Relief ran through me. “So you didn’t know Adrian was in town?”
“No.”
“So Adrian must have gone to her office after you’d left. But why?”
“I believe I left the lights on.”
I gaped. “That’s what he said.”
Walter shrugged. “He spoke the truth, when he had no need to lie.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Then it was just chance.”
“Indeed. Chance I forgot to turn out the lights, chance I left the safe open. I suspect when he came into the office and saw that, it gave him cause to worry. He believed she had his monitor, he’d not found it the night he killed her, and now he saw where she’d kept it. He must have had a difficult few moments, wondering who took it.”
I had to smile. “I doubt he wondered long. Who else would know about her safe, but you?”
Walter smiled then.
I said, “So he’s in her office, freaking out, and then the quake hits. And the bookcase falls.”
Walter said, even, “I’d offered more than once to anchor that bookcase for her.”
“When did you figure out what the monitor meant? What it could prove — the motive for Adrian to kill her.”
“At the Inn. Battery was dead so I used the AC adapter. I played the video.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
All at once, Walter sagged. His chamois shirt appeared too broad in the shoulders, too loose, the weight he’d lost in the hospital suddenly apparent. He said, soft, “I was afraid of what you would do with the knowledge.”
I flinched. Like he’d slapped me. And my thoughts spiraled down into the pit. If I’d ended up alone on the mountain with Adrian Krom — if Walter hadn’t been there for me to worry over — what would I have done? Knowing Krom killed Lindsay, knowing he sent Mike out to his death, knowing he might as well have sent Eric — what would I have done? Knowing we might die there anyway. I said, finally, “I would have done what you did. Give him the correct dose. Put him to sleep.”
“Thank you,” Walter said. “You’ve eased my mind.”
Just as he’d eased mine. Neither of us willing to take that final irreversible step. But we’d each thought about it, and we’d each wondered if the other was capable of it. I shifted my gaze outside, to the snowy peak of Mount Tom — a new skyline to get used to, although all high Sierra peaks will forever remind me of my home base, of Mammoth. But home was gone. Along with a few illusions about the people I loved. About myself.
Walter said, “Is that it, dear?”
I came back. “Yeah, that ties it up. If you agree, we’ll close out Georgia. Geology nailed it, all the way.” The reality is, it’s DNA or prints more often than the geology that places the perp at the scene. Not this time; we did well by Georgia. “And we may as well close out the Nash case. I’ve done the report. I didn’t mention the monitor — as John told me last week, it may be motive for murder but there’s no hard evidence to tie Adrian to the scene.” No fluids, no fibers, no prints. Crinoid’s speculative. “So — bottom line, casewise — we’re batting fifty-fifty.”
“You could look at it that way.”
“I’ve tried. But the fifty percent on the failure side of the column is just too painful.” I placed the second envelope on the table.
He opened it and read for a full minute, long enough to have committed my resignation to memory.
No other way out.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
We returned to Mammoth as we had left, in convoy. This time it went without a hitch. Long line of vehicles herding home, four months and six days after we all hightailed it out of town, the mountain in our rearview mirrors.
Now the mountain looms before us: long time no see.
Jimbo and I, in Jimbo’s heap, followed Walter in his new Explorer. Fire-engine red, like the one he’d lost. Walter had already put the mileage on it, wandering hither and yon for weeks at a time. He’d send postcards. I’d write letters. Other than that, I slept, ate, socialized when pressed, read, watched more videos than I needed. Boxed up lab equipment, put it in storage.
It took Resident Visitors Day, and its prospects, to rouse me from my torpor.
The Army Corps of Engineers had plowed a road across the ash-and-pumice tuff, following highway 203, and the cars raised a haze of ash. Erupted ash and pumice had filled in the gash across 203, the handiwork that had rerouted our evacuation. We passed a forest of gray tree stumps, stripped of bark, splintered. The intervening ground was wormy with charcoal. Just ahead was the hilly plateau on which the town had stood, and above that naked shelf was the mountain.
Landforms laid bare, a geologist’s dream.
“Man,” Jimbo said.
I glanced at Jimbo, barely visible behind the wings of his hair. First I’ve spent time alone with him since the hospital. He’d visited faithfully while I was laid up, jiving with the nurses, but we hadn’t found much to say to each other. Eric was always there, and behind him, Mike. Ghosts aren’t white, they’re tropical neon yellow. Except for Lindsay, who is a winter and whose best color was always gray.
The road leveled and we came to that juncture where we’d always gained the first glimpse of town through the screen of Jeffrey pines. No screen now. In my dreams, nothing has survived, not a single shard to indicate that anything but ash ever existed on this plateau. In my memory, it’s a mountain ski town in deep forest. But in reality the town looked like a beach, with mile after mile of sand castles eroded by the poundings of high tide.
Jimbo’s head snapped right. “That the ranger station?”
I looked. Rubble, unidentifiable but for the fact that the ranger station is the first building on the right as you come into town. Didn’t matter which way I looked. All buildings were the same, reduced to trace evidence. All tree stumps were the same, as though only one kind of tree had ever grown here, a barkless gray splintery species.
We drove on and I saw in the distance the ash trails of two Geological Survey vehicles heading for the Lakes Basin.
Halfway up Minaret Road a flagman directed us into a bulldozed parking lot.
It was a warm summer day and doors slammed and neighbors sieved among the cars. It was like countless occasions — concerts, races, barbecues, parades — which invariably began with greetings in the parking lot. We were a silent bunch today, going in the direction we were flagged.
Walter set off at a brisk pace ahead of everyone.
“What’s up with you two?” Jimbo asked.
I strapped on my belt bag. “He’s giving us some time together.” Who knows when we’ll hang out next? From here, Jimbo’s off again on the summer roller-ski biathlon circuit.
My brother and I walked Minaret, arm’s-length apart, like probers crossing an avalanche field. We came to the boxy perimeter of a foundation and Jimbo speculated that we had stumbled upon the Ski Tip. Hard to say. I found myself looking for curlicues of wood, for the kitschy soul of Bill’s establishment, but of course that had not survived. Jimbo traipsed into the rubble to poke around.
I waited, resting my hands on the pouch at my waist.
Jimbo turned and the sun caught him full on, and I felt a shock. He’d aged. In my memory his face is still a boy’s face — soft curves to the cheeks, the brush of thick blond lashes. In reality, his lips were thinner than I recalled, his forehead faintly lined. He stood fixed, solitary customer of the Tip today. He looked like he didn’t have even ghosts for company.
I did, although their company brought me an unbearable ache.
I came over to Jimbo and punched his arm. “Let’s go.”