Quicksilver (The Forensic Geology Series, Prequel) (13 page)

It looked, actually, like the miners had claimed it as a storage space. Old timber was piled in there, castoffs from the sluiceway.

Robert spoke. “Got a pile of dimes in there, Henry?”

“No.”

I shifted. What, then? Not certain I wanted to know.

“It’s under that... That...” Henry frowned.

“Bracken,” Walter said.

“Bracken,” Henry repeated.

I didn’t know if this was another word Henry had forgotten or if he simply didn’t know the proper name. I would have just said
fern
. Tufted ferns sprouted in crevices on the back wall of the grotto. It was a day for ferns, lacy mountain misery and spreading bracken and I could live happily for the rest of the day without encountering another variety of ferns.

“Look under the bracken,” Henry said. He added, “R.”

Robert didn’t move.

Henry adjusted the aim of his Glock so that his brother was squarely in his sights. 

Robert Shelburne gave a shrug, as if he had no real worries—no expectation, certainly, of finding anything of note in there under the cover of the ferns. Gold nugget, snake, turkey baster. Whatever. Robert strolled over to the grotto and stepped inside.

“Push the bracken out of the way, R.”

The bracken was about chest-level. Robert yanked a fistful of ferns clean out of their crevice. For a long moment he looked at what he’d uncovered, and then he turned to face us. Uprooted ferns in his fingers. “What’s up with
that
, Henry?”

I angled for a look but I could not see what Robert had found.

“Move out of the way,” Henry said.

Robert gave a tight smile and stepped aside.

I didn’t understand the meaning of what I saw. Sticking out of the hillside at the back of the grotto was a length of rusted pipe. A spigot was fitted to the end of the pipe. It looked for all the world like a tap in a garden wall for a hose. Given the lush vegetation, I wondered if it was indeed a water source tapped into a fracture spring in the hillside.

I said, to Henry, “Is it for water?”

“Turn it on.”

Actually, I didn’t really care to do that.

“It won’t bite, Cassie.”

Robert stood very still, very quiet.

Walter said, “I’ll do it.”

Henry leveled the gun at me. “Cassie asked first.”

I moved stiffly to the grotto, trying not to stare at the garden hose bib, instead scanning the walls and the floor, getting the lay of the land. It was like a roomy walk-in closet. Make that a roomy tool shed. Splintery sluice box planks and riffle blocks were stacked against the back wall and an overturned metal bucket lay in a corner. The walls sprouted bracken, brush, greenery I could not name. There was no ‘roof’ to speak of. The cavity simply chimneyed up until it became flush with the face of the hillside. The floor was bedrock—the Shoo Fly Formation, I noted, including the now familiar spotted slate. In the middle of the bedrock the floor was gouged, like a water-eroded pothole in bedrock exposed to the elements. I stepped down into the pothole. It was a couple of feet deep. I scuffed a boot across the rock. It was rough, not erosion-smooth. I wondered if it had been manually gouged. I stepped out and moved to the spigot. My homey comparisons died. I evaluated my task. The pipe extended maybe ten feet out of the compacted gravel wall. It was supported by a brace, a metal stand driven into the bedrock at the edge of the pothole. The pipe was rusted. The spigot at the end of the pipe was rusted. Perhaps it would not turn. I’ve tried that before—straining to open a corroding faucet. Might need a stronger hand here than mine. How about Robert’s? I recalled his hands gripping the sluice box back at the pit when he’d seen the dimes. Big strong hands. I glanced over my shoulder. Robert’s face was white, pinched. As was Walter’s. Henry’s face was pink with the cold. With the poison. He gave me a nod. I turned back to the spigot and I feared that this was not a water source. I gripped the handle. Praying it was rusted shut. Prayer went unanswered. The spigot turned. I let go like it had come alive.

Liquid metal began to flow. Thin as a necklace.

Holy hell.

“Open it all the way,” Henry said.

I twisted the handle. All the way.

I should have retreated then. Instead, I stood rooted. I grew a little dizzy, the way you grow a little dizzy standing on the edge of a cliff staring down at the sea. You know you should back up. Instead, a primitive part of you wants to jump.

A primitive part of me wanted to reach out and catch the flow.

