Volcano Watch

by Toni Dwiggins

  He said, contrarily, “I’ll stay.”

  He’ll stay because he’s lonely at home, or he’ll stay because he’s decided to help?

  He made a close study of the evidence.

  Not what I asked. I needed him to leap. I couldn’t stand the wait so I watched the laden cars passing on Minaret. Minaret and I are in different time zones—opposite sides of the date line. It’s yesterday on the street. It’s tomorrow where I am. The world has flipped.

  Walter said, “Use the spectrophotometer on it.”

  I almost screamed. Yes, I’ve done it, I’ve bingoed the element lamps and I know it was aluminum that painted our limestone gray. It was not gray from iron or silicon, which would have pointed me to other limestones, other places. It was aluminum and that pointed me to a very specific place. I said, “You’ve seen this stuff in the field. You know where it comes from.”

  “I’m sure I’ve… Somewhere.”

  “We talked about it. Right here. Day we vaporized the cyanide.”

  For the first time this morning, for the first time since we lost Lindsay, Walter’s eyes met mine. Not just gazed in my direction, but settled there. “Hot Creek,” he said.

  “So you remember.” My core was ice. “Lindsay told Georgia where to collect a crinoid for Adrian. A lover’s gift. Georgia got one for Lindsay, too. A thank-you. And Lindsay must have been touched by the offering because she put it on her desk with all her treasures.”

  Walter gave me a hollow look.

  “John asked me to look at her desk. The day that… See if anything was missing. I looked but my heart wasn’t really in it. But I visualize it now and I don’t think the crinoid was there. Did you see it? That day?”

  The blue of his eyes shaded.

  “Then I guess I better go look.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The yellow crime-scene tape was still in place. It seemed right that this place was sealed. It should remain sealed for eternity.

  I unlocked the frosted glass door and ducked under the tape.

  Her office had not been disturbed. Every surface that would hold prints was fuzzy with black powder, and there were wads of discarded tape on the floor. Actually, it made being here easier. I could not picture Lindsay at that grimed desk. She would not sit shivering in this cold. The room had finally cooled down. I kept my jacket on.

  The irregular dark stain on the rug looked permanent.

  I could not look at that. I looked, instead, at her desk. All the pretty cluttered things. And no pretty crinoid.

  I took a seat in Lindsay’s desk chair. Creamy soft leather. A dream of a chair. The thought came that Lindsay would want me to have it. I stiffened. I could never sit and work in such a chair.

  But surely this is where she sat that night. Working. Monitoring the progress of the quakes. And then the perp barges in. Does he show the gun right away? Soon enough. And what about her gun? I pictured, vividly, sitting on the other side of this desk and asking her how she could have set up that thing at Hot Creek, and I saw, vividly, how she had to swivel her chair to retrieve her gun from the credenza, to show me how she had the situation covered. She can’t do that now, with him. She swivels and he says freeze, or something. Whatever he says, whatever he wants, he gives her time enough to think up a plan. His gun tells her she may not come out of this alive. She can’t reach her gun. She sees the crinoid on her desk—the symbol. At some point while he glances away—maybe she distracts him, says who’s that in the hallway—she palms the rock. She drops her hand to her lap, hidden from him by the desk, and she sets to work.

  She’s scared, of course, but she’s Lindsay and her wits never leave her. So here she sits, worrying grains from a telling stone into the matrix of her ring, knowing it won’t escape the attention of two cop geologists, should it come to that. Knowing they’ll get the message.

  And what’s the gunman doing? Just watching? What does he want? Why is he going to kill her? Why doesn’t he shoot her right away? What does he want?

  My head was spinning. I opened my eyes.

  And once she works the grains into the ring, what does she do with the rock? He never sees it—if he saw it he would have known enough to see what she’d done. After all, he’s fallen in love with forensic geology. He would have taken the rock and the ring. But he didn’t. The encrusted ring stayed on her finger.

  So where’s the crinoid rock?

