Volcano Watch

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Two weeks after escaping the hospital, I was back. Visiting, this time. Stobie boomed out a greeting, sounding too healthy to be here.

I said, “Hey Stobie.”

“Cool ‘do, babe.”

My haircut. Real short, real curly. There’d been so many cemented tangles the nurses nearly scalped me. Stobie’d lost some hair as well, on top, along with some pounds, giving him the piebald look of an overworked pack horse. We chatted, lurching from the weather to hospital food to Jeanine’s new gig videotaping snorkelers in Maui, and then I told him Mike had been torn up about what happened at the race.

Stobie frowned, gathering the events. His short-term memory is patchy.

“Afterward, Mike visited you. We all did. I don’t know if you heard us.”

“Sure,” Stobie said. But he clearly hadn’t.

“I’m not trying to excuse Mike but I want you to know he was really torn up.”

“Hey Cassie? You don’t have to excuse him. Mike could be a real butthead but aside from that he was okay. I don’t hold blame, about this.” He cocked a finger like a gun at his head, then grinned. “I’m gonna miss the little butthead.”

I had to laugh, and so did he, and for a sweet moment we went with that, but then I caught the pain in his eyes — or maybe he’d caught it in mine first — and I didn’t want to risk slipping from Mike to Eric because I didn’t want to start Stobie crying — not the Stobe. I didn’t think I was going to cry. Not now. Tonight I’ll cry, alone, like last night. I have a routine.

Stobie and I lapsed into silence.

Finally he said, “So what’s new with you babe?”

I flinched. It sounded so normal. What’s new, what’s up. I reached. “My parents bought a place, here in Bishop.” Few blocks from my scummy new condo. They drew me a housewarming cartoon — me on top of a stratovolcano with my thumb in its vent. I’m sure I’ll come to love it. The way I came to love their cartoon showing Henry snug in his coffin, with Dad’s caption, and Jimbo’s, and then mine. Humor as therapy. I refocused on Stobie. “They’ve got a huge yard, so…Fourth of July, mark your calendar.”

“Tradition.” He reached for a smile. “What about you? You back to work?”

“Yeah.” Just let me close it all out. “Actually I, ah, came with an ulterior motive. I hoped you could help me clear something up.”

He settled against his pillows. “Tell Uncle Stobie all about it.”

“Remember the horse hair we found on Georgia?”

“Sure.”

“It was finally matched — to a horse at Sierra Ranch Stables. Where you work.”

He took that in. He did not show surprise. He said, finally, “You think I know who took the horse?”

“Do you?”

“I can guess.”

I said, gently, “Is Mike your guess?”

Stobie worked on that.

I said, “Eric told me he suspected Mike. Explained why he was covering. Explained why he was such a jerk on the retrieval — trying to send me and Walter back. He didn’t rat you out, Stobie, but I can guess why you backed him up. Why you reacted so strongly when he found the horse hair on Georgia. You suspected Mike, too. And — just like my brother — you let Eric handle the problem.”

Stobie didn’t flinch. He said, “It was a hell of a messed-up thing.”

I couldn’t argue with that. “Any particular reason you suspected Mike?”

“You fishing, babe?”

“I’m fishing.”

“Then let’s reel it in.” Stobie eyed me steadily. “On the way up to the glacier, Eric told me he wanted to send you back. Told me why. And then…the horse hair…that’s when I got my own suspicion.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew Mike. I could believe Eric’s theory. And the horse hair fit with Mike.” Stobie shrugged. “Mike worked at the stable once.”

I showed my surprise.

“For about three days. Horseshit grossed him out, and he quit. But he’d know where the keys to the barn were kept.”

I nodded. Just like he had recalled where the gondola keys were kept. That’s Mike, I thought, never forgets a detail. So it was not a leap to assume that Mike would know, years later, how to borrow a horse on the sly. “Thanks,” I said.

“Sure.” Stobie suddenly chuckled. “Mr. Clean and the horseshit. Hadn’t thought about that in years.”

“Mr. Clean?”

Stobie’s face relaxed, going back in time. “Mike’s nickname, at the stable. First day there, he decides the place stinks. So he comes up with this thing — mixes sagebrush in with the drystall. You know how sage smells real sharp? It worked, but man did he get raked. Mr. Clean.” Stobie thought. “Maybe that’s why he quit. All the teasing.”

I said, “What’s drystall?”

“Bedding, babe. Soaks up the horse pee. Mashed pumice, basically.”

It took me several days to make the leap from horse to cat.

Under the scope — in the cramped lab space I’d secured on a back street in Bishop — the Drystall grains I’d got from a Bishop stable did not match my evidence. It was mashed pumice, all right, but only a second cousin to the pumice I’d taken from Georgia’s mouth.

But it pointed me in the right direction.

Through Bobby Panetta I found Ali al-Amin, with whom Mike had planned to room, to whom Mike had evacuated his cat. I knelt beside the litter box in Ali’s tidy laundry room, as Mike’s high-strung manx paced nervously. The room smelled — catshit overlain by another, familiar odor. I pulled on my winter wool glove, making Ali as suspicous as the cat, and shoved my hand into the bin of clean litter. Ali warned me not to spill because it was Mike’s special mix and Ali dreaded weaning the manx to a new brand. I didn’t spill. I withdrew my hand and inspected my glove. It was coated. I brushed it off. Litter still clung to the wool fibers. I brushed again. Not clean yet. Litter had even worked in under the cuff.

I got out my hand lens and squinted at the grains on my glove. Crushed pumice and Jeffrey pine bark. My glove smelled faintly of rootbeer. Pumice and Jeffrey pine, Drystall and sagebrush — Mr. Clean had clearly taken an inventive pride in his work.

Mr. Clean was equally fastidious about his cat’s litterbox. I knew because I’d been to Mike’s place once to pick up Jimbo when his car died and the two of them were in the garage looking for jumper cables, and the litterbox was next to the workbench. On a cold November day, I thought, Mike might wear gloves in the chilly garage to prepare his special litter mix, and if he subsequently wore those gloves in another context, at an old mine site handling a body, bits of that special litter mix could fall out.

I pictured it, Mike and Georgia arguing, and then a shove, and then maybe Georgia falls and hits her head on a rock. I couldn’t see Mike wielding the rock, hitting her. Perhaps he had done, but I couldn’t picture it. Perhaps I’d become more forgiving of Mike but I could not credit him with cold-blooded murder. I was calling it an accident. In my report I’d lay out the scenario, of Mike’s horror when Georgia was knocked out, of his futile attempt to revive her. I’d mention the bruising around her mouth, where Mike had grasped her, thumb and fingers spread just so, opening her mouth to give her CPR. Only she’s not responding and in his panic he jerks his hand and the cuff on his glove rolls and the soil falls in her mouth.

And when CPR fails, he closes her mouth to end her silent scream.