Volcano Watch

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I’m at a crossroad and each direction is hung in fog and if I take the wrong road I’ll step into oblivion. Krom comes. He’s a giant brown bear. I ask him which way is safe but he won’t tell me. He starts to leave and I grab his bare arm to stop him. Fur doesn’t grow there. The scar’s a live thing beneath my hand, and it’s got a pulse. I let go. Krom leaves, taking the righthand road. His head is fixed face-backward on his neck and he’s smiling the wise-up smile.

I woke in a sweat and fought my way out of the covers. The cottage air chilled me fast. The nightmare shrank and one thought filled my head.

One thought. He lied at the demo last week — he can foretell the future.

We hurtled through a chute of ice, Walter’s Explorer planing like a bobsled.

I held on tight, thinking this is one hell of a tight place through which to move a town of fleeing vehicles.

Walter counter-steered and the car regained its grip on the road.

Pika is one of those classic eastern Sierra canyons, a skinny gash in the steep mountain flank, narrowed further by thirty-foot walls of snow thrown up by the plows. Nevertheless, it was all that Krom promised. We were above the caldera, out of the line of immediate fire from Red Mountain, and away from the Inyo system. We were tucked down deep. Not untouchable — nowhere around here is untouchable — but this would get us out.

Krom knew what he was doing.

He’d known, I thought, for a good long while.

I had one question, to test my nightmare hypothesis, and the man I needed to ask was up ahead.

We traveled more slowly through the gorge until we came to the place where the walls widened and the road pitched downhill and the orange cones sprouted, and I knew we’d reached the end of the line.

Walter shut off the engine.

I searched among the road workers in orange vests before finding the man with white hair thatching out from beneath his hard hat. Walter and I caught up with him and I asked, “Jimmy, how long did you tell Adrian this road was going to take?”

“Told him to give me three good weeks on her — and another thrown in for weather.” Jimmy waved his clipboard at the frozen landscape, and grinned. “So the sonofabitch says do it in two and gives me the friggin army corps of engineers! We start on her today.”

“When did you first give him the estimate?”

“Oh jeez, that’d be somewhere back around mid-December.”

“Thanks,” I said. I had my answer.

I gave a nod to Walter and we trudged back toward the Explorer.

“Are you ready,” Walter said, “to enlighten me?”

“Just go with me on this, okay?” I plunged in. “When we made the bargain with Adrian, I got it wrong. I thought he needed to be kept in the loop so he could recover his reputation. He was urging us to find the site, all right, but not because of that.”

“I don’t believe I’m following you.”

I sympathized. I hadn’t been following Krom, either. “When I stalled with the evidence, he said I was a believer — that if I thought something was there I’d never give up.” I glanced at Walter, wondering if he knew me as well as he thought, if he knew how much I wanted to believe that. “It was tactics. Adrian was giving me a kick in the butt. And he kicked me in the right direction, to county records, to find the Gold Dust claim. But he already knew about Gold Dust. He already knew about the fissure and he needed me to find it.”

“Why?” was all Walter said.

“He couldn’t very well ‘find’ it himself without nailing himself for murder.”

Walter halted and looked at me.

“That’s right,” I said, “I think he killed Georgia.”

“I thought we’d dismissed the lovers-quarrel theory…”

“It wasn’t a lovers quarrel. If that was the case, he wouldn’t have wanted me to find the fissure. But he did.”

“Why?” was all Walter said.

“To save himself from Lindsay.”

Walter started walking again, silent but for the crunch of his boots on gravel-pocked snow.

I came along. “Think it through. He comes to town and finds the woman who trashed his reputation at Rainier. She goes after him again. And she’s already doing his job, building an evac route. So he does what he does best. He digs in and courts the locals. Gets in tight with the mayor. And then the mayor goes looking for that hot spring at Gold Dust, and finds the fissure. And, being Georgia, she writes down her thoughts. And then, after she recovers herself, she goes and gets Adrian. She’d intended to take him to a hidden hot spring for another romp, but now she’s got something much more important to show him.”

“You have proof that she went to get him? That he accompanied her?”

“No. Just a wild-ass guess. Maybe not so wild ass, though. Think about it — Georgia gave Krom the gift of a lifetime. A way to save his reputation and take down Lindsay in the process.”

“The fissure,” Walter said.

“Yeah. It makes Linday’s Bypass a death trap. Here’s the opportunity to make his mark. He’ll champion another route, a safe route. Of course, he had to kill Georgia because she sure wouldn’t keep her mouth shut about the fissure. He needed to keep that quiet until he could set up Lindsay. So he gets out his maps and walks the geography and finds an alternative that’s out of range of anything Red Mountain throws. Pika Canyon. He consults Jimmy.” As Jimmy just confirmed; the only solid piece of evidence I’d yet trotted out. “When all his ducks are lined up, he calls the meeting at the Inn and presents his route. Knowing Lindsay will oppose it. Knowing he will crucify Lindsay and her Bypass when the fissure is found.”

