Dinosaur Lake (22 page)

“Sorry, Ann,” he repeated spiritlessly. “I sure tried to keep it all going. But the rising costs and the declining circulations finally did me in.”

“Ah, don’t think you have to explain anything to me. Worry about me. I know, better than anyone, how hard you’ve worked. I’ll do fine.” She patted his back in a daughterly fashion.

“Oh, I know you will. You have Henry, Laura and Phoebe. You’re so lucky.” The man’s face, in the fading light, seemed to crumple. “None of this would bother me so if Ethel was still alive. We’d had such plans for retirement. Together. We were going to see America in a R.V. Now I’ll go see Los Angeles. Alone.”

He looked at her over his shoulder. “Don’t ever take your Henry for granted. Life has a way of dealing us unexpected blows when we least expect them. I thought I’d have Ethel forever. We’d be old together. Die together. I miss her so much. It’s lonely in the world without the one you love.”

They were in front of Zeke’s house and she gave him a quick hug. Over the years, he’d become like a father to her. So she wasn’t just losing a job. She was losing a mentor and a cherished friend.

They went in.

Breaded pork steaks, corn, and mashed potatoes were on the table waiting for them. Since Zeke had made supper the night before, Laura was paying him back. Her daughter, baby in her arms, was smiling as they sat down to eat.

“What’s up?” Ann asked.

“I got a job today. In town.”

“Good for you,” she congratulated her daughter. “How about Phoebe?”

Laura sat down with the child, sleepy-eyed, in her lap. They’d already eaten. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. The job is at Freddy’s Diner. Night shift. Ten until six in the morning. So I can still take the G.E.D. classes at night. I thought, well, I’d hoped that as long as we were staying here at Zeke’s you might watch Phoebe for me. She’d be sleeping, and you’d be here sleeping anyway, too.”

Ann gazed at her granddaughter. Phoebe was a good child. She went to bed at eight and usually slept the night through. And Laura, like her, was only filling the time they found on their hands with the men camped out in the park waiting for their monster to show up again. Then again Laura needed a job. One thing Ann could say about her daughter, she wasn’t lazy.

“All right.” Ann nodded. “As long as I’m here. Just don’t count on it forever. I’ll be moving back home any day now.”

Laura gave her mother an understanding look. They missed their men. “Well, who knows, my plans might be drastically changing after that.” Laura offered a secretive smile, and wouldn’t say anything else. But it was easy to see she was in love and she had a secret. It showed.

“Freddy’s?” Zeke huffed after a bite of mashed potatoes. “Does he know who your mother is, who she works for?” Freddy was the one who’d cooked the contaminated chicken for the Spring Fest.

“Sure he does.” Laura’s eyes sparkled. “Don’t worry, you two, he’s not holding a grudge anymore for that article the newspaper did on the bad chicken.” Laura waved her hand. “He claims he got over that a long time ago.”

“Good,” Ann said. “We never meant to hurt him or his business. We published the facts. The truth, nothing more. That weekend his bad chicken just happened to be news.”

“Oh, he knows. He told me to tell both of you you can start coming back for lunch again any time. No hard feelings. In fact, he thanks you for making him aware of the bad meat. He changed his meat supplier and he’s more careful now.”

Zeke and Ann exchanged subdued looks. When working, Freddy’s had been one of their favorite lunch places, but without the newspaper, there’d be no lunches to go to.

They ate supper and talked about everything, except the newspaper. Laura went to her classes. Ann and Zeke cleaned the kitchen. Afterwards Zeke, despondent from the events of the day, went up to sleep. Ann played with her granddaughter until it was time to tuck her into bed.

Afterwards she tried to call Henry’s cell phone, but the park, in certain areas, had terrible reception and the call didn’t go through. All she’d gotten was cut off. Then she tried their cabin. If he was there, which he should be, she should have been able to reach him. No answer.

As she was waiting, she thought about what closing the newspaper would mean to Zeke, her, the town. She couldn’t let that happen. Not if she could change it. She remembered how the paper’s circulation jumped after the fossil story had come out. Zeke had told her if they’d just had had access to updates on the dig site (which they hadn’t), or another story, a series of them, as good as that one, the paper would have made it.
Would have made it.

Ann had been a journalist most of her working life. It was everything she’d ever dreamed of, except winning a Pulitzer. Yet how could she save the best little newspaper she’d ever worked on and help the old man who’d come to mean so much to her?

