Thrilling Thirteen: 13 Mysteries/Thrillers

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I had some help identifying the wrong words:

Heartfelt thanks to the following, for support, suggestions, information, expertise, and for reading and commenting on the beta draft:

Tom Colby, G. Nelson Eby, Raymond C. Murray, Richard Quinn, Catherine Thomas-Nobles, Emily Williams, J.T. Yeager.

MAPS

EPIGRAPH

1

The man who had hired us took the lead.

His name was Robert Shelburne and he was as sure of this path as he was of himself.

Nevertheless — if anyone was asking — I sure could not recommend this way up the mountain. There was no trailhead. There was no trail—the path did not exist on the map I carried. It was a rogue route, blazed long ago, surviving today as little more than a hint. It shot straight up the slope and was so thickly haired with trees and brush that we were nearly hiking blind.

I heard my partner Walter Shaws, a couple dozen feet below on the path, muttering words he would not normally speak aloud. Walter and I have certainly hiked plenty of unofficial trails and exploited the terrain where no trails run at all, in rougher country than this — we’re geologists who read earth evidence from crimes and crises, which often takes us deep into the field. Still, we weren’t in the habit of bushwhacking up a mountain without good reason.

Robert Shelburne had given a reason for taking this route.

Good or not was yet to be seen.

As we climbed, a breeze kicked up and brought an odd vegetative odor, which I could not identify. Clearly it didn’t come from the rangy manzanita or deer brush that infested the path. It came from deeper into these oak-and-pine wooded slopes, or perhaps up higher.

Up ahead, Shelburne disappeared into the timber as if he’d been consumed.

For a moment I was disconcerted. What if he took a turn that we, in turn, missed? What if the path branched left and we went right? Bad form for two geologists to lose the client in the field. I shouted, “Slow down.”

From the woods above came the reply, “I’ve stopped.”

Lost his way? I picked up my pace and called to Walter to pick up his and a half-minute later I crashed through the brush and found Robert Shelburne kneeling on the path.

I couldn’t see around him. I said, “Find something of interest?”

He got to his feet and brushed dirt off the knees of his stylish hiking pants and adjusted the hip belt of his backpack and then, almost in afterthought, he stood aside to reveal the ground where he’d knelt. On the trail was a bandana, moon-silver and dirt-smeared. If this had been a proper trail I would have assumed that a random hiker had wiped grime from his face and gotten careless stashing the bandana in his backpack.

The chance of that, here and now, was not worth discussing.

Walter drew up, winded, and crowded in beside Shelburne. Walter in his battered gear and weathered face looked like he’d been out in the field for weeks. Shelburne in his upscale gear and cultivated tan looked ready for a photo shoot for Outside Magazine. As for me, I was comfortable in aged boots and worn backpack, female and unweathered enough to take notice of Shelburne’s stylish look, acutely aware of the messages we sent with the gear we chose.

Like bandanas.

Walter was now studying the bandana in the dirt. “That’s his?”

“I’d bet the farm on it,” Shelburne said.

“Meaning what?” I asked. “He flagged the trail?”

“I’d say so.”

“And the color?”

Shelburne cocked his head.

“Silver,” I said. “Unless you’d call it light gray.”

“Silver,” Shelburne agreed. “That’s his color.”

“So do you read anything into that?”

“Beyond the color identifying it as his bandana?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Beyond that.”

“I could read things into the color silver until the cows come home.”

“I was thinking in particular about his state of mind.”

“The state of his mind,” Shelburne said, “is chaotic.”

Walter cleared his throat. “And yet functional enough. Else we wouldn’t be here tracking him.”

We fell silent, gazing down at the bandana. There was no way to tell if it had been dropped a day ago, an hour ago, minutes ago. The ground was thin-soiled, thick with fallen pine needles. No footprints to be examined, identified.

Shelburne turned to go.

Walter said, “Are you going to leave it there?”

“Message sent,” Shelburne said. “Message received.”

“Okay then,” I said, “message being we’re on the right track. No need to bet the farm.”

Shelburne smiled but there was caution in his eyes.

“Well.” Walter plucked up the bandana and stowed it in his pack. “At the least, good wilderness manners.”

We continued our ascent, stringing out along the narrow path, Shelburne picking up his impatient pace, Walter soon lagging, me claiming the middle, keeping track of my companions. I tracked Walter by the sound of his heavy breathing. For the briefest moment the thought floated he’s getting slower in the field. And then the thought went away. I tracked Shelburne by the red of his backpack, which stood out from the green of the brush. I wondered if he was brooding on the color silver.

That odd smell came again — something loamy and rotting, it seemed, beneath the trees beyond the brush.

I thought, not for the first time today, this is not my turf.

Ten minutes later the trail jacked hard left and then like a gift the trail and I escaped the besieging woods.

We’d achieved the upper slope and it was paved by a field of bedrock. Rubbed raw by ancient fingers of ice, this field was not going to give us an easy traverse. The rock was too steep for us to take a high line, and I saw no ducked trail marking, no little pyramid of stones to point the way.

But Shelburne quickly found his traverse, charging ahead.

I followed.

Bare-bone bedrock would normally lift my heart, but not here, not now, not pinned to the rock face with a thirty-pound pack on my back and that bandana on my mind.

I looked back and saw Walter, just beginning the traverse. Slower in the field, yes, but sure-footed. Not young, but surely not old.

I returned my focus to the path ahead and judged the bedrock — by its silky golden sheen and crinkly foliation — to be phyllite, a rock one metamorphic step beyond slate, not the rock we were hunting but perhaps a close neighbor.

Ahead, Shelburne had reached a hackly break in the bedrock where a ladder of switchbacks ascended the wall.

Shadows moved across the rock. I looked up. I didn’t much like the bruised cumulo-nimbus claiming the sky. The weather report had not forecasted a storm but in the Sierra Nevada mountains bad weather was not out of the question, especially in September’s dying days.

By the time I reached the switchbacks, the breeze had begun to bite.

Two switchbacks up, as I was mulling over the idea of digging a poncho out of my backpack to have at the ready should the skies open up, there came a clattering sound like rain — no, like hail hitting a sidewalk — and Shelburne up above shouted “look out” and I flinched. Rock fragments fell, shotgunning the bedrock trail. A slaty sharp-edged piece impaled itself in the tongue of my right boot. It was nearly the size of my fist. It stung my foot. I was glad it missed my head.

Walter, still below on the traverse, called, “Cassie, what happened?”

“Dislodged talus,” I called back. “It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t. Shelburne in his haste was courting recklessness. I hollered up to him, “Be more careful.”

He called down, “It wasn’t me.”

“What?”

“It came from up there.”

I tipped my head way back. Several switchbacks above Shelburne there was a ledge, slightly overhanging the trail. You don’t get talus unless it’s been wasted out of a rock face and that meant this bedrock sheet we were climbing continued above the ledge. The ledge was a false ridge, with a debris field hanging on its lip, just waiting to be dislodged.

Shelburne shouted, “Henry!”

No sound from the ledge above.

Down on the bedrock trail, the three of us waited.

No answer.

My foot throbbed. I bent to extract the rock fragment. It had torn the leather skin of my boot tongue and bruised the top of my foot.

Conceivably, nobody was up on the ledge flinging rocks at us. There was the obvious alternative. A scampering ground squirrel could have done it, although those were a good number of big rock frags for one small squirrel. Could have been a bear. I once encountered a shifty California black bear patrolling a ridge, waiting for hikers to arrive and shuck their packs and open the trail mix. I didn’t mind a bear. I knew bears. I’d ditched the trail mix in deference to the bear and we each pursued our own paths.

“Come on,” Robert Shelburne yelled down at us.

I straightened up.

Hell if it was a squirrel or a bear.

Odds said that it was the man who’d left the bandana to flag the trail. And now he’d found himself a vantage point to watch for us. And I dearly hoped he’d dislodged the talus by accident.

If not… what the hell, Henry Shelburne?

2

The Shelburne case had begun on the other side of the mountains.

California’s Sierra Nevada range showed two faces — the severe steepled eastern side and the gentler lusher western side. Our home base was the mountain town of Mammoth Lakes, on the eastern side.

Day before yesterday, Robert Shelburne showed up at our door.

Normally, our business didn’t come from droppers-by. Most of our work came from law-enforcement referrals and defense-attorney requests. Still, we had a Sierra Geoforensics sign over the door and a working website, and someone looking for world-class forensic geologists could find us easily enough.

It was mid-morning when Shelburne came into the lab, giving it the once-over, tossing us a smile and an inquiry. “Might I steal fifteen minutes of your time?”

Walter rose from his workbench. “That depends on what you intend to do with them. Mister…?”

“Robert Shelburne. And if I’m addressing Walter Shaws, I’ve come to the right place.”

“I am,” Walter said. He gestured at me. “Cassie Oldfield’s partner.”

“Ah, partners, even better.” Robert Shelburne stuck out his hand and crossed the room to me.

I rose from my workbench and accepted the handshake. I knew what he was seeing. Junior partner, clearly. Given that this man had come looking for Walter, I expected him to assess my age and status and possibly gender and pass quickly on to Walter. He didn’t. He held my hand a moment longer than pleasantries required. Firm handshake. Direct eye contact. No flirtation; direct and professional.

That should have impressed me. It nearly did.

It certainly gave me the time to assess him.

He had the air, and look, of a man who took charge. He had a strong face with a bladed nose and black brows that cambered like bird wings. His green eyes were narrow, his face all angles. He looked to be in his mid thirties. His black hair was diked with a single silver ray, slicked back and feathered at the neck. He wore a multi-pocketed khaki jacket over black hiking pants. Power grooming, mountain style. He carried a stylish and very large leather satchel.

I thought, this guy is accustomed to success.

He released my hand and moved on to Walter.

They shook hands. Brief, cordial.

Walter gave a nod, ready to give our visitor those fifteen minutes. “How can we help you, Mr. Shelburne?”

“If I may?” Shelburne dipped his head, indicating our big map table, raising his satchel.

“Please.”

Shelburne set it on the table and removed a box. The box was metal, the size of a lunchbox, scratched and dinged. “My brother went missing,” Shelburne said. “Because of this.”

I said, “You mean, because of what’s inside?”

“Yes, of course.” He flashed a bear-with-me smile. “I’m nervous, I must admit. I’ve come a long way and my hopes are pinned on what’s inside. On gaining some help here.”

“You could have phoned first. Made an appointment.” That came out harsher than I’d intended. “I mean, to be certain you’d find us in the lab.”

“My story is a bit irregular. I decided I’d do better presenting in person.”

Walter said, “You have our attention.”

Shelburne laid a hand on the box. Fingered the latch. Snapped it open. Lifted the lid.

Inside was an ore specimen. Not in the least irregular, I thought, bringing an ore specimen to a couple of geologists. It was a chunk of rock with a reddish-brown hue, rough and lumpy, a gravel of pebbles and small cobbles cemented together. Unlovely.

Shelburne’s eyes were on us, not the rock. “You understand what that is?”

I nodded.

Walter grunted.

I knew that grunt. Walter was interested.

I was wary.

Walter took out his hand lens and bent over the specimen, giving it a close inspection. He said nothing. He kept his nose to the rock for an inordinate amount of time.

I shifted. I could have done a full mineralogical and chemical analysis in the time he was taking to do this hand-lens study. Was he going to take until lunchtime? I could have gone into our mini-kitchen and eaten my lunch, in that time frame — turkey sandwich, nectarine, decadent brownie, the whole nine yards. Geological epochs have passed in less time. I glanced at Shelburne.

Shelburne waited. Perfectly still.

My stomach growled. I said, finally, “And so?”

Walter straightened and passed me the lens.

I put my own nose to the lunchbox, playing the twenty-power magnifier across the rough face of the rock. Right off the bat I could say that this was a conglomerate that consisted of well-rounded rock fragments, primarily quartz and diorite, cemented in a matrix of sandy clay. There were a few angular black pebbles, potentially of more interest, but my focus skipped to the sparse freckling of another color. A deep golden yellow. These tiny grains were flattened, irregular, their surface pitted, so unobtrusive that when I set aside the hand lens they were invisible to my naked eye. I snatched up the lens again, looking again, and now the grains stood out in sharp relief because I understood that I was looking at pure gold. Perhaps only a few dollars’ worth but striking enough to silence my stomach and make my pulse leap.

I tore my attention from the specimen and found Walter looking at me. His blue eyes had gone brighter, bluer.

For Walter, the rock in the lunchbox was a thing of joy.

For me, it was a thing of the past. Or so I thought.

When I was kid — summer job in Walter’s lab doing scutwork — he had tried to hook me on his hobby, puttering around with the geology of precious ores. He claimed to be in it for the history, prowling old mining sites, bringing back chunks of quartz-studded rock not unlike this one. When I came aboard officially after grad school, Walter was still taking jaunts in the field, following old maps and his vast geological knowledge. By the time I became a partner, Walter had pretty much transferred his interest to the internet, posting in the relevant forums.

And now Robert Shelburne walks into our lab with a gold-flecked rock and sets it in front of Walter like catnip.

Walter cleared his throat. “Mr. Shelburne, this ore specimen is connected to your brother?”

“That’s right. And now he’s missing.”

“Did you file a missing persons report?”

“The police have no interest. Henry — my brother — left voluntarily.”

There was a brief catch in my chest. I’d had a little brother named Henry. I took in a long breath. No doubt the world was well-populated with little brothers named Henry.

Walter asked, “In what sense is your brother’s disappearance connected with this specimen?”

“Everything in Henry’s life is connected with this. With gold.”

“Oh?”

“Let me give you a backgrounder. Here’s where we get into the irregular — my family.” Shelburne paused, as if selecting, and rejecting, family details. He continued, “Henry and I grew up in a small town in the gold country foothills. Our mother died of cancer, leaving us to our father’s care. Dad was an auto mechanic during the week but he lived for the weekends. A weekend prospector, you’d call him. Chasing gold. Soon as Henry and I were old enough, Dad would drag us along. Following the veins, panning the rivers. Henry went for it big-time. He still does. He’s not comfortable living in the present. He’s a throwback to the nineteenth century, to the Gold Rush.”

“And you?” Walter asked.

“I took a different path. I’m a venture capitalist. I help companies get a start. I suppose you could say my gold country is Silicon Valley — although I’d never put it that way to my brother. Gold country is gold country for Henry, pure and simple. And this,” Shelburne tapped the rock, “is what sent Henry into the wild three days ago. And what brought me to you.”

“Why us?” Walter asked.

“Well, you specifically. I found you online.”

“Our website.”

“First, I found you on the forums. You appear to be the go-to guy for anyone following the legends.”

Walter said, “I debunk the legends that deserve debunking.”

“And those with merit?”

“I add my expertise.”

“All right, then.”

“Mr. Shelburne, I must clarify that I am not, professionally, a mining geologist.”

“But you have the itch.”

After a long moment Walter said, “Let me give you a backgrounder. Did you ever watch a television program called Dogtown?”

“Sure, when I was a kid. One of those old shows you can stream on the Net.”

“It lives on,” Walter said, brittle.

“Why do you ask?”

“My mother was script supervisor. My father was production manager.”

“No shit?”

“No shit,” Walter confirmed. “When I was a boy I haunted the set, which was a false-front mining camp. For me, it was faux-gritty enough to pretend it was real. There was a consultant, a mining geologist, and one day he took me aside and scraped the gold paint off a ‘nugget’ and explained how that quartz pebble could be associated with real gold. And then I no longer had to pretend. I knew how to make the false real — become a geologist. In graduate school, however, my thesis advisor was called in to consult with the FBI about a murder, in which sand was found in the pant cuffs of the victim. I came along. And here I am, today. A forensic geologist.”

Shelburne said, “Then for my purposes you’re the best of both worlds.”

Walter pretended not to be flattered.

Shelburne turned to me. “What about you? You’ve been quiet.”

“Just waiting to get back on topic.”

Shelburne lifted his palms. “Shoot.”

I shot. “Was it your brother who found this chunk of ore?”

“No. Our grandfather found it, so the story goes. It turned up at our father’s house. Dad died a month ago. My brother and I had a reunion — Henry still lives in the old hometown — and I drove up and we went through Dad’s things. There was a lot to go through. Family things, going back to my grandfather’s day. An attic full of junk, mostly. That’s where we turned up this ugly customer. I would have tossed it but Henry recognized it for what it was. That was three weeks ago. Day before yesterday I got a message from Henry’s landlady. He lives in a boarding house, real old-timey place. She said he’d disappeared. She wouldn’t have taken notice — he went off on his wanderings all the time — but this time he’d left the sink faucet running. When she checked his room she found a note. ‘Call Robert.’ I got there in three hours. He’d gone hunting the source of granddaddy’s ore.”

I wasn’t getting it. “But he left the specimen behind?”

“Not entirely. He left this half behind.” Shelburne indicated the rock in the lunchbox. “It was on his table, along with a microscope and tools and a lot of rock dust. He’d split the rock. Hammer and chisel, bam bam bam. He took half, left me half. Very melodramatic. That’s Henry.”

“And you’re certain he went looking for the source?”

“Yes.”

“He’d know how to do that?”

“My brother is something of an amateur geologist — if you’ll pardon the expression. All those years tramping around the gold country, he’s schooled himself in the kind of things he needs to know. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure he’s gone hunting. Figuring where does take a geologist. At least, for me.”

I said, “We don’t do treasure hunts.”

“How about to save a life?”

“That we do.” I folded my arms. “Should there be a life in danger.”

“Henry’s note was a suicide note.”

It took me a moment. “You just said he was hunting the source of the rock.”

“That’s right.”

“Doesn’t sound like somebody who intends to kill himself.”

“You don’t know Henry.”

Walter asked, “Did you bring the note?”

“I did.” Shelburne took a folded paper from his jacket pocket and passed it to Walter.

Walter opened the paper and read. “This does not necessarily say suicide.” He passed it to me.

I read. It was two short lines. Shaky writing. I’ve had it, for keeps. And below that, Call Robert, with a phone number.

“There’s one more item Henry left for me.” Shelburne took another, smaller metal lunchbox from his satchel. He opened it and withdrew a plastic dish and set it on the table beside the ore sample. He withdrew a small vial, unscrewed the cap, upended the vial, and let the contents slide into the dish.

I thought, whoa.

Silvery drops found one another and congealed into a puddle.

I wanted to stick my finger in it. I wanted to scoop it up and roll it around in my palm. I’d done something of the sort in college chem, although it was officially discouraged.

“Mercury,” Walter said. “This is part of your brother’s message?”

Shelburne turned over the small lunchbox. Crudely etched into the bottom was Property of Henry Shelburne. “He collected the stuff, as a kid. I didn’t know he still had this, until I found it sitting on the table beside the microscope.”

“Still, that does not necessarily say suicide.”

“I fear it does. I know my brother.” Shelburne’s eyes seemed to take on a metallic glow. “We’re a pair. We’re like gold and mercury — numbers seventy-nine and eighty on the periodic table of the elements. Side by side, brothers and fundamental opposites. But when they come into contact, they mix.”

I said, “Please put the mercury away, Mr. Shelburne.”

“It’s not toxic, in the elemental state.”

I said, “It oxidizes upon exposure to air. In its vapor phase, it’s very toxic.”

“Not quickly. In a small overheated room, yes.”

“Nevertheless, please put it away.”

“Certainly.” He took a large eyedropper from the lunchbox. He suctioned up the puddle and expelled it into the vial. He screwed the cap back on, tight. He returned the vial and the dish and the dropper to the small box.

Two metal lunchboxes, side by side.

“Gold and mercury,” Shelburne said. “One precious. One poison.”

3

Walter said, “Tell us why your brother is suicidal.”

“Let me introduce him first.” Shelburne took yet one more object from his satchel. It was a padded envelope. He removed a photograph and laid it on the table beside the lunchboxes.

The photo was an eight-by-ten studio portrait. Black and white with a faux burnt border, clearly meant to evoke an Old West vibe. The subject sat in a saloon chair with a rough planked wall as backdrop.

The subject was a very young man. Slender as a quill. Left thigh tied to a low-slung holster holding a six-shooter, hands resting on thighs, fingers loose, ready to outdraw you. He wore a high-collared white shirt, too short in the sleeves, thin wrists sticking out, looking breakable. Over the shirt he wore a pickaxe bolo tie and a vest with shiny stripes in silver and black and a folded silver bandana tucked into the vest pocket. He wore baggy woolen pants and cracked leather boots. He stared somberly at the camera. He was a smooth-faced wet-combed teenager whose only marks of experience were two sculpted lines beneath his eyes, as if he were squinting at the far horizon.

“That photo was taken ten years ago,” Shelburne said. “I have nothing more recent.”

The subject in the photo had dark brown hair, same color that my little brother Henry had. My Henry was reed-thin, too. Thin-blooded. He’d worn a red cowboy hat just about every waking moment, at least during that last year. If my Henry had lived into his teens, he might have gone to a studio to have an Old West photo taken. He would have tried for a squint like that.

“Something wrong?” Shelburne said.

I looked up. Both Shelburne and Walter were watching me. Walter, with curbed concern. Shelburne, puzzled. I blinked. Eyes dry, no tears. What, then? Maybe I’m just that readable. I considered shrugging off Shelburne’s question but that would have made this too consequential, something that couldn’t be spoken. I said, “I’m just reminded of my own brother. Another Henry. He died very young. End of story.”

“Another Henry,” Shelburne repeated, softly. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” I returned my attention to the photo, looking this time at the tooled leather belt holding up Henry Shelburne’s woolen pants. A big silver buckle anchored the belt.

Robert Shelburne noticed me noticing. “Dad gave him the belt.”

