Quicksilver (The Forensic Geology Series, Prequel) (11 page)

He still gripped the gun with both hands. He pointed it somewhere in the neighborhood of our six legs.

Robert, Walter, and I stood side-by-side in a lineup in front of the tunnel.

Henry spoke to Walter. “I am hiring you.”

Walter said, gently, “We prefer not to work at gunpoint.”

“It’s just in case.”

“In case of what, son?”

“
Just in case. Just in case
.”

Walter said, more gently, “All right.”

Henry raised his hands, and the Glock. His hands shook. The gun oscillated. “A geologist needs to go in.”

“Cassie will go,” Walter said promptly.

I got it. Henry didn’t know that Walter was the expert on the auriferous channels, Henry just knew we’d been hired to get his brother here. And given that we’d followed the float and found our way, I guessed Henry got that right. By now, either one of us would do. And Walter delegated me. I got it. He’ll stay outside with crazy Henry while I get to go on the treasure hunt. He thought he was protecting me. He always has. When I was a kid assisting in his lab and he took me to my first crime scene, he bought me a whistle in case we got separated. All these years later and now we’re doing the tricky dance of who is protecting whom. Vigilance is in his DNA. It’s tattooed on his soul.

There’s a man with a gun. And Walter is stepping up.

I stole a glance at Robert. He stood rigid, watching his brother. Not overtly afraid but then I’d not seen Robert Shelburne show fear. I did not know how he would exhibit fear.

I refocused on Henry. He looked a little lost, as if he’d come out of hiding too soon. His face was more weathered than the teenager in the photo but the Sherpa wool cap now cupping his head made him look young again. Still, he did not have teenage Henry’s cool squint. His eyes were reddened, blinking. Lack of sleep, trying to get a wet fire going, crying, who knew? His nose was pinkish, sunburned, peeling. I guessed the weather had been clear and sunny before we joined the hunt, although I wondered why an experienced outdoorsman like Henry Shelburne had not used sunscreen. His peeling nose—like the preposterous earflaps—made him look like a kid. I ignored that.

Robert Shelburne’s kid brother. Not mine.

Henry let go of the gun with his right hand and lifted it, gesturing at the tunnel.

I stared at his hand. The palm was pink, peeling, and I got a sick understanding that we weren’t talking sunburn here. Jesus Henry, what have you been into?

Robert suddenly lunged.

Quick as a snake strike, Henry had both hands on the Glock, had the gun aimed at his brother’s head.

Robert raised his own hands. “Chill Bro.”

I said quickly,“I’m going in.”

Henry pulled his arms into his chest, bracing his elbows, steadying his aim. “Thank you.”

Cautiously, I answered, “You’re welcome.”

And so now it became my show. I assumed I didn’t need a gas detector, or Robert would not have emerged from the tunnel alive. I started for the tunnel. Henry stopped me. Told me to leave behind my pack. Told me to take only my tools. Told me to bring him a sample. I rummaged in my pack and got the field kit and headlamp, fitted the headband, and started once more for the tunnel.

As I passed into the mouth I heard Henry call to me, “Go all the way.”

A
ll the way
where
?

The tunnel was black as a catacomb.

I snapped on my headlamp and the bedrock lit up. Bedrock walls, bedrock ceiling, bedrock floor, a sturdy incursion into the mountainside, a strong tunnel that needed no timbering, a tunnel with drill holes in the ceiling to ventilate, the only sort of tunnel I felt remotely comfortable traversing. When my eyes had adjusted and my nerves settled, I identified the bedrock as metamorphic slate.

As far ahead as I could see, the tunnel ran straight.

Perhaps somewhere farther ahead there were side branches, offshoots, whatever it was they were called in a mine, a term Walter would know. But Walter was outside facing a Glock and counting on me to return with something shiny and pretty to satisfy Henry. A nice nugget. Sure thing.

All I need do was go all the way, wherever that way led me.

I was breathing more rapidly, leg muscles working a little harder, and I realized that the tunnel was angling upward. I assumed the tunnel-builders had done that on purpose so that any water that seeped in through the rock would drain out.

Good idea.

