“Yeah,” Eric said. His forehead remained on his hands.
What, I thought, the female gets the food? I didn’t want to go find food. We sat, beat. I didn’t want to leave this ottoman. I gazed past Mike into the fireplace, conjuring a merry blaze. The eruption still sounded, muffled, but it could have been the cannonade of avalanche-clearing guns after a heavy snowfall. There were no quakes. There was damage done from earlier quakes, lamps and such knocked over. Worse done at a party. It was dark but cozy-dark, like when the power goes out in a storm. Candlelight dinners, huddling for warmth, romance. Mike had returned a fallen wooden candelabra to its stone shelf on the fireplace flank. He lit the fat beeswax candles. They cast a buttery glow upon us all. I didn’t want to get up off this cushy ottoman. I didn’t want to go on another futile hunt for Walter. I didn’t want to ever leave this hospitable place.
“Yeah, all right.” Eric got up. “I’ll go get the radio.” Eric clapped Mike on the shoulder, thumped my boot with his, and headed for the door.
I pushed myself up. “For your dining pleasure, we have the Yodler Restaurant and Bar, the Mountainside Grille, and a wine cellar I’d bet. No room service.”
Mike said, “You shouldn’t be making jokes.”
You are such a pain, I thought, you’re such a world-class judgemental pain and you’re a bigger pain now than when you used to boss me around the gondola station. You’re going to get your ego pierced somehow in this mess and you’re going to lose your temper, like you did that day in the station. Like you did at the drill, when Stobie wouldn’t listen. Like you did with Georgia? Did you?
I glanced at Krom. He watched me. He tugged the little knot of fear in me.
“Sorry,” I said to Mike. Sorry it was you who volunteered to come back. Sorry for us all. I took my flashlight and set off in search of the kitchen.
Mike and I were wildly successful. We brought blankets, goosedown coverlets, cushions, feather pillows, hurricane lamps, canned salmon, canned mandarin oranges, Greek olives, dried pears and cranberries, cracked pepper water biscuits, anisette biscotti, and a wheel of parmesan cheese that had hidden in the dark pantry recesses. We brought out china plates and the good silverware and carafes of water and glasses. Eric carried in wood but none of us expressed any enthusiasm for a fire. We were warm enough wrapped in wool and goosedown. In truth, I was afraid that a big quake would come while we slept and knock flaming boughs from the fireplace to set us all ablaze.
We slept, in fits and starts. Exercise hard — slog through snow and ash. Lie in pain from a broken leg. Raise the heart rate with intermittent bouts of terror. Wears a body out. We all slept. Never slept so hard as the times I slept through Lindsay’s eruptions.
Sometime in the night, somebody screamed. It wasn’t me. I froze. There were quakes again. Hard little jolts. Rattled the dishes and lamps and knocked the candelabra off its shelf. Beeswax burned on the hardwood floor.
“People all right?” Eric moved to put out the candle.
Krom said, “Alive.”
Voice right in my ear. I jerked around. He was right beside me. He’d been on the chaise when we went to sleep, a good yard from me. Had he been the one who screamed? When he maneuvered off the chaise and dragged himself along the floor, had fractured bone scraped bone, more than even he could bear? I saw into his eyes, pools of pain. Or maybe it was just the squirrely shadows cast by the hurricane lamps, which warped us all.
We lay close as lovers. Krom’s big hands could caress my face, my neck, only he was holding one of the Inn’s fine goosedown pillows.
“Cass?” Eric said. “Mike?”
“I’m o-kigh,” Mike said. His voice cracked. Maybe it was Mike who screamed.
I unfroze and shoved up and took my blanket and lay down beside Eric.
Tell Eric, I thought. Only not in front of Mike. Mike belongs to Krom. Wait until Mike drops off again and then tell Eric. Doesn’t matter if Krom sees. He knows I’ll tell. And he knows I can prove nothing, other than that in the terror of the night he craved the closeness of another human being enough to endure the pain of dragging himself and his pillow to lay by me.
I had no doubt he could have endured the pain of being carried on a sled, or Mike’s back, through the minefield of Pika. All he’d cared for was to get us out on his road. At least one of us. I couldn’t prove that, though. And I couldn’t prove there was something he hadn’t wanted me to see in Lindsay’s office. But I felt it. And I felt he’d shut me up, just in case, if he got the chance.
Funny the way things work out. I’m like Lindsay. I keep getting in his way.
I scanned the room for Eric’s pack. I wondered if he had handcuffs in there. I wondered if he had his gun. After all, he was on duty.
My hand brushed Eric’s hand. We locked fingers.
We all lay still, listening to the dishes rattle. Every few minutes I peered at Mike, waiting for his eyes to shut. Like some kind of weird slumber party. I kept an eye on Krom. He lay still, eyes open, examining the timbered ceiling. His face was stony brown petrified wood.
There was a scraping sound and then a tattoo of thuds and Mike screamed and we all sat up and Krom exhaled sharply in pain. I gasped.
Out of the inky recesses of the great room, into our halo of light, came Walter.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
We built a fire.
I gripped Walter’s cold hand, grinning.
He would tell us nothing until we explained. Eric told him how he and Mike had come to be here, and Krom told his part, and through all that Walter sat stoically hearing them out, but when I had to explain what brought me back to town, Walter appeared to age before my eyes, a sight I’d never wish to see again.
We pressed cheese and olives and dried fruit and water on him but he refused it all. He said, “I’ve already eaten. I have my own supply.”
“Where, my God Walter, I searched the whole Inn.”
“You didn’t search my room.”
“I was shouting. In every hall.”
“I found that the only way I can sleep, Cassie, is with earplugs. Did you know the Inn supplies earplugs along with the toiletries?”
“Then what woke you?”
“Earthquakes,” he said. “I can’t seem to get used to them.”
Mike said, “Oh yah.”
Walter cracked a smile, then, squeezing my hand, harder than I’d been squeezing his. He leaned across me to shake Eric’s hand, then Mike’s. His gaze shifted to Krom. Krom was out of reach, handshake-wise. A hard look passed between them. Or maybe it was just the shadows cast on their faces by firelight. Walter said, “You’re fortunate Cassie found you, Adrian.”
Krom said, “Blessed.”
“What about you, Walter?” Eric said. “How did you come to be here?”
He cleared his throat. “I was trapped in town, along with a good many others. I was waiting my turn to go out. Perhaps the wait was too long. It gave me time to think, and I was at a very low point, and the two made a persuasive combination. I simply felt that — now that I was trapped — I should stay. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic but I decided to do as she would. I came up here to wait and watch. To see what the volcano was going to do.”
I let out a sound.
“I had no intention of dying, Cassie. I still don’t. That’s why I came all the way up here. This provides the safest vantage point. And all the comforts of the Inn.” He forced another smile.
“How did you get here, sir?” Eric asked.
“I appropriated Bill Bone’s station wagon. He’d been evacuated. He had no further use for it.”