Something was written on the buckle, in thin curlicue lettering. I took up my hand lens.

“It says quicksilver. Dad gave him the nickname, too.”

I put down the lens.

“Quicksilver is what miners called liquid mercury, back in the day. For the color and the volatility.” Shelburne gave a sad smile. “Henry liked to play with the stuff.”

“Yeah, who doesn’t?” I glanced at the lunchbox containing the vial of mercury. “Not very smart, though.”

“No, he wasn’t. He knows better now but it’s too late. Which is why he left his mercury kit along with the note.”

Walter said, “Are you saying he intends to poison himself?”

“He already has. But the coup de grace… I don’t know what he intends. His mind is at times chaotic.” Shelburne touched his temple with his forefinger. “Even as a kid, he was uncontainable. Quicksilver was the right name for him — mercurial as hell when he didn’t get his way. And he never did, with our father. Whatever he did to impress Dad turned into a flop. And then he’d regroup and try again.”

I glanced again at the photo, at Henry’s cool-guy squint. I wondered if he practiced it in front of a mirror before posing for the camera. Quicksilver: bright and shiny, squint-worthy, but difficult to contain. I turned to Robert Shelburne. “And you?”

“The opposite. In fact, I’d say Dad was always trying to impress me.”

“I mean, did you have a nickname?”

“Oh. Yes. Henry gave it to me.” Shelburne shrugged. “Golden Boy.”

“I don’t yet understand,” I said, “why Henry is suicidal now.”

“Deep depression,” Shelburne said. “One of the many symptoms of mercury poisoning. And that’s on top of Dad poisoning. Dad spoon-feeds him the family legacy, berates him, Dad dies, Henry finds the legacy rock. All of sudden Henry’s the man. The mission, which he chooses to accept, is to find the source of the rock.”

“Might he not succeed?”

“What if he doesn’t? The final flop. Can’t even impress a dead man.”

My heart squeezed.

“Either way, he sees himself as executor of the legacy.”

“Meaning, find the gold?”

“Not just that.”

“Then what?”

“Finding what our father was after, for most of his adult life.”

“Not gold?”

“Gold, sure. But in the context of something more fundamental.”

Walter, at my side, stirred.

“I’m going to have to go in-depth here. Another backgrounder. Our grandfather — known as the great bullshitter — claimed to have found a hidden ore deposit, from whence this rock presumably came. There’s a letter, flowery, vague as hell, teasing. Full of boasts. My father ended up in possession of the letter. And he signed on big-time. Keep in mind, this had become the family legend.”

“There’s no need to warn me about legends,” Walter said.

Shelburne tipped his head. “So my dad started looking for this deposit, dragging Henry and me along, preaching the letter. When we weren’t out hunting, Dad was feeding us the bullshit along with our breakfast cereal. Fast-forward twenty years. Dad dies — heart attack. We find the rock, Henry takes possession and finds the bullshit letter in Dad’s files.” Shelburne eyed us. “Maybe not bullshit, after all. You geologists will know, right? Is this rock from the… Well, you have a look and tell me.”

Shelburne took the ore specimen out of the lunchbox. He walked over to Walter’s workbench and placed it there.

Walter followed.

“Like I said, Henry split the original chunk of ore and left me this half. And let me tell you, when I saw the fresh-cut face it was damned dramatic.”

The fresh-cut face didn’t show on Walter’s workbench because Shelburne had placed the rock cut-face down.

“Go ahead,” Shelburne said. “See for yourself.”

Walter turned the rock over. He sucked in his breath.

I might have made a noise, myself. The cut face was blue, the blue of glacial ice.

Walter spoke. “I never expected to see this. It’s simply not to be seen, today.”

“That’s right,” Shelburne said. “At least that’s what Dad always said. The blue is buried.”

I turned to Shelburne. “It’s chemistry. Your rock, where the old surface shows, has been exposed to oxygen and so the iron minerals in the matrix have changed to an oxide. That’s why the color is reddish. But there, on the fresh face, which by definition hasn’t been exposed for long, the iron is not oxidized. That’s why it’s blue.”

Walter said, to me, “It’s not the chemistry I was remarking upon, dear. It’s the legend.”

I replied, “You’re becoming as elliptical as Mr. Shelburne.”

“I’m just gobsmacked. This is, quite possibly, an ore sample from the deep blue lead.”

Shelburne said, “Looks like I found the right guy.”

“The blue lead.” I searched my memory. “Isn’t that…”

“Extraordinary,” Walter said. “Mr. Shelburne has walked into our lab with a rock that every geologist who harbors an interest in the story of gold dreams of seeing. The blue. The deep blue gold-bearing gravels. The blue lead.”

Shelburne said, “The golden brick road.”

“Legend has it, dear,” Walter said to me, “that long ago there was one special river channel, different from all others, where the gold-bearing gravels were deposited. The miners followed that path and they called it the ‘lead’ because they thought it would lead them to their heart’s desire.”

I said, “Isn’t that where legends normally lead?”

Walter smiled. “Of course the reality is that there were many channels, many tributaries. But down deep in those channels, down in the gut, the legend is true because the gravel of the lower stratum is a striking blue color and it’s there where the gold ran rich.”

“You’re talking about the ancient river channels. Of the Tertiary Period.”

Shelburne said, “The lost rivers of California.”

“They’re not lost,” I said. “They’re simply hidden by subsequent geologic events. Eruptions. Uplift. Erosion.”

Shelburne turned to Walter. “She doesn’t have much romance in her soul, does she?”

I flinched. Don’t I?

“Speaking of romance,” I said, to Shelburne, “what about you? The blue lead and the gold in the rock? Your eyes lit up.”

He lifted his palms. “You got me.”

“I do?”

“We’re all products of our childhood. Those lessons run deep. You do what you can with them when you grow up. Take them to heart, rebel, whatever. But you don’t erase them. I found my niche in the business world but, sure, I still have an eye for gold.”

“Then why didn’t you join Henry in the hunt?”

“He didn’t invite me.”

“But he’s inviting you now.”

“Yes, the clues. That’s the way Henry communicates. His memory is damaged so he plays these little games. They started as a mnemonic, a way to remind himself of things. Remind others. And it became ingrained. The way I read the clues he left behind this time, he wants me to follow him, help him.”

“Help him find the gold?”

“Help him if he doesn’t.”

“Or do both?”

Shelburne abruptly unzipped his jacket. Underneath, he wore a slim green T-shirt with a Club One Fitness logo. He lifted the shirt. For a bizarre moment I thought he was showing off his gym-toned abs, and then I noticed the belt holding up his hiking pants. It was a tooled leather belt with a big silver buckle.

I couldn’t read the curlicue lettering without coming closer, but I knew what it said. Quicksilver.

“Henry left the belt behind, as well. I’ll be wearing it until I find him.”

I thought, very effective. If Shelburne had practiced this pitch in front of a mirror he could not have performed it more convincingly. Isn’t that what venture capitalists prized?

Shelburne let his shirt drop. “Henry’s a wounded soul. Please help me find him.”

And then I felt unduly suspicious and very small. I looked to Walter.

He lifted his eyebrows.

In the not too distant past Walter would have decided the issue himself, but he’d offered me a partnership a year ago and I’d accepted and new rules had come into play. Either of us can bring in a case for consideration but the final choice is made jointly. Still, there’s the dance of who goes first. Walter was playing the gentleman, here. Charmingly old-fashioned, sometimes irritating, Walter always being a stickler for rules. Ladies first.

So I went first. Were we going to sign on to find Henry Shelburne? I wondered what I would have said had Robert Shelburne’s brother’s name been, say, George. But it wasn’t. I met Walter’s look. “It’s what we do.”

He said, “That it is.”

Dance concluded.

“Mr. Shelburne,” Walter said, “before we proceed we’ll require your signature on a contract. And a retainer.”

Shelburne flashed a grateful smile and took out his checkbook. Walter went to the file where we keep our brochures and reports and contracts. They sat together at the map table.

I watched.

I don’t believe in premonitions — I’m not into the woo-woo stuff — but it seemed creepily pertinent that the contract-signing took place beneath the poster on the wall. It’s a film poster from the Disney flick Alice in Wonderland, the part where Alice is tumbling down the rabbit hole. Walter bought and hung that poster. Walter likes the message: you follow the evidence wherever it takes you, down the rabbit hole if you must.

And that’s where Henry the wounded soul had evidently gone.

I’ve never been a fan of Alice, or her topsy-turvy world. And right now I was, in particular, not a fan of that whacked-out character she meets, the Mad Hatter. Back in Chem 101 I’d learned about the effects of mercury — and in a textbook sidebar, the reason the hatter is mad. Back in the day, hat-makers used mercury in the process of curing animal pelts to make hats. Day in, day out, breathing in the vapors. It affected speech. Coordination. It led to mental instability. Hallucinations. Dementia.

Mad as a hatter.

And we’re gearing up to go hunting for Henry Shelburne who, according to his brother, suffers the effects of mercury poisoning. Who leaves behind his vial of mercury as a fare-thee-well.

Who is reminding me of my own little brother, who suffered the effects of a genetic disorder. Who died while I was looking out the window.

Henry Shelburne and Henry Oldfield, each of them damaged goods.

So yeah, I’m on board with taking this case. Let’s find Henry Shelburne before he does something stupid.

But let’s do it on alert. Let’s be cautious.

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.

5

The following day we left at dawn, taking Shelburne’s pricey Land Rover.

We had to cross the spine of the Sierra Nevada range, traveling from the austere eastern side to the lush western flank, deep into gold country, deep into the heart of the Mother Lode.

Walter, in the back seat, was re-reading Waldemar Lindgren’s Tertiary Gravels of the Sierra Nevada of California. I’d never read it but I knew it was a classic. An original copy would fetch a price in the hundreds. This morning I’d asked what Walter was downloading to his tablet. He’d said, “The bible of the deep blue lead.”

That took me aback. I’d thought he used his tablet strictly for online research or sharing docs with colleagues on the other side of the world. But books? He read his books on paper — biographies, poetry, and mysteries, from the current crop all the way back to Sherlock because, he liked to point out, Sherlock Holmes was the first forensic geologist. As for technical books, he owned a worn paperback of Lindgren that would have served him perfectly well in the field. Instead, he was reading the freaking bible of the deep blue lead in pixels?

I’d said, “Since when did you start reading your books in pixels?”

“Since I looked in the mirror and saw an old man.”

“You’re not old,” I’d said firmly. “You’re just an ink-and-paper man.”

“Old dog can’t learn new tricks?”

And now, as I rode shotgun in Shelburne’s Rover, I could not help glancing into the side-view mirror, spying on Walter in the back seat. Hair grayer than when I’d last paid attention?

Funny thing: Walter had looked old to me when I first met him. I was eleven and he was in his forties. To a kid, that was old. Over the following years as I worked in the lab — part-time after school and full-time in the summers — the only aging I paid attention to was my own, particularly when I crashed into my teens. Then, during my college years, I would come home for the summers and grace the lab with my learning, spouting textbook tidbits like they were tweets. During that stretch I didn’t notice either of us aging. I was too busy proving myself. By the time I’d completed grad school and took my book-learning back into the field what I finally noticed was the authenticity of Walter’s skills.

Old? He’d perhaps grown a bit vain, fretting over his thinning hair and creasing face.

I turned from the mirror and firmly directed my attention to the scenery.

Right now, the road we traveled was unknown to me. In fact, the Mother Lode was mostly unknown to me. Not my country. It was pretty enough, and I never met mountains I didn’t love, but I was a stranger here.

The road worsened. Ungraded, now.

In the back seat, Walter was stone silent, still deep in Lindgren.

I turned to look at him.

Head bowed over his tablet. Finger swiping the touch screen, onto the next page.

Swipe.

Swipe.

On the hunt. Nothing old about that old dog.

I returned my attention to my own tablet. I’d downloaded Lindgren as well, taking my cue from my mentor.

Shelburne parked the Land Rover on a nearly hidden fire road, jarring Walter out of Lindgren.

Walter shut his tablet and looked around. “Where are we?”

“At the start of our hike,” Shelburne said.

Walter said, “Pass me the road map,” and after receiving and perusing it he said, “Two miles up the road we’ll find a proper trailhead.”

“This is the way we always came. My dad blazed this trail with his ego.”

I said, “That’s some whacked-out reason to take it.”

“And,” he said, “it’s faster.”

Walter folded the map and returned it to Shelburne. “Your call.”

We geared up and Robert Shelburne took the lead.

And so we embarked upon Shelburne’s father’s rogue route, unmarked on the map, sign-less at the head, steep at the get-go, infested by brush, scented by that odd vegetative smell. Fifteen minutes into our climb we came upon the silver bandana littering the ground. Flagging our trail. Thirty minutes into our climb we got hit by falling talus.

What the hell, Henry?

In hurried consultation — Shelburne up above on the bedrock ladder, me three switchbacks below, Walter still down on the traverse — Shelburne urged us to hurry, swore that if it was Henry up on the ledge then we had the chance to catch up to him, assured us that the rocks had been an accident.

We might have debated the issue but Shelburne quickly pushed onward, upward, and it was a shorter pitch to the top than to turn around and traverse back across the rock field.

I picked up my pace.

Walter picked up his.

Shelburne shouted his brother’s name twice and when there was no reply he saved his breath.

Nothing more fell from the ledge above and in the course of my climb I began again to entertain the theory of the squirrel or the bear.

I soon caught up with Shelburne, hiking so close I had the leisure to examine his red backpack. I distracted myself with the question of his pack. It was an Arcteryx Altra, latest model, one I admired and would not afford. Made sense, I supposed, that Shelburne had a state-of-the-art pack because the backpack he would have used as a kid being dragged along by his father would not fit him now, as a grown man. I also took note that the floating-top lid of the Arcteryx was stained and one side water-bottle pocket had a small rip. Perhaps he’d rented it.

His boots were Asolos, top of the line. Creased at the toe break, slightly worn around the edges of the vibram soles. Broken in.

I wondered where he’d done his hiking.

In another five minutes we topped the climb, which leveled onto the narrow ledge.

Nobody was there waiting.

It was a false ridge, because the bedrock climbed another couple hundred feet to the true ridge, sky-silhouetted above. A couple of yards westerly, beneath the slaty cliff, a rotten patch spilled talus onto our ledge and fanned out to the rim.

We stood rooted.

Looking. Listening. All of us winded. Catching our breath.

Walter finally said, “I would like to sit.”

“If it was Henry he’d have gone that way.” Shelburne pointed easterly, to the far end of the bedrock intrusion, where the ledge disappeared into the woods. “I’ll have a look.” He set off.

Walter and I shucked our packs and sank to the rock. It was chilly. We retrieved our parkas. We grabbed our water bottles and drank. The water was sweet cold eastern Sierra water, bottles filled back at the lab. Cold water down my gullet. I was now doubly chilled. The rock beneath my butt was stone cold. Not enough sun to warm the phyllite. Even its golden sheen was dulled in this gray light. I shivered. I drew up my knees, hugging them.

Walter got out the trail mix. I freed one hand, opened my palm, and he filled it. I nibbled like a squirrel.

The breeze that had been coming and going now came stronger, more consistent.

I sniffed for the odd odor but smelled nothing other than salty peanuts and sweet dried pineapple.

And then Shelburne returned, shucked his pack, and sank to the rock beside me. He shook his head.

I said, “So you think it was him? Or not?”

“He’s gone now.”

Shelburne hadn’t qualified that with an if, if it was Henry. I said, “Maybe we should get moving.”

“We won’t catch him now. He’ll be hiking fast. No pack — he’s likely made camp somewhere. He’s got the edge. We’ll need to keep tracking him.”

Walter nodded. “I’m content to rest here another moment.”

I studied my partner. Face still slightly flushed, even in the growing chill. Hair mussed and, yeah, graying. He still wore his sunglasses. His eyebrows — gray flecked with brown like feldspar in granite — bushed above the rims of his shades. He caught my scrutiny and lifted his brows.

I said, “Yeah, feels good to sit.” The rock was warming beneath my butt. Sit here much longer, though, and I’d start asking questions.

I watched Shelburne retrieve his water bottle from the side pocket of his backpack. He chose the narrow-mouth bottle. The other bottle, in the torn pocket, was a wide-mouth, more suited for carrying extra water. At least, that’s the way we did it, although I carried two spare bottles in my pack pockets and the quick-grab drinking bottle clipped to my belt with a carabiner. Then again, I’m something of a gear-head.

So was Shelburne.

I watched him drink from his sleek silver bottle emblazoned with the word titanium; major cool factor; no price tag attached but none needed; if you had to ask, you would not want to pay it.

Shelburne was a gear-head with expensive tastes. Still, you had to know what you needed in the field before you laid out good money. And if you were going to lay out good money, you’d want to get plentiful use of your gear.

I watched him replace his titanium bottle in the pocket of his Arcteryx pack. I said, “Been up here recently?”

“Here? Not since I was a kid.”

“But you still do some backpacking?”

He saw me looking at his grown-up pack. “My job takes me afield now and then. I’ve had to site-scout a location or two in this general neighborhood. Investment opportunities.”

“Gold?” Walter asked.

“Sadly, no.”

“What if Henry finds the source of that rock? And there is gold.”

“My interest lies in saving Henry.”

And Henry’s interest? I studied the talus spilling across the ledge. It told me nothing. Talus won’t hold a footprint. There was no way to tell what, or who, had kicked those rock fragments over the edge.

Easy to do, though.

I said, “So if it was him up here, what was that about?”

“Make sure I’m coming.”

“Not just you,” I said. “Us. He expects you but you show up with hiking buddies. What does he think about that?”

“If he thinks it through he’ll understand that I had to get some help. He left me half the rock. He knows geology is not in my skill set. So I suppose he’d figure it out.”

“And rain rocks down upon us.”

Shelburne rose. He walked over to the talus pile and picked up a nasty-edged rock fragment. He angled his wrist and flung it, like you’d skip a rock. It sailed out from the ridge, a good distance, and then arced down. He said, “No, I don’t think Henry was throwing rocks at us. Wrong angle.” He found another spot, standing now within the talus field. He stood rigid and then suddenly he jerked, like he’d been stung by wasp. His foot jerked out, dislodging a small pile of rotten rock. The stuff skittered, some of it skittering over the edge. It did not arc.

He turned to us. “Henry occasionally has mini-seizures. In consequence, you understand.”

I understood.

It was entirely possible.

I’ve done it myself, dislodging loose rock, sending it over the edge of a trail.

“We good?” Shelburne asked.

Walter and I exchanged a look. A nod.

Good enough.

6

We busied ourselves closing up packs, shouldering them, fastening hip belts.

Shelburne set off in the lead.

We fell in.

We followed our ledge to the far end of the bedrock and then plunged into ponderosa pines and oaks and red-limbed madrone. A boy could play hide and seek in those woods. I wondered if Henry Shelburne had ever played such innocent games.

As we hiked, Robert Shelburne surveyed the woods, shouting his brother’s name once or twice, but there was nobody playing hide and seek.

Our wooded trail climbed gently, in a wide arc, eventually giving out onto the true ridge, a broad forested crest.

Here, we intersected a marked trail, the Ridge Trail. We’d studied and inked the map of this territory back in the lab.

Out in the field, I got my bearings.

This was the divide between the canyons of the Middle and the South Yuba Rivers, muscular waterways flowing east-west, coming down from the High Sierra. The rivers were transected by north-south metamorphic belts shot through, here and there, with igneous dikes.

Shelburne said, “We used to call this the Trail of Trial and Error.”

We were in the twenty-square-mile neighborhood that the Shelburne family had marked, by trial and error, one generation after the other.

We were following the path of a huge Tertiary channel cut by the ancestral Yuba River.

The deep blue lead.

Now deeply buried, for the most part.

I tried to see it through Henry’s eyes, the amateur geologist, the squint-eyed teenager in the tricked-up Old West Photo, and before that the kid fed legends with his breakfast cereal.

So how did Dad Shelburne tell the tale?

I gave it a shot.

Once upon a time, Henry, a great river came from a distant land, carrying a peculiar quartz that it ripped from bedrock veins along its journey, veins gorged with gold — and here, I figured, Henry can’t contain himself and interrupts to say nuggets? And Dad Shelburne says shut up kid and listen — at least that’s the way my dad would have told it, if my Henry had interrupted. And Henry shuts up and Dad continues. The long-ago quartz-carrying river was so strong and mighty that it carved a deep channel and laid down its load. And then volcanoes erupted — boom boom boom — sound effects, Henry, keep your attention on what comes next — and the lava buried the ancient river. Oh no, Henry says, the river is gone, all that gold gone. Dad snorts. Be a little man, kid, the gold’s not gone. Listen up: a new age comes and the land rises up like a trapdoor opening and lifts the old river channel up high. And Henry lifts his chin and looks up. No no, Dad says, you can’t see it yet, not until new rivers are born. Here’s where it cuts to the chase: the new rivers cut deep new canyons in the lost land, down through the lava deposits, and they slice open parts of the old river channel and lay bare the auriferous gravels. How about that, kid? Auriferous means gold-bearing, a little prospecting lesson for you, wouldn’t hurt you to start learning this stuff if you want in on the family legend. Now finish your damn cereal before the school bus comes.

That’s the way I imagined Henry learned it.

Who says there’s no romance in my soul?

The story of the ancient rivers played out up and down the Mother Lode, producing many gold-bearing channels, but this channel of the ancient Yuba was the biggest, the richest, the most legendary.

Once upon a time.

I’d been doing quite a bit of reading.