Only one way. She had to get that story. She
needed
pictures of that dinosaur. But how was she going to steal into the park and get them without blowing the whistle on the cover-up or breaking her solemn promise to her husband?

No way…unless…if she got the pictures and wrote the story anyway, but didn’t say where the exact location, or the lake, was. Kept it secret. There were many lakes in the area covered by the newspaper. All she had to do was make sure none of the background was recognizable as Crater Lake or the park land. Hard, but not impossible. Generic pictures with the monster in them. That’d work.

She’d have Henry to contend with. Oh, well, she smiled in the dim living room, the telephone in her hand, she didn’t have to tell him now, did she? And once it was done, the story printed, well, what could he do about it then?

Nothing.

The phone was finally picked up on the other end and she spent the next twenty-minutes talking with her husband. It was comforting to hear his voice. To know he and Justin were okay. She made sure the questions she asked about the park and the creature sounded innocent. Which wasn’t hard to do. Henry was so trusting. Then she went to bed.

Making that decision to sneak into the park had taken everything out of her.

Aquatic biologists Jim Francis, and his partner, Mark Lassen, had been piloting the gray one-man submersible called the Deep Rover for many years. They’d used it most often in the oceans, exploring sunken ships, searching for antiquities and lost treasure, but they’d also taken it into deep lakes to recover bodies or evidence that would have been impossible to retrieve any other way.

They’d logged in over fifty rescue missions. Last year they’d been responsible for freeing eight men who’d been trapped in a crippled submarine near the Florida Keys. They’d had to make eight trips, taking turns piloting, and pick up one man at a time; squeeze him in. They’d been in the area, nearby, when the emergency had happened and they’d agreed to help. There hadn’t been time to wait for a larger rescue vessel before the submarine’s life-support systems would have given out. All eight servicemen were alive today because they’d gone down and gotten them.

They were proud of what they did, and were good at it. They enjoyed their wandering life, the excitement, and the good pay. They were professionals.

They often teamed up with police departments or local authorities when their services were needed. But this was only the second time they’d been called in by the National Park Service to be part of an ICS Team. Not much call for a submersible in most parks.

The Deep Rover’s pressurized hull was a sphere, with one viewing port in front and three more ahead and down, at various angles. The external propulsion machinery and other equipment were aft, blocking any possible viewports in the astern direction. In length the sub was twenty-two feet, with fifteen of it consisting of a conical attachment on the seven foot sphere that terminated in a swiveling propeller used for propulsion and steering. The one drawback was the Deep Rover was meant to carry only one person comfortably at a time. He and Lassen took turns going down. The other stayed on shore and monitored the mission with the latest in photographic technology which not only allowed the voyage to be followed up close, but provided a permanent record.

He and Lassen had arrived at Park Headquarters soon after dawn two mornings earlier and the ICS Team leader, Chief Ranger Shore, had given them permission to enter Crater Lake and begin the search. And they did.

They’d been cruising the darkness of the lake’s deepest regions, 1,032 feet beneath the surface, for the last two days. Looking for some huge lake creature everyone said was down there somewhere. A giant animal that reportedly had so far had killed eleven people or more…if any of that tall tale could be believed. But, what the heck, Francis thought as he maneuvered the craft through the underwater world, they were getting highly paid for the wild goose chase, so why not? It was an interesting job. Like treasure hunting…except for something alive. It’d do until he and Lassen could find something better.

Not that he was able to see much of anything beneath the water with the sub’s high-powered floodlights and cameras. It was murky in the lake.

And as of yet…he’d seen nothing unusual. No water monster. Small or large. Nada.

He’d had orders from Ranger Shore not only to locate the so-called creature, if possible, but to get an idea of where it might be hiding or nesting. But he wasn’t to engage the animal in any way and was not to stick around under any circumstances if the creature saw him. He’d been warned to keep as much distance between them as he could because it was hostile to humans.

“Of course it’s
hostile
to humans, if it attacks, kills and eats them, for God’s sake,” Mark Lassen had pointed out. “According to Ranger Shore this isn’t the Cookie Monster we’re going after, Jim. And, to be truthful, if any of this stuff we’ve been told about the creature is true, I’m not sure we should even be out here.”

