The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  Jimbo’s Fiat, as promised, was full. Seven cartons sat in front of his car.

  “My Soob’s in the driveway.” I hit the garage door opener. “I can fit these boxes.” The Lindsay and Georgia evidence boxes, which I’d packed in my Subaru instead of Walter’s Explorer, didn’t use much room.

  And then there was a shudder like logs rolling beneath the concrete, and the stuff hanging from the walls set up a racket and a box shimmied off the loft and split open on the floor, spilling old baby quilts. I held my ground.

  “Shake and bake,” Jimbo said, grinning. White.

  Across the street, Richard Precourt gave us the thumbs-up then went back to securing a tarpaulin over the mountain of stuff in the back of his pickup.

  Richard’s hanging in there, I saw. Okay, we can do it.

  Jimbo and I carried the cartons to the driveway and loaded my Subaru. It looked like I was embarking on a truly bizarre trip: roof racked with skis, tail hung with mountain bike, interior filled with field gear and boxes. In my passenger seat was a porcelain doll in a glass case that Lindsay brought me from Argentina. The Cerro Galan caldera.

  I got a lawn chair from the pegboard and Dad’s workshop radio and took a seat on the driveway, returning the waves of my neighbors.

  It was unreal.

  Like a block party, only instead of Buddy Precourt’s garage band there were packed cars and radios blasting KMMT. I focused on my street. Looked exposed, hanging on the edge of the bluff. Houses looked unstable, piled three and four stories like cake tiers. I’ve had a meal in every house on the street, I’ve gathered cones for the fireplace from every pine, I remember what the Maser’s place looked like before the propane tank explosion. I know everybody on the street, I remember everybody who moved away, and I can guess who would and who would not return to rebuild.

  Jimbo said, “You think it’s gonna blow?” He was behind me, hands on my chair, which vibrated from his incessant jiggling.

  I shrugged. People evacuated the towns around Rainier and it didn’t blow.

  Jimbo came around to face me. “You don’t act scared.”

  “I’m scared. I’ve been scared so long it’s second nature. You’re used to seeing me this way.” I scuffed my boot, peeling a layer of snow. “It’s been a nightmare so long I have a hard time accepting it’s real. In the dream the ground’s rotting but it never gets to the eruption. I wake up first. You don’t die in dreams, do you?”

  “Shit I don’t know.” He went into the garage and got a chair and sat beside me. “So. You never said if you think it’s Mike.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He holds a grudge, you know?”

  “I know, but... Grudge enough to sabotage the evac?”

  “Look what Mike did to Georgia.”

  It took me a moment, to make the leap to Gold Dust. I said, slowly, “You saying Mike killed Georgia?”

  “I’m just saying maybe he did. You know?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well didn’t Eric ...?”

  Very slowly, I came alert. “Didn’t Eric what?”

  “Aw shit,” my brother said. “Shit.”

  “Tell me,” I said, “what you know. What Eric knows. Tell me, Jimbo.”

  “Okay, but only because I’m through covering for Mike. If Mike did 203...” Jimbo gripped the arms of his chair. “Look, I know you know all about Georgia and Krom, and Mike and Krom, and all that. Eric told me he told you. Guess he left me out of it. That’s Eric, the go-to guy, taking it all on himself. You know?”

  I nodded. That I knew.

  “So after Georgia disappeared, Eric and I were talking about Hot Creek, about Mike and Krom and Georgia seeing that. And we thought maybe that might have set Mike and Georgia off, against each other. And Eric said to keep it between us, that he’d bird-dog it. He’d take care of things. And then after you guys found her in the glacier—only you figured that’s not where she died—I mean, Eric told me that. Anyway, so when you found out there was gunpowder in the evidence and, uh, you wanted a cartridge from me...” He expelled a biathlete breath.

  “You suspected the evidence powder was biathlon powder?”

  “Shit yeah. And I thought Gold Dust, right away. Sorry Cass but I didn’t want you finding it. I mean, not until Eric had the chance to get up there and check it out and find out if anything there nailed Mike.”

  I took that in. “Eric went to Gold Dust?”