Now, all that remained visible of this ancient channel and its tributaries were interrupted fragments that cropped out here and there, most of them already found and laid bare by the miners. Still, the blue lead was said to crop out in all kinds of unthought-of places, on the ridge tops or the gouged flanks that ran down to the river bottoms.

Back in the lab at the map table Robert Shelburne had shown us the tributary his grandfather explored, the Shelburne family’s own deep blue lead.

We’d drawn bullseyes on the map, targets along the Shelburne blue lead where the geology indicated a possible contact zone between the slate and the diorite. It was a coin toss where to begin on the route because there were targets at either end and in between. It was a coin toss where Henry, this time, would have begun.

The Trail of Trial and Error, certainly, for us.

Out here, in the field, we were following the Shelburne offshoot that intersected the main channel and then went its own way.

Once upon a time, Henry my little crusader, your grandfather found a gold-specked chunk of ore with black carbon crosses in its heart.

Somewhere along this route.

We traveled more slowly now, eyeing the geology.

The chill breeze accompanied us, bringing the ozone odor of impending rain.

The ground underfoot was hard andesite breccia, the cemented remains of the lava flows that had buried the ancient rivers. We found a hard spine of oxide-stained quartz blading out of the ground, sign of an ancient channel buried somewhere nearby.

We picked up pieces of diorite float, rock fragments that had weathered off their parent and traveled by water or wind or gravity.

We followed the float to a place where a stream had cut back and exposed layers of weathered slate. We found a hornfels zone but the hornfels was innocent of Maltese crosses.

We looked for signs of Henry.

Listening.

The breeze fingered through the pines and oaks that cloaked the trail, ruffling, whispering. Nothing more.

We marked off the target on our map and continued the hunt.

The trail dipped down a little gully, an eroded funnel of decomposed rock. Down at the bottom, vegetation overtook us. Thickets of sugar and digger pine, tangles of manzanita and toyon and other bushes I could not identify.

And, again, there was that odd scent.

There was a rustling sound.

I nearly called out Henry’s name. A ground squirrel appeared, and disappeared. I was glad to have held my tongue. I didn’t even try to silence the voice in my head. Come out come out wherever you are. I’d played hide and seek with my Henry, usually bored out of my mind because I considered myself too old for such games, and because Henry was too young to hide well. And because my mom and dad and my older brother and I all told Henry at least once a day to be careful, and so I always mixed worry in with the boredom. Usually, I’d pretend not to be able to find him. I’d finally yell, come out come out wherever you are. And you’d think he’d won the lottery.

Our trail wound back up the contour and we achieved a higher ridge top without incident.

Still wooded up here, hardly a view worth achieving, but then again my mountains of choice were the abrupt eastern Sierras where a summit was not easily achieved but once achieved would slay you with the view.

We paused. We’d reached a fork in our trail. The Shelburne family offshoot tangled with other offshoots of the main blue lead and there were two paths to take us where we needed to go.

Walter said, “Which way?”

“The fastest way,” Shelburne said, taking the high path.

I fell in.

Walter, behind me, muttered something.

Wanted to avoid this, I thought he’d said.

I turned.

He waved me onward.

I figured I knew what lay ahead.

The trail began to descend and in another fifteen minutes we found ourselves funneled onto a narrow path that traversed a steep slope. We were yet again closed in by the woods. It was easy going, gentle hiking, but my antennae were now tuned to Walter and I was hiking brittle. We penetrated a scented grove of cedar and Doug fir and a thicket of manzanita, in which anyone might have hidden, and then we came upon a wide gully that exposed a pitch of cross-bedded gravelly sandstone, upon which my boots slipped, shotgunning gravel.

“Careful,” Shelburne called, ahead of me.

“Careful,” I called to Walter, behind me.

Henry hadn’t called careful when he’d accidentally kicked rocks off the ledge. If it had been Henry, and not a squirrel.

The trail twisted out of the woods.

The trail bent sharply and took us to a precipice that gave a view of what lay below.

I halted. Slayed.

I’d seen it mapped, on paper an elliptic of dotted pale pink against a field of green, but the map was utterly two-dimensional. Walter knew it by experience. He’d been here once before. Why hadn’t he warned me? Why hadn’t he said, you’re going to have to brace yourself?

Because a warning was not enough.

There were no words for what I saw down below. I simply had no words.

7

Finally, words did come to mind.

Catastrophic event.

Those are the words geologists use for earthquakes, eruptions, hurricanes, floods.

There had freaking well been a catastrophic event here only you couldn’t lay it at the feet of Mother Nature.

Walter asked Shelburne, “Is this the way your father took you?”

“Yes. It’s in my grandfather’s letters. It’s a bloody monument. It’s mining on the grand scale. It’s what the great bullshitter called the void.”

Walter grunted. “It’s what’s left after taking out a mountain.”

I stared into the monumental hole. “How much did they take out?”

“Four millions bucks in gold,” Shelburne said.

“I meant, how much of the mountain?”

“Forty million cubic yards.”

Walter said, “You know your numbers.”

Shelburne shrugged. “I’m a numbers guy.”

I stared down into the great pit, trying to corral it with numbers. “How big is it?”

“Mile long, half-mile wide,” he said. “I learned this shit in my teens. Hydraulic mining. How they did it. The dudes had to get down through six hundred feet of compacted gravel to reach the holy grail. Built forty miles of canals to bring enough water to feed the cannons. Eight cannons, twenty-four hours per day, firing sixteen thousand gallons of water per minute to ream out the mountain. Ridiculous name, though. I’d never green-light a project with that name. They called it the diggins. No third g. Just the folksy diggins.”

Of course they did, I thought. They would not have called it a catastrophic event.

Walter had picked up a chunk of andesite breccia and was examining it like it was the Rosetta Stone.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement on the cliff tops on the opposite rim. I turned to fully look. Nothing. Maybe a hiker, now absorbed by the trees.

“In the end,” Walter said, “it was mined to extinction.” He tossed the chunk of andesite into the void.

I watched the rock fall. Into the abyss where a mountain had been. The great pit was shadowed now, clouds moving overhead, shapes moving down below. The wind picked up. For a moment I thought I glimpsed something other than a shadow moving down there but maybe it was just the wind moving the vegetation. I caught that odd odor again, carried on the wind.

Walter said, “What did Henry make of it?”

“A big playground. Fantasyland.”

Fantasyland. I could not stop looking. And what was empty, nothing — a void — became strangely beautiful. Where the mountain had been washed away, the ancient gravel beds were exposed in the cut cliff walls, layered like a summer cake in yellow and red and white and orange, eroded here and there into spires and fluted hoodoos. It had a fantastical monstrous beauty.

Walter said, “So it’s likely Henry came this way, this time?”

“Beyond likely.”

“And from here…”

Shelburne jerked a thumb. “Down there.”

Shadows flickered, down there.

I said, “Hey guys, I think there’s somebody down there right now.”

“Henry!” Robert Shelburne’s shout echoed.

All of a sudden thunder sounded, in the distance, but there was no other reply.

“I just caught a glimpse,” I said. “Could have been a pack.”

“Backpack?” Shelburne asked. “Day pack?”

“I’d say day pack.”

“Then he has made camp. Then he is tracking.”

“If it was a pack,” I said. “It was moving in that willow jungle down there.”

Walter asked, “Could it have been an animal?”

“It was brown.” Brown deer, brown bear. Too big for a squirrel. “Could have been.”

“Henry!” Shelburne shouted again.

No answer. No discernible movement.

Come out come out wherever you are.

We started our descent into the pit on another of Robert Shelburne’s unmapped trails. Hardly a trail at all but it was the most direct way down.

The soil was too sandy to hold footprints. If there were any recent scuff-marks, Shelburne, in front, was scuffing them into oblivion.

We descended single-file, Shelburne then me then Walter.

Now and then, when I could safely take my eyes off the treacherous trail, I scanned the landscape below. Nothing. The lower we got, the more limited the long view became.

I shifted my focus to the near view, right under my nose. The trail was so narrow I kept brushing against cliff walls and acquired a coating of dirt. The walls told the story, without the romance. Volcanic andesite breccia capped layers of Eocene river gravels, which were interbedded with sand and clay.

Shelburne said, over his shoulder, “My dad called these bastard gravels.”

Walter, behind me, said, “All the way down. And then the good stuff’s buried.”

Yeah, I got it. No holy grail awaiting us down there, because the basal blue lead, laid down upon bedrock, was now buried beneath the tailings and landslides in the bottom of the pit. Any blue gravel that happened to crop out would have been oxidized into reddish rusty rock.

Would have been mined to extinction.

The Shelburne family offshoot, according to the map, zigzagged through this neighborhood.

What I did see, once again, was a flash of something brown, off in the far side of the pit. And then, deer-like, it bolted. And then Shelburne shouted Henry and a clap of thunder came in reply and the wind picked up and a few fat raindrops fell.

And then ceased.

We continued down the trail.

Alice hiking down into the rabbit hole.

8

Five hundred feet down, we bottomed out.

If I had not known a mountain once stood here I would not have known this was a manufactured landscape.

The hosed-out world of the pit was now jungly, bristling with pines and alders and willows and brush that criss-crossed in a maze that could screen an army of hikers.

The soil was fine-grained colluvium eroded from above, with lenses of pebbly gravel and clay. I looked for, and did not see, footprints.

We crossed a little stream — runoff, I presumed, from the upcanyon watershed. The stream wandered into a thicket of brush.

I wondered if there was a trail down here. I had no idea which way to go.

Shelburne did. As ever, he took the lead and we followed and damned if he didn’t discover a path.

We passed through a tunnel of pines and emerged into a small clearing where old mining equipment was on display. My attention caught on the huge lengths of rusted pipe, jumbled like pick-up sticks. I stopped, stared. A man could hide inside that pipe.

Shelburne saw me looking. “He hates enclosed spaces.”

My Henry would have been in there.

“Not hiding in the water cannon, either.”

Beyond the pipes was a giant rusted cannon that looked like something out of a Civil War textbook. I still had to wrap my head around the idea that it had shot water, not iron.

“Let’s go,” Shelburne said.

Walter held up a hand. “A moment.” He took off his pack and rummaged for his parka.

I looked at a long wooden open-top box set upon a frame.

Shelburne saw me looking. “That, he liked. It’s a sluice box. Miners ran a slurry of water and gravel through it. The riffles trapped the heavy grains of gold. The lighter stuff, they trapped with mercury. The metals mix into an amalgam. Bonded like brothers — as my dad liked to say.” Shelburne snagged his water bottle. He toasted the sluice. “Dad let us play here. He brought vials of mercury and a baggie of gold dust. And a bottle of water. The gold was the prize. The mercury the waste.” Shelburne drank.

I wondered if Dad put it that way to his sons. Robert, you’re the prize. Henry, you’re waste.

I drifted over to the sluice box. I glimpsed something inside, caught between riffles. Something silvery. I thought, if that’s a drop of mercury in there right now, then Henry Shelburne AKA Quicksilver was playing some goddamn stupid game.

I moved for a closer look. It had disappeared. I blinked. Glint of sunlight on a nailhead or something. Now you see it, now you don’t. Sunlight’s playing hide and seek.

“Here’s more numbers for you,” Shelburne said. “The miners used ten pounds of mercury for every foot of sluice. Eighty thousand pounds a year. Thirty percent of it washed away. Poof! I’d never green-light a project with that level of waste.”

I thought, he’s got a lot of numbers at the ready. Who remembers precise numbers like that? Especially when you learned this stuff as a kid. If it were me, I’d just say the miners put a shitload more mercury into the ground than they took out in gold.

Shelburne turned to Walter. “Not Dogtown, hey?”

“No,” Walter said. He shouldered his backpack. Zipped his parka. “Rather, the other extreme.”

I felt I ought to say something to my partner. Yeah, you fell in love with a Hollywood facade and the reality is your grown-up hobby has a real dark history but I understand that you can love something in the whole and yet not love every part of it. I understand why you wanted to avoid this place. And I’m certainly no paragon of consistency. I’m an environmentalist who uses paper towels wantonly. Who lives the pure life?

I said, “Who lives the pure life?”

Both Shelburne and Walter looked at me in some surprise.

I turned away. My field of view altered a smidge. Enough to get a fresh look into the sluice box, to see that the something silvery that had caught my eye wasn’t a nailhead. It was a dime.

I said, “Somebody dropped a dime.”

Shelburne was suddenly beside me, hands braced on the rough rim of the sluice box. Strong hands. Manicured. City-boy hands on rough wood. Fingers flexed. Knuckles white.

Walter joined us. “Somebody dropped a number of dimes.”

I looked further. Dimes scattered throughout the sluice box. All of them shiny. Innocent of dust. How long could a dime lay in a sluice box before acquiring at least a freckling of dust? Hours? If that.

Shelburne picked up a dime.

Walter said, “Is this significant?”

Shelburne spun. Scanning the trees around the clearing. “Give me a minute,” he said. Voice hoarse. Choked. He jammed his water bottle into the pocket and shoved off. Just short of a run.

Walter and I stood flatfooted. A minute to do what?

“We don’t want to lose him,” Walter said.

Hell no, we sure didn’t want to lose him, not down here in this jungle. We plunged back into the maze where Shelburne had disappeared.

But we had already fallen behind. Although I could hear him rustling through the vegetation up ahead, I could not see him. No means of judging distance, no map to consult because quite clearly the way through the maze altered season by season as the underbrush crept this way and that. I shouted “wait” and Shelburne somewhere up ahead muttered something in reply but it did not matter because his voice was the clue and so I followed the bushwhacked path to the left instead of to the right. I heard Walter behind me, the rock hammer and trenching tool tied to his pack rattling like coins in a pocket. Like dropped dimes. Only they weren’t dropped, right? They were placed, scattered throughout the sluice box so as not to be missed. Henry placed them. Who else? And spooked his brother in the bargain.

And now as I crashed through the woods my sense of smell kicked in. My nose stung. There was that odd odor, much stronger now than when I’d first sniffed it hiking up the ego-blazed trail into the Shelburne family neighborhood. It was a medicinal smell. It was like bitter greens I’d once boiled to oblivion. It had an undercurrent of rotting sweet fruit. I turned to Walter and said “what’s that stink?” but he was too far back to hear me or too short on breath to reply.

And then I broke free of the willow jungle and waded hip-deep into cattails and I saw Shelburne ahead, on the far side of a stinking pond red with iron-rich silt.

He was wading through a field of brush, peering into a thicket of pines beyond.

I shouted.

He stiffened. Turned. Lifted a hand to us.

We skirted the pond and joined him.

I expelled the words. “What. The. Hell?”

“I thought….” He passed a hand across his eyes. “Thought I’d find Henry.”

“But you didn’t?”

“No.”

“But the dimes said he came this way?”

“Yes.”

Walter said, “Call for him.”

“Haven’t I been? For the past three hours?” Shelburne lifted his palms. “Fine, I’ll shout my fool head off. Henry Henry Henry Henry!”

There was no reply.

Shelburne glanced up. Around.

I followed suit, looking up to the rim of the pit. There were a dozen viewpoints. More. I looked around us. Jungle. Woods.

Walter said, “And if he’s watching?”

“Christ.” Shelburne flashed a grim smile. Shook his head. “Christ, Henry.” Shelburne suddenly shouted to the sky, “You want the dog and pony show?”

There was no reply.

Walter said, thinly, “Why don’t you give us the dog and pony show?”

After a long moment Shelburne said, “Why not?”

Walter folded his arms.

“It starts with the dime,” Shelburne said. “Did you ever hear the expression you’re on my dime? Dad loved that expression. He wasn’t talking allowance, he was talking I own you.” Shelburne unbuckled his hip belt. “So of course Henry and I would challenge each other to do outrageous shit, betting a dime on it. In particular, there was the time I flicked the dime into the sluice box, making a particular outrageous bet.”

“In what sense outrageous?”

Shelburne slipped his pack off one shoulder and slid it around to access the stash pocket. He retrieved something. Shouldered the pack.

I said, “What’s in your hand?”

He displayed a box of matches.

“Good God man,” Walter said, “you’re standing in mountain misery.”

I looked at the brush, some kind of groundcover, low-lying ferns. My nose stung. It had not stopped stinging since I’d crashed through the maze. Now I realized I’d found the source of the odd odor. It came from the ferns.

“That’s the point,” Shelburne said. “The thing about mountain misery is this time of year its leaves are coated with resin. Flammable as hell.”

I said, “Are you out of your mind?”

“Far from it. There’s a pond behind you. But it won’t be necessary. If I may?”

Walter gave a brusque nod.

“Here’s how it works. You’ve got two boys pretty much brought up in the wild. Daring each other to do the outrageous. You’ve got a father who leaves them alone with dangerous toys. Some dads give their boys boxing gloves to pound out the rivalry. Ours gave us all this. So we made bets. Always a dime.” He paused and made a slow survey of the jungle, of the rim. Then his focus snapped back to us. “Let’s pretend Henry is standing here with me in the misery. We’re facing each other. Use your imagination.”

I didn’t need to. Henry was parked in my mind.

“Here’s how it played,” Shelburne said. “We flipped the dime to see who went first. I chose heads. The dime landed heads-up. I went first.” Shelburne lit a match. He watched it burn down. When the flame neared his fingers he blew it out. He snapped the matchstick in half and put it in his pocket. He took another match from the box. “Henry’s turn.” Shelburne lit the second match. “I’m playing Henry here, of course.” Shelburne watched the match burn down. Blew it out. Snapped it, pocketed it.

I watched, uneasy. If Henry was watching, what was he thinking?

Shelburne took out a third match. “My turn again.” He lit the match. “Mind you, we went through a lot of matches before we got up the nerve to finish the game. But I’m going to fast forward to the last turn. My turn.” He watched the match burn down. Before the flame could lick his skin he opened his fingers and let the match drop. It fell onto a netting of fern. There was a tiny explosion, and then a tiny flame licked along the adjacent ferns in a delicate dance. Oily black smoke curled up.

Reflexively, I reached for my water bottle.

Before I could unscrew the cap, Shelburne stomped out the tiny conflagration.

When the fire was fully extinguished, I said, “Just to be sure I’ve got this straight — which one of you tried to set the forest on fire?”

“I did. Henry flinched. Blew out his match.”

The smell of rotting overcooked ferns turned my stomach. I felt a bit like Alice navigating her inside-out world. Henry Shelburne was supposed to be the mercurial kid, the one who didn’t understand limits, but now Robert Shelburne was demonstrating the reverse.

Robert Shelburne waded out of the mountain misery. His boots and pant cuffs were streaked with pitchy black resin. “By the way, the game wasn’t playing with fire. It was reclaiming the gold.”

Walter leaned in. “What do you mean?”

“Right around here was a remainder of the sluiceway system. Henry and I found it, nearly overgrown with mountain misery. Full of sediment, and the sediment was laced with amalgam.” He glanced at me. “The gold-mercury mix.”

I remembered. Bonded like brothers.

“You went after the gold,” Walter said.

“We went after the gold,” Shelburne agreed. “Bled off the mercury with fire.”

“You vaporized the mercury?”

“We vaporized the mercury.”

Walter shook his head.

I said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“We stayed upwind. No harm done.”

“No harm? Does your brother not have mercury poisoning?”

Shelburne shot me a hard look. “No harm that day.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning no harm that day but I put an idea in my brother’s head. He took it from there. He kept on messing around with mercury, on his own. Burning old riffle blocks impregnated with amalgam. Panning slugs of amalgam from the rivers and then cooking them over an open fire to separate out the gold. And Henry thought he could keep dancing away from the vapor. More like dancing with the devil.”

I shook my head.

“And now,” Shelburne said, “he leaves me the dimes. You asked about the message? Blame. Short and sweet. And I get it.” He shouted once again, to the sky, “I get it, Bro.”

I said, suddenly chilled, “So what does he want?”

“Fuck if I know. Apology? Admission of guilt?”

First I’d heard Robert Shelburne use that particular expletive. First I’d seen him lose any manner of control. I took note.

Walter said, “Is there a chance he wants revenge? To harm you?”

“He’s had years to nurse that grudge. He could have sent me a bucket of dimes a hundred times over.”

“Then why now?”

“My best guess? Culmination. A lifetime of failures. Dad dies. Henry’s doing his last shot at finding the legacy. And maybe he’s tying up loose ends.” Shelburne suddenly grinned, tight. “Don’t worry. He’s not a violent man. If he wants to settle a grudge with me, it’ll be just that. The two of us. All I need from you is to get me to him. I’ll take it from there.”

“Still,” I said, “you’re dealing with that chaotic mind.”

Shelburne took a moment. “Let me ask you something. You told me your brother died. How did that happen?”

“How is that relevant?”

“If you’d rather not…”

I said, “He had hemophilia — a blood-clotting disorder. He fell and hit his head. Bled into the brain.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“So was I. How is this relevant?”

“What if you’d been able to… catch him? What if you’d been there?”

“I was there.”

Walter put a hand on my arm.

I added, “I wasn’t paying attention.”

Shelburne said, “What if you could go back in time, and pay attention?”

“What a damn fool question.”

“Maybe so. But I don’t want to be asking myself that damn fool question some day.”

9

We set off.

We rounded the pond, giving the cattails and the spongy soil a wide berth, circling to the far sit of the great pit, passing the crumbling mouth of a dark tunnel. The little stream we’d crossed earlier appeared here, braiding with another little stream, ferrying muck and sediment into the tunnel.

I peered inside. No light. The sound of flowing water. A blast of cold air. I shivered.

“No,” Shelburne said, “he won’t be in there.”

He doesn’t like enclosed spaces. I got it. Claustrophobic, among his other impairments.

Shelburne led us around the tunnel and out of the giant mining pit and over the lip down into the canyon below.