In fact, the whole assignment had disturbed Lassen so much he hadn’t wanted to accept it in the first place, but Francis had over ruled him, saying humorously, “Most potential water monsters, imaginary or not, like Nessie, are shy creatures. They don’t want to be on the nightly news or have their pictures taken. They flee, avoid, humanity. I don’t see how this creature could be as dangerous as they say. Something else must have taken those people or killed them. Don’t worry so.” Not that either of them had ever gotten close to any so-called water monster before. Oh, they’d spotted a fin once of some unusual sea inhabitant off the coast of Florida. Another time they’d seen a big blur on their sonar in a deep loch in Sweden. Nothing had been real. Nothing they could have proven existed with concrete evidence. Most “monsters” turned out to be an exceedingly large fish, shark, octopus or whale.

Francis didn’t believe in monsters and viewed each of these hunting expeditions as jokes, although well-paying ones. But Lassen wanted to believe and actually found this particular case intriguing mainly because a ranger and a paleontologist both claimed to have seen the water beast up close. In the flesh. Seen it kill someone.

But Ranger Shore was concerned about the body count; afraid their submersible would be the creature’s next target. Francis had to reassure him that the Deep Rover could out-maneuver or outrun anything in the water. “No matter how fast the animal is,” he said, “we’re faster. The Deep Rover’s too big to eat. Too tough to tear open. She’s equipped with outside television cameras, so we can see everything around us, and she has mechanical arms capable of picking up a dime on the lake’s floor. There’s a direct radio link-up to home base that can be set up on any boat or dock, keeping the sub in touch with the shore no matter where she is. She’s indestructible.

“The only thing our sub is missing is weapons, but we don’t need them. Besides her speed and agility, when the Deep Rover sits immobile on an ocean or lake floor, her color makes her nearly invisible. Most marine creatures we come into contact with think she’s a big rock.

“So, you see, all things considered, we’re safe when we’re in the Rover. Take my word for it.”

Ranger Shore, his face grim, hadn’t been convinced. “I know you think you’ll be safe in your submersible, but let me make this clear. I’m giving you strict instructions not to hang around if you find yourselves in the beast’s path. No matter how much you’ll want to gawk. It’s damn big, damn fast and incredibly sneaky, as unbelievable as that sounds. So don’t. I’m not as sure the beast won’t recognize your sub for what it is and go after it.” Francis knew the ranger had had second thoughts about calling them in, but it’d been the only way of finding the creature’s home. It’d be too risky to send a diving team down.

“For an animal that’d be genius level thinking,” Francis had mocked.

Ranger Shore had replied with a solemn frown. “Then you don’t know this animal. It can
think.
Strategize. Don’t underestimate it, is all I’m saying.”

Funny thing was, Francis had later mulled over what the man, who didn’t come across as nuts in any other way, had said. Maltin, the paleontologist, hadn’t seemed crazy either. Just leery and a little frightened. Their astounding account of their earlier run-ins with the creature and the other rangers’ healthy caution had made Lassen uneasy; but had made Francis want to search for it even more.

So here they were.

And the Deep Rover dove, hunting for something that probably didn’t exist.

It was when Lassen was in the sub, third day down, that the cave lair was discovered.

***

The Rover’s headlights skimmed across patches of yellow and orange bacteria that Francis, who waited with Ranger Shore, Dr. Harris and Maltin, Greer and Patterson on a boat at Cleetwood Dock and who was in constant radio and visual contact with it, claimed lived on minerals rather than photosynthetic products of sunlight. He loved to lecture to anyone who’d listen about his field of expertise. The screen showed them everything Lassen was seeing below.

“These particular bacteria are everywhere down here,” Lassen voiced over the sub’s radio, aware Francis wasn’t the only one listening. “They’re real pretty.”

Lassen seemed delighted at the variety of plant life he was seeing.

“They’re growing in puffy masses. Some as large as fifty feet across. They resemble loose mattress stuffing. So weird looking. I’d love to touch them. Wonder if they’re soft or hard. Hmm.”

“That type?” Francis said. “Probably soft like mushrooms.” He laughed. Always amazed at how childlike Lassen could be when it came to what lived on the water’s floor.

Francis, short and wizened, looked older than his fifty years, and liked to dress in shades of gray. Casual wear. Bulky sweaters and Dockers. His hair of the same color was tied in a ponytail; he often wore a cowboy hat and was considered an eccentric individual who kept to himself. Best at what he did, he knew oceans and lakes and the creatures that lived in them.