  “Yeah, couple days after the race. And he didn’t find anything that pointed to Mike. So we kind of breathed easier.”

  “Easier? Shit, Jimbo, we’re talking murder and you were content that Mike wouldn’t be nailed?”

  “No Cass, we hoped we were wrong about Mike.”

  I recalled Eric in the cottage, trying to talk me into his version of Mike—misunderstood, mistreated. I thought about Eric, bearing the burden of Mike, going up to Gold Dust to find out if his fears were justified. And then I suddenly stiffened. “Wait a minute. I asked Eric about the hot spring at Gold Dust, where it was, and he stonewalled me. But now you tell me he’d already been there, so he must have seen the spring was gone. He must have seen the rockfall that blocked it. And the fissure...”

  “No Cass, come on, he didn’t find that thing. And the rockfall was nothing new—we saw that way back when we used to hang there. The spring was right in front of it. So when Eric didn’t see the spring this time, he figured it was dead, under the snow.”

  “You’re saying he didn’t notice there’d been new exfoliation, which would explain why the spring that used to be in front of the rockfall was now behind it?”

  “Why would he? You’re the geologist. He’s not.”

  I relaxed. Jimbo was right. Eric wouldn’t have noticed. If he’d noticed, he would have gone straight to Lindsay or Krom. Just as I had, when I found the fissure.

  Jimbo said, “So we clear now?”

  “Partly. I think I get what took Georgia to Gold Dust. Seeing Mike and Krom together. Jealousy. So she goes to check out the spring she remembers—Mike’s old spring. She’s going to bring Adrian there, trump Mike. But I still don’t know the how and the when of it. Since you think Mike killed her, care to explain that?”

  “Um.” Jimbo popped his fist on the chair arm. “Eric and I kicked around a few ideas.”

  I waited.

  “Okay, so she goes up there to find the spring, like you said. And I think when she found it—and it turns out to be more than a spring—she’s really hyped and she comes back to report it to Krom. I mean, cops found her car in the Community Center lot. But she runs into Mike inside. And she can’t help it, she puts it to him. Or maybe he puts two and two together and figures where she’s been. And he wonders why she’s so cranked about it. And he says he’s gonna go check it out. And she takes charge, you know, like she does, and says Mike’s not going without her. Gets her gear from her car, and they drive up to Lake Mary, and from there...”

  There was a rumbling, a throat clearing, shivering our chairs.

  Jimbo said, white, “So what do you think?”

  I said, slowly, “Why do you think it was Mike she ran into? Instead of Adrian?”

  “It was a Sunday.”

  “So?”

  “She disappeared on a Sunday. Didn’t you look it up?” Jimbo shook his head. “You make a lousy cop.”

  “What’s so special about Sunday?”

  “Mike mans the office for Krom on Sundays. Krom takes the day off. You didn’t know?”

  I stared at my brother. “I didn’t know.”

  “Hey, no sweat. And you’re not such a lousy cop. I mean, man, when you started in that night about powder in the evidence... Wish I gave you that cartridge. Wish you’d figured out about Mike and Georgia—then he’d be in jail and we could evac out both roads.”

  “Wish you’d told me about Gold Dust.”

  “That was Eric’s call. Anyway, I figured you’d figure it out eventually.” Jimbo slumped in his chair until his butt was on the
edge and his legs bridged out over the snow.

  I glanced at my brother. Let somebody else do the damn dishes. Our world’s about to come undone, but Jimbo’s still Jimbo. It was, oddly, comforting.

  ~ ~ ~

  It wasn’t until three twenty-five that we heard a sound like garbage trucks waking the neighborhood. Jimbo snaked up from his chair and shouted across the street to the Precourts, who were already piling into their pickup, “Gentlemen start your engines!”

  My legs were rubber.

  Jimbo hooted. A police Jeep was turning the corner, followed by a Guard truck and then a line of cars I recognized from the next street over. The Jeep slowed and Eric rolled down the window and yelled, “Let’s go, Oldfields.”

