I dropped to my knees and looked under my parents’ bed. The safe was gone.
“I got it.” Jimbo checked his watch. “Come on.”
“All right let’s go.” I moved along the hallway, whose walls were now bare of photos, thinking this is what this room looks like and this is what that room looks like, thinking I might forget. I passed the laundry room that used to be Henry’s room, where I was babysitting my little brother and staring out the window, and that was one room I would not miss. I snapped off the hall light and followed Jimbo down the stairs and through the family room and into the garage.
The garage runs half again the length of our house. Three cars can park in here, with room left over for Dad’s workshop. There are walls of shelves and a loft jury-rigged from the rafters. The unshelved wall is planked with pegboard and hung with hoses, lawn furniture, flashlights, power cords in orange braids. Half the space is devoted to old sports gear: skis, snowboards, bikes, camping stuff, ropes, pitons, and at least a dozen helmets that look like giant shellacked insect heads. A lot of it’s junk. Mom had e-mailed if it’s worth over $500, take it. Leave the rest. She’s expecting to return.
Jimbo’s Fiat, as promised, was full. Seven cartons sat in front of his car.
“My Soob’s in the driveway.” I hit the garage door opener. “I can fit these boxes.” The Lindsay and Georgia evidence boxes, which I’d packed in my car instead of Walter’s Explorer, didn’t use much room.
And then there was a shudder like logs rolling beneath the concrete, and the stuff hanging from the walls set up a racket and a box shimmied off the loft and split open on the floor, spilling old baby quilts. I held my ground.
“Shake and bake,” Jimbo said, grinning. White.
Across the street, Richard Precourt gave us the thumbs-up then went back to securing a tarpaulin over the mountain of stuff in the back of his pickup.
Richard’s hanging in there, I saw. Okay, we can do it.
Jimbo and I carried the cartons to the driveway and loaded my Subaru. It looked like I was embarking on a truly bizarre trip: roof racked with skis, tail hung with mountain bike, interior filled with field gear and boxes. In my passenger seat was a porcelain doll in a glass case that Lindsay brought me from Argentina. The Cerro Galan caldera.
I got a lawn chair from the pegboard and Dad’s workshop radio and took a seat on the driveway, returning the waves of my neighbors.
It was unreal.
Like a block party, only instead of Buddy Precourt’s garage band there were packed cars and radios blasting KMMT. I focused on my street. Looked exposed, hanging on the edge of the bluff. Houses looked unstable, piled three and four stories like cake tiers. I’ve had a meal in every house on the street, I’ve gathered cones for the fireplace from every pine, I remember what the Maser’s place looked like before the propane tank explosion. I know everybody on the street, I remember everybody who moved away, and I can guess who would and who would not return to rebuild.
Jimbo said, “You think it’s gonna blow?” He was behind me, hands on my chair, which vibrated from his incessant jiggling.
I shrugged. People evacuated the towns around Rainier and it didn’t blow.
Jimbo came around to face me. “You don’t act scared.”
“I’m scared. I’ve been scared so long it’s second nature. You’re used to seeing me this way.” I scuffed my boot, peeling a layer of snow. “It’s been a nightmare so long I have a hard time accepting it’s real. In the dream the ground’s rotting but it never gets to the eruption. I wake up first. You don’t die in dreams, do you?”
“Shit I don’t know.” He went into the garage and got a chair and sat beside me. “So. You never said if you think it’s Mike.”
“I don’t know.”
“He holds a grudge, you know?”
“I know, but… Grudge enough to sabotage the evac?”
“Look what Mike did to Georgia.”
It took me a moment, to make the leap to Gold Dust. I said, slowly, “You saying Mike killed Georgia?”
“I’m just saying maybe he did. You know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well didn’t Eric …?”
Very slowly, I came alert. “Didn’t Eric what?”
“Aw shit,” my brother said. “Shit.”
“Tell me,” I said, “what you know. What Eric knows. Tell me, Jimbo.”
“Okay, but only because I’m through covering for Mike. If Mike did 203…” Jimbo gripped the arms of his chair. “Look, I know you know all about Georgia and Krom, and Mike and Krom, and all that. Eric told me he told you. Guess he left me out of it. That’s Eric, the go-to guy, taking it all on himself. You know?”
I nodded. That I knew.
“So after Georgia disappeared, Eric and I were talking about Hot Creek, about Mike and Krom and Georgia seeing that. And we thought maybe that might have set Mike and Georgia off, against each other. And Eric said to keep it between us, that he’d bird-dog it. He’d take care of things. And then after you guys found her in the glacier — only you figured that’s not where she died — I mean, Eric told me that. Anyway, so when you found out there was gunpowder in the evidence and, uh, you wanted a cartridge from me…” He expelled a biathlete breath.
“You suspected the evidence powder was biathlon powder?”
“Shit yeah. And I thought Gold Dust, right away. Sorry Cass but I didn’t want you finding it. I mean, not until Eric had the chance to get up there and check it out and find out if anything there nailed Mike.”
I took that in. “Eric went to Gold Dust?”
“Yeah, couple days after the race. And he didn’t find anything that pointed to Mike. So we kind of breathed easier.”
“Easier? Shit, Jimbo, we’re talking murder and you were content that Mike wouldn’t be nailed?”
“No Cass, we hoped we were wrong about Mike.”
I recalled Eric in the cottage, trying to talk me into his version of Mike — misunderstood, mistreated. I thought about Eric, bearing the burden of Mike, going up to Gold Dust to find out if his fears were justified. And then I suddenly stiffened. “Wait a minute. I asked Eric about the hot spring at Gold Dust, where it was, and he stonewalled me. But now you tell me he’d already been there, so he must have seen the spring was gone. He must have seen the rockfall that blocked it. And the fissure…”
“No Cass, come on, he didn’t find that thing. And the rockfall was nothing new — we saw that way back when we used to hang there. The spring was right in front of it. So when Eric didn’t see the spring this time, he figured it was dead, under the snow.”
“You’re saying he didn’t notice there’d been new exfoliation, which would explain why the spring that used to be in front of the rockfall was now behind it?”
“Why would he? You’re the geologist. He’s not.”
I relaxed. Jimbo was right. Eric wouldn’t have noticed. If he’d noticed, he would have gone straight to Lindsay or Krom. Just as I had, when I found the fissure.
Jimbo said, “So we clear now?”
“Partly. I think I get what took Georgia to Gold Dust. Seeing Mike and Krom together. Jealousy. So she goes to check out the spring she remembers — Mike’s old spring. She’s going to bring Adrian there, trump Mike. But I still don’t know the how and the when of it. Since you think Mike killed her, care to explain that?”