by Taylor Smith
“An open stretch,” she said. “Good visibility in either direction.”
“They said it was snowing that night,” Chaney recalled. “And those guys had had a few drinks, according to Cheryl at the Trinity.”
“Maybe one of the drivers dozed and drifted over the centerline?”
“Or swerved to miss an animal and skidded, maybe.”
Mariah shook her head. “No visible skid marks, Ortega said, not from the van or the tanker truck. They must have just flown into each other.”
They poked around the site a little more, but there was nothing to see—new black asphalt and scorched piñon bushes, that was it. In a few months, when the fresh asphalt faded to match the rest of the road and new spring growth overtook the burn damage, no sign would remain that five of the world’s best nuclear weapons experts had lost their lives here.
They walked back down the highway toward the Pilar parking area. Chaney started to head to the car, but Mariah veered off toward the river, walking to the bank. The river was narrow, only about thirty feet across, and maybe ten feet at its deepest point. This time of year, its flow was relatively sedate. But in late spring and early summer, when the melting runoff from the mountains was at its peak, experienced rafters would thrill at the river’s untamed rapids. The wildest stretches were in the gorges upriver, including the Taos Box Canyon, one of the best white-water runs in the country. Mariah and David had done it not long after arriving in Los Alamos, and she would never forget the heart-stopping excitement as the inflatable raft dropped precipitously through the churning waters and rugged terrain. But an easier course started right here at Pilar, she knew, a relatively manageable sluice through narrow drops and massive boulders that even families with kids could enjoy.
“What are you doing, Mariah?” Chaney called.
She picked up a flat stone and attempted to skip it across the water, but it sank unceremoniously on first contact. “Nothing. Thinking.”
“It’s getting dark,” he said, walking toward her. “We should get going.”
She nodded but walked farther along the bank, picking up a long stick and prodding between the rocks on the shore, then using it as a walking stick while she ventured out onto some boulders that jutted into the river near the end of the clearing. She stood on a large boulder, looking first up and then down the winding river, and took a few soundings with the stick. Finally, with a sigh, she turned back and began to pick her way across the boulders to the bank. She was only a step away from terra firma when her eye, watching the water flow over the rocky streambed, caught sight of something wedged in a crevice just at the edge of the bank.
Mariah reached down to try to pick it up, but a scrubby juniper branch hanging over the riverbank caught on her sleeve. She yanked her arm to free it from the bush’s grip, but with the sudden movement, her footing gave way on the slippery rocks. Her hands flailed but found only air, and she fell backward into the stream.
She heard Chaney yell as she plunged her hands into the freezing water to break her fall. The edge of the riverbank dropped away sharply, but she managed to spin herself around and regain her balance on the narrow ledge before the current could grab her and carry her off. When Chaney ran up, she was sitting in a shallow, ice-cold pool, thoroughly soaked. She glanced up. Seeing that she was unhurt, Chaney folded his arms across his chest and broke into an amused grin.
“Oh, shut up!” she said, disgusted.
“I didn’t say a word. Far be it from me to tell Mariah Bolt where and when to take her daily swim.” She gritted her teeth.
Chaney held out a hand and Mariah stretched out to take it before remembering what she had been trying to do when she fell. She ignored him and scanned the rocks, but the object she had seen was gone. Then she spotted it where it had fallen into the river. She reached behind her, plunging her hand back into the icy water.
“What are you doing, crazy woman?” Chaney put his hands under her arms, pulling her to a standing position. The cold wind on her wet clothes sent Mariah into immediate and uncontrolled shivering. “Come on, you lunatic. You’re going to get pneumonia.”
“I found something,” she declared, holding up her clenched fist.
“Get out of the water, Mariah!” He helped her out and up the bank toward the road. “Come on, there’s a blanket in the car. Let’s get you wrapped up before you freeze to death.”
Mariah nodded and they broke into a run. Chaney grabbed her arm as she stumbled across the rocky parking lot, her freezing muscles sluggish and unresponsive. Water squished in her sopping boots. When they reached the car, Chaney opened the trunk and withdrew a woolen blanket. He threw it around her shoulders, then led her to the passenger seat, where he sat her down and pulled off her waterlogged boots and socks.
“Get in and I’ll get the heater going,” he said.
While he started the car, she pulled the blanket tighter and tucked her feet up underneath herself. Only then did she peer at the object still clasped in her hand.
“What have you got there?” Chaney asked, putting the car in gear.
“Part of a buckle.”
“What?” She held up a bit of black nylon webbing to which was attached half of a plastic buckle. “You took a swim in icy water for that?”
Unable to keep her shivering hand still, Mariah slipped the thing into her pocket. “Pretty stupid,” she agreed, “but I hadn’t planned to go in. God! I’m freezing!”
“The heat’s kicking in. We’ll get to a hotel as fast as we can so you can dry out.”
“Hilltop House in Los Alamos,” she said, her jaws clattering. “That’s the best bet.”
Chaney hesitated at the edge of the highway. “We should return to Taos. It’s faster.”
“No, let’s carry on. I’ll survive. Go south. The Los Alamos turnoff is just past Española.”