Still the Trail of Trial and Error, he said.

And now, the fast way down to our next target.

He took us by way of the bouldery outflow of the tunnel, the escape route of sludge and debris once washed out of the sluiceway and into the drainage tunnel, where the pit once and still disgorged its waste, where the father taught the boys to pan the tailings for pickings. Robert Shelburne shouted “Henry” and we listened for a moment to the hiss of water streaming out of the tunnel and boiling over the boulders as it picked up speed on the down slope.

The debris stream fed into a larger creek that cut a channel into the canyon side.

The canyon steepened.

Waterfalls muscled down over boulders.

The trail veered close to the tumbling creek and I thought, easy to lose your footing.

Shelburne nimbly navigated the trail like he’d done it a thousand times before.

We dropped until our trail bottomed out onto an oak-studded ledge overlooking a wide rocky river.

The river ran like a boulevard through a high-rise canyon.

I looked downriver, to the west, and then upriver, to the east. We were in the southern district of the Shelburne neighborhood.

Walter said, “Which way would Henry have gone?”

Shelburne said, “I’m sure he’s been all over this river canyon but which way now? I don’t know. From here, the trail goes east and west. From here, we follow the river. At least according to my grandfather’s letters, as interpreted by my father. The trail meets the waterway, at the southern grapes.”

“Grapes?”

“Early explorers found wild grapes growing along the banks and named the river for them. They spoke Spanish. Grapes in Spanish is uvas. My grandfather spoke Spanish. My father got a Spanish-English dictionary. Voila, the Yuba River. South fork.”

“So from here,” I said, “Henry might go either direction.”

Shelburne nodded. “Which way would you go?”

We had studied the geologic maps back at the lab.

Out in the field, it was show time.

The Shelburne family blue lead offshoot splintered at the river. There were mapped outcrops west, and east. So the question became, in which direction lay the contact metamorphic zone with the chiastolite hornfels aureole? Because that was the landmark Henry Shelburne would have sought.

Walter spread his hands, east and west. “In either direction we have a pluton invading metamorphic rock. A pluton, if you’ll recall Mr. Shelburne, is a large body of igneous rock that can cook the country rock to hornfels.”

“Good, fine.” Shelburne looked ready to bolt. “Which way?”

I jerked a thumb downriver. “South Yuba Rivers Pluton is thataway.”

Walter jerked a thumb upriver. “Bowman Lake Pluton is up yonder.”

“Although,” I said, “we’re not necessarily looking for a large mapped pluton.”

Walter nodded. “Could be a small and unmapped igneous dike.”

“Which way do you like?” I asked my partner.

Walter scratched his ear, considering. “I like the mapped rock unit up yonder.”

As did I. The rock unit up yonder was known to have been intruded by numerous small igneous dikes. I said, “I tend to agree.”

“Then let’s go.” Shelburne turned. “Upriver.”

More like, above the river. The river was a good sixty feet below us.

I paused to read a wooden interpretive sign staked into the ground. Once, the river had been level with the ground we now stood upon. And then debris had washed down from the mining pit above, elevating the river bed. And then, over time, the flowing water carved out its bed anew, leaving behind compacted-gravel benches like the one beneath our feet.

As soon as possible we’d need access to the river.

Meanwhile, we were at the mercy of the trail.

Save for Shelburne occasionally shouting his brother’s name, we hiked in silence. It was a rollercoaster trail that took our breath away. The trail paralleled the river but the rugged rock of the canyon walls forced the route to climb, traversing the descending ridges and knife-gullied canyons. Now and again the trail dipped down steep rock benches to skirt the river but there was no way down to the gravel banks, save a dicey scramble.

We pushed on.

Finally we got lucky. The trail jacked hard right and switchbacked down to the river’s rocky bench.

“What do you think?” Walter asked me.

I took in the lay of the land. “I think it’s prime.”

“I think,” Shelburne said, “we should keep moving.”

Walter turned to Shelburne. “We need to establish a baseline. This appears to be a natural catch-basin for anything coming downriver. Sediment, debris, minerals. Including, perhaps, float from a metamorphic contact upriver.”

Shelburne gave a brusque nod.

I thought, something here doesn’t sit right with him. I wondered, what’s here?

Nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I could see. The river bank was paved in cobbles and pebbles, armored with boulders. A gravelly sandbar extended halfway across the water.

Shelburne sat on a boulder and folded his arms.

Walter and I turned to our work. We shed backpacks and took out field kits. Walter claimed the rocky bank and I headed out on the gravel bar to sample the geology mid-river.

I found a promising spot, a submerged bedrock hump that bridged the water and slowed its flow. A group of boulders gathered, forming deep crevices, a natural hydraulic trap on the river bottom where material coming downstream was likely to get lodged.

I knelt to sample.

The water was low. I wondered how much of a rainstorm was needed to saturate the watershed feeding this river. Right now, shafts of late afternoon sunlight glassed the surface. Where clouds shadowed, the river turned inky. A rainbow trout nosed the bottom, the fish multicolored as the gravel. I scanned the riverbed, noting how the rocks and sand acted as riffles, thinking geologically speaking this was an eminently likely site to find grains of gold. Gold is heavy. Water needs a brute-force flow to suspend gold and move it along, and the moment the water slows, the heaviest grains bail out and settle into pockets and crevices. I peered into a large crack. Looking, I abruptly realized, for the telltale metallic flash. I shifted position and did see a flash but it was silver — muscovite mica. Still, my mouth had gone a little dry. I moved on to the next crevice, the next little hollow. The gravel here was mostly buried under silt and sand that had settled out of the river flow. I bent lower and plunged my hands into the water, wetting my sleeves, running my fingers through the sandy bed, unearthing grains of quartz and chert and mica and every other freaking mineral that lived in this micro-niche but no gold.

Hold on. What are you looking for again, lady? You’re looking for float. Diorite. Hornfels. That’s what should make your mouth go dry.

Not gold.

I glanced at Walter, who was examining a specimen under his hand lens, and then I glanced at Shelburne, who was still in that strange funk on his boulder, staring into the distance.

They were paying me no attention.

I recovered my dignity and paid heed to the little pool and riffle pocket where, in my professional opinion, something worth examination might be lodged. Upon closer examination I noticed a ledge. It was recessed, in shadow, and the riffling water was silty, but nevertheless I could make out the shape of a cobble in there. Hard to tell the texture and color but it was worth a closer look.

I reached.

My fingers closed on the cobble.

I yelped.

I’m not afraid of snakes but for a moment I thought this must be the hump of a coiled water snake, clammy and cold. But if it were a snake it would have moved, would have recoiled from my touch, would have slunk out from the crevice and skedaddled or, worse, and wrapped itself onto my hand and given me a bite. This was no snake. This did not recoil. It simply pushed my fingers aside.

Walter was suddenly beside me. “Cassie?”

I let go of the thing and sat back on my haunches. Heart pounding.

Shelburne sprinted across the gravel bar to flank me on the other side. “What is it?”

It was a moment before I could speak. “Something’s down there.”

“What?”

“It’s not a snake.” I cast about, to explain my reaction. “But it felt… soft. It fit in my hand. About the size of my fist. It felt like…” The word came to me from some primitive zone in a dark corner of my mind. “Like a heart.”

Shelburne went white.

I bent back to the water, leaning farther, angling for a better view of the ledge down there, and now I got a straight-on look and saw the thing for what it was. It sat cupped on its ledge in the crevice. I understood my earlier confusion. It was indeed rounded as a river cobble, but not solid. It was big as a heart and it quivered slightly, fanned by the riffling water.

“Cassie,” Walter said, “what the devil is down there?”

I straightened. “Mercury.” A quivering heart of liquid mercury.

Shelburne sucked in a deep breath, let it escape.

“Well that’s not surprising,” Walter said.

“It sure surprised me.”

Walter said, “Millions of pounds were lost from the sluices. You’ll find it in the rivers and soils. You’ll certainly find droplets in catch-basins like this.”

“Not droplets.” I held my hands apart, to demonstrate the size. A heart.

His eyebrows lifted.

I turned to Shelburne. “Did Henry put this here?”

Shelburne looked taken aback. “Why would he do that?”

“Why would he leave the dimes? His games.”

“No no, he didn’t know I’d hired you — at least not until he saw you on the trail with me. And if he did, how would he have time to set this up? And if he did, how could he possibly know you would look down there?”

I acknowledged the unlikelihood of the scenario but my heart rate had not yet gotten the message.

“Look,” Shelburne said, “you get enough droplets caught in a hotspot, they coalesce. You can thank Mother Nature for that. I’ve heard of guys finding puddles big as pillows. When my dad brought us here panning, we sucked up mercury with a turkey baster. It’s all the hell over the place.”

Big as pillows? Holy hell. A heart was big enough for me. I said, “You know a lot about it.”

“Yes I do. As I’ve explained, Dad marched me and Henry up and down his trail.”

“Here too?” I asked.

“Sure. Here.” Shelburne got to his feet. “As you geologists point out, it’s a natural catch-basin. Good place for panning.”

“Been here recently?”

“Last time I panned for gold I was twelve years old.” Shelburne started to retreat across the gravel bar.

“Hang on,” I said. He’d been on edge from the moment the trail brought us here, even before I’d said heart and freaked him out. “Anything else going on here?”

Shelburne paused. “Like what?”

“Like whatever’s been making you so edgy.”

He turned. “Aside from the fact that my brother is missing?”

“If there’s something else, yeah. Aside from that.”

A shadow passed over his face. “It’s not relevant.”

“I would like to be the judge of that,” Walter said. “Before we proceed.”

Shelburne took a long moment and then he said, “My father died here.”

Walter and I got to our feet. Scrambling to catch up.

“This is news,” Walter said.

“No kidding,” I said, “I thought your father died of a heart attack.”

“Yes. Here. In fact, it wasn’t the heart attack that killed him. It was falling into the water and drowning.” He grimaced. “Animals got to him before the rangers found him.”

I flinched. “That’s awful.”

“Now you understand why this place gives me the creeps.”

I nodded. That made two of us, now.

“What was he doing here?” Walter asked. “Panning?”

“No.”

“Then?”

“It’s not relevant.”

“Indulge me,” Walter said.

Shelburne shrugged. “He was sampling the water.”

“Why?”

“All right.” Shelburne looked at us squarely. “It’s irrelevant but let’s get it out of the way. My father, the auto mechanic, was a handy guy. He developed a piece of technology and brought it to me, looking for funding for a startup. Venture capital, it’s what I do. Dad had a plan to build a super-dredge to suck up mercury, clean up the gold country riverbeds.” He shot me a look. “You saw for yourself what’s down there.”

I nodded. Seen, and felt.

“Environmental remediation is the big-bucks term. There’s your new gold rush. Turns out my firm was already working with a deep-pockets company looking to get into the business. So I hooked Dad up with the company, which I’m going to call Deep Pockets. I helped bring the plan to product. I helped Dad come up with a catchy name for his subsidiary — AquaHeal. And yes, I came out here with Dad and a Deep Pockets guy a couple of times. Site survey, checking out hotspots, up and down the river. We packed in, stayed awhile.” He held up a hand. “By the way, I did mention my site scouting, earlier.”

Walter said, evenly, “You didn’t elaborate.”

“It wasn’t relevant. Don’t know how else I can put that.”

“It involved your father,” I said. “He died and you found the ore sample and that kicked off what’s going on now.”

“He wasn’t out here hunting gold when he died. He was here, on his own, taking water samples — as I said. I was in Sacramento trying to get the permit for a second round of tests. Had a few problems with the first round.”

“What kind of problems?” Walter asked.

Shelburne sighed. “Dredging is a violent process. It sucks up the riverbed — sediment and gravel along with the mercury. Breaks up large drops into smaller ones.”

Relevant or not, I flinched. “It floured? Into reactive mercury?”

“Yes.”

Jesus. “You’re talking methylation.”

“Yes. Bacteria convert the inorganic mercury into the nasty form, and that gets into the food chain.”

I glanced at the river.

“I wouldn’t eat the fish.” He gave a tight smile. “In fact, you can take that advisory all the way downriver to the San Francisco Bay.”

I said, “Methylated mercury is a neurotoxin.”

“Yes. Hence the word problems. Hence the need to tweak the technology. Hence the need for a second round of tests.”

I shook my head.

“By the way, storm waters rile up mercury-laden sediments all the time. Mercury gets methylated all the time. It’s already in the state’s water transport system. We just added to the problem.”

“And Henry?” Walter asked. “Was he involved with the startup?”

“No, of course not. He had no money to invest, no skills to offer. He’s hardly a company man, anyway.”

“But he was aware of it?”

Shelburne shifted. “Actually, no. Henry and I hadn’t been in touch. And then, at Dad’s place, I didn’t bring it up — no point until I knew if the technology would work. As far as Dad goes, he and Henry had nothing to do with one another for years. In any case, once the estate is settled, Henry will inherit half the company.”

I said, “Did Henry know his dad died here? How he died?”

“He read the report. Didn’t seem to rattle him. Remember, he spends his life in the wild. Hey, we Shelburnes are hunters. Dad was a hunter. Dad died as he lived, hunting the new gold rush. And he was hunted, in death.” Shelburne put his hand to his neck, as if there were a tie to adjust. “Admittedly, that’s all too wild-kingdom for me.”

Walter had moved to sample upstream of the gravel bar when he shouted, “Oh dear.”

I sprinted across the bar to the rocky bank.

Shelburne was already sprinting along the bank.

We joined Walter and looked where he was looking. Into the river.

The water was clearer here than at the gravel bar. It ran over bedrock and it ran fast and everything on the river bed was glaringly visible. A metal bottle lay on the bottom. It was cylindrical with a screw-cap top lying alongside. It was open. It was rusted. It was about the size of an extra-large water bottle but you wouldn’t want to drink from it. A word came to mind. Flask. In my reading during the drive across the Sierra, I’d come across that word. Heavy iron flasks were needed to hold heavy liquid mercury. Seventy-six pounds of quicksilver per flask.

A few of those pounds were scattered downstream from the flask, like breadcrumbs. Carried by the fast-moving flow.

It didn’t take much of a leap to assume that some of the silvery stuff had been carried still farther, until it hit the catch-basin. Until some of it found its way to the hidden ledge, where droplets liked to coalesce.

I wondered how much of the silver heart was thanks to Mother Nature and how much was thanks to Henry Shelburne. I guessed it didn’t matter.

Robert Shelburne muttered, “Christ, Henry.”

Walter spoke. “I suppose one could find flasks abandoned in old mines.”

I went cold. “You’re saying Henry found a stash?”

Walter turned to Shelburne. “Is that likely? And if so, how would he transport it? The weight.”

“Likely, sure. Transport… Rent a horse? Or could’ve lashed it to his backpack. Heavy load but I guess it’s doable.”

I said, “Why here? It can’t be coincidental that he leaves it here, where your father died.”

“That’s my brother. Some kind of bizarre memorial.”

“Is that what you think it is?”

Shelburne gave a tight smile. “I think it’s preferable to what I thought you’d found, when you shouted.”

“What did you think I’d found?”

“My father’s heart.”

10

We packed up.

There was no discussion about continuing, or not continuing. For all its ugliness, the information about Shelburne’s father was not, I had to admit, relevant. The fact that Shelburne’s father died water-sampling on the river where he used to hunt gold was correlative, not causative. The fact that Henry left a memorial or a message was perhaps pertinent, but it was aimed at Robert. Once we found Henry, it was going to become Robert’s predicament. He’d take it from there.

We set off, following the narrow trail upriver to a place where the water ran free of catch-pools, and because we were low on potable water we decided to stop. We got out our bottles and filtering kits. Shelburne’s pricey model and our bargain squeeze-bag filter both did the job, straining out gut-sickening bugs like Giardia. Either model should in theory filter out microscopic mercury. I would have paid for a filter that put that in writing.

Resupplied, we moved on.

The trail again left the river and began to climb. As I plodded uphill I scanned the cliff tops, thinking that if I were Henry Shelburne and I’d been leaving messages for my brother I’d sure want to see his reaction. There were a hundred places to view that site from the cliff tops. But that would take time, to leave the message, to scout the viewpoints. To rent a horse, if he had rented a horse to transport the flask. And it was the question of time that bugged me. Robert Shelburne said his brother left three days ago. If we assumed that Henry was now shadowing us, an assumption that seemed creepily reasonable, then had he abandoned the hunt for the source of the rock? Or had he already found it? Amateur geologist — barely three days in the field if you leave aside travel time from the boarding house to the wild — bam bam bam and he goes straight to the source? I supposed that was possible. This was, after all, his territory.

Or perhaps he was long gone from the South Yuba, leaving us to our own devices.

The trail roughened and I abandoned timetables and paid attention to the ground beneath my feet.

And then our route traversed a gashed canyon gully and we detoured down a spur trail to the river’s gravel bank in order to do some sampling. Small cobbles of quartz and chert chinked underfoot. Of more interest was the fractured bedrock near the river’s edge, which was emplaced with jade-green serpentine.

Now we were getting somewhere.

Walter pointed out the rock face. “That’s serpentine. Its soils are associated with gold.”

Shelburne looked. “That green rock? Never knew I should care.”

“Good heavens man, it’s the state rock of California.”

“There’s a state rock?”

I said, “You’d think the state rock would be gold.”

Shelburne smiled, as if I’d spoken entirely in jest.

We moved on, up and over another spiny ridge. Then back down to the river bank, monitoring the cliff tops, watching the sky — how far will we get before we have to make camp, before the rain or the night comes?

The clouds answered, coalescing to form a seamless roof.

Hurry up.

And then, down another spur trail, at a little pool and riffle system, Walter picked up a large pebble and pursed his lips. He took out his magnifier. He studied the pebble under the twenty-power lens for a good minute, and then he passed the lens and the pebble to me. I had a look. It was black, fine-grained, with the luster of mica and a hackly fracture. It was hard, flinty. I went low-tech, took a steel nail from my pocket and dragged it across the surface. It did not scratch. Its shape was subangular, the edges fairly rounded by transport down the river.

I nodded and passed it back to Walter because he carried the high-tech tool.

He already had it out of his pack. The handheld XRF spectrometer looks like a hair dryer but shoots like a gun, firing X-rays at the target, exciting the atoms to display their elemental ID. He laid the pebble on the ground. He put the snout of the XRF to the rock and read the results on the display screen. “Chemically speaking,” he said, “woo-hoo.”

I said, to Shelburne, “He means that’s a probable match to our hornfels.”

Shelburne picked up the pebble. Turned it over and over. “There’s no cross.”

“Could be a question of random chiastolite distribution in the parent rock.”

Walter said, “She means, we keep going.”

Thunder sounded, echoing down the canyon.

We pushed on. We did not have to go far. Ten minutes later, following the bouldery river bank, we hit the mother lode.

The first angular black pebble I picked up was studded with tiny white crystals that were themselves intruded by black carbonaceous inclusions disposed in the form of a cross. My mouth went dry. Here it was. We’d seen its like in the lab, looking at the angular black chiastolite hornfels embedded in the ore sample. We’d done the geology. We’d set out to find its brother in the field. We’d hypothesized where to find it. And find it we did. Here it was, a little stone in the river. Better than gold.

I passed it to Walter. He eyeballed it and his face creased into a smile and then he brought out the XRF to confirm. He said, “Woo-hoo, in spades.”

I said, to Shelburne, “We’ve found the neighborhood.”

“So where to now?” Shelburne asked.

Walter turned from the river and looked up the offshoot side canyon.

I followed suit. It was a narrow canyon showing abrupt walls polished to a glacial sheen, so steep as not to be haired over with vegetation. I moved to examine the near wall, a slab of intertonguing slates and cherts and metasandstones. Here was the rock formation we’d been aiming for, the Shoo Fly Formation. I did not know the provenance of that name. Rock units are usually named after a patch of the local geography and I guessed some hapless geographer had been swatting flies when he named this unit. I took a moment to celebrate the coolness of geological names, to ease the tensions of the hunt.

A thin creek fed out of Shoo Fly Canyon — as I decided to name it — meeting the South Yuba River.

A confluence of two waterways.

We were in the neighborhood and now the question became, which way to go?

The float could have come down the Yuba from a source farther up the main canyon, or it could have come down the thin creek from a source up Shoo Fly Canyon. Or perhaps — however unlikely and undesirable — it could have come from both waterways.

Walter and I sampled a dozen yards farther up the South Yuba and then a dozen yards up Shoo Fly Creek. We struck out on the Yuba. We struck cross-studded float on the side canyon creek.

Life just got simpler.

We headed up Shoo Fly Canyon.

We began to find a new and interesting addition to the float, salt-and-pepper colored diorite.

Shelburne shouted “Henry!”

I thought, he’s expecting a reply. I nearly did, myself. We were getting closer. We all sensed it. We were closing in on the contact zone between the slate and a diorite dike, birthplace of chiastolite hornfels. We were in range of the address and the question would then become, is Henry living there right now?

We moved slowly because there was no trail, no path, just a rock-hopping contour up the creek. We stopped twice to sample because there were two skinnier side canyons that fed creeklets down into Shoo Fly creek and we did not want to miss a turnoff.

More problematic, the slate-gray sky was darkening by the yard.

And then it began to rain.

We dug out ponchos and covered our heads and our packs with urethane-coated nylon. The clouds heaved and the rain hardened. We pussyfooted, now, slipping on wet rock and clay soil turned to slickenside. And then we were no longer searching for float, we were hunting a flat spot to anchor and wait out the rain. If need be, to set up tents. And then Shelburne said there’s old mining tunnels all the hell over the place, and within another five minutes we indeed came upon the black mouth of a tunnel.

