Fault Line

by Sarah Andrews

  Faye rolled over onto the bath mat and stared at the ceiling, her lips swollen from crying. Tears continued to stream out of the corners of her eyes, descending now towards her ears. “Nooo. It’s just that he’d want it sooo badly, and I don’t know … he’s—he’s not around a whole lot, you know?”

  “Maybe he’d change.”

  “I make a lousy codependent, Em. I don’t suffer the delusion that men can change. And I’m too used to having my own way to even give one the chance to try.”

  I heard the phone ringing. “Want me to get that?”

  “Sure. That’ll be him,” she said, her voice hollow with fatalism. “Checking on me.”

  As I rose to find the telephone, I said, “Hey, count your blessings. At least he calls. It’s been six hours now since the quake and I haven’t heard from Ray yet.”

  “You’ve checked your messages?”

  “Four times.”

  “You’ve called him?”

  “No. Fact is, I don’t know how to reach him. He went down to Saint George for the weekend with his mother. Just a mo—” I picked up the telephone next to her bed. “Hello?”

  There was silence at the other end of the line.

  I repeated my salutation, automatically beginning to count the number of times I’d said it so that at three I could feel polite about hanging up, but before I got it out the third time, I heard an exasperated sigh, and then: “I did dial Faye’s, right?”

  “Yes, Tom, you did.”

  With heavy annoyance, he said, “Well, it was you I wanted to speak with anyway.”

  I was taken aback, naturally. “So why are you all pissed off that’s you’ve found me?”

  Another pause, then: “Okay, sorry. Can you come down to my office? Meet me in about a half hour?”

  “Well, sure. Why?”

  “Tell you when you get here.” He clicked off without saying good-bye.

  I stared stupidly at the phone for a moment.

  “Who was it?” Faye asked.

  I explained. Faye frowned.

  I said, “Well, you didn’t like it any better when he hovered.”

  Faye flopped onto her back on the bed and groaned. “This means he has a new case. He always gets grouchy when he has a new case.”

  “And he wants me on it?”

  “Oh, get off it, Em. The man’s been training you for months now. He isn’t doing that out of sheer altruism. He’s getting older. He’s slipping. He needs a fresh new mind to keep him going.”

  “Now, that sounds just terrific,” I said huffily. “I get to be an extension of the great man’s eyes and ears. And what’s this now? You assigning him to the Alzheimer’s ward?”

  Faye was staring at the ceiling, her hands folded on her belly, beginning to relax for the first time that morning. “No, but, well … he’s old enough to be this baby’s grandfather! You misunderstand. Tom goes so far into his work that he really doesn’t see a big line of demarcation between himself and the rest of the universe. You’re an extension of him, yes, but more as a peer than a tool. If he thought you stupid, he couldn’t get that Zen about it.”

  “I think I followed that,” I muttered.

  “Okay, to hell with it. You were telling me where Ray is, and why the self-righteous SOB hasn’t called you.”

  I dumped myself into the lounge chair that sat ten feet away from Faye’s king-sized Arts and Crafts bedstead. “He’s been in Saint George with his mother. Family business.”

  “Which is?”

  I thought about it. “I have no idea.”

  “Really knitting you into that family, ain’t they?”

  I started to say something defensive—tike. Okay, so you’re in a big bad mood because you’re knocked up, so don’t take it out on my sorry love life—but something stopped me. Something that felt like it was surfacing in my consciousness, something I wished would dive back to the bottom and stay there. “You’re right,” I said. “In the past two months, they’ve all but closed me out entirely.”

  “Used to invite you to Family Home Evening, Sunday dinner, all the rest.”

  “Now I’m lucky to get a glass of lemonade when I stop by to say hi.”

  After awhile, almost to herself, she said, “I was wondering why he was taking vacation time to go somewhere with her, rather than with you.” That’s what I like about Faye. She’s not just up there looking down; she’s down there taking the long walk with me.

  “Family business,” I said again, so quickly that even I heard the defensiveness in my voice. “He’s due home tonight,” I added, trying to make it sound like a solution rather than a miscellaneous fact.

  “Good.”

  “He’s the man of the family and has been since his dad died, so that’s his job, I guess. But I thought he could have asked me to go with them.”

