Volcano Watch

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

We built a fire.

I gripped Walter’s cold hand, grinning.

He would tell us nothing until we explained. Eric told him how he and Mike had come to be here, and Krom told his part, and through all that Walter sat stoically hearing them out, but when I had to explain what brought me back to town, Walter appeared to age before my eyes, a sight I’d never wish to see again.

We pressed cheese and olives and dried fruit and water on him but he refused it all. He said, “I’ve already eaten. I have my own supply.”

“Where, my God Walter, I searched the whole Inn.”

“You didn’t search my room.”

“I was shouting. In every hall.”

“I found that the only way I can sleep, Cassie, is with earplugs. Did you know the Inn supplies earplugs along with the toiletries?”

“Then what woke you?”

“Earthquakes,” he said. “I can’t seem to get used to them.”

Mike said, “Oh yah.”

Walter cracked a smile, then, squeezing my hand, harder than I’d been squeezing his. He leaned across me to shake Eric’s hand, then Mike’s. His gaze shifted to Krom. Krom was out of reach, handshake-wise. A hard look passed between them. Or maybe it was just the shadows cast on their faces by firelight. Walter said, “You’re fortunate Cassie found you, Adrian.”

Krom said, “Blessed.”

“What about you, Walter?” Eric said. “How did you come to be here?”

He cleared his throat. “I was trapped in town, along with a good many others. I was waiting my turn to go out. Perhaps the wait was too long. It gave me time to think, and I was at a very low point, and the two made a persuasive combination. I simply felt that — now that I was trapped — I should stay. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic but I decided to do as she would. I came up here to wait and watch. To see what the volcano was going to do.”

I let out a sound.

“I had no intention of dying, Cassie. I still don’t. That’s why I came all the way up here. This provides the safest vantage point. And all the comforts of the Inn.” He forced another smile.

“How did you get here, sir?” Eric asked.

“I appropriated Bill Bone’s station wagon. He’d been evacuated. He had no further use for it.”

“How’d you start it?” I asked. “Every car I saw on 203 was locked and the keys were gone.”

“I broke the window and hotwired it. Something I learned in my undergraduate days. Then I drove up here and settled in. I parked the wagon in the garage by the gondola, where they keep the snowmobiles. Keeps the ash off it. It is, after all, Bill’s property, and I intend to replace the window.”

I gaped. Nothing stops him. He’d survived on vandalism, like me. “How’d you get in here? Break a window?”

“No, I used a credit card to let myself in the service entrance around back — the same way I opened the garage lock.” He squeezed my hand. “A trick Lindsay taught me, the time she locked herself out of her office.” He cocked his head. “By the way, Cassie, I had a thought on my drive up here. Bill could use a nice CD player for the wagon.”

“What?”

“The gift,” Walter said. “For Bill’s birthday.”

I was afraid Walter might crack open.

He lifted his eyebrows. “As I’ve told you all, I don’t intend to die. Thoughts do creep in. Large and small. About this and that. Like Bill’s gift.”

Eric said, finally, “Sure, I’m in. Mike too — right, man?”

Mike said, “I already paid.”

Walter turned a cold look on Krom. “Adrian? Are you in?”

Krom returned the look. “You bet your life.”

The fire popped. Silence fell.

Walter broke it. “And so, my friends, here I am. Yesterday I hiked partway up the mountain and found myself a view. Stupendous.”

And here he was. Here, not in a ditch or her office or the lab or mired in the muck of her half-finished escape route. Now Eric didn’t have to worry about my running off. Now Mike didn’t have to whine. Now Krom had one less thing to use against me. I tensed. No. I’d got that wrong. Now Krom had one more thing to hold over me. He had Walter. Because there was clearly something between them. Something had happened. Maybe something down at the 203 crater during the evac. Maybe something in her office. I considered the open safe. The love letters. I thought over Walter’s story, trying to read it coldly — without the intense rush of relief and worry and anger and pity — and something was off. There was something he wasn’t telling us.

I said, probing his story, “Why’d you have to take Bill’s wagon? Why didn’t you take your Explorer? I saw it out on 203.”

Walter met my look. “I left my car in the expectation that people would assume I had evacuated. I left it hoping to avoid the very thing that occurred. You coming in here after me, dear.”