I looked at Shelburne.

He nodded. As he’d said.

This tunnel cut into a sturdy stretch of the rockwall and, peeking inside, we saw that it was a straight-shot gullet, empty and dry.

Walter retrieved the mini-G gas detector from my pack and went into the tunnel. He came out with an upraised thumb.

We moved in.

As we shucked our packs and dripping ponchos, I reflected on the fact that we’d taken shelter in a tunnel cut into the general neighborhood of the Shelburne family offshoot of the deep blue lead. If this were the Dogtown television show, we’d prospect the gullet and encounter the legendary blue.

Instead, we huddled near the mouth and watched the flux of rain and then, shit, sheet lightning smeared the rock of the gorge.

The Shoo Fly Formation lit up like Christmas.

11

Thunder followed the lightning, as it does.

Thunder echoed up and down the gorge like rocks kicked over a ridge.

Thunder got right into the tunnel with us, a long-period rumble that I felt in my bones.

I wondered where Henry sheltered — since he didn’t like enclosed spaces.

We sat shivering until the thunder stopped and then in hurried consultation we chose to wait until the storm passed, or night came.

An hour later, night came.

Thunder and lightning were sporadic now but the rain did not falter.

We unrolled our pads and sleeping bags on the hard rock floor. We removed our boots and rubbed our feet and put on clean socks and campsite sandals. Walter switched on our LED lantern and Shelburne unpacked his stove. Shelburne offered to heat water for all three of us, to reconstitute the freeze-dried glop that would pass as dinner. I didn’t envy his fancy stove. I appreciated his offer to do the work.

I was deeply and thoroughly fatigued.

So fatigued that it took me a good minute to process the steel clip hooked on the torn mesh pocket of Shelburne’s backpack. As he took the wide-mouth water bottle out of the torn pocket, the clip caught the low-angle light from Walter’s lantern. Steel gleamed. I stared at it. Wondering why Shelburne carried a bottle clip when he didn’t clip his bottle to his belt. Wondering if the steel edge had caught the mesh at some point, tearing it. Thinking, no, the clip was not in position to do that. To tear the mesh, the clip would need to be cinched around the neck of the bottle, edged toward the mesh. But why carry a bottle with the clip attached in a backpack pocket? The whole point of the clip is to clip the bottle to your belt. Or to a D-ring on your shoulder strap.

I watched Shelburne pour water into the cook pot on top of the stove.

I listened to the hiss of the little gas flame.

Nothing to do but wait for the water to boil. And obsess over the water-bottle clip.

Five minutes later we were eating our glop. Shrimp Creole for Shelburne. Chili Mac With Beef for Walter and me. I suspected it all tasted the same. If this were the Dogtown TV show we’d be eating canned beans and glad for the grub.

The rain hardened and lightning and thunder returned, as if they’d taken a break and were now refreshed.

Deeply and thoroughly fatigued, we all three moved to our sleeping bags.

Walter switched off the lantern.

Like some kind of weird slumber party. Normally I sleep alone in my tent. Normally I sleep in as little as possible but the cold and the company got my attention. I slipped out of my Crocs and stripped down to a T-shirt and pulled on silk long underwear, suitably modest. I grabbed my poncho and ventured just outside the tunnel to pee. No need for a flashlight. Lightning lit my way.

Walter and Shelburne took their turns.

Chilled, I wormed into my sleeping bag and shivered until body heat flared and my thoughts fuzzed.

Next thing I knew I was back at the bedrock hump across the Yuba watching lightning bolts duel. Rain like needles. Me, sodden. Benumbed on the gravel bar. Electricity in the air. The taste of ozone. Me, thinking I’m sticking up like a sore thumb on this flat river. And then a lightning bolt the size of Nevada struck the water, speared down to the bed of the river and it brought up on the point of its spear a silver heart. It quivered in front of me. I put out my finger to touch it. Who can resist? And then my hand went straight through the heart and the quicksilver wrapped my wrist. Flashing in the glow of the lightning storm, it thinned, now looking like a steel bottle clip.

Sometime later I thought I heard bees. I woke.

Snug in my sleeping bag, water sampling on my mind.

Hydrology 101 back in college — you attach the specimen bottle to the sampling pole with a steel clip and then dip it in the water to grab the sample. For that class, I’d been sampling sediment load. The equipment I’d used had been designed for the task. Shelburne’s steel clip and wide-mouth bottle would be an improvisation, but doable.

I sat up straight.

It was morning. Early light, silvered. Foggy.

Not enough light to allow me to re-examine Shelburne’s steel clip. Enough light, though, to make out his hunched form at the mouth of the tunnel, up there watching the day break. Humming to himself.

Sounded like bees.

I wetted my lips. My mouth was cottony, tasting of ozone. I cleared my throat, to ask Shelburne if he himself had done some water sampling on those site scouts he’d mentioned. His father had been out water sampling when he’d had his heart attack. Alone, Shelburne had said. Hadn’t he?

I said, “Hey.”

Shelburne didn’t hear me. Probably could not hear me over the drum roll of Walter snoring.

Good thing, because I didn’t know how to phrase my question without accusing Shelburne of lying. Were you in Sacramento when your father died? Or did I misremember the timing?

I shivered. I pulled the sleeping bag up to my neck. I noticed that Shelburne was cold, as well. He’d put on a wool cap, yanked down over his ears. He wore a puffy parka, one I hadn’t yet seen. A down parka is not recommended in the rain. Rain had stopped, though, thank you very much.

If my backpack was in reach I’d drag it close and dig out my own down parka.

Walter turned over, muffling his snores.

Thoroughly chilled now, fully awake now, I figured I’d just ask about the timing. Clarify things.

I cleared my throat, loud. “Good morning.”

Shelburne turned. Just dipped a shoulder and angled his head. Acknowledgement. A listening man. In profile, backlit, he looked like he’d been sketched. An artist’s quick strokes, just framing the man. But, I now noticed, the artist got the nose wrong. It should be stronger, more hawk-like.

I went very cold.

It wasn’t Robert Shelburne.

12

Two things, in quick succession:

I said shit and Walter stirred.

I scanned the tunnel and saw that Robert Shelburne’s sleeping bag was empty.

The figure at the mouth of the tunnel did not move. Not an inch. Shoulder still dipped. Head still angled.

Holy holy shit.

I tried to exit my sleeping bag. Too quick. Entangling myself. Making struggling noises.

Walter slowly sat up. Looking at me. What?

I nodded toward the entrance.

Walter turned to look.

The figure, unmoving, carved there by the artist for all eternity, watched us in turn. “How do you do?” he said. And then when we did not respond, “I do poorly.”

His voice was soft, reserved. Frugal.

Time passed. Seconds most likely. Possibly a full minute. The light outside intensified, as if an hour had passed and full morning had bloomed. A trick of radiating sunlight, tearing a hole in the fog. A matter of seconds.

I said, “Henry?”

He said, “Yes.”

Walter spoke. “Henry Shelburne.”

I thought perhaps Walter’s use of the surname was for my benefit, as if Walter thought I had just awakened, myself, and was in that exit-mode from the dream world where reality is conditional, as if I had another Henry in mind, one only accessed in memory.

“We have five minutes,” the figure said. Henry Shelburne said, in his soft parsimonious voice. He shifted slightly, crooking his left leg so that he could more fully look at us. “I can’t come in.”

Walter turned on the lantern.

Henry Shelburne was still backlit by the day outside but now frontlit, as well, by the cool LED glow of the lantern. I could see that his cap was Sherpa-style, with earflaps. I could make out the color of the cap and parka: brown. Disappearing-phantom-in-the-woods brown. I could just make out his features. He looked remarkably like the wet-combed teenager from the Old West photograph. But, in this light, the marks of the years would not be apparent. What was apparent was his left hand gripping his thigh.

In the photo, I recalled, in which Henry sat in the saloon chair, his left thigh had been strapped to a holster. No holster, now. No fake six-shooter. Just faded jeans encasing that thigh. Jeans, down parka, wool hat. Muddied hiking boots. Henry Shelburne looked like any other hiker on a foggy mountain morning. I tried to wrap my mind around this new Henry, the real deal, not the fragile teenager in the photo.

Walter said, “How do you do, son. My name is Walter Shaws and my associate here is Cassie Oldfield. We’re geologists in the employ of your brother, who has been searching for you. Who is extremely concerned about your welfare. But I expect you know all that.”

Henry Shelburne’s hand tightened on his thigh.

“I’m quite sorry to hear that you’re doing poorly,” Walter said. “How can we help?”

“You helped,” Henry said.

Walter nodded. “I assume you mean in the sense of leading your brother here.”

“Yes, I mean that. That was resourceful, Robert.”

I looked beyond Henry but if Robert Shelburne was out there he was masked in the fog. Henry’s thought processes were… off. Chaotic, as Robert had said. Still, the word resourceful. The phrasing. Henry Shelburne was well-spoken. I didn’t know why that surprised me. A chaotic mind did not mean an ignorant mind.

I said, “What did you mean by we have five minutes?”

Henry lifted his left arm. His parka sleeve was too short. It rode up. He rotated his arm and looked at his wrist, as if demonstrating the concept of telling time. There was no wristwatch on his wrist. His wrist was still stick-thin.

Off, chaotic, confused? Or just making a point? I asked, “What happens in five minutes?”

His left hand began to tremble. The tremor traveled up his arm.

Neurological effect, I assumed, of mercury poisoning. Yeah, he was doing poorly.

He caught me staring and jerked his hand back down to clutch his thigh. He said, “We need to travel.”

“Travel where?”

“You go home. I go back.”

“Back where?”

“Where Robert is waiting.”

I asked, “Where is Robert waiting?”

“Out there.”

“He left his gear behind.”

“He doesn’t need it right now.”

“Why doesn’t he come back in and tell us himself?”

“He wants you to see I am doing well.”

Walter spoke. “You just told us you’re doing poorly.”

Henry Shelburne put his hands to his head. His fingers splayed across his temples. “You need to stop following. From now on. You need to stop looking for… for the black rock. For the black rock. I lost the word.” He closed his eyes. “It’s in the microscope, Henry. Look Henry. And there’s a cross. What is that called? Look it up Henry, look it up Henry. It’s a black rock and there’s a white crystal with a black cross. The cross is beautiful, it’s like a sign to show the way….”

Like a crusade, I thought.

“…it’s called a… what is that?” He drummed his fingers on his temples. “Look it up Henry, it’s…”

“It’s called chiastolite,” I said. “Henry.”

His fingers stilled. He opened his eyes and stared at me. “Yes, it is.”

Walter said, “And the black rock is called hornfels.”

Henry slammed his hands down onto the floor of the tunnel and twisted his body to face Walter full-on. “I know that.”

“Take it easy,” Walter said.

Very slowly, Henry Shelburne pushed himself backward, pushing down on the floor to lever his body up, uncoiling with surprising control, given the tremors in his hands when he’d unloosed them. He stood now at the mouth of the tunnel and he shoved his hands into his parka pockets and gave a little nod in our direction, into the tunnel, a nod that I read to say I’m outta there. I’m free.

And then I thought, watch yourself lady. Don’t read things into Henry Shelburne.

Don’t act as if you know him.

By the time Walter and I had extracted ourselves from our sleeping bags and scuttled up to the entrance of the tunnel there was nothing to see outside but the fog-tricked walls of Shoo Fly Canyon.

We stood shivering, me in my silkies and Walter in his thermals.

“We should consider our options,” Walter said.

“First things first,” I said. “Do we think Henry is armed?”

“My call, it’s possible.”

“I concur. That parka could be hiding a belt holster.”

“In which case,” Walter said, “the question is whether Robert went with him willingly, or at gunpoint.”

“Yeah.”

“Arguing in favor of gunpoint, that would explain why Robert didn’t wake us and tell us he was going.”

I took note that Walter was now referring to our client by first name. Had the gunpoint scenario made it more personal? Sure it had. I said, “On the other hand, if he went willingly, the question is why he didn’t wake us, thank us, tell us to go home and the check will be in the mail.”

“Do you have an answer in mind?”

“Occam’s razor,” I said. “The simplest explanation — he was honoring his brother’s wishes. Henry just made it clear he doesn’t want us to join them. Think it through. Henry shows up — unarmed in my scenario — and wakes his brother. I know I know, he doesn’t like enclosed spaces, but maybe he gathers his courage and just dashes inside. Or maybe he stands at the entrance and calls to Robert.”

“And we slept through that?”

“Evidently we did.”

Walter considered. “And then, Henry waits for us to awaken so he can tell us to go home?”

“I don’t think he waited. He was humming. That woke me up.”

“Meanwhile,” Walter said, “Robert is waiting out there in the canyon. Willingly.”

“In this scenario, yeah. Robert’s achieved his stated goal. He’s reunited with his brother. He can take it from there.”

“Take it where?”

“To the hornfels site, I assume. Assuming that Henry already found it. Which I admit is a large assumption, given the state of his mind and the short time he’s had in the field. Then again, he evidently spends a lot of time in this neighborhood. And, he is an amateur geologist.”

Walter snorted. Amateur.

I was once an amateur geologist and I didn’t do so badly. Then again, I was working under Walter’s tutelage.

“In a nutshell,” Walter said, “we have two scenarios. In the first, Robert left voluntarily. In which case, I would like a formal declaration that he no longer requires our services. In the second scenario, Henry took Robert at gunpoint and presumably secured him somewhere. In which case, our client is potentially at risk.”

“In which case we should call for help.”

“I doubt we have cell service up here.”

I unzipped the grab pocket of my pack and took out my cell phone and slipped on my Crocs and went out of the tunnel and tried. No signal. I returned to Walter and said, “You’re right.”

“We could hike downcanyon until we reach a place where we can make the call. And then we wait for… hours?” Walter grunted. “We don’t have hours to spare. Robert Shelburne may be at risk. Henry Shelburne is a very unstable young man. At risk, himself.”

“Which means we don’t know what we’d be walking into.”

Walter gave me a look. Eyes sharp as quartz. “We have a contract, Cassie. To save a life.”

Actually I wasn’t so clear what page of the contract we were on. The page that said we’re trying to prevent Henry Shelburne from committing suicide? Having finally met the man, I had no idea if he was suicidal. I had no idea if he was homicidal, either. Or which damn scenario — if either — was the right one.

Walter waited. The dance of who goes first.

Contract or no contract, I didn’t see a moral path to walk away from this. But I had a feeling as strong as I have ever had that we would be walking into something we weren’t prepared for. I said, “Okay but we go on alert.”

“Indeed.”

Once decided, we hurried. Wrangled into clothing, into boots. We decided to carry day packs for faster travel. We packed parkas, ponchos, headlamps, first aid kit, trail mix, water, field knives. A geologist should never be without a field knife.

We headed out of Shoo Fly Tunnel.

For the briefest moment we paused. Which way had they gone? Upcanyon, or downcanyon? The most reasonable assumption was that they were heading for the hornfels site and that — judging by the float we’d been following — was upcanyon.

We did as we were trained to do: follow the geology.

13

We headed upcanyon.

We traveled like thieves in the night, mindful of every truck-sized boulder that could hide a man. We scanned the cliff tops. We saw fog-wrapped trees that looked more human than arboreal.

It was not easy hiking.

We followed the creek, on the lookout for scat that would promise a deer trail or bear trail up ahead, but as with yesterday’s hike there was no trail, no path, just the boulders and gravel and the odd patch of fog-slicked clay soil.

Walter slipped on a wet rock, and cursed.

“You okay?”

“Could be worse.”

All right then. We had a name for this trek. It Could Be Worse.

At a promising riffle in the creek, we stopped to sample. I ventured out on a wedge of slick boulders, courting balance, and was rewarded with two pieces of chiastolite hornfels float. A mineral pledge that we were on the right track.

Getting better.

The way grew rockier, spinier, and I jammed my right boot into a crevice and ignited the talus-bruise from yesterday’s hike. Weeks ago, it felt like. The top of my foot throbbed.

But it could be very much worse.

Farther along we came to an incursion into the northeast wall of Shoo Fly Canyon. It was a skinny side canyon, feeding a skinny creek down into our creek. We sampled another few dozen yards up Shoo Fly Creek and determined that the now-familiar hornfels float was no longer to be found. We retreated to the confluence with the side canyon and sampled up that way, and we found our float again, same old same old salt-and-pepper diorite and cross-studded hornfels. We were too skittish to say much in the way of woo-hoo.

We simply nodded at one another and started the hike up Skinny Canyon.

Scanning the cliff tops. Gingerly navigating the rocky banks of the creek. Walking on Shoo Fly eggs.

Same old same old.

Farther up Skinny Creek the float was more abundant, the edges of the hornfels sharper — barely rounded by transport. Not transported far, at all, from the source.

And then the canyon made a little bend and precipitously narrowed, a dozen yards ahead where the rock walls closed in and formed a V-notch.

My heartbeat ramped up. Up there was something new.

A thumb of rock stood at the notch, webbed to the right-hand wall.

We crept forward carefully, quietly, thieves in the night.

We halted at the thumb. Waiting, listening. Straining to hear what, if anything, was occurring beyond that notch. Nothing, it seemed.

We had all the time in the world to take out our hand lenses and glass the thumb to identify the white and black minerals as the constituents of diorite. We turned our attention to the wall and took note that the familiar bands of cherts and metasandstones and gray-green slates had a new member, a lens of darker-gray slate flecked with black spots like an Appaloosa horse.

I considered the rocks. If I were a young intrusive diorite dike and heated my way into the old Shoo Fly Formation, this is what I would look like. If I wanted to cook up some hornfels, this would be my neighborhood. If I wished to include Maltese crosses in my hornfels, I’d roast those carbonaceous spots in the slate.

If I were Henry hunting the family legend, this is what I would see.

Walter grunted. “We’re in fat city.”

“Nearly.”

We’d found the general contact zone but not the hornfels itself. Fat city, perhaps, was on the other side of the notch.

“Then shall we?” Walter moved.

I said, “Wait.”

He stopped.

“Do you smell something?”

It was a faint odor, drifting through the fog, drifting our way, so faint that it took Walter a full minute to acknowledge it.

“Mountain misery,” he finally said.

“And smoke.”

We looked at one another.

I said, “Do you want to continue?”

“Let’s just nip through the notch and see what we can see. And then we can figure out what to do next.”

A sketchy plan. But I did not have a better one.

I followed Walter through the notch.

14

Skinny Canyon opened into a small valley that extended several dozen yards before narrowing at the far end and canyoning upward again. It was a lush valley, thatched with brush and trees, bisected by a creek — our own Skinny Creek — and caged by high walls.

What first caught my attention was a clearing at the far end of the valley. It boasted a rock ring holding timber tented over a brushy pile of kindling. The brush was brown, dried, but nevertheless I identified the crinkled ferny leaves as mountain misery. What else smelled like that?

My nose stung.

The timber smoked. The fire had almost gone out. Despite all logic, I ached to draw near. Add some of that dried kindling, help the fire along. Warm my feet.

Walter whispered, “See anybody?”

No. The fog was capricious, clearing the rock walls but lingering in the trees. I whispered, “I think that’s a tent back there in the trees.”

We waited, watching.

After a time Walter whispered, “Fat city, phooey.”

I turned to him.

He pointed. “It’s hard to see, what with the fog and the bend in the southern rock wall, but there’s a tunnel opening.”

I turned. Peered. Saw it.

“This place,” he said, “has already been mined.”

“So,” I said, “what about abandoned mercury flasks?”

“It’s not out of the question.”

Just great. I expelled a breath and refocused on the tunnel. “Perhaps they’re in the tunnel.”

“Henry hates enclosed spaces,” Walter replied.

“Maybe Robert’s in the tunnel. Maybe that’s why Henry brought him here.”

We waited, watching for Shelburne brothers.

Still, while waiting, I looked over this valley with a treasure-hunter’s eye. I could not deny that this place was as good a candidate as we had yet seen. The diorite thumb was webbed, on this side of the notch, to a full diorite hand that slapped against the southern wall, a wall shot through with spotted slate. There was no visible outcrop of hornfels but it surely had to present a face to the elements to erode off pieces of float. It was perhaps camouflaged in the brush, in the trees.

Equally to the point, these solid rock walls would hold an elevated ancient river channel intact for millenia. Indeed, I thought I could make out a high spur of gravel intersecting the rimrock of the southern wall.

Buried in that hillside, perhaps, was a stretch of the deep blue lead.

I wouldn’t mind seeing that. Had I caught the itch, from Walter? I whispered, “What’d you put in the Chili Mac last night?”

“What?”

“Never mind.” I refocused. “Shall we take a closer look?”

He nodded. We inched forward and achieved a small knob of bald bedrock and got a new angle on Notch Valley, as I decided to name it.

Walter nudged my arm.

I nodded. I saw Henry, in the trees. Not certain how I’d missed him before. Perhaps, three yards back, our field of view had been obscured. More likely it was due to the excellent nature of his camouflage.

Brown cap, brown parka, jeans faded to the color of volcanic breccia. Sitting cross-legged, right hand clutching his thigh. His left hand was not visible.

He was still as stone.

As were we, abruptly fossilized in place.

I thought he hadn’t seen us, which was why I jumped when he called my name.

“Cassie.” His fragile voice carried well enough across the little valley.

Walter whispered, “Answer him.”

I called back, “Henry.”