  Faye turned her head my way, her eyes soft with sympathy. “And you’re wondering why he didn’t tell you what that business was.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Screw him.”

  I forced a smile. “Nah, I could wind up like you!”

  She sat up and threw a pillow at me. I jumped up and heaved it back. She threw me a second one and we fell into a fit of nervous giggles. As they subsided, she turned her head my way again. This time, it was she who was defensive as she asked, “So, what did Tom want?”

  “He told me to get my butt down to his office.”

  Faye gazed fixedly at me, her eyes dark and thoughtful. “Fine, but this time, you keep that butt of yours covered.”

  5

  I believe that there is more danger to be apprehended from the concealment of facts, or the tacit silence of the public press on this topic, than in free and open discussion of the subject and speculation for the future.

  —Bret Harte, 1866; from a newspaper editorial on the subject of public policy response to earthquakes, including the San Francisco. temblor of October 8, 1865

  FRANCIS W. MALONE SAT ON THE TAILGATE OF HIS GLOSSY new Ford pickup truck, watching the men in the trench work. He unscrewed the cap of his stainless-steel thermos and poured himself a cupful of his special blend of coffee. He had had the beans shipped straight from Jamaica, and he kept them in the freezer so they’d stay fresh. He knew to thaw just the right amount of beans overnight before grinding them, so that the flavor could reach its full bouquet, and he doused the grounds in a drip brewing system, using only unbleached filters. Life was nicer that way.

  He was in no hurry for the men in the trench to complete the job of setting the big steel shores that would keep it open while he got down inside and took a look at the condition of the sediments through which the trench had been excavated. It was cold, and would be colder still down in that dank, cramped space, and even uglier than this beaten-up patch of earth on which these fools planned to construct a new shopping center. Urban renewal, they called it: You could throw a rock and hit downtown Salt Lake. He called it urban removal: Just scrape away the old crap and build new crap.

  He unkinked his shoulders and took a sip of his coffee. Up here on his pickup truck, the sun was shining, and he needed this moment of respite to recover from the experience of the earthquake that had so rudely awakened him that morning. Hell, his colleagues seemed to have loved getting knocked awake ahead of the alarm like that, but he had suffered a slight nausea and had been more than a little bit pissed to find that his wine rack had collapsed and dumped two bottles of good California chardonnay onto the quarry-tile floor of his kitchen. The bottles had shattered into a thousand pieces, and not only were their contents lost, but he’d had a nasty job to clean up, as the maid had just been there and wouldn’t be back for a week.

  Francis W. Malone was, however, prepared to be philosophical. An earthquake was cash on the barrelhead for him as a consulting engineering geologist. He could not ask for a better demonstration of the Earth’s disregard for the constructs of human civilization and the resultant need for his services. A nice 5.2 to snap some fear into people, but not the mess th
at a 6.5 or a 7 would cause. Then, all work would stop for weeks or months as everybody tried to dig the bodies out of the rubble. Of course, there might be even more work for him after that, but it would, in fact, be too much work, and would draw in heavyweight competition from out of state. No, a 5.2 was perfect, just his cup of java.

  There was a commotion in the trench, which gaped twenty feet away from where he had parked the truck. He heard hollering in Spanish, a bunch of ripe epithets no doubt, and—whoa, boy—someone was jumping up the ladder out of the ditch in one big hurry. Hell, what was this, a collapse? Shit, okay, nobody hurt. One of the hydraulically operated shores had just let go as they were trying to lock it in, that was all. Scared them. The man was standing up on the edge of the trench now, visibly shaking as he knocked the mucky soil from his brown hands, his ill-fitting hard hat jiggling on his head.

  The trench was ten feet deep, plenty deep enough to kill a man if the walls collapsed. Everyone on the site knew that a man had to be buried only up to the diaphragm to suffocate before the dirt could be moved off of him; that was why OSHA required these shores to keep the walls apart. The crossbracing also provided handy supports for the boards on which Malone could stand while he examined the upper portions of the walls.

  The site foreman hustled up to him. “Malone,” he said, “damned stuffs pretty unstable.”

  “That’s what the shores are for,” Malone answered.