Not smart, although in this cold air there was little risk of the quicksilver giving off vapor. Still, the flow was thicker now, more like a snake, and it poured into the pothole.

So that’s what that pothole’s for, I thought.

“Cassie Cassie Cassie,” Henry said. “Move out of the way.”

Yeah.

I turned and headed back to my place in line. As Robert and Walter gained the view into the grotto, their faces mirrored mine. Mesmerized. Spooked.

Robert found his voice. “Did you do that, Henry?”

“It was here.”

“How’d you find it?” I asked.

“In the supply room.” He pointed. “There’s a ... There’s a ... It shows where things are.”

A diagram. I looked up Sluiceway Canyon, up where the bunker was, the room with the old mining equipment, the room with the flasks. I looked back to the grotto, to the spigot. “So where’s the mercury coming from?”

Walter glanced up to ridge above the grotto. “Was there mining up there?”

“Everywhere,” Henry said.

I got it. Mercury loss, from the sluices. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of the stuff, over the years. And mercury being so very heavy, it leached down through the soils. The soils were saturated. And the miners came across the seepage and drove the pipe into the hillside to capture the free supply. And it’s still there today. But in that case the stuff would still be oozing out of the hillside. I didn’t quite get it. I said, “Hillside’s not oozing mercury.”

“Sequestration,” Walter said. His place in line bordered the trough. He stepped down into it, scrutinizing it, no doubt running the hidden spring scenario. He looked up and scanned the entire hillside, examining the terrain with that look he gets in the lab when he’s considering the provenance of a chunk of evidence on his workbench. “Most plausibly, the mercury has sunk down to an impermeable bedrock layer and collected there. A basin of sorts within the hillside.”

I nodded. “Makes sense.”

Henry said, “What do you think, R?”

“Why ask me?” Robert said, cautious. “I’m no expert.”

“You sounded like one. That day on the Yuba.”

~ ~ ~

W
e went silent. So stone silent that I swore I could hear the hiss of the mercury straining through the spigot.

I took a few steps upslope, angling for a better look into the grotto, to judge the size of the growing pool. It came nowhere near to filling the pothole. But still, it grew. The silver snake kept sliding out, the pool kept swelling. It was like watching a faucet left running in the kitchen sink, and the person who left it running didn’t notice the sink beginning to fill. I noticed. I’d left it running. My hands went slick with sudden sweat, with the need to turn off the damn spigot.

Robert finally spoke. “You want to help me out here, Henry?
What
day on the Yuba?”

“The day I saw you and Cam.”

Robert stiffened.

“Who is Cam?” Walter asked.

“Camden,” Robert said, tightly. “Our father.”

My attention snapped fully to the Shelburne brothers.

“You were there together,” Henry said. “I saw you. You sampled the water.”

I went cold. The steel clip, the wide-mouth water bottle. Robert sampled the water.
With
his father.
What
day on the Yuba?

Henry said, “I overheard you, R. That’s how I found out you and Cam went partners.”

“Wait wait wait just a goddamn minute,” Robert said. “Are we talking about a company Dad and I had going? What’s that got to do with anything? That’s something Dad came to me about, that was a deal I helped Dad put together, that’s a technology he came up with, that was business, that was...”

“That was my idea,” Henry said.

I went colder.

“
Hang on
.” Robert put up his palms. “I’m blindsided here. I had no idea. And it’s a great idea, Henry. Christ, you of all people would know what needs to be done. You’ve
lived
the stuff. And Dad, okay, you knew he had the mechanical skills.” Robert dropped his hands. “He didn’t tell you he came to me for financing, did he?”

“No.”

Robert shook his head. “Camden Shelburne’s game. Play one brother off the other.”

Henry was silent.

“I apologize,” Robert said.

“Do you know for what?”

“For doing business with Dad behind your back.”

“You need to go into the quicksilver now,” Henry said.

~ ~ ~

I
thought, fiercely, it’s symbolic. You’d float, not drown. I wondered how long the mercury would continue to snake out of the spigot. That depended on whatever the hell the pipe tapped into. That basin. However big that basin was. I looked at Walter, who was scrutinizing the grotto, face set in severe concentration.

Robert Shelburne simply turned his back on the grotto. He fully faced his brother. He took off his parka and dropped it on the ground.