Like we were friends. He hadn’t called either of us by name, back at Shoo Fly Tunnel. And now he did. Using my first name, at that. Of course he knew our names — Walter had introduced us back at the tunnel — but the use of a name is a familiar thing. Like extending your hand for a shake. And I had now replied in kind. I watched. He did not extend his hand and I guessed that he couldn’t without releasing the tremors, but he could have nodded, cementing the Cassie-Henry relationship. He did nothing. He sat rigid as the trunk of the tree at his back. The harder I stared, the more he seemed to blend in, like a deer in the woods. I knew this game. Hide and seek. I’d played this game with my Henry and the trick was to look but not see, let the quarry reveal himself when he was ready.

And then he replied. “I said don’t follow.” Voice now gone shrill.

I had no idea how to pretend to make friends with this wounded soul.

Walter called, “We’ll leave, Henry, once we’ve had the chance to talk to your brother. Where is he? In the tunnel?”

Henry shifted. His left arm moved. Like he was reaching for something.

“Back up,” Walter hissed, flinging an arm across my chest, and as I stumbled my way backward I swore I saw that something in Henry’s hand, flashing silver.

We backed down off the knob and dropped to our knees.

I waited for the sound of a gunshot.

All I heard was the sound of blood pounding in my ears.

Walter whispered, “We can dash back to the notch but I’m not sure how long we’ll be within his field of view. Crawl, perhaps.”

I whispered, “I’m not crawling.”

Walter’s eyebrows lifted.

Well maybe.

And well we might have but for a new voice sounding down there in Notch Valley.

“Hey Bro,” Robert Shelburne’s voice rang clearly. “No go.”

I relaxed an inch. Robert was now on the scene. Must have been in the tunnel. He sounded fine, cheerful even.

Henry was speaking now, in reply to his brother, voice softened again. A murmur on the breeze.

“I’m on board with you,” Robert said, “but I don’t know what I’m looking at in the tunnel. I’m not qualified. What I do is, I hire qualified people. In fact, I hired two of them. I know you want to go it alone, just me and you, the family thing, but we’re failing here. Let’s get smart. Use our tools. We can go back and get them.”

Henry spoke. Voice loud enough to carry now. “They’re here.”

Silence, and then Robert’s cheerful voice. “No shit?”

“Up there.”

“Then invite them down.”

“I will.”

Robert went silent.

Walter and I looked at one another. There was something off about Henry’s I will, something that silenced Robert and caused Walter to shake his head, something that put me on high alert.

“Whoa,” Robert suddenly said.

There came a sound, the sharp sound of cracking ice, a sound I once heard skiing across a frozen lake, a sound that froze me now in place until another, closer sound caused me and Walter to wrap our arms over our heads.

Something struck the bedrock beside my leg.

I twisted and looked. It was a shard chipped off the bedrock knob.

“Come down here,” Henry yelled and there was nothing fragile about it.

He didn’t give us enough time to respond. He fired his gun again, the ice cracked again, and the bedrock knob chipped on the other side, on Walter’s side this time.

My heart slammed. I whispered, “Were those good shots or bad shots?”

“Good shots,” Walter said.

Henry fired a third time and this time he chipped the center of the knob and I wanted to yell stop shooting up the geology but I was shaking too hard to get the words out.

There was a micro-moment in which Walter and I considered our options, glancing at the path back to the notch, trying to do the geometry of angles of fire, and then Robert yelled at us, “He’s coming up.”

I nodded and Walter yelled, “Henry we’ll come down once you say you won’t shoot.”

“I won’t,” Henry called, “once you come down.”

Walter pushed up to his knees and I followed suit, thinking I sure hope we’re all clear on the timing of coming down and not shooting but once we were standing and I had a line of sight down into the valley my fears eased, slightly.

Henry stood watching, his gun barrel pointed groundward. He gripped the weapon with both hands and I guessed that was to counteract the tremors or maybe it was a sharp-shooting style but it looked for all the world like he’d had to wrestle the gun out of firing position.

Henry had shed his parka. He wore a brown long-sleeve shirt tucked into his jeans. He wore a belt holster.

Robert stood a few yards behind Henry. He was making no move to tackle his brother.

Walter and I came down off the knob to join the Shelburne brothers.

It wasn’t an Old West six-shooter in Henry’s hand. It was a modern-day Glock, carried by cops everywhere or at least at the crime scenes I’d worked. Henry’s Glock was matte black except for the slide, the metal there silvered where the finish had worn off, which left me thinking Henry Shelburne handles this gun a lot. Or maybe Henry ‘Quicksilver’ Shelburne had sanded the finish down to silver on purpose.

He still gripped the gun with both hands. He pointed it somewhere in the neighborhood of our six legs.

Robert, Walter, and I stood side-by-side in a lineup in front of the tunnel.

Henry spoke to Walter. “I am hiring you.”

Walter said, gently, “We prefer not to work at gunpoint.”

“It’s just in case.”

“In case of what, son?”

“Just in case. Just in case.”

Walter said, more gently, “All right.”

Henry raised his hands, and the Glock. His hands shook. The gun oscillated. “A geologist needs to go in.”

“Cassie will go,” Walter said promptly.

I got it. Henry didn’t know that Walter was the expert on the auriferous channels, Henry just knew we’d been hired to get his brother here. And given that we’d followed the float and found our way, I guessed Henry got that right. By now, either one of us would do. And Walter delegated me. I got it. He’ll stay outside with crazy Henry while I get to go on the treasure hunt. He thought he was protecting me. He always has. When I was a kid assisting in his lab and he took me to my first crime scene, he bought me a whistle in case we got separated. All these years later and now we’re doing the tricky dance of who is protecting whom. Vigilance is in his DNA. It’s tattooed on his soul.

There’s a man with a gun. And Walter is stepping up.

I stole a glance at Robert. He stood rigid, watching his brother. Not overtly afraid but then I’d not seen Robert Shelburne show fear. I did not know how he would exhibit fear.

I refocused on Henry. He looked a little lost, as if he’d come out of hiding too soon. His face was more weathered than the teenager in the photo but the Sherpa wool cap now cupping his head made him look young again. Still, he did not have teenage Henry’s cool squint. His eyes were reddened, blinking. Lack of sleep, trying to get a wet fire going, crying, who knew? His nose was pinkish, sunburned, peeling. I guessed the weather had been clear and sunny before we joined the hunt, although I wondered why an experienced outdoorsman like Henry Shelburne had not used sunscreen. His peeling nose — like the preposterous earflaps — made him look like a kid. I ignored that.

Robert Shelburne’s kid brother. Not mine.

Henry let go of the gun with his right hand and lifted it, gesturing at the tunnel.

I stared at his hand. The palm was pink, peeling, and I got a sick understanding that we weren’t talking sunburn here. Jesus Henry, what have you been into?

Robert suddenly lunged.

Quick as a snake strike, Henry had both hands on the Glock, had the gun aimed at his brother’s head.

Robert raised his own hands. “Chill Bro.”

I said quickly,“I’m going in.”

Henry pulled his arms into his chest, bracing his elbows, steadying his aim. “Thank you.”

Cautiously, I answered, “You’re welcome.”

And so now it became my show. I assumed I didn’t need a gas detector, or Robert would not have emerged from the tunnel alive. I started for the tunnel. Henry stopped me. Told me to leave behind my pack. Told me to take only my tools. Told me to bring him a sample. I rummaged in my pack and got the field kit and headlamp, fitted the headband, and started once more for the tunnel.

As I passed into the mouth I heard Henry call to me, “Go all the way.”

15

All the way where?

The tunnel was black as a catacomb.

I snapped on my headlamp and the bedrock lit up. Bedrock walls, bedrock ceiling, bedrock floor, a sturdy incursion into the mountainside, a strong tunnel that needed no timbering, a tunnel with drill holes in the ceiling to ventilate, the only sort of tunnel I felt remotely comfortable traversing. When my eyes had adjusted and my nerves settled, I identified the bedrock as metamorphic slate.

As far ahead as I could see, the tunnel ran straight.

Perhaps somewhere farther ahead there were side branches, offshoots, whatever it was they were called in a mine, a term Walter would know. But Walter was outside facing a Glock and counting on me to return with something shiny and pretty to satisfy Henry. A nice nugget. Sure thing.

All I need do was go all the way, wherever that way led me.

I was breathing more rapidly, leg muscles working a little harder, and I realized that the tunnel was angling upward. I assumed the tunnel-builders had done that on purpose so that any water that seeped in through the rock would drain out.

Good idea.

My body settled into a rhythm, releasing my mind to dwell on the question at hand.

How did Henry know where all the way led? He didn’t like enclosed spaces. And how would he know how far I went?

And, further, what did he expect me to find?

Quite clearly this tunnel was working its way into the hillside toward the buried river channel whose upper gravel reaches I had glimpsed on the ridge top. Clever, those miners. If you can’t hose out a mountain to get to the gold, tunnel your way. One way or another they’d found the way. One way or another those ancient Eocene river channels had condemned this countryside to an extreme makeover.

And that bugged me, because it should have bugged Henry.

Presumably he wasn’t looking for hosed-out mine pits or well-tunneled hills. Presumably he was looking for a site lost since his grandfather’s time, a site that nobody but nobody had since seen. Was he not disappointed to find that Notch Valley had already been mined? Walter sure was. And Henry, I thought, should have been beyond disappointed. Should have been devastated.

Another failure for Quicksilver.

So why was he so anxious to have me go into this well-tunneled hill? If there was something legend-worthy in here, it would already have been found.

Poor Henry.

Henry with his peeling pink palms gripping the black and silver Glock.

My sympathy evaporated.

Several hundred feet into the tunnel, the walls abruptly changed.

The bedrock was now overlain by gravel. I played my light upon the stuff. It was mostly quartz and slate, cemented in clay and sand. I ran my fingers along the rough face.

I had entered the lost river channel.

There were pebbles and cobbles and even a few boulders — the well-rounded rocks of milky quartz that were legend in and of themselves, the defining characteristic of the blue lead, carried by long-ago rivers, carried to this place. Here right now.

I lost my bearings.

For a moment I forgot that I’d been sent in here. For a moment it seemed I’d chosen this hunt.

The tunnel drifted into a bend.

I halted and stared at the wall. Gravel sitting upon bedrock. Gravel the basal layer of the ancient channel. The basal layer being the deep blue lead.

Only, it wasn’t blue.

It was reddish, the iron pyrite in the clay oxidized.

I set my field kit on the floor, fumbled it open, and grabbed the hammer and chisel. Aiming my headlamp at the wall, I went to work on the cemented gravel, gouging my way through to the virgin blue.

And then I had to stop and stare.

It was blue as the wings of a jay.

Something like a fever took hold of me. Right here in front of my nose was the deep blue lead. I’d listened to Walter and Robert Shelburne rhapsodize about it, I’d read up on it myself, I’d contemplated the geology of it, but right now what made my pulse pound was the sheer reality of it, and I had to admit that I felt a thrill. If I had to name the feeling perhaps I’d call it romance.

Walter should see this.

And then I regained my senses. Legend-worthy to Walter, yes, but to Henry Shelburne? I recalled what Robert had told us, back at the lab, back when he was spinning the legend of the deep blue lead. He’d said Henry was hunting not only gold but something more fundamental. And since Henry had been hunting his entire adult life, could he not have encountered the blue somewhere, sometime? Hacked into some forgotten gravel outcrop? Maybe. As long as it wasn’t buried in a mining tunnel. In any case, this patch of the blue lead was not the patch he sought.

To be certain, I took my hand lens and had a twenty-power look. Nope, no visible gold. There was no visible treasure here. Perhaps there was microscopic gold somewhere within this seam but surely what was economically recoverable had already been recovered. There was certainly no diorite dike, no cross-studded hornfels sheath, no intrusion acting as a giant riffle, entrapping a secret pocket of gold.

The bedrock here was unviolated.

Nevertheless, I picked up the chunk of gravel ore I’d gouged out and put it in my field kit. Better to return with something than nothing at all.

And perhaps there was something worth seeing around the tunnel bend.

Go all the way.

I wondered, again, if Henry knew where all the way led.

The tunnel was bending like a U, and there now appeared on the bedrock floor the broken remains of iron tracks. I understood. The miners had not hauled the gravel out in backpacks. They’d used rail cars.

The tunnel now straightened into the second leg of the U. The tracks continued as far as my light could penetrate.

I continued, as well, following that deep blue lead.

Even oxidized, even rusty reddish brown, it held my attention.

Within a few dozen yards, the gravel receded. Within a couple dozen more yards, the walls were pure bedrock. And then up ahead I saw the faint glow of daylight.

Another exit.

Now what?

I thought it over. I found that I knew two things.

First, Henry had been camped in Notch Valley, perhaps for a couple of days. Henry would have had time to crawl all over this place and would have found this second tunnel mouth. Which meant he already knew what was out there.

Second, what was out there could not be what he sought. What he sought must be in here, or so he must believe. Otherwise, why send his brother into the tunnel searching? Why send me? At gunpoint, no less.

I took in a deep tunnel breath. It tasted like stone.

Okay. I knew one more thing.

Third, I knew that Henry Shelburne was not going to shoot Walter, while they waited. There was no possible need. Walter was not hot-headed enough to go for the gun. Walter was Henry’s insurance, guaranteeing my cooperation.

I exhaled, in a hiss.

I had not yet gone all the way.

It could not be more than a couple dozen yards to the exit.

I stepped out of the tunnel into silvery light. While I’d been underground the sun had begun to burn through the fog. The sky was now a thin pearl shell, ready to crack. Aching for warmth, waiting for the pearly light to penetrate my skin, I took in the lay of the land.

The tunnel opened onto another slim canyon, thickly vegetated. I stood on one side of the canyon and opposite me the wall rose to a high ridge. This canyon’s slim floor angled downhill in a steep incline and put me in mind of an unrolling carpet.

Other than the works of nature, this place was all business.

The rail tracks exited the tunnel at the high end of the canyon. The tracks fed into the skeleton of a building that held the rusted guts of some sort of machinery. Walter would know the name, would know the mechanism, but I hazarded a guess that the cemented gravel had gotten crushed in there. Running downhill was a long ditch littered with boulders and cobbles and pebbles — a sluiceway, artery of the gold country. I could see its bones surviving here and there, stretches of wood planking forming the walls and huge riffle blocks crisscrossed along the bottom, stepping downhill in the gut of the sluice box. At the head of the sluice, just uphill from me, sagged a rusting metal tank. Quite clearly it was a water tank, to store the water to hose the crushed gravel down the sluice. To free the gold. I had certainly gotten the hang of sluicing.

It appeared that this slim canyon might feed into Notch Valley, which, if I had my bearings straight, was downhill from here.

I ventured farther outside to see what I could see.

What I now saw was another building of sorts, more a bunker nestled into the side of the hill, just uphill of the tunnel. Its door was rust-patched iron, secured by a heavy iron latch with a heavy iron padlock.

The latch hung open, the padlock unhooked.

How far was I supposed to proceed? All the way in there?

I went to the door and knocked, calling out hello, feeling monumentally foolish.

No answer. No surprise.

There was nothing for it but to have a quick look inside. I grasped the iron handle and pulled the door open. Daylight streamed in but nevertheless it took a moment for my eyes to adjust, to penetrate the gloom inside. No need to step in. From the doorway I could ID this room as a storage space. It was cluttered with equipment, stuff jammed in so tight that I could not tell the armature of one from the leg of another. Some stuff quickly recognizable: shovels, a wheelbarrow, buckets. Other stuff Walter could name. All of it in a state of rust and disrepair, dense with history. A maze of a pathway wound through the room.

And then my attention shifted to the shelves carved into the bedrock walls. Half a dozen mercury flasks sat on one thick shelf.

I felt a sudden relief.

Only half a dozen. I had expected more. I had expected a shitload.

That is, if this was where Henry had obtained the flask he took to the river, where his father died.

So was this the place? The door latch was open, the padlock unlocked. He didn’t like enclosed spaces but with the light streaming in, surely he could have brought himself the few steps necessary to take one of those bottles off the shelf.

And then rent a horse or lash it to a backpack and transport it. And then open the flask and dump it.

Jesus Henry.

I envisioned his peeling nose, peeling palms, pink skin, some sort of rash. Contact dermatitis? Hyper-sensitive, surely, from a lifetime of messing around with mercury, dancing with the vapors.

I backed out of the doorway and shoved the damn door shut.

Henry Shelburne’s mania was not my problem.

His Glock was my problem.

I turned my back on the bunker, spinning around to return to the others and give Henry what I’d found, a chunk of the deep blue freaking lead, and pray that satisfied him.

Rather than retrace my journey through the tunnel I decided to go downhill and take what I judged a shortcut.

As I moved, something at the base of the opposite hillside caught my eye. It was a bald spot in the vegetation where black rock cropped out. In this pearly light I thought I detected a wink of mica and quartz. My heart jumped. This was it, right? This was the door to fat city.

I charged across the little canyon, using the wooden riffle blocks in the ditch as steppingstones, and put my hand lens on the outcrop. It took no time at all to identify the rock as flinty hornfels. It took a little more time to locate the squared crystal faces speckling the rock. In some faces the carbon inclusions were muddied, unfinished. In some faces the carbon formed crosses so distinct it looked like they’d been drawn with a pencil.

I fingered a perfect specimen, a flared Maltese cross that suggested obsession, crusade.

If I were Henry I would take a hammer and chisel and pop that talisman out.

But I wasn’t Henry and I decided not to take the time or invest the effort to hack off a sample. If he’d explored this canyon, surely he found the outcrop. And if he had, I cursed him. He could have steered me here to begin with. But I got it. I knew why he’d sent me into the tunnel. If he’d found the hornfels, he’d have filled in the rest of the story.

By now, so could I.

This hornfels was formed a long time ago when magma had punched into an ancient river channel. Subsequently — still a long time ago — during a period of uplift, that intersection got exposed and eroded. And the auriferous gravels mixed with broken-off chips of hornfels, and in the due course of time and travel downstream, the stuff got re-cemented by river sand and clay. And chunks of that conglomerate got scattered hither, thither, and yon.

And that was the source of the chunk of ore Robert Shelburne brought to our lab.

I pictured Henry standing here, telling himself the story. Yesterday? Day before? And then in a fever hunting around for that magical junction, that giant hornfels riffle in the old blue lead, that collector of gold.

Reburied, over the course of the years. Volcanic eruption, landslide, who knew?

Perhaps buried right here in this slim canyon, or in the hillside before me, or somewhere in the tunneled hillside behind me.

Perhaps right beneath our feet.

Right Henry? How’s it feel? To be so near, and yet so far. You can’t just haul a water cannon up here and hose away the mountain.

So you look to the likely. To the drift tunnels.

You can’t go in there yourself. Your brother disappoints. So you send me in, in hopes that the junction has been breached, in there. Tough luck Henry. It wasn’t. Although it’s quite likely to be around here somewhere.

I shrugged.

Not my problem.

I turned to go.

There was a path on the tunnel side of the sluiceway, an access route I guessed, reinforced with occasional rock steps. I crossed the ditch and took the miners’ route down.

As I descended, all thoughts of cross-studded rocks and ancient gold went by the wayside.

I saw smoke.

16

At the bottom of the sluiceway the land leveled out.

I was back in Notch Valley.

Several yards beyond was the campfire ring. Sitting around the campfire were the three men I’d left at the main tunnel entrance. Robert and Walter sat side by side on a log on one side of the ring. Henry sat on a low boulder on the other side. Around his waist he wore a belt bag, which pouched next to the holster. His Glock hand rested on the belt bag.

The little fire struggled.

As he watched me approach, Henry picked up a ferny spray of dried mountain misery and tossed it onto the embers and the fire leapt to life and Henry explained in his fragile soulless voice, “The odor repels insects.”

Holy hell it was some kind of bizarre camp-out.

Henry nodded at an unoccupied boulder and I came over and took a seat. So chilled that I hunched toward the fire and held out my hands.

My eyes caught Walter’s eyes and I read caution there.

Henry watched me intently, the way a kid who’s built a campfire in the woods waits for Mom’s approval. Mom nodded, cautious. Good work, Henry. Now let’s go home and by the way you’re grounded for life.

Henry spoke. “What did you find?”

I cast about. Where to begin?

He said, “You came all the way.”

“How did you…?”

Walter cut in. “We heard you.”

Oh yeah. Back up at the bunker. Knocking at the door. Shouting hello.

“What did you find?” Henry repeated.

I swallowed. Whatever I said in answer was going to have consequence.

“What did you find?” he said again, Henry the fixated kid who keeps on asking asking asking…

Be very careful, lady. You’ve got to give him something.

As I hesitated I noticed Robert’s keen attention. Nearly as keen as his brother, it seemed, to learn if I’d found something worthy in the tunnel.

What could I say? The gravel was not blooming gold. The miners had stopped, given up, run out of money to cover the costs. All I’d found in there was the ancient bearer of treasure — the deep blue lead. Henry awaited my answer. I thought, it’s deeply risky to bullshit this life-long seeker of legends. Very slowly, very carefully, I put my field kit on the ground and opened it. I withdrew the chunk of cemented gravel that I’d hacked free.

I held it up so that all three men could see it.

In the pearly light the rock face looked blue-gray, like the face of an ice crevasse. For a flash I thought I saw Walter respond, thought I glimpsed the Dogtown boy who fell in love with painted nuggets and grew up to thrill to the geology of the deep blue lead. But Walter just jerked a shoulder in the direction of Henry and the gun, and gave me a look. Focus, dear.

Henry focused. He was examining the rock with a disciple’s concentration. His face twitched, like a fly had buzzed him. Shoo fly. His hands began to shake. The gun bobbed on his knees. He said, “Please give it to me.”

I could not reach him. I’d have to stand and take three steps to hand the rock to him. I thought that over.

“Please bring it to me, Cathy.”

“It’s Cassie,” I said. Like that mattered.