My body settled into a rhythm, releasing my mind to dwell on the question at hand.

How did Henry know where
all the way
led? He didn’t like enclosed spaces. And how would he know how far
I
went?

And, further, what did he expect me to find?

Quite clearly this tunnel was working its way into the hillside toward the buried river channel whose upper gravel reaches I had glimpsed on the ridge top. Clever, those miners. If you can’t hose out a mountain to get to the gold, tunnel your way. One way or another they’d found the way. One way or another those ancient Eocene river channels had condemned this countryside to an extreme makeover.

And that bugged me, because it should have bugged Henry.

Presumably he wasn’t looking for hosed-out mine pits or well-tunneled hills. Presumably he was looking for a site lost since his grandfather’s time, a site that nobody but
nobody
had since seen. Was he not disappointed to find that Notch Valley had already been mined? Walter sure was. And Henry, I thought, should have been beyond disappointed. Should have been devastated.

Another failure for Quicksilver.

So why was he so anxious to have me go into this well-tunneled hill? If there was something legend-worthy in here, it would already have been found.

Poor Henry.

Henry with his peeling pink palms gripping the black and silver Glock.

My sympathy evaporated.

Several hundred feet into the tunnel, the walls abruptly changed.

The bedrock was now overlain by gravel. I played my light upon the stuff. It was mostly quartz and slate, cemented in clay and sand. I ran my fingers along the rough face.

I had entered the lost river channel.

There were pebbles and cobbles and even a few boulders—the well-rounded rocks of milky quartz that were legend in and of themselves, the defining characteristic of the blue lead, carried by long-ago rivers, carried to
this
place. Here right now.

I lost my bearings.

For a moment I forgot that I’d been sent in here. For a moment it seemed I’d chosen this hunt.

The tunnel drifted into a bend.

I halted and stared at the wall. Gravel sitting upon bedrock. Gravel the basal layer of the ancient channel. The basal layer being the deep blue lead.

Only, it wasn’t blue.

It was reddish, the iron pyrite in the clay oxidized.

I set my field kit on the floor, fumbled it open, and grabbed the hammer and chisel. Aiming my headlamp at the wall, I went to work on the cemented gravel, gouging my way through to the virgin blue.

And then I had to stop and stare.

It was blue as the wings of a jay.

Something like a fever took hold of me. Right here in front of my nose was the deep blue lead. I’d listened to Walter and Robert Shelburne rhapsodize about it, I’d read up on it myself, I’d contemplated the geology of it, but right now what made my pulse pound was the sheer reality of it, and I had to admit that I felt a thrill. If I had to name the feeling perhaps I’d call it romance.

Walter should see this.

And then I regained my senses. Legend-worthy to Walter, yes, but to Henry Shelburne? I recalled what Robert had told us, back at the lab, back when he was spinning the legend of the deep blue lead. He’d said Henry was hunting not only gold but something more fundamental. And since Henry had been hunting his entire adult life, could he not have encountered the blue somewhere, sometime? Hacked into some forgotten gravel outcrop? Maybe. As long as it wasn’t buried in a mining tunnel. In any case, this patch of the blue lead was not the patch he sought.

To be certain, I took my hand lens and had a twenty-power look. Nope, no visible gold. There was no visible treasure here. Perhaps there was microscopic gold somewhere within this seam but surely what was economically recoverable had already been recovered. There was certainly no diorite dike, no cross-studded hornfels sheath, no intrusion acting as a giant riffle, entrapping a secret pocket of gold.

The bedrock here was unviolated.

Nevertheless, I picked up the chunk of gravel ore I’d gouged out and put it in my field kit. Better to return with something than nothing at all.

And perhaps there was something worth seeing around the tunnel bend.

Go all the way
.

I wondered, again, if Henry knew where all the way led.

The tunnel was bending like a U, and there now appeared on the bedrock floor the broken remains of iron tracks. I understood. The miners had not hauled the gravel out in backpacks. They’d used rail cars.

The tunnel now straightened into the second leg of the U. The tracks continued as far as my light could penetrate.

I continued, as well, following that deep blue lead.

Even oxidized, even rusty reddish brown, it held my attention.