Chaney nodded and they headed back down NM 68 as the last light faded. Mariah huddled down into the blanket, cold and wet and miserable despite the raging car heater. At one point, she reached over and held the steering wheel while Chaney shrugged out of his jacket and draped it across her. When they finally turned off NM 68 and began the steep ascent up the five-fingered mesa that constitutes Los Alamos, Mariah was feeling sluggish and dopey.
“You’d better wait in the car,” Chaney said, casting a wry glance at her. “I don’t think the management will be too impressed by you sloshing across their lobby.” Mariah nodded as Chaney climbed out, leaving the engine running and the heater pumping. A few minutes later, he was back. “All set. We can move the car around the building and slip in the side door.”
When they entered the hotel, a family was leaving and cast curious glances at the blanket-wrapped woman going in. “Mommy!” Mariah heard the youngest child cry. “That lady’s all wet!”
“Hush!”
Chaney grinned at Mariah as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. She only shook her head ruefully.
“Here you go,” he said, slipping a key in a lock and stepping away to let her pass.
She flicked on the light. “Thanks. What room are you in?”
Chaney closed the door behind him. “This one.”
“Excuse me? I don’t think so. You get your own room, bub.”
“I was lucky to get this one,” he said, dropping their bags. “There’s some kind of conference going on, but fortunately they had a last-minute cancellation. Unless you want to drive around until you turn into the Snow Queen, we’re just going to have to make do. Relax,” he added, catching her stern gaze. “You’ll sleep on that bed over there and I’ll take this one here, light-years away. I promise to behave.”
Mariah frowned but conceded. There wasn’t another large hotel in the town, and she knew that their chances were slim of finding accommodation in one of the few small inns.
“Why don’t you take off those clothes?” Chaney suggested.
On the other hand, maybe she should just make him sleep in the lobby.
“I mean,” he sai
d, slowly and deliberately, “why don’t you go into the bathroom, run yourself a hot tub and throw those wet things out to me? The clerk at the desk said there’s a laundry room downstairs. I’ll dry your stuff and get us something to eat while you warm up.”
Mariah glanced down at the drip marks she was beginning to make on the carpet. “I guess,” she said. “I’m traveling light. I don’t have much else to wear.”
She emptied her coat pockets on the dresser, sliding Frank’s gun into the bureau’s top drawer, then slipped out of the coat and handed it to him before heading to the bathroom to fill the tub. As she tossed out the rest of her wet things, she heard a thump on the floor.
“I left my duffel bag outside the door, Mariah,” Chaney called. “There’s an extra sweater in there that you can use when you get out. I’ll be back in a while.”
“Okay, thanks. See you.”
She stepped into the tub and sank gratefully into the warm bath, submerging herself up to her ears until the shivers finally melted away and the numbness left her hands and feet. Closing her eyes, she let her mind float, listening to the steady hum of the building through the water. This was her element. All her life, whenever she had needed escape from pain or confusion, she had sought out the peaceful, buoyant calm of water. It cleared her mind, washing away the debris until she was once again able to think. Somewhere nearby she heard footsteps clumping along the hotel’s thin floors. Hilltop House, like most of Los Alamos, had the cost-conscious, jerry-built feeling of a military base despite the fact that the hotel, like the town, had long been open to the public and run on a normal commercial basis.
It felt strange to be back here, Mariah thought, remembering how isolated she had felt when she had moved here with David after Berkeley, cut off from the world on what the Soviet propagandists had always liked to call “the mesa of doom.”
Los Alamos had remained a closed town for two decades after the Manhattan Project conducted the Trinity Test in 1945 that launched the atomic age. Access during that period had been limited to the scientists who continued to perfect the nuclear arsenal as the American defense focus shifted from Japan and Germany to the Soviet Union. But by the time Mariah and David had arrived, the town of Los Alamos had long been opened up, only the actual lab site off-limits and invisible to outsiders. Despite the proliferation of fast-food restaurants, movie theaters and bowling alleys, however, there was no escaping the fact that it was a one-industry town engaged in an arcane and deadly business.
She reflected on the irony of the Russian scientists who now apparently visited the lab in great numbers. With the end of the Cold War, the scientific fraternity had reasserted its primacy. Former enemies had become worthy colleagues, like the five who had driven to Taos that night, Mariah thought, dreamily trailing her fingers through the warm water. Driven sixty-five miles for a few drinks in a seedy bar and then vanished off the face of the earth.
Water sloshed on the floor as Mariah shot upright in the tub. “Holy smoke!” she breathed. She lifted herself out of the water. Snatching a towel off the rack, she wrapped it quickly around herself before running into the room and over to the bureau where she had dropped the contents of her coat pockets. She picked up the buckle she had fished out of the Rio Grande and turned it around in her hand. It was the sort of plastic buckle normally attached to life vests, among other things. The black webbing was frayed and the buckle could have been ripped off after becoming snagged in the bushes next to the river, just as her sleeve had. Even frayed nylon is strong, however. The person wearing this buckle would have had to be moving pretty quickly to have had it ripped off like that.
“Holy smoke,” she repeated.
The clerk at the front desk of the Hilltop House Hotel examined the photos the stranger handed him.
