The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  Mike said, “Oh yah, and maybe you forgot the road over the summit is closed for winter? It’s not plowed.”

  “I didn’t forget. We walk it, ski it, snowmobile it if we can.”

  Eric was nodding. “Gets us out, all right. Gets us down to the backcountry, and then we’ve got the whole Sierra crest between us and the eruption. Only thing is, Cass, that’s a long way, real tough haul. And it gets us into a wilderness camping situation.” Eric regarded Krom.

  Still, Krom smiled. “You’re forgetting something else, Cassie. Mammoth Mountain is a volcano too.”

  “I didn’t forget that.”

  “And you want to risk it?”

  “Yeah, it’s risky.” My mouth was dry. “But so far the activity’s elsewhere. Shall we weigh risks? Let’s start with option two—203 to 395. What happens if we’re in the middle of that seven-hour journey and the moat starts up? How about if it’s a magmatic eruption and it goes pyro? How about a race with a hot cloud going six hundred miles an hour?”

  “I agree,” Krom said, smiling. “Option two is out.”

  “So,” I said, “option one. Pika. Let’s say we can climb the pileup. Let’s say it doesn’t collapse and explode on us. Let’s say we’re carrying your two hundred seventeen pounds plus the sled plus our packs plus our skis and making, oh, three or four yards an hour? Let’s add quakes. Let’s add rockslides. And avalanches. And just for the hell of it, let’s add a little fallout from a pyroclastic flow. Just a smidge of burning ash, carried by the wind. I’m sure your computer sims factored that in. You didn’t factor the bears or a fifty-car pileup—who could know? But there we are. There’s option one.”

  Krom said, softly, “Tell me, Cassie, does your plan hinge on the fact that you don’t want to leave the area? You planning on doing a search for Walter on the way up the mountain? Because if that’s what you plan, you’d better make it clear exactly what kind of sacrifice you’re asking of us.”

  I stared at Eric and Mike. They stared back. Is that what I planned?

  Krom said, unsmiling, “Option three is out. We go with option one.”

  Eric leaned against the tailgate. “I’d like to hear if Cassie has anything more to say.”

  “Hey, man,” Mike said to Eric, “she’s not authorized. Mr. Krom’s authorized, and you are, and I think we should...”

  “Can it, Mike.”

  Mike went silent and tucked his hand into his armpit.

  Eric smiled at me. “So, Cass, why do you want to go up?”

  I found my voice. “Going up puts us above the moat. Going up puts Mammoth Mountain between us and the Red Mountain eruption. Plus, wind’s in our favor if we go up.”

  “That it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You planning on taking off to look for Walter? Because if you do, I’ll have to go after you, sacrifice or no sacrifice.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not planning on running off.”

  “So you believe this is the best choice?” He wore the comradely grin. Old times. The two of us needling each other over the merits of the burgers at Grumpy’s or the chili at the Tip. A chick flick or a car-chase movie. New times, in the cottage, the merits of a kiss. He grinned but the scarred skin beneath his glass eye was taut.

  I inhaled, exhaled. Used his biathlete’s trick. “Let’s go up.”

  Eric switched on the radio, clapping Mike on the shoulder, and Mike’s swarthy face turned even darker but he ducked his head and tunneled a pissed look at me.

  “Sergeant.” Krom straightened, bracing himself. He withdrew his own radio from his parka pocket. “The decision rests with me.”

  “I’m afraid not, sir—you’re the victim. You’re in our charge.” Eric held out his hand. “And it’s best I take charge of all comm equipment. Keep the lines of authority straight.”

  Krom blinked. He shifted his weight, cautiously, as though testing the hold of the splints, the way an animal might try to extricate itself from a trap. Even now—leg mummified, corduroy pants ripped from cuff to pocket, parka stained red with my blood, ash graying the brown of his hair—even now he seemed as though he might snap his fingers and bring Eric to heel.

  But Eric kept his hand out and Krom finally relinquished his radio and then Eric called Bridgeport on the field radio to report our plan of action.

  Krom went still.

  His eyes, though, were alive on me. It was surely my overtaxed imagination but I thought he inclined his head and made me a little bow.

  CHAPTER 45

  We headed in silence out of town.

  Eric drove. Mike rode shotgun. I sat in the back seat. Krom remained in the rear, in the baggage area, braced by our gear. He was, after all, cargo.

  I watched out the left window toward Red Mountain as Eric nursed the jeep along Minaret. Still not much in terms of pyrotechnics but it was a mighty consistent eruption. I swiveled to look behind, toward the caldera. No fresh plume from the moat. No discernible quakes. Winds continued in their normal direction, to the northeast. We got drifted ash.

  I watched the back of Krom’s head a moment, that thick brown pelt. No whimper of pain from him. I turned back to Red Mountain.

  We inched along, murderously slow. Even at this speed, the jeep stirred up clouds of ash. I had ample opportunity to brood on the topography of Minaret Road as we turtled along. Going up, just barely. The Red Mountain plume was visible above treetops. Don’t do anything yet, I prayed.

  No ghosts appeared, waving down the jeep. Nobody left in town, of that I was convinced. Nobody alive, anyway.

  I thought I’d feel at least a twinge of regret, leaving town. Thought I’d feel something but it’s not my town any more. Did feel something. Urgency. Floor it, Eric. Screw the ash. We’ve got spare parts.

