The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  Eric set a climbing pace but I set mine by the rasp of Walter’s skis. I had to slow, and slow again, to pace his fitful stride. A gap opened between us and the others and within an hour Eric and Stobie had left Walter and me behind.

  Georgia would have been slower, still, had she come this way.

  It was a wicked climb. When the old sea floor lifted to become the Sierra Nevada range it tilted sharply westward, so this eastern flank rises without mercy. We live on a plateau of eight thousand feet at the base of an eleven-thousand-foot peak, and we consider a pass of nine thou low. But this climb goes up to twelve. There are those of us who’d hike it or ski it just for the thrill of it, but Georgia tackled the outdoors only by necessity. To take a school group snowshoeing, to ski to the market when the roads weren’t plowed. She fought off her extra pounds on a treadmill, not on a mountain. It took three million Pliocene years to raise this range and it would take three mill more to convince Georgia Simonies to climb up here for fun.

  Which could argue that it wasn’t Georgia up the mountain.

  Walter and I turned up the next switchback, a pleat of a trail that would lift us another hundred or so feet.

  I glanced up. Eric was positioned on the cliff edge above, watching our progress.

  We topped the switchback and found Stobie with folded arms, poles dangling from his wrists.

  Eric edged down from the cliff. “Listen up folks, I phoned for a weather update and that storm’s moving in faster. We’ve got to make time. Stobie and I talked about it and we can handle this. Cassie, Walter, why don’t you two head back down.”

  Walter stiff-armed his poles for support, recovering his breath, eyeing Eric.

  When my own breathing had steadied, I said, “What the hell?”

  “Hey babe,” Stobie chimed in, “getting snowed-in up there’s no joke. Eric and I can boogie-woogie it a whole lot faster.” He shook his rump, waggling the sled.

  I regarded Stobie, who’s called me babe since we were kids, me being two years younger than Stobie and Eric, the two of them part of my older brother’s group. Stobie’s always quick with a smile, kidding around, more a big brother than my own flaky brother. Now, he smiled but without any warmth. Perhaps it was the cold. I turned to Eric. Eric’s always slow to make a joke, although easily amused. He has inky blue eyes, the left one glass. There’s a delicate network of scars beneath that eye and when he’s amused the skin there crinkles like crystallized ice. The skin stayed taut.

  No, I thought, nobody’s kidding.

  “I’ll bag your evidence for you,” Eric said, evenly. “Don’t be territorial.”

  “But we are,” I said. “And you’ve worked enough scenes with us to know that.”

  There was a thick silence, all of us looking past each other and the air heavy with retained snow.

  And then Walter smiled. He has a beautiful smile, in a rough seamed face. Walter himself calls it a geologist’s face: it looks igneous. “Eric,” Walter said, “I will get there when I get there, which I can assure you will be no later than twenty minutes after you get there, during which time you can busy yourself with your own duties, and perhaps you, Stobie, can busy yourself photographing the scene, and as long as neither of you disturbs the geology before Cassie and I can put our eyes upon it, all will be well.”

  Eric exhaled a long breath. “Your call.” He did a kick turn and took off up the trail.

  Stobie pulled a rueful face, and fell in.

  And then Walter and I were left stony-faced, looking at each other wondering what just happened here, why had half the team acted like the other half was downright unwelcome on this trip?

  But the first half of the team was already leaving us behind and so we fell in as well. Walter set himself an ambitious pace. I followed, taking note of the ease of his stride. A couple of years ago Walter had suffered a series of tiny strokes; according to his doctor he was now fully recovered. Nevertheless, I kept on keeping watch—and keeping it to myself.

  It took me some time to find my own pace. There’s a rhythm to be had on skis, even uphill, a rhythm that takes over the body and relaxes the mind, and I aimed for that.

  A couple hours later we gained the last switchback and the land leveled into summit country. A wide snowfield lapped up to the jagged tips of the mountain range. The sole representative of the living was a whitebark pine, branches clawing the ground, battered into submission by ages of steady wind.