  I’m Lindsay and I have to hide this rock and I can’t make any obvious moves or he’ll notice. I’m standing on the jute rug when he shoots me, so I had to have hidden the rock before I got there.

  It had to be in the desk.

  I reached to open the top righthand drawer. No. He’ll see my arm move.

  And then the obvious hit me, as it must have hit her. There is a shallow center drawer, and all I have to do is raise my knee to slide it open. The modesty shield on his side of the desk will block his view.

  I raised my knee and nudged the drawer open and it slid silently because her desk is the kind of quality craftsmanship that makes drawers slide smoothly. I looked inside. Keys. Hand lens. Flashlight and batteries, pens and pencils, paper clips. Tape measure. Clinometer. Rock hammer and cold chisel. A geologist’s catch-all drawer. Not surprisingly, containing a rock. Bo or Lupe or Jim would not have found it odd upon checking the drawer to see a rock. Not worth mentioning—she had rocks on her desk, in the cabinet, on top of the apothecary cupboard. She used a rock as a doorstop.

  I took out the chunk of gray limestone with the white disk standing in high relief. I used her lens. Under high-power, the limestone looked the same as the ring evidence I’d examined in the lab. Or darned similar to. I bagged the crinoid.

  I felt nauseated.

  There was a terrible odor in the room and it came from the apothecary cupboard. I hadn’t noticed when I first entered because it was so familiar. Someone had left the cupboard doors ajar and the coffee bean oils were scenting the office. I covered my mouth but the odor was on my hands. It was in my clothes, in my hair.

  Quite suddenly, I was furious with her. Indulging her eccentricities to the point that a simple cup of coffee became a ritual and Walter and I had to drink from her cup as solemnly as though we were meeting with the gods.

  I waited until the urge to retch had passed, then restored the scene and locked the door behind me and ran through the hallway. Outside, in the cold, I took in a long breath of fresh air but it was some time before I left behind the scent of coffee.

  Aged Sumatra. The Toba caldera.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  It’s very strange now.

  Everything’s gone quiet. Quakes, which built into a swarm in the past week, have all but ceased. Gas emissions in Hot Creek and on Red Mountain have subsided. Strain rate’s dropped. And in the absence of activity there is a vacuum, a stifling feeling like the sky is falling, only very very slowly.

  Lindsay described this kind of thing to me once. It’s called premonitory quiescence—a brief interruption in the unrest that often leads to an eruption.

  We’re still at alert level WATCH. Volcano watch.

  Phil Dobie phoned this morning. Without Lindsay I don’t have a backdoor into USGS anymore and so I’ve been calling Phil and getting noninformation. As Lindsay put it, Phil has to weigh all the variables before he’ll decide whether to order the burger or the chicken nuggets. This morning he decided on the chicken nuggets. He called me. He said something about owing it to me and to Lindsay’s—and then he muttered something I think was memory—to call and give me a heads-up. The Survey is considering declaring alert level WARNING. I swallowed and asked Phil if he thought we were going all the way. He said without a pause to weigh the variables “it’s not out of the question.”

  Phil must have phoned Krom as well because Krom has issued his own decree, closing the town to nonresidents, clearing the backcountry of snow campers.

  We’re left in town with only ourselves for company.

  Meanwhile I’m on watch,
in synch with the volcano.

  I sit at my bench and stare at the specimen dish of pumice and bark, and I still can’t say how it got into Georgia’s mouth and I still can’t connect it with Adrian Krom. I can’t place him at the scene of her murder. I stare at the specimen dish of gray limestone, which does not place him at the scene of Lindsay’s murder. I know he killed them, but I can only watch the dust gather on my specimen dishes. My evidence exists in a vacuum.

  Today, I could stand it no longer and so I fled to Hot Creek. The gate was unlocked. There were two Survey trucks parked in the lot. I parked and got out. I needed to walk. The gorge was swarming with Survey people. I headed out into the tableland above the creek, intending to pay a visit to Lindsay’s fumarole, her little fellow.

