Quicksilver

EPILOG: elements 79 & 80

Henry Shelburne vanished.

A search party was organized.

Of course I hoped they’d find him — as Search and Rescue nearly always does. Find him and bring him home, well not home, not to the boarding house, not to his father’s house, home most likely being some mental health facility.

But there was a part of me that wished him to find a niche out there in the wild, someplace far from a world where he was not an asset, some place not enclosed.

It was romantic, no doubt, to wish the Henry Shelburne of the Old West photo, the squint-eyed teenager, to disappear over the horizon.

I could not condone what he’d done. If anyone was asking.

In time I would bury the pain, a technique I was perfecting. Encompassing all Henrys.

Robert Shelburne returned to his own gold country.

Even if Henry could be found, even if Henry testified as to what he saw that day on the Yuba, Robert Shelburne saw it differently. He panicked. There was no legal penalty for that. End of story.

Still, there was harm. There was a foul.

Robert had watched his father have a heart attack, watched him fall into the river. He’d just watched. And then he’d left. And then, the animals got to Camden Shelburne. If Robert Shelburne had, say, experienced a measure of guilt and come back to retrieve his father’s body, it would have been way too wild kingdom for him. But he hadn’t. Rangers found Camden Shelburne.

No wonder Robert concocted the story of being in Sacramento the day his father died.

I supposed it was analogous to concocting a ‘front’ company, a dog-and-pony-show green cred for the money guys.

A couple of weeks after the conclusion of the Shelburne case, as Walter was at his workbench analyzing a feldspar from our current case, I suggested a coffee break. Walter was up for it. I poured two mugs and Walter grabbed the pink donut box and we settled in at the map table.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said, sliding the day’s newspaper closer. I opened it to the business section.

Walter’s eyebrows lifted. “Since when did you start following the stock market?”

“Since today.”

Actually, since several days ago when I’d googled it and found the salient abbreviation. They ID stocks with numbers and letters, like elements on the periodic table. But when it came to following the market Walter was still an ink-and-paper man — he liked newsprint on his fingers to go with the donut crumbs — and so I did it his way. I pointed out the salient abbreviation.

He read. “Deep Pockets?”

“Yup.”

“You’ve been tracking it?”

“I figure I might buy a share. Attend the next shareholder meeting. They let you ask questions, right?”

“They do,” he agreed.

“Tells them the shareholders are paying attention, right?”

“It does.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ll have a few questions about AquaHeal.”

“Such as?”

“Along the lines of, do you intend to invest enough to get the technology right, and if not, why don’t you get out of the way?”

He rubbed his chin.

“Because if you let AquaHeal fail, you’re souring this market for clean tech.”

Because I’d become a numbers chick, googling to find the salient number — how much mercury was deposited into the watersheds of the Sierra during the gold rush. Because that number blew my mind. Fifteen point two million pounds. Because I’d grabbed hold of fifteen or so of those pounds, cupped on the ledge in the crevice, that day on the Yuba. Looked like a river cobble, felt like a heart.

Walter reached for the newspaper. “What was today’s quote…”

“Hundred and twenty-four dollars and thirty-one cents. Per share.”

He sampled his coffee, nodded his approval. “I’m in.”

Walter said, one day, apropos of the Shelburne case, “We did what we set out to do. We prevented Henry from committing suicide.”

I nodded. And added, “And you found the gold.”

Walter smiled.

“Didn’t you?”

Up at Notch Valley, in the confusion of events, Walter had lost the conglomerate pebble he’d found in the trough. Never got the chance to bring it back to the lab and put it under the stereoscopic microscope. Certainly never got the chance to put the hand lens to it at the scene. Still, in my estimation, Walter should know. If anyone could eyeball a grain in a pebble and ID it as gold, or not gold, Walter Shaws was the man.

In any case, for Walter, it was a moot point whether or not there was a hidden pocket of gold in that hillside. The land, Walter discovered, was leased. A widow in Burbank California held the mineral rights. Inherited from her late husband, who’d himself inherited the rights, several generations of rights holders who didn’t have the capital to do exploratory drilling. Walter had paid the widow a visit. She’d served him a good whiskey and thanked him for the information and said she’d consult with her financial advisor. The widow, Walter said, had played her cards close to the chest.

So when I asked, not for the first time, if Walter judged that grain in the pebble to be gold, he said, to stop me asking, “I might take a jaunt one of these days back to the gold country. Find the blue lead somewhere, in situ. Somewhere fresh.” He winked. “While I’m still able.”

Old man, my ass.

The next day I asked, “And if there is gold?”

“Ah.”

I got the coffee and donuts and we sat at the map table.

When he didn’t speak, I asked, “How does it feel to want something that people have crippled the land to obtain?”

He shot me a quartz-eyed look. “Conflicted.”

I said, again, “And if there is gold?”

He blew on his steaming brew. Circled the mug on the table, creating cooling air currents. “Let us say that I come across a sizeable grain embedded in the blue gravel.” He sampled his coffee, nodded his approval. “I would get out my rock pick.”

“Just the one grain?”

“In this scenario.”

I sipped my coffee.

He asked, “And you, Cassie? If you came across that grain of gold?”

A vision rose, along with the steam from my coffee. Me, walking the bedrock tunnel up at Notch Valley, the tunnel walls changing to cemented gravel. Me, entering the lost river channel. And then stopping in my tracks, chiseling my way to the virgin blue, the bright blue indigo wings of a jay. I shivered, feeling again the chill of the tunnel, the thrill of the blue. And now I envisioned another color, a bright sunrise. I envisioned a grain of gold in that gravel. A coarse grain, water-worn from its rough travels in the ancient river. About the size of a kernel of wheat — a description I’d found and liked while reading Lindgren. I saw it now clearly. That one grain. Shining gold.

“And you?” Walter repeated. “Would you get out your rock pick?”

I nodded. Who wouldn’t?