  One by one, we stopped to add layers of clothing.

  Eric started off again, leading the way across the snowfield.

  We followed our own trails and our own thoughts.

  In the distance, Eric stopped and faced up to the headwall of the range. As I neared, I saw what he was examining: a glacier cupped by a steep rock outcrop. This range was littered with remnants of the Little Ice Age, and this glacier was a larger one. Waves showed its progress, the spacing between the crests marking the amount of ice flow in a year. In places, the downflowing glacier had run over ridges and cracked open into crevasses.

  The others drifted in. Walter was winded, but hanging on. I thought of the whitebark pine.

  After a rest and power-bar snack, we advanced up the glacier. I anchored for a moment near a crevasse, peering at the bluish ice within, thinking what the world had been like when that old ice was water. Thinking how one could dive right down into oblivion.

  “Here!” Walter called. He squatted at the head of the glacier.

  We converged and looked down.

  This was the bergschrund, where the downflowing ice separated from the rock headwall and opened a cleft. It looked to be fifteen or twenty feet deep. Down there on the floor of the schrund was a sprawled form, sheathed in ice but recognizable nevertheless as a woman. She was face-down, arms and legs askew, and a woman’s generous hips humped up. Someone—I assumed the ice climber who found her—had scraped her clean of loose snow.

  Stobie dug a spotlight from his pack and planted it on the edge of the schrund, illuminating the scene down below, highlighting the details.

  She wore hiking boots. She wore pants, parka, and gloves, matted with mud and ice. She wore a wool cap, beneath which darkish hair hung out. She could be a perfect stranger. She could be Georgia. Georgia had bottle-brown hair. Georgia had disappeared five weeks ago, in early December. It would have been cold. Not a lot of snow then; the big Thanksgiving ski weekend had been a bust. Georgia had complained to God but it wasn’t until mid-December, after she’d disappeared, that the storms came.

  “Hiking accident,” Stobie said.

  “We’ll know,” Walter said, “when we establish the career of the body.”

  Eric’s eyes ticked to Stobie, the glass eye a tick out of sync. “He means what happened to her, Stobe. How she got here.”

  The career of the body would be written in the soils she picked up. I glanced around. Certainly, the basin rock would feed minerals into the glacier, but down here on the schrund floor those soils were locked in ice. She could have picked up basin soil up top, around the glacier—walking, sitting, falling?—before she went into the schrund. Assuming the soil was bared then. There could have been bare patches in early December, before the storms hit. I realized I was already identifying her as Georgia. I stared down at her, my eyes aching with cold, as if she could be somebody else. Whenever, however, she got here, she’d come to the end of her career. The career of the body stank.

  “Odd,” Walter said. “The climber noticing the body down there.”

  “Nah,” Stobie said. “Ice climber wants to get to that rock wall, he’d be checking out the schrund before he crossed.”

  Eric opened his pack. “Let’s get on with it.”

  Walter and I began sampling the soil in the glacier basin, digging where it was thinnest beneath rock overhangs. Eric and Stobie rigged a rope ladder and climbed down to the bergschrund floor and then set to work with ice axes. By the time the sky had hardened into a gray roof, enough ice was quarried to loosen the body.

>   Walter and I clambered down to join them.

  And now that I was down there, I took note that the body was that of a short woman. Just how short was hard to tell, the way she sprawled. The face was obscured, planted nose down into the ice, hair fanned like a frozen drape. I had the urge to sweep the hair back, get a look. Bad scene protocol. I kept my hands to myself.

  Eric moved in first, to collect evidence that might jar loose when we move her. He exchanged his ski gloves for latex. He plucked out a thick fiber caught in the waistband, and bagged it. Looked like rag wool—heavy-duty winter wear. Could have transferred from her hat or her gloves. Or could have come from somebody else’s. It looked like the rag wool of my own hat. Or Stobie’s gloves. Or Walter’s socks. Eric moved to the right boot and plucked out something caught at the collar. He studied it. He took his time.