  “Yeah, well. You gonna feel safe going down in there after we get them set? I mean, I’ve set plenty of shores before, but this is dicey. We’re down below the frost level there, and the ground’s really wet. Falling into a slurry. You gonna be able to see what you need to see, even?”

  Malone nodded. “You just keep Jaime and Juan at it, okay?”

  The foreman’s face clouded with anger. “That’s not their names.

  “Sorry,” Malone said, his heavy-lidded eyes telegraphing his apathy. Guys are making a mint here next to what they get back home in Mexico, he mused. What’s a little risk? “Whatever their names are, just make sure they do it right, okay?”

  Malone’s cell phone burbled at him. He pulled it out of his pocket, told the foreman, “Catch ya in a minute,” and said into the phone, “Hello?”

  “Mr. Malone? This is Maria Teller in the governor’s office.”

  “Hey, Maria! You can call me Frank.” He grinned into the phone. Maria had nice stems. She was short, but that meant she wore those nice high-heeled jobs, little stilettos, gave her that kind of mm-hm look, even though she was all upholstered up in a little drab suit because she was playing at being the director of Natural Resources for the state of Utah.

  “Frank. Look, what’s the verdict out there? As you can imagine, things are getting even hotter up here now with this morning’s earthquake. What are you finding?”

  You see? he told himself. One little tremor and they’re running for their cell phones to call their geologist. Time to make hay. The green kind that folds up and fits right into the old wallet. “I’ll know more in just a few minutes, Maria. I have the men down in the trench setting the shores. OSHA regulations. Very dangerous. Just as soon as I know, I’ll let you know.”

  “Well, now really, Frank, you give this one to me straight. I want it by the book. The governor’s really concerned.”

  I’ll bet the big honcho probably slept right through it and hasn’t even bothered to come in yet, Malone thought, but he said, “Of course, of course. I hear you loud and clear. Get back to you soonest.”

  “And Frank, you know what’s riding on this, need I say.”

  Yeah. Sure. I say something you don’t like and I’m not your consultant anymore. Malone let out a grunting laugh. Clients were all alike. They had to make nice in public and look very serious about geologic hazards, but when push came to shove, they wanted only one thing, and that was profit. He wondered who was paying Maria, or the governor, or whether Maria was just fixing to run for higher office and angling for campaign contributions. Maria isn’t stupid. She knows I’m answering her call on a cell phone, and that anyone with a little technology and half an idea of crying foul could tape this conversation. “I’ve got everything under control,” he told her. “Public safety is priority one.”

  “Thanks.” She rang off.

  Five minutes later, the coffee consumed and the shores properly set, Francis W. Malone strolled over to the lip of the trench to take a look.

  He could see almost nothing.

  Damned if trench walls aren’t a devil to read, he told himself. He sighed. The old conundrum faced him once again: how to read the history of the site from a haphazard pile of muck. He scanned the far wall of the trench for any sign of faulting, such as a steeply diagonal line with one kind of soil on one side and another on the other. Or buried paleosols with the A horizons cattywampus. Or contorted bedding—lines that should be horizontal all humped up and around as a result of slumping or soil liquefaction. Malone knew that these soils had developed on old lake bed sediments deposited during the last ice age, when Great Salt Lake, which now ended miles to the west, was a big mother pluvial lake that put this spot almost a thousand feet underwater, with beaches miles to the east, up in the ramparts of the Wasatch Range. The sediments here were fine sands and silts fully saturated with water, just waiting to squirt that water skyward whenever they were shaken hard, such as by earthquakes. But Malone could see nothing but smeared muck.

  He put his hands on his hips and scanned up and down the trench. Nothing. It needed to be scraped clean with a mattock and then picked at with a knife. But that would require getting down inside and exposing himself to the risk. He walked down the hundred-foot run of the trench, around the end, and along the other side. That view was no better. He considered calling a grad student in. Send him down there. Let him pick at that crap.

  He returned to his truck to think. Poured a second cup of coffee, wishing he’d put in more half-and-half back at the house. He saw the foreman looking his way again. What a pisser; if the bastard had the nerve to push him, he’d tell him he was contemplating the case, which he was. Foremen have it easy, he decided. All they have to do is point and shout and follow someone else’s plan. But geology is never cut-and-dried, never obvious.