“Cassie Cassie Cassie Cassie.” He nodded to himself. “Cassie.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Robert and Walter on alert. Waiting for something? Waiting for me. I leaned forward and tossed the rock to Henry. It landed behind him.

He did not turn to look. His hands steadied on the gun. “Only a child falls for that trick.”

“It wasn’t a…”

“I’m not your brother Henry.”

I twitched. Hard. Like I’d been punched.

“My brother told me about your brother who died. We have the same name. It’s only a name, Cathy.”

“Cassie,” I said, automatically.

“I have trouble with names,” he said.

So the fuck did I.

Still having trouble with Henrys. It was more than a name that linked the two Henrys, it was the fragility of a boy with hemophilia and a man with mercury poisoning, and it was guilt, Robert’s guilt about his brother and my guilt about my brother, and isn’t that a kicker that guilt trumps logic every time?

Oh boy, get a grip Cathy.

I watched Henry’s hands on the Glock. Shaking again. One twitch and his finger trips the trigger and then he shoots his brother. Or Walter. Or me. Accidentally, on purpose, doesn’t matter, shot is shot.

He said, “How did your brother…”

“Accident,” I snapped.

“What more did you find?”

Short attention span, Henry? My mind raced. I gave him the only thing I had. I jerked a thumb, pointing uphill. “I found an outcrop of chiastolite hornfels.”

“Is that all?”

Well that answered that. He’d already seen it. And it wasn’t enough. Okay then, I’d make it enough. “Somewhere around here, Henry, you’ve got hornfels intersecting an auriferous channel. Maybe near the existing tunnel, maybe a deeper or parallel channel. Maybe somewhere out here.”

Henry listened.

Walter jumped in. “That’s right, Henry. The channels were laid down in different ages. You can have later channels intersecting earlier channels, channels occupying different positions laterally as well as in elevation — all in the same general area. You understand the geology, son?”

Henry shifted his fevered gaze to Walter. “Not like you do.”

“Nevertheless, you’ve had a couple of days to look around.”

Henry said, “A couple of weeks.”

A couple of weeks?

Walter and I exchanged a look. Had we misremembered Robert’s story, back at the lab? I could have sworn Robert had told us that his father died a month ago, and then a week later he and Henry got together to go through their father’s things. Which was when they’d found the ore specimen in the attic. And then — two-plus weeks after that—Henry had gone off hunting, leaving the so-called suicide note.

Robert had not said what Henry was doing in those two-plus weeks in between finding the rock and setting out to find the source.

Shit.

Robert gaped at his brother. Surprised as we were.

Henry stared back.

“Hey Bro,” Robert said, finding his voice. “What the hell?”

“What the hell,” Henry echoed.

“You want me to put two and two together?” Robert looked at the sky, looked at the ground, taking the time to do the math, struggling to catch up. And then he faced his brother. “Well shit, Henry, looks like that equals four. You went looking for the source right after we found the rock. Right? And you found it. You found this place. You spent a couple of weeks at it. And then three days ago you went home and left me a note and half the rock and then you took off again. You left me clues and expected me to follow.”

“You followed,” Henry said.

“Damn straight I did.”

“You found me.”

“How could I miss? I read you loud and clear. Found the bandana on the hike in. Smelled the mountain misery — you build a little campfire up top? I assume kicking the rocks over the edge was an accident. And then down in the pit, I found the dime. I played it out. And then that flask in the river. I understand. It’s all cool, Henry. I’m here now. I’m listening to you.”

“And I’m listening to you,” Henry said.

I thought, this is isn’t going anywhere good.

“Why didn’t you just talk to me, Henry? That day in Dad’s attic. We could have talked.”

“No we could not.”

“Meaning what? We need to play games to talk?”

“That’s how we roll.”

Robert gave a short laugh, a bark. “Where’d you pick up that phrase?”

“From the movies.”

“It’s a little cliched. I wouldn’t use it if I were you.”

“How should I talk, R?”

“R?”

“You call me Bro, I call you R. It’s cool.”

“You’re playing games with my head, Henry.”

“That’s right.”

“So what’s this game called? Bro.”

“It needs a name.”

“How about brothers?” Robert said.

“That’s good.”

“How does it start?”

“You apologize.”

‘No problem,” Robert said. “I apologize.”

“Do you know for what?”

Robert said, “For whatever I did to offend you.”

Henry’s hands began to shake. He shook out his arms, gun bobbing in his clenched fists like a jackhammer. He pressed his hands back onto his knees and steadied himself. Steadied the gun. He repeated, “Do you know for what?”

“I just said I…” Robert lifted his own hands, spread them wide. “Sure, I know. For being a bully of a big brother. All the times I put you down.”

“That’s when we were kids.”

“I don’t recall being a shithead to you as an adult.”

“Do you know for what?”

Robert said softly, “Not just being a bully. Enabling you to mess around with the mercury. I’m truly sorry Henry.”

“That’s when we were kids.”

Robert blinked. “Then I don’t know what you want me to apologize for.”

“Think.”

“If I was a shithead as an adult, I apologize for that too. We good?”

Henry didn’t answer.

“Henry,” I blurted, “your brother came to us to help you.”

Henry turned to me. “Thank you Cathy.”

And then he looked beyond me, beyond us all, to the hillside that bordered the mine works canyon.

17

I looked where Henry was looking. Thinking, what’s over there?

I’d come down that way, following the sluiceway path down the slim canyon from the mine works — albeit on the opposite side of the sluiceway. Seems that canyon now deserved a name. Sluiceway Canyon. Up top, I’d found the hornfels. Down here, in Notch Valley, the hillside met the high southern wall that caged the valley and rose to a ridge far up above.

I stared hard but could discern nothing remarkable about that hillside.

Henry stood and, with his gun, urged us to stand.

It seemed we were going to find out what was over there.

He steered us to the bottom of the sluiceway where the climb upcanyon began. This was the side without an established path, and the ground was rough. We carefully hiked a short distance and then Henry turned us to walk toward the hillside. We halted just short of it. The footing was uneven, the slope gradient noticeable.

We stood in a line, ducks in a row, me at the uphill end, Henry at the downhill end, with a fine position in which to cover us with his gun.

I examined the hillside. Now that I was facing it straight-on, I saw that its gravelly face appeared to have been eroded, perhaps by a hidden spring, some long-ago finger of flowing water. Indeed, a shallow trough ran out of the cavity and cut the slope between Walter and Robert. The cavity itself looked to be about twenty feet deep and twenty wide and ran a good twenty feet high. It was nearly overgrown by vegetation. It looked like a grotto. It looked like a good place to hide.

It looked, actually, like the miners had claimed it as a storage space. Old timber was piled in there, castoffs from the sluiceway.

Robert spoke. “Got a pile of dimes in there, Henry?”

“No.”

I shifted. What, then? Not certain I wanted to know.

“It’s under that… That…” Henry frowned.

“Bracken,” Walter said.

“Bracken,” Henry repeated.

I didn’t know if this was another word Henry had forgotten or if he simply didn’t know the proper name. I would have just said fern. Tufted ferns sprouted in crevices on the back wall of the grotto. It was a day for ferns, lacy mountain misery and spreading bracken and I could live happily for the rest of the day without encountering another variety of ferns.

“Look under the bracken,” Henry said. He added, “R.”

Robert didn’t move.

Henry adjusted the aim of his Glock so that his brother was squarely in his sights.

Robert Shelburne gave a shrug, as if he had no real worries — no expectation, certainly, of finding anything of note in there under the cover of the ferns. Gold nugget, snake, turkey baster. Whatever. Robert strolled over to the grotto and stepped inside.

“Push the bracken out of the way, R.”

The bracken was about chest-level. Robert yanked a fistful of ferns clean out of their crevice. For a long moment he looked at what he’d uncovered, and then he turned to face us. Uprooted ferns in his fingers. “What’s up with that, Henry?”

I angled for a look but I could not see what Robert had found.

“Move out of the way,” Henry said.

Robert gave a tight smile and stepped aside.

I didn’t understand the meaning of what I saw. Sticking out of the hillside at the back of the grotto was a length of rusted pipe. A spigot was fitted to the end of the pipe. It looked for all the world like a tap in a garden wall for a hose. Given the lush vegetation, I wondered if it was indeed a water source tapped into a fracture spring in the hillside.

I said, to Henry, “Is it for water?”

“Turn it on.”

Actually, I didn’t really care to do that.

“It won’t bite, Cassie.”

Robert stood very still, very quiet.

Walter said, “I’ll do it.”

Henry leveled the gun at me. “Cassie asked first.”

I moved stiffly to the grotto, trying not to stare at the garden hose bib, instead scanning the walls and the floor, getting the lay of the land. It was like a roomy walk-in closet. Make that a roomy tool shed. Splintery sluice box planks and riffle blocks were stacked against the back wall and an overturned metal bucket lay in a corner. The walls sprouted bracken, brush, greenery I could not name. There was no ‘roof’ to speak of. The cavity simply chimneyed up until it became flush with the face of the hillside. The floor was bedrock — the Shoo Fly Formation, I noted, including the now familiar spotted slate. In the middle of the bedrock the floor was gouged, like a water-eroded pothole in bedrock exposed to the elements. I stepped down into the pothole. It was a couple of feet deep. I scuffed a boot across the rock. It was rough, not erosion-smooth. I wondered if it had been manually gouged. I stepped out and moved to the spigot. My homey comparisons died. I evaluated my task. The pipe extended maybe ten feet out of the compacted gravel wall. It was supported by a brace, a metal stand driven into the bedrock at the edge of the pothole. The pipe was rusted. The spigot at the end of the pipe was rusted. Perhaps it would not turn. I’ve tried that before — straining to open a corroding faucet. Might need a stronger hand here than mine. How about Robert’s? I recalled his hands gripping the sluice box back at the pit when he’d seen the dimes. Big strong hands. I glanced over my shoulder. Robert’s face was white, pinched. As was Walter’s. Henry’s face was pink with the cold. With the poison. He gave me a nod. I turned back to the spigot and I feared that this was not a water source. I gripped the handle. Praying it was rusted shut. Prayer went unanswered. The spigot turned. I let go like it had come alive.

Liquid metal began to flow. Thin as a necklace.

Holy hell.

“Open it all the way,” Henry said.

I twisted the handle. All the way.

I should have retreated then. Instead, I stood rooted. I grew a little dizzy, the way you grow a little dizzy standing on the edge of a cliff staring down at the sea. You know you should back up. Instead, a primitive part of you wants to jump.

A primitive part of me wanted to reach out and catch the flow.

Not smart, although in this cold air there was little risk of the quicksilver giving off vapor. Still, the flow was thicker now, more like a snake, and it poured into the pothole.

So that’s what that pothole’s for, I thought.

“Cassie Cassie Cassie,” Henry said. “Move out of the way.”

Yeah.

I turned and headed back to my place in line. As Robert and Walter gained the view into the grotto, their faces mirrored mine. Mesmerized. Spooked.

Robert found his voice. “Did you do that, Henry?”

“It was here.”

“How’d you find it?” I asked.

“In the supply room.” He pointed. “There’s a… There’s a… It shows where things are.”

A diagram. I looked up Sluiceway Canyon, up where the bunker was, the room with the old mining equipment, the room with the flasks. I looked back to the grotto, to the spigot. “So where’s the mercury coming from?”

Walter glanced up to ridge above the grotto. “Was there mining up there?”

“Everywhere,” Henry said.

I got it. Mercury loss, from the sluices. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of the stuff, over the years. And mercury being so very heavy, it leached down through the soils. The soils were saturated. And the miners came across the seepage and drove the pipe into the hillside to capture the free supply. And it’s still there today. But in that case the stuff would still be oozing out of the hillside. I didn’t quite get it. I said, “Hillside’s not oozing mercury.”

“Sequestration,” Walter said. His place in line bordered the trough. He stepped down into it, scrutinizing it, no doubt running the hidden spring scenario. He looked up and scanned the entire hillside, examining the terrain with that look he gets in the lab when he’s considering the provenance of a chunk of evidence on his workbench. “Most plausibly, the mercury has sunk down to an impermeable bedrock layer and collected there. A basin of sorts within the hillside.”

I nodded. “Makes sense.”

Henry said, “What do you think, R?”

“Why ask me?” Robert said, cautious. “I’m no expert.”

“You sounded like one. That day on the Yuba.”

We went silent. So stone silent that I swore I could hear the hiss of the mercury straining through the spigot.

I took a few steps upslope, angling for a better look into the grotto, to judge the size of the growing pool. It came nowhere near to filling the pothole. But still, it grew. The silver snake kept sliding out, the pool kept swelling. It was like watching a faucet left running in the kitchen sink, and the person who left it running didn’t notice the sink beginning to fill. I noticed. I’d left it running. My hands went slick with sudden sweat, with the need to turn off the damn spigot.

Robert finally spoke. “You want to help me out here, Henry? What day on the Yuba?”

“The day I saw you and Cam.”

Robert stiffened.

“Who is Cam?” Walter asked.

“Camden,” Robert said, tightly. “Our father.”

My attention snapped fully to the Shelburne brothers.

“You were there together,” Henry said. “I saw you. You sampled the water.”

I went cold. The steel clip, the wide-mouth water bottle. Robert sampled the water. With his father. What day on the Yuba?

Henry said, “I overheard you, R. That’s how I found out you and Cam went partners.”

“Wait wait wait just a goddamn minute,” Robert said. “Are we talking about a company Dad and I had going? What’s that got to do with anything? That’s something Dad came to me about, that was a deal I helped Dad put together, that’s a technology he came up with, that was business, that was…”

“That was my idea,” Henry said.

I went colder.

“Hang on.” Robert put up his palms. “I’m blindsided here. I had no idea. And it’s a great idea, Henry. Christ, you of all people would know what needs to be done. You’ve lived the stuff. And Dad, okay, you knew he had the mechanical skills.” Robert dropped his hands. “He didn’t tell you he came to me for financing, did he?”

“No.”

Robert shook his head. “Camden Shelburne’s game. Play one brother off the other.”

Henry was silent.

“I apologize,” Robert said.

“Do you know for what?”

“For doing business with Dad behind your back.”

“You need to go into the quicksilver now,” Henry said.

I thought, fiercely, it’s symbolic. You’d float, not drown. I wondered how long the mercury would continue to snake out of the spigot. That depended on whatever the hell the pipe tapped into. That basin. However big that basin was. I looked at Walter, who was scrutinizing the grotto, face set in severe concentration.

Robert Shelburne simply turned his back on the grotto. He fully faced his brother. He took off his parka and dropped it on the ground.

“What are you doing?” Henry asked.

Robert didn’t answer. He pulled off the next layer, a fleece sweatshirt. Dropped it on the ground. He was stripped down to his green Club One Fitness T-shirt.

“You don’t need to do that,” Henry said. “Clothes don’t get wet in quicksilver.”

Robert lifted the green shirt.

Walter shot me a warning look but there was no need. I wasn’t going to speak, move, do anything at all. It was all I could do to stifle my sudden hope. I’d forgotten that Robert was wearing his brother’s belt. I stared at the big silver belt buckle with the curlicue lettering. Back at the lab, his display of the Quicksilver buckle was sure effective, sure worked on Walter and me. Sure got us to the contract-signing.

I watched Henry, wondering if it was working on him.

Henry’s face was closed. Unreadable.

“Our father had the heart of a snake,” Robert said. “It’s just us now, Henry. Look, I’m wearing your belt. I’ll take on every burden of Quicksilver.”

Henry was silent.

“Or, you want me to take it off?” Robert began to unbuckle the belt.

“Keep it on,” Henry said. “It won’t get wet.”

18

Robert Shelburne stood at the mouth of the grotto.

His hands were on his hips. His green fitness T-shirt showed bare arms, muscles flexed. He looked ready to run. Or fight.

“I don’t want to shoot,” Henry said.

Robert said, over his shoulder, “You don’t need to.” He went in.

He skirted the pothole, hugging the south wall, leaving us a view of the works, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the flowing mercury. He tipped his head to follow the flow, down to the pool.

I tried to estimate how much mercury had accumulated. If that had been water it would drown a small animal. But it was liquid metal. Thirteen times denser than water. A small animal would float. A large animal would float. A full-grown man would float, buoyant as a cork.

Robert Shelburne was examining the pool as if doing his own calculations.

I glanced at Walter. He was frowning deeply. Watching the scene in the grotto. And then again breaking his focus to take a slow survey of the lay of the land. I figured my partner was estimating distances, angles of fire, places to take shelter. I assumed he was concocting a scenario in which Henry’s attention faltered long enough for us to flee. That seemed unlikely. Further, that didn’t sit too well with me. Flee and leave Robert at risk? Go get help? That would take hours.

“Sit,” Henry called to his brother.

Robert Shelburne did not have hours.

I watched him work up his nerve. He stamped his feet, one and then the other, like a guy preparing to wade into an icy river. And then he stepped down into the quicksilver pool.

The liquid lapped his thick-soled Asolo boots. The stuff was so dense it pushed them back, his feet could get no traction. His body revolved trying to maintain its balance but every little move popped a foot out of the mercury, skittering for purchase, and then abruptly he gave it up and folded heavily down into the pool in a cross-legged sit.

Not into the pool. Onto the pool.

He put out his hands to brace himself on the surface and then snatched them away from the liquid.

Don’t worry, I would have said — if he was asking — liquid mercury is very poorly absorbed through the skin and you could probably sit naked on there all day and take in only point oh-oh something percent if I recalled correctly from Chem 101.

He found his balance. He sat very still. He folded his hands in his lap. He sat there like a Buddha on a lotus. For a moment he wore a childlike look of wonder and then he flashed us a fucking grin. “Game on, Bro.”

I shook my head. Some kind of inbred Shelburne bravado or venture-capital training — who knew but he had adjusted his game. Stakes rise? Man up.

“Kinda cold in here,” Robert said. “This shit’s cold.”

Henry’s hands began to shake. He jammed his elbows into his flanks and steadied himself.

Robert said, “We still playing the same game? Where I’m supposed to guess what to apologize for?”

Henry nodded.

“Give me a hint. Give me something I can work with.”

“At the river,” Henry whispered. Voice softer than ever, breakable.

“Little louder, Bro.”

“At the river.” Loud enough to make Robert flinch. “At the river,” Henry said a third time, “when I heard you and Cam talk about your company.”

“Yeah?”

“Cam said, what if Henry finds out? Maybe we should bring Henry in.”

“Yeah?” Robert said, voice tightening.

“What did you say to that, R?”

“Some bullshit.”

“What did you say, R?”

“I’m apologizing.”

“What did you say, R?”

“You want the exact words?”

“That’s what I want.”

Robert hunched forward. He was shivering now.

Henry said, “What did you…”

“I said, Henry would not be an asset in my world.”

My heart squeezed.

Henry unzipped his belt bag. “That’s what you said.”

Walter grunted and looked away, shifting from foot to foot, almost skittish.

Yeah, I thought, that’s it. Game over. I waited for… I didn’t know what. Henry to shoot? He didn’t want to shoot. He’d said so. And he wasn’t aiming the damn Glock, he was unzipping his belt bag and whatever he took out of that bag had to be better than the Glock. Better for Robert. Better for us. Better for Henry. Henry wasn’t a killer. Henry was a damaged soul. A wounded soul, betrayed by his father and his brother, not an asset in their world, surely not an asset in anybody’s world. Hurt to the core. A man in the wrong century. And all he wanted now, here, was an apology from his brother.

I waited for Robert to apologize so we could all go home.

Robert just gave his brother that appraising look of his.

I wanted to scream. Will you please apologize? You’ve already said the words a dozen times. Doesn’t matter if you meant them. Doesn’t matter how glib you are if you can’t spit it out one more time. When it counts.

Walter spoke. “I would like to sit.”

I gaped at my partner. That’s all you got?

Henry jerked a shoulder. Go ahead and sit. Or maybe it was just one of Henry’s twitches. Didn’t matter. Walter cleared pebbles from a space with his boot and sank to the ground like an old man and Henry kept his wounded attention on Robert.

Robert smiled. “You want an apology, Bro? You wander around the mountains like some kind of original man and you think you know what a business deal is? You think it’s unfair I left you out in the cold?”

I tensed. Careful Robert, you’re insulting him, I hope you know that.

Henry flushed, a deeper pink than the pink of his peeling nose.

Robert rolled his shoulders and put his hands flat on the surface of the pool. This time he didn’t flinch at the touch. He relaxed into a more comfortable position. He looked like a man lazing on a raft waiting for someone to bring him a Margarita. He cocked his head to appraise his brother. “Not a world where you’d thrive, Henry.”

Henry blinked. “You either.”

“Oh but I do,” Robert said.

“I heard you.” Henry’s voice stronger now. “The test failed.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does.”

“It doesn’t. That’s the beauty of it.”

Henry frowned.

“What matters,” Robert said, “is the name. We named the company AquaHeal.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Because it’s a shell.”

“A what?”

“A front, Henry. For the parent company, the money guys. They don’t care that the test failed. They don’t care if the cleanup works. Yes or no, it doesn’t matter.”

“It has to.”

“No it doesn’t. The money guys make their money in the oil market. That sample Dad and I were taking, when you saw us at the river? It was for their dog-and-pony show, a stunt for the press. AquaHeal is their green cred.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the money guys want people to look at what they say and not what they do.”

“That’s illegal,” Henry said.

“No. That’s strategy.”

“That’s… That’s….”

Shameful, I thought. Shameful is the word you want, Henry. I glanced down at Walter seeking I didn’t know what, some kind of help here, some way to take this in a better direction than it was now heading, but Walter was hunched over staring at the ground, perhaps trying to come up with a word, an idea, with something and if the answer was there in the dirt I wished him good luck finding it.