  Walter said, “What is it?”

  Eric said, finally, “Maybe a horse hair.”

  I glanced at Stobie, as if the horse wrangler might have an opinion on the matter.

  Stobie was silent. And then, almost in afterthought he whinnied.

  That was for my benefit, I thought. Showing me the old Stobie, kidding around when things got dicey. Somehow, it did not ease my mind. I said, “Could she have ridden a horse up here? That makes no sense.”

  “Her car was left at her office,” Walter said. “However she got here, she didn’t drive to the trailhead.”

  “Maybe she caught a ride,” I said, “with somebody else.”

  Eric finished his collection and moved back from the body.

  Now it became Walter’s and my show. We gloved up. Walter examined her clothing, her hair. I took the boots. I was numb with cold, too cold to speculate whose feet were in those boots. I grasped the left heel, toe still locked to the ice. There was a generous layer of soil preserved in the waffle sole. With the small spatula I pried loose plugs, then with tweezers transferred the plugs to a sectioned culture dish. I shivered.

  Walter cast me a sidelong glance. “Something?”

  “Not a good match,” I said, “just eyeballing it.” It was a quick and dirty field guess, but the boot soil did not look much like the basin soil we’d collected. Which argued that she didn’t walk here, that she walked somewhere else and picked up soil in her boots and then was dumped here.

  I was talking murder, but yet not out loud.

  I heard the ratcheting of Stobie’s Nikon and glanced up. He was shooting a roll of the body. He aimed the Nikon at me, and snapped. “Beautiful.”

  On my best day—auburn hair clean and shining, gray eyes framed with liner—I’m not beautiful. Been called pretty. And now...nose red, skin bleached cold, eyes squinting, hair roping out from beneath my wool hat. Knot in my chest, although that wouldn’t show in the photo.

  I looked away, at the ribbon-like bands of blue ice on the schrund wall, shimmering in the glow cast by Stobie’s spotlight. Beautiful. And then the wall seemed to lean in and all I wanted to do was escape.

  But she was still bound here.

  When Walter and I finished our collection, we all worked together to chip away the last bonds of ice. Then we eased our arms beneath the body. It was like lifting some valuable piece of furniture you dare not drop. And now that we held her I could not deny who she was. We eased her onto her back.

  There lay our mayor.

  My heart plunged.

  Arms and legs askew, she looked as if she were trying to run. She was iced all over, smooth in some places and rough where chunks of her glacial bed still clung. Her face was abraded and there was damage to the forehead. The ice on the right side of her face was sheet thin and the texture of the skin there was apparent. White and waxy, like boiled fat.

  Walter bowed his head.

  Eric pulled out a notebook. His face was pale as hers. “Overt marks of trauma to the head,” he said, voice not his own. “No apparent lividity in the visible skin of the face and neck. Suggesting she didn’t die in the position she was found, face down.” He grimaced, and wrote it down.

  I said, fury rising, “Suggesting someone put her there, after she died.”

  “Aw shit,” Stobie said. “Shit.”

  “Dear God,” Walter said.

  None of us took it particularly well.

  ~ ~ ~

  We had made our collections on her anterior side—more wool fibers, another horse hair, a few more mineral grains—and we were easing her into the body bag when Walter noticed a bulge in her parka pocket. Eric unzipped the pocket, fishing out a small clutch bag. Shiny vinyl, wild tropical print, pure Georgia. I recognized it. She carried it in place of her big purse, when convenient. Eric unzipped the clutch, dumping the contents onto the ice. Keys, cell phone, comb, lipstick, micro-wallet, pen, small notebook.

  Walter said, “What’s the notebook?”

  I looked. “Weight Watchers—her pocket guide. Calories and all that.”

