The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  He spoke. “Help’s on the way.”

  “Help?” I stood dumb. And then I saw Krom’s little emergency radio lying beside him. And I realized why he’d wanted his parka, and why the parka was so heavy—because his radio was in one of the deep pockets. I said, faintly, “Who’s coming?”

  “Search and Rescue,” he said. “From Bridgeport, where I set up the emergency ops center. It will be hours. Once they hit the ash zone, they’ll have to go slow. They’re worried about ash clogging air filters.”

  “Do you realize what you just did?”

  “They’re volunteers, Cassie. And once they get here and free me, I will get all of us out safely.”

  “You will? Your leg...”

  “Does not affect my training or my skills.”

  “What about sacrifice, Adrian? What about the tribal elders who sacrificed themselves so the others could live? I thought that’s what you wanted to do but now that it’s real, you don’t want to. You’re willing to have other people do the sacrifice and come into a goddamn eruption zone.”

  He regarded me coldly. “No sacrifice will be necessary.”

  I returned his icy look. I wondered if that’s what he was thinking when he lay here pinned, alone. Hearing the eruption. I’d bet he was pissed. The volcano’s winning, and he’s lying here in his enemy’s office, on the rug stained with her blood. I bet he sure in hell thought about the sacrificial irony in that. The volcano wins, she gets her revenge.

  But then of course I came, and everything changed. I looked at his radio.

  He clamped a hand on it. “You can’t call it off, Cassie. You have no authority.”

  I knew. I knew how Search and Rescue worked, how volunteers got charged up on adrenaline and bravery and then went with open eyes into whatever lay ahead. If I could get the radio away from Krom, I could go outside and call Bridgeport and say he’d died and I was skiing out on my own, self-rescuing.

  But Krom held the radio to his heart.

  I shivered. Cold. And, suddenly, afraid. A new species of fear—unlike the fear of the eruption, of another avalanche, which were fears that had made themselves at home. My fear of Krom was specific, at a point I could fix in my solar plexus as accurately as I could plot a coordinate on a map. I was afraid of this man under a bookcase, who likely didn’t have the strength to walk two steps should he be set free to walk. But he still had two good strong hands with which to take me by the neck, should I get too close. He still had the power.

  “Of course,” he said, “you’re free to leave right now.”

  “No I’m not. Why do you think I came back in the first place? Walter didn’t get out. That’s why I’m staying.”

  His eyes closed. The earth shook, hard. He seemed not to notice.

  “Call Bridgeport, Adrian. Ask if anyone has located Walter.”

  He opened his eyes. “If you like.”

  He radioed and a half hour later Bridgeport radioed back. Walter was not in Bridgeport. Nor in Bishop, nor in any other little Sierra town, as far as the emergency operations center could ascertain.

  So he had to be in Mammoth.

  I went out and looked again. Roamed the town, went up the Bypass until stumbles interrupted my stride, then gave in and went back to Lindsay’s office to wait for rescue.

  Krom was asleep. I made myself a place in the corner and curled up. The room was a tomb, dim and cold with stale air that tasted of ash. I’d brought the smell in on my clothes, in my hair, or perhaps it had just seeped in. The pervasive smell of ash. Almost masked the coffee scent coming from the apothecary cupboard. I lacked the strength to go close it. I drank. Ate. Granola bar tasted of ash. I glanced up at the desk. The little Japanese teapot was near the edge; one more quake should send it over. I thought about rescuing it but didn’t. Never love anything that can’t love you back. I aimed my headlamp at the empty wall where the Mexican mask had hung. I played the light around the floor and found the thing amidst the debris, its hideous tongue sticking out at the ceiling.

  There were two sharp quakes and the teapot went. Krom’s eyes opened.

  I said, “Why are you here?”

  He rolled his head to look my way. “Saw the lights on through the window.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t leave until everybody’s out.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Nobody here when I came in.”

  “How’d you get in?”

  “Forced the lock.”

  “Why’d you take off your parka? It’s cold in here.”

  “It’s cold everywhere. I decided to put on a thermal undershirt. I’d just got my sweater on over that when the quake hit and the bookcase fell.”

  I looked at his pack, lying beside her desk.

  “Gloves in there. Gaiters. Wool hat. Help yourself.”

  I looked back to him. “How did you get to town?”

  “Took a Guard jeep.”

  “How’d you get the key?”

  “From the driver. And then I had him evac with someone else.”

  “Where’s the jeep?”

  “In the parking garage around back.”

  “Why didn’t you just park on Minaret?”

  He turned back to the ceiling and studied it. “Habit,” he said. “I always park in the garage.”

  “How long were you in here?”