  Jimbo was already in his Fiat and it peeled out of the garage and backed into the driveway beside my Subaru. Somehow, I was in my car with the engine on. Somehow, I was backing down the drive. My arm was hooked on the windowsill. I saw the minute hand on my watch leap from three twenty-nine to three thirty.

  Two hours left of daylight.

  CHAPTER 39

  I was choking. That’s what made it real.

  This was no dream, no drill, this was the real thing and I knew it because our fleeing neighborhood—and the neighborhood that fled before us and the neighborhood coming behind us—filled the air with exhaust that seeped in through the vents, in through the nose and mouth and eyes and burned the message into the tissues. It’s real.

  Jimbo’s Fiat was in front of me and the Precourts’ pickup was behind me and the high Pika walls flanked me. That was the immediate neighborhood.

  We crawled. Twenty-five miles per hour. Safe and sane.

  My second hand leaped to four o’clock.

  Jimbo’s radio fed me a steady whisper of advice. Stay calm. Keep moving. Leave two car-lengths between your vehicle and the vehicle in front. I wore the phones, like Jimbo, half-on and half-off my ears so I would not miss the onset of an eruption.

  Up ahead, someone honked.

  Another honk, and then another.

  Jimbo slowed and I gained on him and then I slowed too, and I watched the rearview to be sure Rich Precourt was going to slow. We were doing fifteen, and holding our two-car-lengths-pace beautifully, when Jimbo’s brake lights went on and his Fiat squirreled into the right-hand snowbank. I slammed on my brakes and the Subaru’s nose slid left, and up ahead I heard nonstop honking and in the earphones stay calm leave two car-lengths and then all I heard was the screeching of brakes up and down the line and somewhere far behind the Precourts, like distant thunder, a crumpling of metal on metal, time after time.

  Jimbo was already out when I got out, both of us choking on the haze of exhaust. And then mercifully people began to shut off their engines.

  I killed the Soob.

  Now, there were screams. I braced for an explosion. No explosion came—just nonstop screaming. It came from up ahead.

  The Precourts were crowding behind me, and behind them the Robinsons and the Wargos and the Ruiz’s, the whole damn block. They swept me up and we engulfed Jimbo and in front of him the Werneckes, and like the accident junkies we’d all become, we surged forward toward the screams.

  Some twenty vehicles up the line the crowd stopped and swelled like an aneurysm and I was squeezed against a little sedan. I’d lost Jimbo. I wormed along the sedan and then suddenly I got a clear view and saw why we had stopped our flight.

  Between our crowd and another crowd plugging the canyon up ahead was an unpopulated stretch of road. Vehicles were stopped at odd angles, doors open. Roaming this no-man’s-land was a bear. Big as a truck, within a paw’s swipe of someone’s Taurus. It reared as if trying to see over the crowd, and the screamers who had not once let up screamed even harder. The bear froze. Ears went flat. The ground gave a little jolt, and nobody in the crowd noticed or cared about one more shake, but the bear did. It launched itself backward, landing on its belly, then lumbered up with a howl of anguish like the snow’s on fire. It shook itself and snow crystals popped off the cinnamon fur.

  Dragged out of its winter sleep, I guessed, by the same rude shakeup that sent us all scrambling for a way out.

  Something jammed into my back. I turned. It was Jimbo’s elbow. He held his biathlon rifle, pointed skyward, but I could see the clip was in firing position.

  “You can’t stop a bear with a twenty-two,” I hissed.

  My brother hissed back, “Got a better idea?”

  Of all times to decide not to duck out, Jimbo chooses this.

  In my earphones a voice was advising calm and I didn’t know if that was the standard evac spiel or if emergency communications had caught up with the bear.

  The bear wasn’t calm. It was trapped and snarling and it lowered its anvil head and began to come our way.

  I was deafened by screams. I lost Jimbo again and then I saw him worming his way out front of the crowd, rifle held high. He yelled “back up, back up” and the crowd did its best, heaving backward but there were just too many of us squeezed in at this block party, and the people farther back could not hear, over the screaming, my brother’s cries.

  The bear heard. I saw the silhouette of teeth, and then the big cinnamon started forward again, all its anguish homed on Jimbo.

