She had a safe. She’d never told me that.
I gazed into the empty hole, wondering what she’d kept there. And then I came to. Never mind what she kept there — who took it? Who opened the safe?
Krom lay quietly watching me.
It couldn’t have been Krom. How would he know? And if he’d terrified her into telling him, if what she had in the safe was what he’d come for the night he shot her, he would have opened it back then and taken it. Why was the safe open now? Well, how about Walter? Walter knew about it and he changed his mind. He did want something of hers. Something that could love him back. Love letters, I thought. Love letters guarded in her safe behind her coffee. When did Walter come? It could have been days ago. Weeks ago. Or it could have been yesterday.
Maybe it was Walter who left the lights on.
And maybe Krom came in and found Walter at the safe.
Maybe it was more than love letters. Maybe there was a letter that incriminated Krom. And so Krom killed Walter and took the letter and hid it in his pocket. I stared at him, at his tan parka draped over his trunk, his brown sweater, his brown cords, pelt draped loosely on his frame. I stared at his arms, which could wrap around me quick as a snake strike, and I kept my distance.
If he killed Walter, I would have found Walter.
I shut the apothecary doors and returned to my corner. The quakes were picking up, two and three per minute. I listened to the rattling of loose stuff — background noise. I listened for the sound of rescuers from Bridgeport. I thought about topography. We’re not in a bad place, here. About fifteen hundred feet higher than the moat. Wind’s away from us. And if the moat progresses to a magmatic eruption, if it’s the main event? Hard to say. I seemed to have acquired the rectitude of the Geological Survey’s calmest of the calm, Phil Dobie.
The earth shook, hard, and Krom’s hand lifted a moment, then dropped. If he had been a stranger, someone inexplicably trapped here, I would have gone over and taken the hand. I would have held the devil’s own hand, waiting in this miserable place, but in the end I did not care to take Krom’s.
I closed my eyes.
It was some time before I noticed that the quakes had slowed. Maybe one per minute now. I said nothing to Krom. His eyes were closed again. I may have dozed off myself. Sooner or later, I’d learned, you go to sleep unless the roof’s falling in on you at the moment. I got up and went to the window. Same old, same old. Dark ashy sky. Was there any other kind of sky, anywhere in the world?
I took my empty water bottle and went to fill it next door at the bathroom sink. By my headlamp in the mirror, I caught a look at myself. Halloween night. I turned on the tap then realized there was no way to wash my face without soaking my bandages. And washing matters? I started to laugh, and I was still there hooting when the bathroom door opened and someone shined a fat beam of light in my face and said “Cass?”
Eric filled the doorway in a huge pack and hard hat and slick yellow suit that shone even in the dark, and even when I’d got my own beam focused it took me a moment to recognize him with his blackened face and the goggles and dust mask around his neck, but I sure did know his voice. It made my heart drop. Why did it have to be Eric who came, why not some other adrenaline-charged rescuer? And then against all my fears, my heart lifted and I ran to him.
A second yellow-suited figure crowded into the bathroom. “Where is he?” Mike said, “where’s Mr. Krom?”
“We’ve got a problem,” Eric said.
We moved out into the hallway, leaving Mike to finish splinting Krom’s leg.
I said, “What kind of problem?”
Eric assessed me as if he were lining up a shot. “How you doing, Oldfield?”
“I’m okay.” I’m dying. I’m doing beautifully now that you’re here, except that I’m doing hideously because it’s you who came. I shrugged. “Always with the problems, Catlin. What’s the problem?”
“Have you been outside?”
“Sure. Not for awhile though. I fell asleep. You believe that? What’s outside?”
He put his arm around me and led me out. I saw ash. Always ash. I heard a faint hissing, far away, like sprinklers turning on. I went into the middle of the street and peered down toward the caldera.
“Not that,” Eric said.
I went numb. Understood the problem. Didn’t want to see it. I stood frozen.
Eric nudged me forward until we passed the office building and then he turned me ninety degrees. “Look up.”
I looked up.
“You didn’t know?”
I shook my head. I had a fine view, a line of sight that shot straight up the two thousand or so feet of elevation gain that separated us from this new eruption on Red Mountain. I was transfixed, although as spectacle it wasn’t much. A plume of ash, like chimney smoke. Rising above the murky silhouette of trees, it could have been a small forest fire. Phreatic, judging from the look of it.
Activity was no longer confined to the caldera. The volcano had opened its second front.
Topography was no longer in our favor.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
“Where, Cassie?” Eric checked his watch.
We were packed and ready, and the three of us — Eric and Mike and I — stood around the open tailgate of the National Guard jeep. Krom sat in back, propped against packs, his splinted leg straight. A sled and snowshoes were racked on the roof. The jeep was parked inside the police department garage, where Eric had cannibalized a vehicle left behind in the mechanic’s pit. Only when we had a dozen spare parts was Eric satisfied. Soon, real soon, we were going to have to expose the jeep to the elements. The only question was, which way to go?
“Where haven’t you looked, Cass?”
I met Eric’s eyes. “Nowhere.”
“What’s that mean?” Mike said. “Does that mean she’s looked everywhere, because if she has then I don’t see how she can ask us to look there again. And if she means she hasn’t looked anywhere then why should we be the ones running around looking where she should have already looked?”
I felt the pulse in my throat. “Give me an hour.”
Eric said, “It’s already three-fifteen.”
I wanted to burrow into his yellow-slick chest and plead. Instead, I studied his face. Grimed, eyes red-veined. Like Mike’s. They’d risked their lives coming into town — it didn’t matter that Mike hadn’t risked his for me, that he’d come for Krom — they’d volunteered to come get us out and now I was asking them to stick around and hunt for someone I couldn’t prove was here. In truth, I couldn’t answer Eric’s question. Where to look?
I said, “I won’t hold us up.”
“Good call,” Eric said.
We were pressed around a lantern on the garage floor, like it was a campfire. Wherever Walter was, I hoped he was warm.
“All right people, Bridgeport says we assess the situation, make the decision on site, and report in.” Eric nodded at the squat field radio that sat on the tailgate. “It’s our ass, so let’s look at the options. The Bypass is out for obvious reasons.”
Part of me, a mulish grieving part, wanted to protest. That’s Lindsay’s route. That’s her option. Inyo hasn’t erupted, and if her road had been finished and we’d gone out that way, everybody would have made it. But now, of course, Red Mountain is venting. And she, of course, had given up on the Bypass the moment she realized what the fissure meant — she’d publicly capitulated the day Krom called in the chopper to show the path of a pyroclastic flow from Red Mountain.