  “Cassie,” he said, “I’m in your debt. For the water. The food. But I won’t put up with this much longer.” He coughed, and cleared his throat. “You want to know why I’m here? Because I waited until everybody was gone and then I came back to town and drove every street to be certain. I almost lost these people, with your damned bears, but I turned it around. And I got them out. And then I came back to be sure. And when I was driving down Minaret I saw the reflection. So I checked. I wasn’t going to leave somebody behind.”

  “Like Walter.”

  “Walter is out. Everybody is out. There is nobody here but you and me.”

  And Lindsay’s ghost. The smell of coffee oils suddenly hit me. I got up and went to shut the doors to the apothecary cabinet, where she stores her beans and paraphernalia. I froze. The shelf was swung aside. The shelf wall was a false wall. Behind that, in the real wall, there was a hole. Rectangular, deep. I scoured it with my light. It was a safe.

  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? Ha
rd 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 44

  “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.

  “That leaves two options,” Eric said. “Pika, and 203. Let’s look at option one, Pika. I was up there night before last. Canyon’s choked with vehicles—wall to wall. It’s impassable. We didn’t even consider trying to clear it. Take days.”

  Mike said, “We can climb over the obstructions.”

  Eric shook his head. “Goes for damn near a mile.”

  “We can carry Mr. Krom.”

  “He’s got a double fracture of the tibia. He barely withstood being carried here.”

  We glanced at Krom. Even recessed in the jeep, he drew attention. His face was worn from pain. He’d refused the morphine.

  “We’ll go slow,” Mike said. “We’ll be careful.”

  Eric said, evenly, “There’ve already been explosions. And everybody had a full tank of gas. We gonna go on tiptoe? It’s fucking unstable, man.”

  Mike’s mouth opened, then closed.

  “Let’s look at option two. Mike and I came in that way. Truck died on 395 before we got to the deep ash zone. We snowmobiled it from there, almost to 203. That’s where the snowmobile died. From there, it took us over three hours to walk to town. Assuming this jeep gets us as far as the crater in 203, we walk from there until we get far enough out of the deep ash that another truck can reach us. Gonna take a good five-six hours. Maybe seven.” Eric gestured at the sled. “Depending on how this thing pulls loaded through deep ash, and how fast a ride Mr. Krom can withstand.”

  We glanced, again, at Krom.

  “Long haul,” Eric continued. “Time’s my biggest concern. That, and the likelihood that the moat will start up again. In fact, we thought about that on the way in.”

  I bet they had. I bet when they saw Red Mountain starting to vent, they’d thought real hard about it. The moat was quiet when they came in but it had vented intermittently last night, so they said. I hadn’t known. Tucked into Dad’s corduroy chair at home by the fireplace, I’d slept through it all.

  We listened a moment. Listening for the thunder, for the reawakening of the moat.

  Krom spoke, then. “How deep is the ash? At its worst.”

  Mike answered. “Above the knees, sir.” He pointed to the spot.


  “And you pulled the sled through that?”

  “Oh yah.”

  “I weigh two hundred and seventeen pounds.” Krom stared at Mike’s stringy frame. Mike’s no more than a hundred and forty, dripping wet.

  “We can pull you,” Mike said.

  “Eric,” Krom said, “how deep is the ash on Pika?”

  “Don’t know. My guess is it’s gonna be shallower. It’s farther from the vent.”

  “That’s right,” Krom said. “Pika was built with that in mind.”

  I felt the change. It was swift as water hitting rock and diverting its course. Eric had adjusted his stance to directly face Krom. Mike already faced him. Command shifted. It was just that easy.

  Krom said, “We go with option one. Pika.”

  There was silence around the campfire. Eric appeared uncertain. Mike wore a tight little smile.

  I saw Krom’s point. Ash’ll be shallower. Pika was built with a whole lot in mind, hunkered down deep, safe as anything around here can be safe from lava bombs and pyroclastic flows. But it wasn’t built with spooked bears in mind. As Lindsay pointed out at the Inn, it’s a bobsled run. No room for accidents. He hadn’t foreseen that. But he surely saw it now. We’ve got a problem there. Ash’ll be shallower there, sure, only it’s not ash that’s the problem. It’s the wall of tangled steel, the leaking gas tanks. It’s a man-made problem. But it’s his route.

  I spoke. “How about option three?”

  They turned. Eric said, “What’s that, Cassie?”

  “We go up the mountain.”

  Mike gasped.

  Krom slowly formed a smile. “That doesn’t get us out.”

  I said, “Let’s look at it. I’ve skied Minaret as far as the Bypass turnoff. Ash is pretty shallow. Assume we can drive Minaret all the way up to the lifts. We hole up there if need be. At the Inn.” Back to where we started, over two months ago, debating how to get out. “We’ll be well out of reach of the moat. Mammoth Mountain will be between us and the Red Mountain vent. From there, if we can, we continue over Minaret Summit.”