  Jimbo shifted into marksman’s stance and like he has done a thousand times before he brought the rifle to his cheek and sighted and squeezed off a round.

  There was a bellow from the cinnamon that stopped my heart.

  Someone nearby yelled Jimbo you idiot.

  But it looked for a moment as though Jimbo had done the right thing, for the bear froze and twisted, focusing its rage on the pinprick in its shoulder.

  “Okay,” I said, heart beating again.

  At both ends of no-man’s-land the crowds had shut up.

  There was gunfire upcanyon.

  Jimbo raised his rifle again and I elbowed him because across the gulf, Eric had appeared. He had both hands wrapped around his service weapon, leveling it at the bear.

  And now the bear and I had two marksmen to worry about. A shooter with a glass eye and the knowledge that accuracy is not his trademark, but he’s got a whole lot more firepower than the other shooter, who’s armed with a weapon meant to knock down mechanical targets.

  Eric sidled along the road. The bear turned, nose into the air, and zeroed on Eric. They were no more than a couple of truck-lengths apart. Eric eased forward, waiting, it seemed, for the bear to lift its chin and present its best target.

  I wanted to scream.

  There was gunfire, again, upcanyon. The bear reared up.

  And now the crowd behind Eric convulsed, and five Guardsmen trotted into the clearing, one behind the other like a line of geese. They carried heavy artillery and the cinnamon hardly had time to shift its focus to this new threat before they’d wheeled into a firing squad. The bear seemed to flinch, and then the sound of automatic weapons swamped all else, even its roar of surprise. The shooters fired for what seemed minutes, shredding the bear until the wall of snow behind it was splashed red and cratered with plugs of fur.

  Jimbo fumbled to eject his clip. “Let’s go.”

  He was shoving me, everyone was shoving again, back the way we’d come, back toward the cars. I didn’t need shoving, I had plenty of adrenaline pumping me along. And then someone said “bears” and Jimbo caught it—bears, plural—and my dumbshit brother turned with his rifle under his arm and fought his way back toward Eric. By the time I caught up Eric was saying, “Bears are all down, bears aren’t the problem.”

  I said, sick on adrenaline, “What is the problem?”

  “Pileup.” Eric pointed back toward town, the way we’d come. “Back in that throat where the canyon starts.”

  I looked. Vehicles to the horizon. No access.

  “How big?” Jimbo asked.

  “Big.”

  I said, “How big is big?”

  Eric met my look. “It’s all clear up ahead. Be ready to move in fifteen minutes.”<
br />
  I was looking back, toward the throat of the canyon. I said, my own throat constricted, “No way out.”

  “We’ll get them out,” Eric said.

  “Walter’s back there.”

  “I’ll check,” Eric said.

  “No, I will.” I started off. Vehicles to the horizon, and way back there, beyond the throat—beyond the pileup—vehicles waiting to get out. Walter was in the group behind ours. How many neighborhoods to a group, how many vehicles to a neighborhood, how many miles back in the canyon was Walter’s Explorer? Beyond the throat? I started to run.

  Eric caught my arm. “I’ll find out where he is, Cass. I’ll see him on his way. If he’s behind the pileup, we’ll get him out. We got a lot of people stuck back there and you can be damn sure we’re not going to leave any of them behind. I give you my personal guarantee.”

  I shook my head. “I’m going to check.”

  “Aw shit, man,” Jimbo said, “you want a sister?”

  Eric said, “No.”

  I tried to move.

  Eric tightened his grip and said, weary, “You see those guys?”

  There were Guardsmen moving our way, monitoring the flow of the crowd. They moved like they were under fire. I saw one guy look up the canyon walls. He was skinny—all helmet and uniform. He planted his hands on his wide fatigue belt and scanned the cliffs far above. He looked like he was expecting a bomb to fall. His head snapped down. He spat. He didn’t want to be here. He looked like he wasn’t going to be patient with anyone who slowed him down.

  “There isn’t an option,” Eric said.

  Death by traffic jam.

  With a sense as strong as I have ever had of making the wrong choice, I let Jimbo tug me back toward our cars.