Robert finished it for us. “Bottom line, Henry, I kept you out of it. I kept you pure.”

Henry Shelburne laughed.

“Did Cam know?” Henry asked.

Robert answered, “Does it matter?”

Henry reached into his belt bag.

Robert appeared unconcerned. Still waiting for that Margarita.

Walter said something, whispered something, so hushed that I could not make it out and I moved down into the trough and knelt beside him thinking okay finally he’s got an idea.

Something landed in front of me.

I jerked, and looked. It was entirely commonplace. And unsettling as hell.

Now that I was on eye level with Walter I turned to him — what now, because things are really going to hell here, because we really need an idea here. He met my look and gave a shake of the head. Don’t.

Don’t what? I could think of a dozen things not to do. I could think of nothing useful to do.

“You need to sit ankles together,” Henry said. “You need to do them first.”

I looked up.

Henry nosed the Glock in our direction.

Walter took hold of my arm and tugged me down to sit beside him in the space he had cleared.

The package Henry had tossed was closer to me. So I picked it up and ripped the plastic open. Took out two cable ties. Passed one to Walter. They were heavy-duty, rated to handle a couple hundred pounds. I’d used heavy-duty ties like these to bundle duct hoses when I installed my washer and dryer, two years ago. Now, slowly, Walter and I began to bind our ankles. Threading the cable ties, a micrometer at a time. Sounded like a clock ticking.

“Zip them.”

We zipped them tighter than I’d wished. Sounded like a machine gun.

“Now you need to do your wrists,” Henry said.

I took out two more cable ties. Passed one to Walter. We bound our wrists. At Henry’s instruction, zipped machine-gun tight.

Walter hunched over his knees and muttered, “Blast it.”

I whispered, “You okay?”

He hiked a shoulder.

Henry crabbed close and retrieved the open package. He moved to the mouth of the grotto. He took out a tie and tossed it to Robert. It landed short, in the brush edging the pothole. He took out another tie. Hands shaking. He crabbed closer. “I don’t want to shoot,” he told Robert.

“You don’t need to.” Robert leaned forward and held out his hands.

Henry tossed the tie. It landed true. It floated on the pool like a stick. Robert picked it up and began to loop it around his wrists.

“Only do one hand,” Henry said. “Thread it through the handle first.”

Robert’s face tightened. He had to twist his torso and stretch his arm to reach the spigot. He slid around the surface of the pool like it was ice. He gripped the spigot. He anchored there. And then with an effort he threaded the cable tie through a wheel cutout in the handle and closed it off around his wrist. He pulled the zip tight. Quite clearly it was not going to slip off over his big hand. He adjusted his position to face his brother. Awkward, now. No relaxing on the raft, no Margarita on the horizon.

Henry returned the package of cable ties to the belt bag. He asked, again, “Did Cam know?”

“You’re like a dog with a bone, Bro.”

“Did Cam know?”

“I kept him out of it.”

“Then why were you fighting?”

Robert took a long pause. “Fighting?”

“That day on the Yuba.”

Robert took a longer pause. “I’ve never fought with Dad. Which day on the Yuba we talking about, Henry?”

“That day Cam died.”

I thought, oh shit. I thought, as if it mattered, Robert lied about being in Sacramento the day his father died.

Robert slowly held up his uncuffed hand. Palm out. “Let’s be clear, Henry. You overheard us talking about the company, right? So if you heard that, you also heard me giving Dad the strategy, the way it got funded. And you heard Dad disagree. He waved his hands around, like he does. But no blows were exchanged, for Christ’s sake. We argued. That’s what you heard.”

“No,” Henry said. “I didn’t hear the strategy. I didn’t hear that part.”

“Then I don’t follow, Bro.”

“I saw that part.”

Robert gave a strained laugh. “You’ve lost me, Bro.”

“You said, Henry would not be an asset in my world. When I heard you say that, I left.”

“You left? Well then…”

“The trail is steep, Robert. I saw from up above.”

Robert gave a little jerk.

“I saw Cam wave his hands.”

Robert gave a stiff nod.

“I saw Cam fall over.”

“He had a heart attack,” Robert said.

“I saw Cam fall into the water.”

Robert sat stone still in the quicksilver.

“I saw you watching. That’s all you did.” Henry holstered his gun. “And then you left.”

19

Henry turned and walked away.

Robert remained silent.

Walter and I were silent. I could hear my own heartbeat, the pulse in my ears. I could hear the distant cry of a bird, the crunching sounds of Henry’s boots upon gravel, Walter’s quickened breathing beside me. I could hear the hiss of the mercury through the spigot. A constant sound. Otherwise, the silence went on and on, excruciating.

At last Walter spoke. Whispered. “This is news.”

Was it? Hadn’t I suspected as much, when I obsessed on the steel clip on the mesh pocket of Robert’s pack? Yes I had. And then I’d let it go. And then Henry had come on scene. Henry and his gun. And I had a new suspect in my sights.

Now I fixed my sights again on Robert Shelburne. One expression after another seemed to chase across his face. Worry, confusion, anger, calculation. No, what I saw was mounting fear. And then he started yanking his cuffed hand, trying to free it from the wheel handle of the spigot.

I glanced at my partner. He was doing the same. Bent over his feet, shifting position, trying to find an angle to work.

Good idea.

I followed suit, hunching over my own feet, positioning my ankles, hoping for a little give in the binding, a space between one foot and the other which could be capitalized upon. Maybe if I took off my boots I could slip one foot free. Hands bound at the wrists but that left my fingers free. I yanked the laces on my right boot, the boot with the torn tongue, didn’t even feel the bruise anymore, that damage entirely inconsequential, and now in my haste I’d knotted the laces and I thought fiercely pay attention but already another thought had entered my mind. A geologist thought. How many times have I used a rock pick to pry out minerals deep inside a pocket in an outcrop? I didn’t have my tools at hand but I sat in a field of rock debris. I started raking through the gravelly soil.

Walter hissed, “He’s coming back.”

I snapped my attention to Henry. He was indeed returning and what he carried chilled my bones.

Robert, too, had seen. Had frozen.

Henry Shelburne went straight to the grotto, went inside, skirting the pool where his brother sat stunned, squatting at the back of the grotto where the old timbers and riffle blocks were stacked in a jumble. Henry deposited the armful of kindling he’d brought from the campfire.

Brown and dried, thick woody stems, shriveled leaves still bearing their resin glands, I guessed, because when Henry had thrown that kindling onto the campfire it threw off that nose-tingling odor.

That, and set the campfire ablaze.

Flammable as hell.

Walter whispered, “Can you get free?”

Yeah, sure, if I can find a pointed shard. If it’s pointed enough to do the job. I whispered, “Rock pick.”

He nodded and began to pick through the pebbles around his feet.

“Hey Bro.” Robert’s voice rang out. Strong, but without the hearty gloss he’d put on Bro before. Strong and harsh now. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Henry stood and opened his belt bag. He took out a box of matches.

“Not fair,” Robert said. “Not a fair fucking game.”

I was transfixed. I knew this game. I’d seen Robert play it back at the great mining pit, the void, the place where a mountain had once stood. Robert standing in the mountain misery, striking a match, dropping it onto the resin-thick ferns, showing how quickly the stuff would ignite. Explaining how the brothers had played this game when they were kids, vaporizing the mercury to go after the gold. But Robert’s demonstration for us was just a dog-and-pony show. This, here, now, was the real deal. This mountain misery was tinder-dry. This stuff was ready to kindle a bonfire of old timbers and riffle blocks — no doubt impregnated with mercury — and if that bonfire got lit it was going to heat the pipe coming out of the wall, through which the mercury flowed from some never-ending supply somewhere in that hillside.

I wondered at what point it would give off its poisonous vapors.

I glanced at Walter. He too was watching. Pebbles forgotten.

“Get past it,” Robert said. “Dad’s dead. I panicked. End of story.”

Henry opened the box and took out a match. Hands shaking.

“This game is fixed,” Robert said. Anger flared off him like heat from a fire. “You’ve got matches. I’ve got nothing. What kind of game is that?”

Henry said, “No kind of game.”

“The hell it isn’t.”

Henry struck the match on the side of the box.

I waited for Robert to scream, because once Henry lit the mountain misery on fire and heated the mercury, Robert wouldn’t be wanting to scream, wouldn’t be wanting to open his mouth, in fact he’d be holding his breath.

The match was burning.

“You want to play poker, brother? Let’s play poker.” Robert sucked in a breath, let it escape. “I’ll see you.”

I shook my head. How? With what? Robert had no moves, no hand to play. He was bluffing.

Robert twisted his head, underneath the spigot, and brought his face to the silver stream.

I sealed my lips. Some kind of crazy-ass Shelburne bluff, ready for the fire to start, the mercury to heat, to vaporize, for the poison to pour out of the spigot. Ready to breathe in a lung-full. Hey Bro I’ll see you, this what you talking about?

Robert opened his mouth wide.

It was a moment before I understood.

He was not bluffing. He was drinking.

Henry, stunned, let the match burn down to his fingers. Jerked. Let the match fall. By the time it touched ground it had gone out.

Robert turned away from the flow, and grinned. A crazy-ass grin. “Drink it today. Shit it tomorrow.”

I tried to take it all in. Drinking elemental liquid mercury. Who does that? Only a crazy Shelburne brother. I knew the stuff was poorly absorbed through the skin but who knew it would freely traverse the digestive tract — well Robert clearly knew, or hoped, Robert who had read up on all things mercury, Robert who was anything but suicidal. But still. I swallowed hard, watching him open and close his mouth like a fish out of water, a fish who’d performed the wrong kind of respiration.

“We can…” Robert spat, “…play this game all day.”

Henry recovered himself. He lit the next match. “I’ll see you, brother.” He let the match fall. This time it stayed alight. The little flame kindled a spray of mountain misery. It crackled to fiery life. Henry kicked it aside.

Robert stared.

The brothers locked onto one another, a poisonous face-off, waiting it seemed for someone to make the next move.

Henry did. “And raise you.” Henry pulled the Glock from his holster and tossed it into the pool.

20

I thought it must have been a mistake.

Even as I watched the gun rise with the toss and then fall with gravity — dropping into, no, onto, the surface of the pool — even as I watched the game change I thought it must have been a mistake.

They thought so, too.

Henry’s head tipped up and then dipped to follow the arc of the gun as if someone else entirely had tossed it.

Robert’s mouth opened, an O of surprise.

Walter grunted, a sound of disbelief.

And then the Shelburne brothers upped their game.

Henry took another match from the box. The fire he had kicked aside was already consuming itself but the main pile of kindling awaited the next match.

Robert’s free hand stretched, reaching for the gun.

Henry smiled.

It was too late but I did the only thing I could think to do, went back to raking my hands through the rock debris, hunting for that shard, my mind racing — what the hell Henry? — and the ugly answer came. Suicide by brother.

Walter whispered, “Use your nail.”

It took me a very long time to get it, to understand what Walter meant, and then for a hysterical moment I almost hooted at the beautifully absurd genius of it, but Walter was watching me with such fierce hope that I wanted to cry. Sure, it could work, but Robert was about to shoot the shit out of his brother and Henry was about to turn that mercury stream into vapor and we were relying on my fingernail?

He lifted his bound hands, clasped. “I’ll buy you the time.”

I gaped. You will?

Walter sat up straight and bellowed, “Your grandfather was here.”

I was taken aback all over again. And had to stop myself from actually turning my head to look around. The Shelburne brothers were doing just that. Henry’s head swiveled, the match in his fingers forgotten for the moment, but still at the ready. Robert looked right, looked left, although his field of view from inside the grotto was severely limited. My field of view was just damn good enough to see the top of the mercury pool, to see his fingers kiss the handle of the Glock.

“Right here,” Walter bellowed. “Look at this.”

I looked.

Walter held his bound hands high. Unclenched now. His right hand commanded attention. He pinched a small rock between his thumb and forefinger. “This is what you came for.”

Henry peered at Walter. Robert cocked his head. I looked back and forth, from one brother to the other, from the brothers to Walter. Surely they could not see what I could see. Could not make out the details.

I could make out the details. It was a largish pebble, rough and reddish, lumpy, bits of rock cemented together. A conglomerate, if anyone was asking. I wondered, could it be?

Walter shot me a look. Shot my bound hands a look.

Use your nail.

And then I understood, staring at the pebble pinched between Walter’s fingers, staring now at his fingernails, a man’s good-sized hands and a man’s good-sized nails. His nails were too large. Unlike mine, which just might fit into the locking bar of the cable tie. Yes, Walter. I get it.

You do your bluff, I’ll do my best to unlock this sucker. And then what? And then we’ll see.

“Listen to me, boys,” Walter said, voice gone soft now, so soft that we all had to strain to hear. “Your grandfather saw that hillside. Look at it.”

They looked, scanning the walls, and while they looked I bent to my work. The heavy-duty cable tie binding my ankles had a big wide slot. And I had small unclipped fingernails. Doable?

“I give you this,” Walter said. “A workable hypothesis. Follow me. A, you have a source of trapped mercury in that hillside. B, it is likely trapped in a bedrock basin. C, something created that basin. D, a long time ago a dike intruded a Tertiary gravel channel and acted as a giant riffle. It created a giant pocket, in which gold collected. That ore specimen you brought to the lab, Robert, originated in there. In that hillside. Right behind you.”

I began to think it wasn’t a bluff. As my mind followed the geology lesson, my fingers worked. I worked my right pointer fingernail into the cable slot and pressed down on the locking bar. Astonishingly, the lock opened. Not astonishing. The right tool for the right job, hey? I nearly laughed. A crazy-ass laugh.

I stole a glance at Walter, gave him the slightest nod.

He returned it.

“In that hillside,” he said, “there is what geologists call a fracture spring. It charges with winter rains that percolate through the soils. Over the years it eroded the material in the riffled pocket and some of it flushed out here.”

Eroding the trough where we sat. I thought, it’s really not a bluff. I held my breath and very very slowly backed the loose section of the cable tie through the slot. Sound like a clock ticking.

“Some bits larger than others,” Walter said, loud again, “and at least one a large enough specimen that it caught the eye of your grandfather. Most so small they would catch nobody’s eye. Unless one knew where to look.”

Henry turned. “How do you…?”

“Know?” Walter glanced at me.

I held the opened tie in a loop around my ankles. I held it like a prize.

“How do I know?” Walter boomed. “I deduce. I look at the geology, Henry. I analyze. I make a hypothesis. And because I understand what I am looking at, I know where to look.”

“Is there…”

“Yes.”

Henry came out of the grotto, pausing at the entrance, eyes fixed on Walter. Robert leaned forward, his bound hand straining against the cuff. His unbound hand had captured the Glock. He held it loose, upended, and a thin silver necklace slid out of the barrel.

I thought, chilled, could the thing work?

“Come here, son,” Walter said.

Yeah, I thought. Step away from the grotto. Step away from the kindling. Step away from your brother.

“Look,” Walter said, “right in my hand is a bit of that gravel. The same stuff your grandfather found.” Walter angled his bound hands. Showing a different face of the tiny rock. “Look here. There is a visible grain of gold. You can see it but you’ll have to come closer.”

I stared at the pebble. There was color. Could be a flake of gold. Could be a grain of pyrite. Fool’s gold. Either way, my pulse leapt. With a tremendous effort I yanked my gaze from the pebble to look at Robert. His face was keen. Avid. His gun hand had gone slack.

I moved my feet. Just slightly to the side, in preparation. Keeping them together as if they were still bound.

“Come on, son,” Walter said. “You should have a look at this.”

Henry whispered, “No.”

I heard the yearning in Henry’s voice before I turned and saw it in his face. No? You don’t believe Walter? You, the amateur geologist, don’t believe the evidence before your eyes? Then come the fuck closer and look. Because I saw. Because I believed. Because Walter was talking geology. Not legend. Not wishful thinking. For the love of your soul Henry come and take the pebble from Walter and see for yourself. This is what you’ve hunted since your father fed you the legend with your morning cereal. This is what Camden Shelburne promised. Lured you with. Taunted you with. This is it, Henry. This is where you prove yourself to your father. To the dead man. Alive, I fear, in your mind. You found this mine site. You got here, you got us all here. You pointed a gun at us and hired yourself a couple of geologists. All you have to do is take the pebble that the gold-minded geologist found. And then you can say you won. All that shit with your father and your brother over the failed cleanup company doesn’t matter. You can win now. Take it. You earned it Henry. You really did. You spent your life force hunting this. You want it. I see it in your face. You’re squinting to see what Walter is offering. Come get what you came for. You look like the kid in the Old West photo. You look like a kid.

An aching memory washed over me, a kid in a red cowboy hat playing hide-and-seek.

I shut it down.

“Henry,” Robert said. “My God. We can do this. Together.”

The hesitation was tiny, a clenching around Henry’s mouth.

And then Henry stepped back into the grotto and struck the match and flung it into the kindling.

I heard it before I saw it. Heard the crackling, like corn popping. Smelled it before I saw it. Smelled the bitter odor of mountain misery, just curling into the air. And then I saw a black resinous tendril of smoke, and then an orange tendril of fire. The smoke rose thinly, up up up the chimneyed grotto. The fire spread laterally, licking along a plank, probing the jumbled pile of splintery old wood.

Henry squatted and blew on his fire. A fresh match in his hand.

Robert raised his gun hand.

Time turned squirrely. Stretched and slowed.

I was scrambling to my feet, ankles free of the cable tie, hands still bound, swinging my legs behind me to lever myself up, and stumbling up the trough, legs rubber, stampeding into the grotto, a madwoman surprising Robert in the act of aiming the barrel of the Glock in the direction of his brother.

Time turned so stretchy that I had all the time in the world to glance at Henry in the corner and see him smile.

To glance behind me and see Walter struggling to get onto his knees, ankles and hands still bound, an impossible task.

To hear Walter shout, “Blast.”

To stop myself at the edge of the pool and wonder if there was room for me.

To assess the growing blaze, to see the flames heighten, to feel the heat cast off, to swear I could smell the iron pipe heating.

To yank up my parka to cover my mouth, my nose, and collapse into position with my boots over the edge.

And then whoosh I scooted into Henry Shelburne’s pool, crushed between Robert and the bedrock edge.

For a moment all the familiar workings of things were suddenly cast aside.

I sat on top of—on top of—the silver sea.

My knees were bent, my heels cupped into the liquid, and I braced my arms behind me, hands clutching the mercury like I’d clutched the silver heart back at the South Yuba River. Cold and clammy and alien.

The heat from the fire was almost welcome.

Robert’s face was inches from mine. His eyes bitter green. We just gazed at one another, me thinking is this how you gazed at your father as he fell into the river?

I was dizzy. Short of breath from my exertions. Breathing into my parka, re-breathing that air but it was sweet in comparison to the grotto air that was about to go bad.

I hissed, “Cover your mouth.”

Robert could not, not with one hand bound to the spigot and the other holding the Glock aloft.

There came a sound like a gunshot, another match striking.

Robert aimed.

And time that bitch speeded up. The velocity of a fired bullet. The speed of liquid mercury heating and particles vibrating faster and faster until they escape their fluid bonds and form a gas. I cried out stop and the speed of sound beat me to it, reached Robert’s ears and made him curse before I could reach him myself. And then at last I hit his chest, threw myself upon him, losing the grip on my parka in the process, my parka mask slipping down leaving my face naked, my nose and mouth unprotected as I sent Robert spinning, me spinning with him, together we spun on the mercury it seemed forever without friction, Robert’s free arm whipping out, and at last Robert’s hand opened like a flower and lost its hold on Henry Shelburne’s weapon.

Walter shouted.

Walter was on his elbows and knees crawling, bound feet lifted, an eternity to go before he reached Henry.

Henry the kid playing with matches.

“The gold, Henry,” Robert shouted. “You and me. We can do it.”

Henry didn’t answer. The only sound was the thunder of the fire and the hiss of streaming mercury.

I yanked my parka back up. Yanked Robert’s Club One fitness T-shirt up over his mouth, his nose, because Robert was desperately yanking his bound hand trying to get free.

I fumbled at the cargo pocket of my pants. Fumbled it open. Fumbled out my field knife.

It took forever to move to the spigot, it was like a dream where you’re swimming through molasses, where your feet run but your body remains in place, and damn me but I calculated the time, how long it was going to take me to cut Robert free, for the two of us to slither our way out of this hideous pool and escape the fire and the heating quicksilver. And I thought, hey lady you could slap the knife into his hand. You could leave him to it, you’ve opened the knife yourself one-handed and surely Mister Gearhead can open a knife one-handed so just get yourself the hell out and tackle Henry and stomp out the fire, no, stomp out the fire first and then tackle Henry because all he could do was light another match and if you got the fire out first he could do no….

There came a sound like salvation. Henry stomping out the fire, kicking apart the pile of wood.

And then another sound, a broken sound that was Henry’s own. “No we can’t, R.”

By the time I cut Robert loose, by the time we fumbled ourselves out of the quicksilver pool, by the time I stumbled to meet Walter and cut his ties loose, Henry had walked away.

By the time we reached the campsite and found our day packs and retrieved our water bottles and filled them in Skinny Creek, in order to douse the embers of the dying fire, Henry was nowhere to be found within Notch Valley.

He took his backpack. Left behind his tent.

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?

About the Author

Bestselling author Toni Dwiggins is a third-generation Californian who migrated from southern Cal to northern Cal. What she likes most about her state is that one can go from the ocean to the mountains in one day, with a lunch stop in the desert. She likes it so much she has chosen those settings for her forensic geology books.