Walter said, thin, “This is enormous speculation, Cassie.”

I didn’t argue the point. “Look, he lied at the demo. Back when he was considering routes, he did know what was brewing on Red Mountain. That’s why he picked Pika.”

We both looked up the road. There was a car coming down the chute toward us.

“He knew he had the ammo to kill Lindsay’s route. He just needed to hold on until he could use it. He couldn’t have the fissure found too soon after publicly championing Pika — that would be too coincidental. But he couldn’t wait too long, either. Len Carow was here, looking for any excuse to sack him. That’s why Adrian made Hot Creek into a battleground — he’s fighting Lindsay to fence it off. Mr. Safety.” I watched the oncoming car. It was Krom’s Blazer. “He was playing for time. That’s all he needed.”

“And what about the drill at the race? Another battlefield?”

“You tell me. Lindsay den-mothers the guys, and here’s the World Cup on their home turf. She’s sure not going to cancel that. And for Krom, that’s opportunity knocking. He’ll humiliate her on her own turf. The volcanologist is up there playing games and the safety czar interrupts with grownup business. On a ski course that we later find out is in the path of an eruption from Red Mountain, for the love of God.” I shook my head. “And Stobie, well… That’s fallout. Adrian can play that game.”

Walter was listening.

“What he couldn’t play was the sucker game at the creek. Trading safety for sex.”

“No,” Walter said. “That was not grownup business.”

I ached, for a moment, thinking about Lindsay’s role in it. I still saw no reason to lay that on Walter. I said, “Well, the thing with Jeanine almost worked. A lot of bad press. It really looked like he was going to be replaced. And so at that point, time’s really against him. He can’t just wait any more for me to find the fissure. He needs to push. So he makes the bargain with me. With us.”

Walter grunted.

We fixed our attention on the Blazer, which parked in front of Walter’s Jeep. People piled out. Council bigshots and the man himself, Adrian Krom.

“Is that all?” Walter finally asked.

I nodded. I had no more. Walter waited, perhaps for me to whip out the missing piece of evidence, the magic stone that would tie Krom to the fissure, to the scene of death, to the scenario I’d just spun. I didn’t have it.

He cleared his throat. “There are holes, dear.”

I knew.

“Why does he transport Georgia’s body to the glacier?”

“He needs it to be found. He needs the evidence on the body to be traced to Gold Dust. Which it was. And we found the fissure. Which is what he needed.”

“The body was found only by chance. By an ice climber.”

I said, “The climber phoned in the report. Voice was garbled, staticky. Maybe the ‘climber’ was Adrian — when he’s ready to set his plan in motion.”

“There’s still a difficulty. He needs to know that the evidence on the body will be traced to Gold Dust. That is a large assumption. He didn’t know about the geology — according to what you told me — until that day at Casa Diablo when he learned how we could track the soil. And, further, he couldn’t count on the fact that it would lead to the site of death, and the fissure.”

I shrugged. “You’re right. I haven’t got it all worked out.” Not that I hadn’t twisted it a dozen ways. “Okay, let’s say he had plan A to help the cops along. Whatever it was, he set it into motion with that meeting at the Inn. And then he found me and the geology at Casa and hatched a better plan. Plan B. And it worked. I found the fissure for him.”

“No dear, the timing doesn’t work. What if you took too long?”

“I don’t know.” The damnable timing. What if things heated up before I found the fissure, what if he didn’t have time to build a new way out before we had to go? I watched him, now, herding the Council. He’s a master manipulator but he can’t time the volcano. Any more than Lindsay can.

Walter said, “Are you planning to present this theory to John?”

“Not until we have some proof.”

“We have no proof,” Walter said. “And there’s simply too much we don’t know.”

“We know plan B worked. The only snag, for him, is if we can place him at the scene.” My pulse gave a little leap. “Maybe he has a plan C, in case we can.”

Walter looked at me in alarm.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “we seem to be failing at that.”

There was a long silence and then Walter, bless him, laughed.

In that, we caught the attention of the person I’d hoped to avoid. Krom was walking the site with the Council in his gravitational field. Now he changed direction and intercepted us before we could reach the Explorer.

“You here for me?” he asked, and when I shook my head, he asked Walter, “What’s funny?”

“Very little,” Walter said. “A small release of tension.”

Krom gave a sympathetic shrug. His attention pulled back to the Council. He smiled to himself and moved on.