CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We halted at the mouth of Gold Dust and Lindsay lifted her chin. “Where?”
Perhaps it was the surprise at this hidden gouge in the mountain, but there was surprise in her voice.
I said, “Then you’ve never been here?”
“Should I have?”
I kicked off. “This way.” For the first time in the field with Lindsay, I took the lead. It was midday and Walter’s and my earlier tracks had softened in the sun. Walter had bowed out of a second trip to Gold Dust in one day. Truth was, he was giving it to Lindsay and me, the volcanologist and her pupil.
The rockfall was again seamless in the flat light. I led Lindsay to the door.
She whistled. “You have young eyes.”
I told her about the dipper.
She bent to examine the Dutch door. She looked cold, the flush of exertion draining from her Dresden skin.
Urgency welled in me. I took off my skis and went first through the cavity and she passed me her knapsack and I shoved it around the corner. She followed me on her belly and when she reached the grotto she grunted in amazement. I did not give her time to read deeper into the geological record. I snatched up her pack and moved out through the granite leaves into the little pocket. The dipper had not returned.
She followed, and blanched.
I had not prepared her. I had told her only, there’s activity. I had wanted her to come to it raw.
“Oh honey,” she said, and her face just opened like a flower. I handed her the knapsack and got out of the way.
She went alone to the fissure’s rim.
With Lindsay in the field, I’ve always hung back upon first examination of an object. I would wait for her to take it in, and when she’d processed it, to draw me close and explain. Even when I knew as well as she what the object signified, I would wait for her to speak. On a primitive level, no fumarole or stratum of ash was real to me until Lindsay said it was. If we had gazed into the face of Mount Pelee herself in eruption, I would have waited for confirmation from Lindsay. If Lindsay had said honey it’s a mirage, I would doubtless have stood there admiring the volcanic hallucination until the hot cloud incinerated us both.
I joined her, finally. Heat from the fissure had returned the flush to her face, and steam had wetted her skin like dew on the flower.
She said again, “Oh honey.” Now her face tightened.
The way I read her face, the flower opening and then closing, was that she was seeing here something every volcanologist both dreams of and dreads. She was seeing her volcano unloose its bonds.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
In town we parted without ceremony, Lindsay to alert the Geological Survey and me to report to Krom.
We took facing chairs in his office. I sat sweating, still wearing my thermo-lined snow pants, and told him about the fissure up on Red Mountain. He showed amazement, like he was stumbling upon it along with me, following in wonder through the grotto and then halting to gape at the rockfall’s secret. He sat silently, seeing it.
I gripped the arms of my chair. It was death to just sit here.
He spoke, finally. “Then she really did find something.”
I nodded.
“What did Lindsay say when you showed her?”
“It’s a big deal. Not in those words, but…”
“No way out?”
I glanced at Krom’s wall of photos, at the frozen family who didn’t escape. “Lindsay didn’t say that.”
“Tell me everything she did say.”
“She didn’t say a lot. She took measurements. She took photos.”
“And what is she doing now?”
“Alerting USGS.”
“Good.”
I said, “What about you?”
“I’m going to contact my people.”
“So you can spin it?”
His hand slammed down on the desk and I jumped.
He too looked poised to bolt. Both hands on the desk, forearms braced. White scar stood up from brown skin, Dante rising. He said, “So I can do my job.”
“Glad to hear that.” I stood. “That’s why I came to tell you.”
“Let’s be clear,” he said, “there’s no more spin involved. I’m going to notify FEMA that the situation has altered, then I’m going to go have a look for myself and consult with USGS. Then I’m going to study the maps and reprogram the simulations and see where we go from here. Then I’m going to telephone everyone on the Council, then email my report to the home office, and copy it to Len Carow. And in the course of doing my job I’m going to reclaim my reputation.” He looked at me squarely. “I win, we all win.”
“I sure hope so.” I headed for the door.
His voice followed me. “We’re finished, you and I.”
I turned. “Finished?”
“The bargain. You delivered. In fact, you might very well have saved us, finding that fissure. Congratulations.” He looked down at the scar on his forearm, then back at me. “No sacrifice required.”
I didn’t feel much like a savior. “I just found what Georgia found. She’s the one who deserves the credit.”
He briefly bowed his head.
“One thing,” I said, “that surprises me. You didn’t ask about Georgia — what happened to her there.”
“Do you know?”
“No. Just that she died there. Pending analysis of the evidence and exemplars, of course. I’ll copy you our report. I thought you’d want to know.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I think she was murdered. I don’t know if we’ll get an ID on the killer.” I shrugged. “I can’t foretell the future.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was impossible, now, to think of Gold Dust as hidden.
There were people everywhere — laden with instrumentation, in big parkas and gaiters and wool caps and you could tell the men from the women, more often than not, by the beards. They were in the mine tunnel with headlamps, they were taking the temperature of the dipper’s stream, they were scouring the mountain for cracks in the snow and newly dead trees. There was a field camp in the shell of the cabin and it looked like the miners had returned to work the lode. There was a bearded man tending a radio and he was in contact with the USGS field station set up in Mammoth’s fire department, and that in turn was in communication with Survey headquarters.
It looked like USGS had been here a week but it’s been just thirty-six hours since Lindsay made her call and the Survey put its Western Region Event Response Team on a plane.
A path had been blasted through the rockwall. Nobody need negotiate the cavity behind the Dutch door.
The snow looked like it had been paved.
Amidst this buzz, Walter sat on a crate waiting for the okay to go back behind the rockfall and dig. He chafed his hands. He’s not used to being a sideshow to other people’s business. He wanted more samples from the hot spring because the soil we’d hurriedly scooped and stashed in our pockets had orange-peel particles from our gloves and had to be considered contaminated.
I paced, from the Dutch door to the mouth of the tunnel. From the tunnel to the cyanide pond.
“What are you doing?” Walter asked, as I passed his crate.
“Trying to figure out in what order Georgia picked up the stuff in her boots.”
He strained for a glimpse of Lindsay. We’d seen her an hour ago, disappearing through the blasted corridor. She’d nodded in passing. Was already looking beyond us, seeing the fissure. She’s consumed by it, she’s stripped to raw energy, she’s an exposed high-voltage wire and Walter’s been trying to keep an eye on her.
“And what are your conclusions?” Walter asked, on my next pass.
I halted. “I figure Georgia picked up the leaf near the stream, and then tramped through the tailings area and acquired the cyanide. Looking around for the hot spring. Picking up bits of the native soil. Then she found the door in the rockwall, crawled through, found the spring, acquired the sulfur and calcite. Found the fissure. Freaked out.” No wild-ass guess needed for that. “And maybe that’s when she wrote what she wrote in her Weight Watchers notebook.”