Within a few dozen yards, the gravel receded. Within a couple dozen more yards, the walls were pure bedrock. And then up ahead I saw the faint glow of daylight.

Another exit.

Now what?

I thought it over. I found that I knew two things.

First, Henry had been camped in Notch Valley, perhaps for a couple of days. Henry would have had time to crawl all over this place and would have found this second tunnel mouth. Which meant he already knew what was out there.

Second, what was out there could not be what he sought. What he sought
must
be in here, or so he must believe. Otherwise, why send his brother into the tunnel searching? Why send me? At gunpoint, no less.

I took in a deep tunnel breath. It tasted like stone.

Okay. I knew one more thing.

Third, I knew that Henry Shelburne was not going to shoot Walter, while they waited. There was no possible need. Walter was not hot-headed enough to go for the gun. Walter was Henry’s insurance, guaranteeing my cooperation.

I exhaled, in a hiss.

I had not yet gone all the way.

It could not be more than a couple dozen yards to the exit.

~ ~ ~

I
stepped out of the tunnel into silvery light. While I’d been underground the sun had begun to burn through the fog. The sky was now a thin pearl shell, ready to crack. Aching for warmth, waiting for the pearly light to penetrate my skin, I took in the lay of the land.

The tunnel opened onto another slim canyon, thickly vegetated. I stood on one side of the canyon and opposite me the wall rose to a high ridge. This canyon’s slim floor angled downhill in a steep incline and put me in mind of an unrolling carpet.

Other than the works of nature, this place was all business.

The rail tracks exited the tunnel at the high end of the canyon. The tracks fed into the skeleton of a building that held the rusted guts of some sort of machinery. Walter would know the name, would know the mechanism, but I hazarded a guess that the cemented gravel had gotten crushed in there. Running downhill was a long ditch littered with boulders and cobbles and pebbles—a sluiceway, artery of the gold country. I could see its bones surviving here and there, stretches of wood planking forming the walls and huge riffle blocks crisscrossed along the bottom, stepping downhill in the gut of the sluice box. At the head of the sluice, just uphill from me, sagged a rusting metal tank. Quite clearly it was a water tank, to store the water to hose the crushed gravel down the sluice. To free the gold. I had certainly gotten the hang of sluicing.

It appeared that this slim canyon might feed into Notch Valley, which, if I had my bearings straight, was downhill from here.

I ventured farther outside to see what I could see.

What I now saw was another building of sorts, more a bunker nestled into the side of the hill, just uphill of the tunnel. Its door was rust-patched iron, secured by a heavy iron latch with a heavy iron padlock.

The latch hung open, the padlock unhooked.

How far was I supposed to proceed? All the way in there?

I went to the door and knocked, calling out
hello
, feeling monumentally foolish.

No answer. No surprise.

There was nothing for it but to have a quick look inside. I grasped the iron handle and pulled the door open. Daylight streamed in but nevertheless it took a moment for my eyes to adjust, to penetrate the gloom inside. No need to step in. From the doorway I could ID this room as a storage space. It was cluttered with equipment, stuff jammed in so tight that I could not tell the armature of one from the leg of another. Some stuff quickly recognizable: shovels, a wheelbarrow, buckets. Other stuff Walter could name. All of it in a state of rust and disrepair, dense with history. A maze of a pathway wound through the room.

And then my attention shifted to the shelves carved into the bedrock walls. Half a dozen mercury flasks sat on one thick shelf.

I felt a sudden relief.

Only half a dozen. I had expected more. I had expected a shitload.

That is, if this was where Henry had obtained the flask he took to the river, where his father died.

So was this the place? The door latch was open, the padlock unlocked. He didn’t like enclosed spaces but with the light streaming in, surely he could have brought himself the few steps necessary to take one of those bottles off the shelf.

And then rent a horse or lash it to a backpack and transport it. And then open the flask and dump it.

Jesus Henry.

I envisioned his peeling nose, peeling palms, pink skin, some sort of rash. Contact dermatitis? Hyper-sensitive, surely, from a lifetime of messing around with mercury, dancing with the vapors.

I backed out of the doorway and shoved the damn door shut.