, he picked a couple of fights.”
“A couple?”
“Kicking him off was the worst call she could have made.”
I said, mulish, “It worked.”
Eric’s good eye widened. “Did it? I’d say it turned him into a time bomb.”
“He was already a time bomb.”
“And the kicker was, Mike never bought that I didn’t sell him out.”
The beer soured in my stomach.
Eric looked away, staring at the photos on the wall as if he were cataloging a crime scene. Mike with the others on the peak, back when he was one of the guys. Eric said, finally, “You didn’t warn me. That you were going to Georgia. You blindsided me.”
I fixed on the rock in Eric’s hand. Was that the one little thing I could have done to change things? Tell Eric I was going to Georgia? Tell him I thought he’d hung me out to dry? And then it would have turned out different. I said, finally, “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Is that why you’re trying to protect Mike?”
“I felt…responsible for him. I had it in my head I’d check out the evidence and if it looked bad I’d get him to confess. Maybe he’d get a lighter sentence.”
“Why don’t you just ask him?”
“I did. He denied it.”
“But you’re still covering for him.”
He passed a hand across his eyes. “I guess I thought you and I and Mike started something back in the gondola station that ended up with a body in the ice.”
A saying came to me, some biblical phrase — you reap what you sow.
Eric moved to the bookshelf and replaced the sandstone, refitting my books until they packed in tight as sediments compressed by the weight of the earth’s crust.
I said, “Can we ever get past the past?” And then I honked out an embarrassed laugh because that sounded so utterly idiotic.
Eric stood. Turned to face me. He came across the room in his cop stride — no smile, no laughs certainly. I started, at the last moment, to meet him but he reached me first, and so it was Eric who took the lead and kissed me.
And it was Eric who broke away first. “I don’t know, Oldfield.”
I took in a breath. “So what was that, Catlin?”
“Trial run?” Now he smiled, fleeting. But the scarred skin beneath his glass eye remained taut. “The past is biting us in the butt. This case is toxic. We’re not done with the past yet.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Next morning at dawn Walter and I made the journey to Gold Dust.
On the way up, I told him the story of boys testing gunpowder. It was a hard ski and we didn’t have the breath to say much more. When we got to the draw, Walter was agog at the hidden old mine site.
We agreed to postpone speculation until we did the geology.
We sat on our skis and ate breakfast — oranges and trail mix — cataloging the lay of the land.
I mentally paced it off, to the southeast of the tunnel. Ten yards, fifteen, twenty. Just snow and a wall of rock. On this visit, though — unlike my last visit — I knew with certainty there had been a spring. Dead and entombed now, but presumably alive back when Georgia came here. Presumably Georgia saw it. Then Georgia died, then the spring died. All I had to do was find it.
I carved an orange, studying the rockwall.
It was a fine example of exfoliation. Big hunks of granite, like this dome that borders Gold Dust, build up internal pressures and every so often shed their skin. It falls in slabs. At the base, the slabs crack into smaller chunks. Over the years — it looked to have been years — the rocks had nearly mortared themselves into a solid wall. There were chinks, where one hunk jutted askew of another, and presumably there were small bits of granite beneath the snow, decomposed by years of weather.
Walter got to his feet, hefted his field kit, and waded through the snow to the ore-tailing mounds. He settled happily in at the cyanide pond.
I sucked the juice from an orange section. Trying to decide where to dig. Ten, fifteen, twenty yards from the tunnel, Eric had said. Twenty yards put it inside the rockfall. I chose fifteen.
I stowed my orange peels, hefted my field kit, and went to work.
Half an hour in, I straightened and stretched and took a breather. Walter was still at work. I glanced, reflexively, at the mouth of the draw, checking for visitors.