Brian Latimer had already worked a full shift that day, and he had an essay to finish before English class tomorrow. But the guy who was supposed to have taken the Sunday-evening shift had called in sick with the flu, and Brian was stuck there for two extra hours until the manager got back from dinner. Mrs. Peterson had apologized when she’d asked Brian to stay on and had said yet again that he was the most responsible student she had ever had the pleasure to employ at Hilltop House. Yeah, right, Brian mused ruefully. I’m so responsible, I’ll probably flunk English for not getting this paper in on time. Come on! he thought, glancing at the clock before turning back to the stranger at the desk.
The man was conservatively dressed in a suit and tie, and he had presented some sort of government ID, which Brian didn’t find surprising. He had lived in Los Alamos all his life. His father was now chief of security at the lab, and Brian had heard endless lectures about how you had to be security-conscious. The old man could get really uptight when strangers showed up on the mesa. Los Alamos might look like any other small town, Brian thought, but a person could become real paranoid living in this place. As soon as I graduate, BAM! I’m outta here. He glanced nervously at the clock one more time. If I graduate.
“So, have you seen them?” the man asked.
Brian shook his head. “Not the lady.” He flipped to the other photo. “But this guy, yeah. Checked in a while back. I just saw him go out again—five, ten minutes ago maybe.”
“He was alone?”
“Yup.” Brian handed back the photos. “Who is he?”
“Nobody special. It’s just a routine check. What room did you say he was in again?”
“I didn’t. But it’s…let’s see…” Brian consulted the register. “He’s in 303. You want to leave a message?”
“No,” the man said, turning to leave. “And there’s no need to mention I was here, if you happen to be talking to him. You understand about security, don’t you, son?”
“Yes, sir.” Do I ever, Brian thought, watching the man go. It’s the story of my life. He turned back to the clock. Come on, Mrs. P. I gotta get that paper finished!
“Speedy Delivery—laundry and pizza our specialty!” Chaney called as he unlocked the door and slipped into the room.
Mariah leaned on the jamb of the bathroom door, arms folded. “You don’t look like the Mr. McPheely I remember from ‘Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”’
Chaney put his load on the table before looking over at her. Then he froze, taken aback. “Yeah, well, you’re no Mr. Rogers, either,” he said finally.
Mariah glanced down. Wanting to travel light that morning, she had been able to fit only a change of socks, underthings and an extra cotton turtleneck in her briefcase, along with her toiletries. On her feet now were her heavy woolen socks. Her legs were bare, but Chaney’s oversize sweater, which she had pulled on over her own things, came halfway to her knees. She tugged at it self-consciously, wondering why it should suddenly feel so much more revealing than the thin nylon Speedo suits she had spent half her life in. She felt her cheeks go warm.
“Looks better on you than me,” Chaney said, a smile mounting.
“Oh, quiet. Can I have my slacks?”
“Right here.” He handed them over, neatly pressed and folded.
Mariah went into the bathroom to put them on. “Nice job. Thanks.”
“My one domestic talent. I’ve done more laundry in hotel rooms than I care to think about.”
“Paul?”
“What?”
Mariah came out of the bathroom holding a black hardbound notebook. “This was on top of your bag when I went to get the sweater.”
Chaney stared at the notebook for a moment, then walked over and took it from her hand. Squeezing past her, he picked up his duffel bag, dropped the book inside and zipped the bag shut.
“I didn’t read it. Honest. Well—the flyleaf,” she confessed. “Nothing else, I swear. ‘Letters to Jack, Volume XII?”’
He regarded her briefly, then threw the duffel bag in a corner and started fidgeting with the pizza box.
“I’m sorry, Paul. I didn’t mean to be nosy.”
He sat down in a chair, contemplating the wall. “It’s a journal,�
�� he said quietly. “I started it after I lost him. He was just a baby.” He tore the bill off the the top of the pizza box and began folding it and refolding it in his hands until it was a tiny, irreducible square. “Phyllis had remarried. I realized that someone else was going to be his dad—teach him to ride a bike and throw a baseball. I wouldn’t be there when he hurt himself or lost his first tooth. Someone else would commiserate with him when some little girl broke his heart for the first time.”
Mariah moved quietly into the room and sat on the edge of the bed nearest him, watching the tight lines around his mouth and the deep creases in his forehead.
“I realized he’d never really know me,” Chaney went on. “Not the way he’d know that other father he saw every day.”
“So you started writing letters to him?”
He nodded. “I send postcards and things when I’m traveling. But this is different—letters to the man he’ll be one day. From a guy who just wants to tell his son what he’s seen and pass on a bit of what he’s learned about this world, for what it’s worth. I don’t know. I’ll hand them over to him one day, I guess. He can read them or burn them or do whatever he wants with them. I just want him to know that I never stopped thinking about him, even if I couldn’t be there.” Chaney looked over at her. “I guess that doesn’t really count for much, though, does it?”
Mariah reached out and laid her hand on his. “It counts for a lot, Paul. I would have given anything to have something like that from my father. Just to finally know that he did care, after all.”
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and cupped her hand in both of his, examining it closely. “Mariah—”