  The snow was soft and my boots made no noise and in this vacuum I became invisible. This is how he came back from the airport, I thought. Invisibly. Snowstorm postponed his flight and maybe he took that as a sign. Tonight’s the night. Tonight he has to kill her. There must be a reason, of course—nobody kills without a reason. Nobody’s on the street in this storm, nobody sees him. It’s late, her building’s nearly deserted. He wears gloves so he will leave no prints. He wears a cap so he will shed no hairs. He sheds Sears wool but that’s not going to nail him. He brings clean shoes and changes in the hallway so he will leave no soil trace, or maybe he ties plastic bags over his boots. That alarms her, although not as much as the gun in his hand. Maybe he just intends to scare her, some final humiliation, and things get out of hand. She says something, indicates she will not be cowed. Scared of course but even in fear, we are who we are. Maybe it’s just a look from her that does it. The lift of her chin, and he shoots. Then he goes home, gets some shuteye, and rises early to catch the flight out.

  I could not breathe well. This thick air. I once went snorkeling in Hawaii and all I could hear underwater was my own labored breathing. This was like snorkeling, just me and an ocean of snow and the faraway horizon where the caldera lip rises. And that crazy sky, blue as the ocean, sitting down on top of me. I walked faster, underwater breathing, and I wanted to scream to break the silence but the feeling of pressure was so great that I was afraid to open my mouth—it would be like opening my mouth underwater.

  Her little fellow was steaming.

  I turned and ran for my car through the crazy thick air, breathing ragged, heartbeats like gunshots.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Harmonic tremors in the moat, new ground cracking on Red Mountain, and the fissure is belching acid gases.

  The premonitory quiescence has broken, like a fever.

  *****

  Walter and I were at the open door. The storefront window, cracked by quakes and secured with duct tape, rattled until its protest was drowned by the roar of oncoming trucks. I moved out for a better look and all along Minaret Road others were stepping out of doorways, the lot of us like prairie dogs popping from our burrows in alarm.

  There was a line of trucks from here to the horizon, and although it’s seven in the morning they came into town with their headlights switched on as though dark had already fallen in Mammoth.

  The noise grew insufferable and we retreated inside.

  It’s as if burglars have been at work in here. The lab’s stripped bare, most everything moved to Bishop. What’s left is now boxed and waiting by the door—the bare-bones equipment we’ve been using the past few days, and current cases. Los Angeles, Costa Rica, a new one from Tucson, and of course Georgia and Lindsay. The small lab television plays with the sound off. It’s tuned to King Videocable, which keeps playing the same tape with a crawl updating the evacuation schedule. I’ve been watching for two hours. I switched the TV on at home at five ayem when the civil defense alarm went off and shocked me awake. Jimbo and I knew the drill and we’d moved in synch packing last-minute stuff, and then Walter phoned and we agreed to meet at the lab to pack our skeletal equipment. We were packed and ready to go by six-thirty but Minaret was closed in anticipation of the National Guard convoy. When it passes and officials open the road again, we can bring around our cars, load up, and head home.

  Plan is, we evacuate by home address. My street’s in the second-to-last group and Walter’s is in the last. So far, everything is going stopwatch perfect. It’s a perfect day, clear and no storm forecast. There are no visitors in town to burden us, to clog the exit. Plan is, last I heard, to evacuate out highway 203—with Pika Canyon as backup in the case of flat tires or engine trouble or fender benders or anything else to slow 203—but either way we should all be out within four hours.

  We sat waiting. The workbenches and catchall table and metal shelves were too heavy to be worth moving—moving twice should we return. The stools on which we sat were too cheap to bother with.

  I thought of Lindsay’s leather chair. A real waste. We’d packed nothing from her office, although it was no longer sealed, no longer a worked crime scene. We’d packed nothing from her house. We leave her things alone, Walter said. I asked about her personal stuff—didn’t he care about that?

  He said, never love anything that can’t love you back.

  So all we have of Lindsay is what’s in the box. A gold filigree ring and some grains of limestone. She would be pissed, I thought. She was a shopper, she valued things. What a waste.

