Volcano Watch

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

It was impossible, now, to think of Gold Dust as hidden.

There were people everywhere — laden with instrumentation, in big parkas and gaiters and wool caps and you could tell the men from the women, more often than not, by the beards. They were in the mine tunnel with headlamps, they were taking the temperature of the dipper’s stream, they were scouring the mountain for cracks in the snow and newly dead trees. There was a field camp in the shell of the cabin and it looked like the miners had returned to work the lode. There was a bearded man tending a radio and he was in contact with the USGS field station set up in Mammoth’s fire department, and that in turn was in communication with Survey headquarters.

It looked like USGS had been here a week but it’s been just thirty-six hours since Lindsay made her call and the Survey put its Western Region Event Response Team on a plane.

A path had been blasted through the rockwall. Nobody need negotiate the cavity behind the Dutch door.

The snow looked like it had been paved.

Amidst this buzz, Walter sat on a crate waiting for the okay to go back behind the rockfall and dig. He chafed his hands. He’s not used to being a sideshow to other people’s business. He wanted more samples from the hot spring because the soil we’d hurriedly scooped and stashed in our pockets had orange-peel particles from our gloves and had to be considered contaminated.

I paced, from the Dutch door to the mouth of the tunnel. From the tunnel to the cyanide pond.

“What are you doing?” Walter asked, as I passed his crate.

“Trying to figure out in what order Georgia picked up the stuff in her boots.”

He strained for a glimpse of Lindsay. We’d seen her an hour ago, disappearing through the blasted corridor. She’d nodded in passing. Was already looking beyond us, seeing the fissure. She’s consumed by it, she’s stripped to raw energy, she’s an exposed high-voltage wire and Walter’s been trying to keep an eye on her.

“And what are your conclusions?” Walter asked, on my next pass.

I halted. “I figure Georgia picked up the leaf near the stream, and then tramped through the tailings area and acquired the cyanide. Looking around for the hot spring. Picking up bits of the native soil. Then she found the door in the rockwall, crawled through, found the spring, acquired the sulfur and calcite. Found the fissure. Freaked out.” No wild-ass guess needed for that. “And maybe that’s when she wrote what she wrote in her Weight Watchers notebook.”

Walter nodded.

“And then she crawled back through the cavity. In a panic. Intending, I’d hope, to get Lindsay. And maybe that’s when she encountered her killer. Or, alternatively, he caught her back at the fissure.”

Walter nodded.

“I’m thinking that they ended up in the tunnel — because of all the powder she’d acquired. So that’s where I’d say she took her final steps. And then there was a struggle, and she took no more steps.” And who was struggling? Georgia and Mike? Georgia and Krom? Georgia and someone else? Death by fury? Death by passion? Or was it death by cold calculation? “Anyway,” I said, “that’s one theory.”

Walter gave a brief nod. He was looking at the fissure. “She’s been back there for hours.”

Lindsay, not Georgia. An hour at most.

He rose. “I believe they’ve forgotten us. I’m going to go collect that sample.”

I snatched up my pack and followed him through the corridor.

This time, the hidden pocket was different. First time, when Walter and I came, and even the second time with Lindsay, this had seemed like a lost land whistled into existence by the dipper. Now, it was mapped and staked, concrete as a crime scene. Orange tape roped off the hot spring and fissure. People hovered over the great wound and the banks were draped in silver tarps upon which instruments had been laid out, like the fissure was due to undergo surgery.

Lindsay was at the fissure, head to head with Response Team leader Phil Dobie, who was unmistakable due to his beard — notable even among USGS beards for the quartz-white vein that diked through the black.

We took our samples at the hot spring then went to join Lindsay.

“Phil,” Lindsay was saying, “we’re there.” She looked worse than she had earlier, eyes bloodshot, skin drawn, like she’d waved off sleep because there was no time to sleep.

I butted in. “We’re where?”

She collared me, fingers like hot pokers. We were goddamn snuggled right up to the rim. “Cassie saw him.”

Saw who? All I saw now was the fissure.

“You remember my little fumarole?” She didn’t wait for my memory to kick in, she turned back to Phil. “He popped out six months ago and if you’d care to draw a line from here down to the caldera’s south moat, my little fellow is sitting on that line.”

Phil, who is about as low-key as white noise in the network, said, “It’s not out of the question. Moat activity’s at a depth of about ten kilometers so, sure, new surface phenomena could be offset by that much.”

I stiffened. From Phil, this was worry. The fissure’s certainly been worrying enough to spark an event response from the Survey but all on its own, it’s not enough to do the trick. It’s the location that’s raising blood pressure, the idea of a dike reaching out from the caldera’s magma chamber and thumbing up through the crust here, an area thought so placid that the Red Mountain geodimeter station is sampled only once a year. But it was sure being sampled now and I had to wonder if it had measured new deformation of the earth. I asked, “What’s the strain rate now?”

“Up ten parts per million,” Lindsay snapped.

Phil said, “We need the quakes…”

“We’ve got them.”

“You’ve got low-frequency?” I swallowed. Magma’s on the move.

“We do,” Phil said, “but we need them at a little shallower depth.”

“We’ll get them,” she said. “I know this volcano.”

I looked at her in alarm. She was flying by the seat of her pants.

“Maybe,” Phil said thoughtfully, “you’re a little too close, Lindsay.”

“Horseshit.”

Walter cleared his throat. “We all get ahead of ourselves at times. I certainly have, in my work.”

Not that I’d ever seen.

Lindsay shot a red-eyed look at Walter, decades of rivalry and devotion in that look: geology is volcanology, honey.

I felt a charge run from Lindsay to me, her fingers grounded in my neck, and the circuit ran from the fissure to Lindsay, and by chance of touch through me, and back to earth again. It did not loop through Phil or Survey headquarters. It was Lindsay and the volcano, a closed loop. We all leaned toward the fissure, like yearning toward water when standing on a bridge, Phil stroking the quartz in his beard, Lindsay drumming her fingers on my neck, Walter fairly itching to consult, and me, damned if I was going to come unglued.

“My volcano,” Lindsay said, “has extended his reach.”