“What are you doing?” Henry asked.

Robert didn’t answer. He pulled off the next layer, a fleece sweatshirt. Dropped it on the ground. He was stripped down to his green Club One Fitness T-shirt.

“You don’t need to do that,” Henry said. “Clothes don’t get wet in quicksilver.”

Robert lifted the green shirt.

Walter shot me a warning look but there was no need. I wasn’t going to speak, move, do anything at all. It was all I could do to stifle my sudden hope. I’d forgotten that Robert was wearing his brother’s belt. I stared at the big silver belt buckle with the curlicue lettering. Back at the lab, his display of the Quicksilver buckle was sure effective, sure worked on Walter and me. Sure got us to the contract-signing.

I watched Henry, wondering if it was working on him.

Henry’s face was closed. Unreadable.

“Our father had the heart of a snake,” Robert said. “It’s just us now, Henry. Look, I’m wearing your belt. I’ll take on every burden of Quicksilver.”

Henry was silent.

“Or, you want me to take it off?” Robert began to unbuckle the belt.

“Keep it on,” Henry said. “It won’t get wet.”

R
obert Shelburne stood at the mouth of the grotto.

His hands were on his hips. His green fitness T-shirt showed bare arms, muscles flexed. He looked ready to run. Or fight.

“I don’t want to shoot,” Henry said.

Robert said, over his shoulder, “You don’t need to.” He went in.

He skirted the pothole, hugging the south wall, leaving us a view of the works, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the flowing mercury. He tipped his head to follow the flow, down to the pool.

I tried to estimate how much mercury had accumulated. If that had been water it would drown a small animal. But it was liquid metal. Thirteen times denser than water. A small animal would float. A large animal would float. A full-grown man would float, buoyant as a cork.

Robert Shelburne was examining the pool as if doing his own calculations.

I glanced at Walter. He was frowning deeply. Watching the scene in the grotto. And then again breaking his focus to take a slow survey of the lay of the land. I figured my partner was estimating distances, angles of fire, places to take shelter. I assumed he was concocting a scenario in which Henry’s attention faltered long enough for us to flee. That seemed unlikely. Further, that didn’t sit too well with me. Flee and leave Robert at risk? Go get help? That would take hours.

“Sit,” Henry called to his brother.

Robert Shelburne did not have hours.

I watched him work up his nerve. He stamped his feet, one and then the other, like a guy preparing to wade into an icy river. And then he stepped down into the quicksilver pool.

The liquid lapped his thick-soled Asolo boots. The stuff was so dense it pushed them back, his feet could get no traction. His body revolved trying to maintain its balance but every little move popped a foot out of the mercury, skittering for purchase, and then abruptly he gave it up and folded heavily down into the pool in a cross-legged sit.

Not into the pool.
Onto
the pool.

He put out his hands to brace himself on the surface and then snatched them away from the liquid.

Don’t worry, I would have said—if he was asking—liquid mercury is very poorly absorbed through the skin and you could probably sit naked on there all day and take in only point oh-oh something percent if I recalled correctly from Chem 101.

He found his balance. He sat very still. He folded his hands in his lap. He sat there like a Buddha on a lotus. For a moment he wore a childlike look of wonder and then he flashed us a fucking grin. “Game on, Bro.”

I shook my head. Some kind of inbred Shelburne bravado or venture-capital training—who knew but he had adjusted his game. Stakes rise? Man up.

“Kinda cold in here,” Robert said. “This shit’s cold.”

Henry’s hands began to shake. He jammed his elbows into his flanks and steadied himself.

Robert said, “We still playing the same game? Where I’m supposed to guess what to apologize for?”

Henry nodded.

“Give me a hint. Give me
something
I can work with.”

“At the river,” Henry whispered. Voice softer than ever, breakable.

“Little louder, Bro.”

“
At the river
.” Loud enough to make Robert flinch. “At the river,” Henry said a third time, “when I heard you and Cam talk about your company.”

“Yeah?”

“Cam said, what if Henry finds out? Maybe we should bring Henry in.”

“Yeah?” Robert said, voice tightening.

“What did you say to that, R?”

“Some bullshit.”

“What did you say, R?”