  I stared at her carton. She’s in limbo, like Georgia. The two old crones boxed up, one on top of the other. Village elders sitting in judgement. Both royally pissed with me. I could have gone into volcanology but I’m a failed forensics chick who can’t nail one guy for two murders in my own backyard. Stop whining, Georgia snaps. Lindsay just raises one fine eyebrow. Honey, what a waste.

  I spun on my stool and said to Walter, “It just royally stinks. We know he did it.”

  Walter said, dully, “There is no evidence.”

  “There’s the crinoid she put into her ring. Why’d she do that if not to tell us it was him?”

  Walter didn’t reply. There was no reply, and we both knew it, and we were both royally sick of this dead-end talk, and so he just sat quietly waiting, his shirt untucked, two fingers bandaged from paper cuts, old fellow beaten and lost in the attic.

  He got up and walked over to the TV and flipped up the sound.

  We’d seen the tape three times already.

  Jeanine, our local TV star, wearing a prim sweater dress, is standing at a lectern. Jeanine, of all people, has been tapped to read the USGS hazard alert, the WARNING declared this morning. A mouthful for anyone and for Jeanine the laid-back queen it’s the challenge of a lifetime. But it was somehow comforting to have Jeanine on the tube with the official word.

  “…indicates that a volume of maaagma,” she read, “is being injected into the shallow crust with a strong possibility…”

  I knew it by heart.

  “…still possible that the maaagma may yet stop short…”

  I knew at precisely which point Jeanine’s hand was going to wander to her hair. I knew how her hand was going to stop short and that—given the gravity of the situation—she would stifle the need to tug on her ponytail.

  “…and an assessment of its implications for possible…volcanic…hazards.” She looked directly into the camera, her eyes slitting.

  I knew Jeanine had acquired a new war story, a companion piece to her battle with Krom in Hot Creek.

  I knew I should be fixing my attention on details at hand—I help Walter load the Explorer and keep room in my Soob because Jimbo called and said there’s more boxes waiting at home—but I could not help wondering what Krom was thinking. He’s won. He’s built his road, he’s vanquished his human foe, and his nonhuman foe—that nasty-tempered unpredictable chum—is about to be vanquished as well because by noon Krom will have whisked us all beyond its reach.

  On TV the tape rolled and Jeanine began again.

  And then there was a blast and then another and another, one blast rolling into the next and the window crack widened and the door sucked open and my ears buzzed
and Walter and I hit the floor and rolled beneath our workbenches and I began to pray.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  This is it, I thought, already through the door.

  The road was clogged with people. The convoy was stopped, the gray-green line broken as trucks had veered to avoid rear-ending each other. Drivers hung out windows, people ran out their doors, and we all gaped east, down Minaret Road, in the direction of the caldera.

  It’s what we all expected, what I’d dreamt of, a dark cloud rising.

  A neon-yellow fire truck came screaming down Minaret, the driver blasting the horn in fury but the convoy could not get out of the way because there was no room in the road. The fire truck came halfway up onto the sidewalk, screaming a warning, and people scattered as it passed.

  “I’m going to see,” I told Walter, and set off at a run before he could stop me.

  I ran down Minaret to the intersection with Highway 203 and followed others who made the turn onto the road out of town. Down 203, I could see flames rising above the tops of the Jeffrey pines.

  This was wrong.

  A horn blasted and I threw myself out of the way to let the ambulance scream by.

  I ran until my muscles seized then slowed to a limp and finally stopped and crouched over my cramping thighs. It’s too far. I’d made it as far as the ranger station on the edge of town. Close enough to smell the acrid smoke and hear the snap of flames but not close enough to see the damage. Others caught up, gasping. The foolhardy. We were a small panting crowd, the kind that races toward the scene of an accident only none of us had the wherewithal to make it. Bo Robinson was in my face, yelling “where do we go?” and I shook my head. I didn’t know where to go.

  Screams. Fire trucks. Ambulances. Police.