  We passed the intersection of Minaret and the Lake Mary Road and got a dead-on view of the Lakes Basin peaks and the plume dirtying the dirty sky. Maybe it was our change in position but I could hear the eruption now. Boom boom boom, like a small war being fought on the ridge. Please don’t progress to the next stage. Please don’t go pyro now.

  We came, in moments, to the Bypass turnoff. Eric slowed, unnecessarily. Heads turned right. In the back, Krom made a sound, an exhalation. Far as I could see, it still looked navigable. Scuffed in ash, like Minaret. No volcanic bombs raining down, no sign that Inyo had awakened. Looked inviting, this Bypass, but for the fact that it dead-ended a good four miles short of 395, but for the Red Mountain plume, up and to our left. I felt a little dizzy. My ears buzzed, like a helicopter had just flown overhead.

  I scanned the Bypass for Walter. It was her route, after all.

  Minaret wound lazily toward the mountain. Still Jeffrey pine forest. Bad luck, Jeffrey, you’re too low—downhill from the Red Mountain plume—you’re never in the right place anymore, are you? And right now I wanted lodgepole, red fir, hemlock. I wanted elevation.

  Eric stopped the jeep.

  I sat forward. “What are you doing?”

  “Checking the filters, Cass. Just take a sec.”

  I died, as Eric got out and went under the hood. We all die as the Red Mountain vent goes pyro and sends hot rock at us but the incandescent cloud races ahead of the flow and we’re stopped in the road. I did not look back at Krom, Krom whose truck had stalled in ash, who had gotten out to check his engine and seen his driver killed, who’d been hit by a lava bomb, who’d returned to his truck for shelter, where he screamed in pain and forgot fear.

  Eric climbed back in and I breathed again. We accelerated to our snail’s pace, but our filters were clean and we were going up.

  Lodgepole pine. Red fir.

  We climbed. I kept an eye on the Red Mountain plume until the solid hip of Mammoth Mountain came between us and the eruption. Finally, topography was beginning to be in our favor.

  The road steepened. I peered down gullies for a wrecked snowmobile. For a body. For a waving ghost.

  No ghosts. Skeleton trees, though. No more than last time. Okay, then.
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  Minaret snaked, and climbed, and at last leveled and delivered us onto the broad flat shoulder of Mammoth Mountain. Eric stopped in the roundabout beside the statue of the woolly mammoth, woolled in ash.

  We all peered up at the Tyrolean Lodge, the gabled gondola stations, the venerable Inn. It wasn’t the ash that so transformed the place, for ash had become the benchmark. Sky’s blue, grass is green, snow’s white? Not anymore. What made this place so eerie, so wrong, was the emptiness. On the lousiest ski day of winter, on the most blistering day of summer, there are people here. This is Mammoth Mountain. There’s always somebody here to ski it or board it or bike it or hike it or sit by the fireplace at the Inn and admire it. Not now. Not a car in the lot. Nor a snowmobile. Nor even a pair of skis staked in the snow.

  We’re here.

  “Gives me the creeps,” Mike said.

  Eric shut off the engine. “End of the line.” At the far end of the lot was a wall of snow, beneath which Minaret Road continued unplowed. Too late to go any farther because the dark sky was already grading into night.

  Well lady, I thought, you won. You picked the movie. Now sit through it.

  Krom said, “I could use a john.”

  Mike snapped out of his seat belt. “We’ll get you right into the Lodge, sir.”

  “No,” I said, “the Inn.”

  “But there’s emergency keys to the Lodge in the box around back of the gondola station, or at least there used to be and I don’t see why anybody would have put them in a different place since I was working here.”

  “The Inn’s safer,” I said.

  “Why is it safer, I don’t see...” Mike, despite himself, leaned on the dash to get a look up the mountain, up the two thousand feet of vertical world-class drop. The Lodge snuggled at its base. The Inn was across the parking lot, that much farther from an avalanche of Mammoth’s fabled snow. “Oh,” Mike said. “Oh, the Inn. Only how do we get inside?”

  “Break a window,” I said.

  Mike’s street-bum face bloomed in wonder.

  Eric and Mike took Krom in a four-handed carry and I found a window. Inside, I followed my flashlight beam through the murk, skirting a fallen housekeeping cart and toppled tables, and let them in the big main doors. As they bore Krom across the colonnaded great room toward the public restrooms I recalled that meeting, that night, when the only question was how we get out. Not whether.

  I went back outside and crossed the roundabout to the gondola station and got the keys—Mike was right. I toured the ski barns and the Lodge and then returned to the Inn. They were coming out of the Men’s; I raised a hand in passing, and Eric gave a weary nod. I wandered up and down hallways, keeping an eye out for other lights, listening, shouting now and again.

  When I returned they were assembled around the cold mouth of the fireplace, Mike standing before it, Krom laid out on a chaise, Eric straddling a chair with his arms crossed over the back and his forehead on his hands. I collapsed onto an ottoman.

  Mike shifted from foot to foot. “It’s cold. Shouldn’t we go find blankets? What about lanterns? Won’t they have propane lanterns around for power outages? I’m referring to regular outages. I’ll do blankets and lanterns. What about food? They could have left food. Cassie should go find some food, shouldn’t she? We should bring our packs in, anyway, since we’ve got rations. Oh man, shouldn’t we contact Bridgeport?”

  “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 judgmental 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, goose down 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 goose down. 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 squirrelly 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 goose down pillows.

  “Cass?” Eric said. “Mike?”

  “I’m fine,” 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.

&nb
sp; 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 46

  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?”