Quicksilver

4

The men concluded the paperwork. Walter moved to our mini-kitchen to put the coffee on — coffee being a celebratory ritual he likes to indulge, if the client is amenable — his version of breaking bread together, a symbolic sharing of the basics in life, establishing trust.

Shelburne packed away the photograph and the mercury kit. Exhibits no longer required.

I turned to the blue-faced rock.

Striking as it was, the blue face was not going get us where we needed to go.

There was a better clue cemented in the rock. A crackerjack clue. I assumed Henry the amateur geologist had noticed it, as well. Why else grab his microscope?

I grabbed mine.

Mine — well, Walter’s and mine — is a bulk-specimen stereoscopic scope. It has an articulated arm that can lift and reach and twist and accommodate a thick object like this chunk of ore. It looks vaguely prehistoric. I’d wager it cost more than Henry’s.

I placed the rock on the stage and focused in on the angular dark pebble.

The digital camera built into the scope sent the view to the attached monitor.

Under magnification, the pebble showed its structure, a mosaic of tiny interlocking grains that made the rock tough, that shouted its name. Hornfels — very very cool. Even cooler was the exquisite crystal with a black Maltese cross piercing its heart.

Walter brought me a mug of coffee and paused to admire the magnified pebble. He lifted his free hand; we high-fived. He said, “I believe I’ll start with the maps and see if that hornfels can lead us to fat city.” He headed to our map cabinet.

Shelburne took his place, brew in hand. “Fat city?”

I said, “The jackpot.”

“Now you’re speaking my language.”

I switched to my own. “That pebble is chiastolite hornfels, which…”

“What does that mean?”

“Chiastolite from the Greek khiastos, meaning a cross. Hornfels from the German, meaning horn rock, because it’s flinty and sharp-edged.”

“The names aside — what does it mean for our search?”

I took a careful sip of steaming coffee. A celebration in honor of the coolness of geological names.

Shelburne drummed his fingers on his coffee mug.

I said, “It narrows the neighborhood. Let’s start with the hornfels pebble. Notice the edges are still angular. That means it was not transported far from its source. If a stream had carried and battered it, the edges would be rounded. But they’re angular and that tells us the source was a nearby hornfels zone.”

“How do we find that?”

“Hornfels is very site specific — it’s not all over the place.”

Shelburne glanced at Walter at the map cabinet. “Meaning look at a map?”

“To begin with. But hornfels zones can be small, and not always mapped.”

“So we could be shit-out-of-luck?”

“Not necessarily. We can look for the birthplace. Hornfels gets born when a dike of hot magma intrudes sedimentary rock — call that the parent rock. The dike cooks the parent rock, metamorphosing it. And then the magma cools and hardens into igneous rock. In our case, that’s probably an igneous rock called diorite, since we have diorite in the specimen.”

I paused to give Shelburne the chance to look at the diorite cobbles in the ore. He didn’t bother.

He said, “What about the cross?”

“That’s a gift. That tells us the nature of the parent rock. The chiastolite is a carbon inclusion, which suggests that the parent rock contained organic matter which became the carbon. So that parent rock is likely a carbonaceous slate that got cooked into chiastolite hornfels when the magma intruded.”

“Could Henry have figured that out?”

“You said he’s an amateur geologist.”

“He’s also a romantic. He’d follow that cross and call himself a crusader.”

“You want romance?” I set down my coffee and cupped my hands. “Here’s the metamorphic contact zone: rings around the intrusive dike. The outer ring is the slate. The inner ring, more cooked, is the hornfels. So I can freaking well say that we’re looking for a contact of diorite and slate. If we’re lucky we’ll find the inner ring — the hornfels aureole sheathing the dike.” I picked up my coffee. “There’s romance for you. Geology gets downright sexy.”

Shelburne winked. “You put on a good dog-and-pony show.”

“It’s not…”

“It’s a compliment.”

I shrugged. It was really more of a petrology-and-geochemistry show, but never mind.

“Yoo hoo!” Walter called, from the table beside the map cabinet. “Come on over and let’s see where we are.”

I trailed Robert Shelburne to the map table. Along the way he detoured to the kitchen sink and dumped his coffee, whispering to me, “Can’t stand the stuff.”

I didn’t know what to think of that. Of him. He’s considerate of Walter’s need for the coffee ceremony. Unwilling to decline the offer. Unwilling to drink the stuff. Willing to let me in on it. I didn’t know what to think.

We flanked Walter. He was hunched, hands pinning a map to the table. It was a geologic map of the gold country, with lithologic pattern symbols showing the major rock units. Walter’s crosshatched hands were weathered symbols in and of themselves. Walter’s a seasoned pro, with rocks and clients. If he’d noticed the coffee dump, he ignored it. If he’d paid mind to the dog-and-pony comment, he didn’t mention it. He lifted a hand, patted my arm. Don’t take it to heart.

I hadn’t.

“This is the Mother Lode,” Walter said. “It’s roughly three hundred square miles. If we narrow that to likely hornfels neighborhoods, we’re looking at many dozens of square miles.”

“I can do better than that,” Shelburne said.

Walter looked up, from map to client.

“I can narrow the neighborhood down to about twenty square miles.” Shelburne ran his finger across a slice of the gold belt. “That’s where my father searched. That’s where he dragged Henry and me searching. What you need to do is figure out where in the ‘hood this rock came from. That’s where Henry will be searching.”

“Then we’ll want a larger-scale map.” Walter moved to the map cabinet. “Meanwhile, help yourself to more coffee, Mr. Shelburne. We have donuts, as well.”

The coffee ceremony was history, I saw. Donuts now. Walter had just welcomed Robert Shelburne onto the team.

Shelburne threw me a wink and said to Walter, “You have any glazed?”

Walter and I spent the remainder of the day on more sophisticated analysis, while Robert Shelburne went out for a long lunch and last-minute errands. Normally we would have spent more time on the labwork but Henry Shelburne set our timetable.

Find Henry before he finds the source. Hunt for the source to find Henry.

Out there in the wild. Missing. Looking like the Henry in the photo because I could not conjure up an alternative. Squint-eyed, on some mission, suicidal or not. In need of finding, or not.

Either way, we’d signed on to find him.