  Walter indicated the pen. “She wrote in it?”

  Eric picked up the notebook and flipped through it. “Yeah. What she ate, some kind of point system.”

  I asked, “When’s the last entry?” thinking that might pinpoint the day she died because I knew Georgia damn well wouldn’t have skipped a meal or skipped holding herself accountable, and I waited while Eric flipped to the last written entry and read it, while his face closed up tight. “What?” I said. “What?”

  Eric passed it to me. Walter and Stobie crowded in. I read the inked notes, then read them again. It looked like she’d been trying different ways to word something. Mostly cross-outs. Nearly blotted-out, the way you’d slash your pen angrily because you can’t get the words right. I could decipher just found out and then, at the end of the slashed-out section that nearly tore the page, she’d found the words she wanted.

  No way out.

  CHAPTER 2

  On the way down the mountain Stobie took the lead and Eric roped the sled from behind, holding it in tension. Walter followed and I stayed close on his heels.

  At the last ridge before the final descent, a sled strap came undone and we had to stop. While Stobie fussed with the litter, I went to look at the view eastward, way out in the distance.

  I found what I was looking for: the mountain ranges and ridges that join to erect a giant loop around the high desert floor. The loop closes against the wall of the Sierra, embracing Mammoth Mountain and enclosing our hometown of Mammoth Lakes.

  What it is, in fact, is a cleverly camouflaged volcano.

  Seven hundred thousand years ago it blew the hell up, blowing so ferociously that it sank a fifteen-by-twenty mile block of the earth’s crust a mile and a quarter deep. The eruption left a hole so vast that people passing through today see desert and mountains and don’t recognize it as the bowl and rim of a volcanic caldera. Beneath the bowl, the magma chamber has been refilling. Six months ago, within the span of a day, four big quakes hit this area. With these abrupt shivers, the volcano awoke.

  That was five months before Georgia disappeared. Her last five months were her best. She rose to the occasion. She’d downplayed the volcano through four mayoral terms, as it sporadically stirred. Don’t spook the tourists. She simply told us what we wanted to hear—which was that things would quiet down—and she was always right. But this time was different. This time, seismographs and tiltmeters said time to worry. To our utter amazement, Georgia called in the feds. If an eruption was coming, she was going to get us ready.

  Stobie called “fixed” and I abandoned the view and rejoined the team.

  I said, “About Georgia’s notes...”

  “We keep that quiet,” Eric said.

  I shrugged. That was a given; we don’t discuss case details with anyone not authorized. I glanced at Stobie, the only one of us not involved in criminalistics, but he was official Search, Rescue, and Recovery and I assumed they followed the same code.

  Stobie held my look. “We don’t know jack about what she meant. Who says it has anything to do with anything?”

  “
This is what needs to be established,” Walter said.

  “In the meantime,” Eric said, “we don’t need the whole town speculating.”

  We resumed our descent.

  Two switchbacks down, it began to snow. Snow like white cement stuck to the body bag until it looked like we were transporting a snowman. Snow woman. The wind picked up and drove wet slugs into my face. If I cried now, snow would hide the tears. I had no tears. Just cold misery and a hot poker in my gut.

  I stared at the shape on the sled. What did you find, Georgia?

  You mind me talking to you? I talked to my little brother Henry for years after he died. Nothing woo-woo, I don’t believe in ghosts, just in talk therapy. So explain yourself, will you? What did you just find out? And what in the name of all that is logical does no way out mean? Does it mean you couldn’t dodge the volcano issue this time? Couldn’t pat us on the head and say ‘there, there’? You just found out how serious the unrest is? You couldn’t see any way out of that predicament?

  I can almost raise your voice Georgia, but, sad to say, I can’t put answers in your mouth. All I can do is read the message you left behind. I’m not talking about the notes, now. I’m talking about the bits of the earth embedded in your boot soles. I’ll track that soil and find out where you died, how you died. And why you wrote no way out.