  And here he was, working on this political hot potato of a project. It could blow up in his face if he didn’t watch out. The big boys who held the purse strings would kick him off the field like a lopsided football if they needed someone to take a fall.

  He walked back over to the trench and looked in again. “Get someone down in there again with a shovel,” he told the foreman.

  A moment later, the trembling Mexican was once again back down in the trench, his dark eyes wide with fear. The foreman handed a shovel down to him.

  “Cut away that smeared soil there, okay, fella?” Malone told him. He crouched down behind the retaining position of the nearest shore and gestured with one hand, indicating the direction to carve at the wall of the trench.

  The man bent to the task, gingerly cutting at the soil with the edge of the shovel. A little of it caved away, revealing much the same effect as he had started with.

  The wall is just too sodden, Malone told himself. We’re not going to see anything. Then as he noticed that his coffee was getting cold, he decided, If there were anything dramatic, we would see it; it would be obvious. Coarse gravels here and sand there, that kind of stuff. The foreman was watching him. Time to put on a show.

  He returned to his truck and opened the toolbox, looking for his mattock. Couldn’t find it. Fished out a Swiss army knife instead. Sauntered back to the trench, grasped the top of the ladder firmly with both hands, held his breath, and climbed down to the first set of boards, which the two Mexicans had now set in place. They were wet and slippery. The air was dank with the breath of the Earth. Malone walked along the board to a place where the sediments seemed a little coarser. Picked at it with his knife. Wished he hadn’t forgotten his gloves. Damn the cold.

  “What d
o you think?” called the foreman from the brink.

  “I don’t think. I read history,” Malone answered. “The story’s right down here. Just got to be able to interpret it accurately is all.” Like hell, he told himself, now picking a little harder. Stuff’s all stirred up. Probably liquefaction. Whole area’s subject to it, just like the UGS maps say. The nearest branch of the fault ends half a mile north of here. What am I doing down in this frigging hole in the ground, risking my nuts for some half-witted developer? The reason I can’t Me anything is that this shit’s all been stirred up half a dozen times by earthquakes. No news is no news. Liquefaction. All go home now. Have us a beer.

  But he knew he had to justify his order to dig a test trench before the foundation excavation was dug, so he kept on picking. Pick, pick, pick, hands getting chapped, cuticles torn. Sniffing with self-pity, he decided, I’m going to have to charge them double for this job somehow.

  Half an hour later, Malone climbed out of the trench. He drew his cell phone out of his pocket and punched in the number for Maria Teller’s office. He knew he should call Hayes Associates first, as they were, in fact, his client on this project, but he’d do that next, because he knew what Hayes would want him to do anyway. When Maria Teller’s secretary had punched him through to the woman herself, he said, “Everything’s fine, Maria. We’re going to have to put the foundation on piers, sure, but that’s just a technical matter for the engineers. They can build around just about anything.”

  Maria enunciated extra clearly, even though the connection was good. “Let me get this exactly right. You’re saying there’s no fault running through the foundation trenches for the Towne Centre project?”

  Malone paused, considering his wording carefully. “That’s right,” he said, inwardly congratulating himself on another job completed. “I see no fault here.”

  6

  IN A SALT LAKE TRIBUNE MOTOR POOL CAR PARKED A BLOCK down the street from the spot where Sidney Smeeth had met her destiny, Pet Mercer sat pondering her next move. Automatically, she fished out the small pocket mirror she carried in her case next to her notebook computer and took a squint at herself. She tugged at the few strands of hair that were long enough to need combing, making no change to the arrangement she had sprayed them into early that morning. She had worn her hair this way since early adolescence; it fitted her face and her personality. It was pert and easily cared for. It was, in fact, her unchanging pertness and apparent low need of maintenance that had earned her the nickname “Pet.” Nowadays, her high school pals slapped her on the shoulder and said, “These days, you even fetch the newspaper!” Pet would flash a preoccupied smile. Such comments whipped right past her. She was too busy fetching stories for that paper to concern herself-with other peoples’ opinions anymore.