Lassen could have been his brother, most people said, they looked that much alike, except Lassen had no ponytail and was taller than Francis. He wore his hair medium length and shaggy; had pale blue eyes like ice. He enjoyed people and was the more sociable of the two.

Lassen was the mechanical expert. He kept the Deep Rover running safe. He was also the married one of the two, having a wife and two chubby kids waiting for him in Vancouver, while Francis was a lifelong bachelor. Yet they were staunch friends and had been for over ten years, as long as they’d been partners.

The day before, Francis had piloted the sub along the lake’s bottom and discovered what the paleontologist, Maltin, had previously discovered, that the water was being heated by subterranean volcanic eruptions. He’d also told him they’d done the necessary tests, had recorded the results and found the water was nearly eighty-five degrees along the crater floor, although the deep-water temperature of the lake was supposed to average somewhere around fifty-five degrees. Francis had been disturbed, but intrigued by the temperature aberration.

His search had also found radon, the radioactive decay product of radium, at levels nearly two thousand times higher than at the lake’s upper levels, and unusually large amounts of the light element hellium-3, a component of the hot viscous rock called magna that flowed upwards from the mantle beneath the earth’s crust.

“There are also signs there’s been extensive earthquake activity, perhaps going way back to prehistoric times, down there. Astonishing,” Francis had exclaimed the day before.

“Still is earthquake activity,” Henry had commented.

Francis thought about the earthquakes as the engines of the submersible purred through the radio and it picked up speed to cut through the cloudy water.

Through the sub’s mechanical eyes the men watched above as the Deep Rover passed rocky basins which resembled small volcano craters. These, like the ones Francis had seen the day before, were filled with dense water rich in salts that appeared vividly blue in the bright headlights and contrasted sharply with the gloom of the surrounding water.

“Wow,” Lassen remarked from below. “See these spires of silicate rocks on the cameras up there? Some of them must be thirty feet tall.” He was referring to the pointed spires rising around him from the bed of the lake like a stone garden. “They’re similar to those black smokers we found along the upwelling heat sources of that ocean ridge near Hawaii, remember those, Jim?”

He and Lassen had charted the depths of the Pacific and seen the lush plant life six-thousand feet down. Yet the bottom of Crater Lake still held unique sights. “Must be the volcano’s influence and the molten lava that created these formations. Lovely.”

“We see them,” the answer bounced back across the miles after a short pause. “They’re awesome. But, Mark, watch your way between them, looks like it’s going to be a tight fit.”

“It is,” Lassen responded. “But I’m a good driver.” He chuckled.

“You getting tired down there, Mark?”

“No. Doesn’t take much energy to shove around a joystick and aim the sub in the right direction. So far so good. Not tired at all. I can stay down a bit longer. Got another six hours of air. By the way, the scenery down here is exquisite. For a lake, extraordinary.”

Lassen had been searching the east curve of the caldera for hidden caves the last two hours.

“Well, put in another hour, buddy, then surface.” Francis didn’t want him under too long. The tense work rapidly wearied a person, and tired pilots made careless mistakes.

If Shore was right, his partner couldn’t afford mistakes if the mystery creature showed up.

“I hear ya,” Lassen responded. “But I haven’t found anything yet. No so-called water monsters. In fact, strangely enough, I haven’t seen any fish. None at all. If, as they say, they stock this lake every two years, and there aren’t any inlets or outlets with the sea, then something’s depleting the supply big time.”

Francis noticed the ranger listening to the conversation and didn’t seem surprised at the news. Greer’s colleague, Patterson, was listening, too.

“I’m in full throttle and retracing my route to the other side of the lake to a place I passed earlier,” Lassen told him. “By the time I saw it, I’d passed it. I’d like to check it out. I thought I saw tunnels branching off and burrowing down away from the bottom. Huge mothers. Must be the lake’s plumbing system. If I explore, could be I can figure out where all the heat’s coming from.”

“I didn’t see any large tunnels yesterday when I was down there,” Francis said. “Just small caves.”

“You were on the other side of the lake most of the day, remember, Jim?”

“I was, wasn’t I? Okay, check them out, but be careful. The tunnels could be unstable with the recent earthquakes and since we don’t know where the magna flows are originating, even more so. And if that’s where the heat’s coming from, even the Deep Rover’s thick hull might not keep you from turning into a crispy critter.”