The sample fizzed madly. The air stank of rotten eggs.
And something else.
Walter grimaced.
I leapt. Snapped on the hood fan. Grabbed Walter’s arm and yanked him off his stool and the two of us scrambled back, covering our faces. I could detect the unexpected smell of bitter almonds.
Jesus.
Before either of us could recover our dignity, the smell dissipated. I took in an exploratory breath. The gas was gone.
Walter returned to his stool, throwing me a speculative look.
“You tell me,” I said, when I could trust my voice, “what’s cyanide doing in the soil?”
Walter was smiling now.
The liquid in the tube, I saw, had gone flat like old ginger ale. I knew what must have happened. When I added acid to the soil it found cyanide, lowered its pH, and drove it into its vapor phase. I just didn’t know what that meant. “Walter,” I said, “I’m not in the…”
“Mines.” His eyes were blue as day.
Mines. I waited. His eyes always gleam when he’s puttering around with the geology of ores. It’s his one vice, in Lindsay’s eyes, wasting time prowling old ruins. Treasure-hunting in her view, although he’s in it for the history — the treasure no longer being economically recoverable. I’m not inspired by old mining tales but I take a guilty pleasure in being the one Walter confides this passion to. Lindsay and I share a passion for shopping flea markets that totally excludes him. My shopping guru. I waited, stewing, for Walter to explain.
He did not disappoint. “Miners around here sometimes used a dilute solution of cyanide to leach the metals from slag ore.”
The meaning fizzed up. We’d got another new lead — mines. The metallic minerals are often picked up by hot water circulating deep and precipitated out near the surface.
By hot springs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The de-icing sand laid down on Minaret Road had mixed with slush and grit to form a startling brecciation along the sidewalk and I walked it with dread and care.
I had an appointment in half an hour with Adrian Krom.
On the way there, I planned to drop in on Lindsay.
My gut churned.
I said, “How could you?”
Lindsay lifted one fine eyebrow.
“Hot Creek,” I said.
She swiveled her creamy leather chair around to the credenza below the window, and bent to open a drawer.
What was she after? I glared at the landscape of her desk, littered with the detritus of expeditions in the field and the shops. The brass pot-bellied fertility goddess. The tiny Japanese teapot. The bowl made from the skin of a dried orange. The pink tourmalines set like teeth in a bed of pegmatite. The delicate sea lily crinoid in a bed of gray limestone — Georgia’s gift, I assumed. Why’d Lindsay display that? Some kind of memorial for the dead?
Lindsay swiveled to face me with a gun in her hand.
“Oh God,” I said, “that’s a gun.”
She laid the pistol beside the teapot. “Here’s how.”
I gaped.
“I was on the right bank, upstream of them.”
I found my voice. “You were going to shoot him?”
She lifted her chin. “I was going to keep Jeanine safe. As far as the creek goes, I took measurements at the site before they arrived. Gases were stable. No temperature fluctuations.”
“But you were going to shoot?”
“I would have winged him. If need be.”
I shook my head. I hadn’t known she knew how to shoot. I wondered if she’d shot targets out at Casa Diablo, to practice winging people.
“In any case, there was no need.” She held my look. “And further, honey, he saw me there after they all left. I made certain he saw me.”
“Waving a gun.”
“No,” she said, deadly calm. “Holding it steady.”
“And that helped how?”
“It clarified where he should direct his wrath.”
My chair hit the floor and I was moving with a sudden laser fury and I didn’t know where to aim first, didn’t know if it was directed at Jeanine and Jimbo and Bobby for being so dumbass stupid or at Lindsay for using them like that or at Krom for taking the bait.
She said, “I’m sorry you’re caught up in this.”
“You going to tell Walter?”
Her face roughened. “No.”
Me neither, I’d cut out my tongue before I laid this on Walter. And then I wondered just whose secret I was keeping because it was, after all, me who had given her the ammo. I had, after all, told her about Krom’s midnight swim.
It was after six when I left Lindsay’s office.
I followed Minaret to Forest Trail and took a right and came to the Community Center.
Lights were ablaze. It’s a huge octagonal building, half windows. Inside looking out, it’s like you’re in a clearing in the woods. Expensive to heat. Georgia got a variance on the building code when she was pushing plans for the center. She wanted a building that mirrored her vision for the town: hub of the known universe. She got it.
I stood outside until my jeans turned stiff from the cold, then checked my watch. Six-twenty. I was early.
I waited eight more minutes and then went in.
There was nobody to be seen in the vast central orb of the building. This is the heart of the Community Center, the Circle Room. A skating rink could fit in here. Radiating from this hub are corridors which lead to offices.
I didn’t know which corridor led to Krom.
I gravitated to the room’s centerpiece, a great pit within which seems to float a good deal of Mono County. I began to circumnavigate the relief map. I saw him then, some thirty degrees northeast, hunched on one of the split-log benches that face the pit. He motioned me forward. I came along, my boot soles squeaking like mice on the tile floor.
He rose. He had the Mammoth Times in hand.
I stared, like he’d just risen naked and steaming from the waters of Hot Creek.
But of course he was dressed. Tan parka, brown cords, brown cowboy boots. Brown hair wet-combed into submission. Tanned face smooth-shaven. His eyes, though, were reddened like he’d not been sleeping well.
He waited until I got close and then tossed the newspaper onto his bench. “Seen this?”
No chitchat, no attempt to explain, no bullshit about consenting adults. Still, I could not help reading the headline for the umpteenth time. CZAR TRADES SAFETY FOR SEX. It was worse, this time, because the subject of the headline was standing in front of me.
I found my voice. “I’ve read it.”
“And?”
“That’s not why I asked to see you. I want to talk to you about Hot Creek, yeah. But not…” I scrupulously avoided looking at the paper, “not about you and Jeanine. You and Georgia.”
He didn’t miss a beat. “That was a private matter.”
“Not anymore. Lindsay told me.”
“I hadn’t taken Lindsay for a common gossip.” He glanced at the newspaper. “ I hadn’t taken Lindsay for a blackmailer, either.”
I almost didn’t let that pass. “Lindsay told me about you and Georgia at the creek because there’s sulfur and calcite in the evidence.” That was stretching the truth; she told me because she bears a grudge against him. “Meaning, the last place Georgia walked might have been near a hot spring.”
“She die at Hot Creek?” he asked, blunt.
“No. No match there. But I wondered if…after the creek…Georgia might have gone looking for another spring.”
“That doesn’t necessarily follow.”
“I’m speculating.” Wild-ass leaping, more like it. “Georgia had a romantic streak — I mean, going to the creek, to that chunk of limestone to dig out a crinoid for you. That’s not how she normally shopped. But what a perfect gift. I know what that’s like, wracking your brain to find the perfect gift for your boyfriend. When you’re in love — or in lust, whatever — you go the extra mile, so to speak. You get a little black dress, a sexy number to wow your guy. So the crinoid was her sexy black dress. Metaphorically speaking. And it worked. Wowed you enough that you two ended up in the creek.” I ran out of breath. I waited for him to say something.