Virtue Falls (12 page)

“Not at all! But my funding had run out on the project I had developed in Mexico, and the new project in Washington wasn’t yet funded, so I took the job.” Charles chuckled a little. “My poor students. I know my subject inside and out, but teaching it…” He shuddered. “I tend to get carried away. I’m easily distracted by the cool stuff that the earth does, and I’m not so good at hammering at the basics, which they were supposed to learn.”

She found the pocket knife and grad-u-ally pulled it out of the backpack. Surreptitiously, she opened one of the blades, then slipped it under the covers with her. “So you met Mama at Berkeley?”

“I did. Remember, Misty?” He looked off to the side, seeing someone who sat beside him … and wasn’t there. “Remember? I was thirty-seven, and you were twenty, and you took the class because you needed a science credit. Remember?”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Charles stood at the classroom podium and shouted at the departing students, “Before next week, read chapters five and six in your textbook!”

None of the 237 students even waved a hand in acknowledgment.

“There’ll … there’ll be a test!” he yelled.

A few groans. Proof that he hadn’t been shouting into a vacuum.

But why had he said that? Now he would have to make up a test. He sighed, went to the desk, and sat in the chair. Which was broken, and tilted off-balance. Just in time, he righted himself.

The nontenured instructors always got the crummy equipment.

“Professor?” A female voice spoke from the podium. “Professor Banner?”

“Yes?” He looked up—and saw
her.

The girl who sat in the middle of the third row.

Even in California, the land of the groomed and gorgeous, she was outstanding. White-blond hair as fine as spun sugar, eyes as deep and blue as lapis, fair, translucent skin tinted by the faintest blush and with the texture of polished quartz. And she had a very nice body, not like the usual skinny California girls. More like a World War II pinup girl, all curvy and—

—and he was too old to be ogling her like this, especially when she was biting her lip and looking nervous. “May I help you?” he asked.

“I’m Misty Winston. I’m one of your students. I hope you can help me. I, um, need a science credit and this isn’t what I expected when I signed up for the course.”

“You’d like to drop it.” Figured. Anyone that beautiful had to be skating along on her looks.

“No.”

Next logical assumption. “You want me to dumb it down.”

“No! I like it. I like the way you explain things, how you obviously love your work. I just, um, don’t have the scientific background and I was wondering”—she stopped biting her lip and smiled at him—“would you consider some after-hours tutoring?”

He was so dazzled that for a full minute he forgot to answer.

She waited patiently, still smiling into his eyes.

Finally he woke up from his lust-inspired daze. “I could … I could give you a list of video tapes that explain the basics of geology. They’re in the library, and they have video players if you don’t have one. To check out, I mean.”

“I’ve got a video player. I’m a theater major—”

“An actress?”

“Yes, and being an actress, it’s imperative that I be able to see what I look like on camera.”

“Oh.” He wondered if he could get one of her video tapes to watch at night when he was alone.

No, damn it. No! She was a student. His student. And he was … well, he was a geologist. A boring old scientist, emphasis on
old.

He said, “Those tapes I’m recommending would give you a good start. On understanding geology, I mean.”

“Then I can come to you and ask questions?”

He couldn’t stop staring at her pink, full lips as they shaped the words. “Yes. Of course. If they don’t answer all your needs.”

Why had he said it like that? He was going to get investigated for sexual harassment. Or she was going to slap his face.

He didn’t dare look at her, so he talked faster. “Your questions. If the tapes don’t answer all of your questions.” He dug in his notebook for his list of recommended videos. “Let’s go make a copy of the list.”

She followed him to the door.

He stood aside to let her pass, and did not stare at her butt nicely encased in leggings and a miniskirt.

She waited for him. She asked, “Which way?,” and tucked her hand into his arm.

He had never been so terrified in his life. Terrified, and thrilled, and … oh, God, he was horny. He was at least fifteen years older than her. That made him a dirty old man. A disgusting, dirty old man who needed to get this one simple task completed—making a copy of the list—so she would be on her way. All he had to do was walk. “I made this up in case someone like you wanted further instruction. In geology.” He had been walking since he was one. He could do it. One … step … at … a … time.

“That was very farsighted of you.” She gurgled with laughter. “Or is that nearsighted? I never can remember.”

He risked a glance at her.

She was smiling at him again. Smiling with that frank and open delight, which should have made him suspicious and instead made him want to melt into Silly Putty.

He was very proud of himself. He returned her smile in what he thought was an appropriately avuncular style. He led her into the copy room. Used the Xerox machine, which jammed only once. And he firmly sent her on her way.

When she was gone, safely out the door, he sagged against the wall and tried to regain his composure, and make himself decent so he didn’t get arrested for horny, disgusting dirty-old-manism while walking down the corridor.

“Professor?” Misty’s soft voice spoke right behind him.

He turned so fast he slammed his knee into the copier. It hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, and thank God, because it provided him with a reason to lean down and rub the bruise, and conceal his inappropriate arousal. “Yes?”

“I heard that the San Andreas Fault ran under the Berkeley campus and there’s a high probability of a big earthquake here soon.”

“No. No. It’s the Hayward Fault that runs under the Berkeley campus. The San Andreas Fault is to the east.” He managed to straighten up. “But yes, the probability is about thirty percent within the next thirty years that the Hayward Fault will rupture in a six-point-seven or greater quake. Why?”

“I find all of this geology so fascinating. It’s not like most science, where it’s protons whizzing past me that I’ll never see, or DNA I can’t do anything about. It could happen, right now, to all of us!”

He found himself smiling at her enthusiasm. “Yes, that’s why it’s always appealed to me.”

She took his arm again.

Why did she keep taking his arm?

“I was wondering if you’d like to go for some coffee? There’s so much I don’t know … about geology … and you’re so knowledgeable.” She started walking toward the door.

He followed. In fact, it never occurred to him to resist.

*   *   *

Elizabeth wanted to laugh. Her father seemed so amazed. “She seduced you?”

Charles smiled with a kind of bewildered, nerdlike delight. “Yes! I never understood what she saw in me. I mean, I lifted a lot of rocks, so I was wiry. But I’m not tall, and I’m not handsome. Never was. And my hair was already thinning. I wasn’t a virgin or anything, I don’t want you to think that.”

“Of course not,” Elizabeth muttered. What man wanted any woman to think that?

He continued, “But females never chased me, and I was always working on some project in Death Valley or Chile or Panama, and I never thought … with my job and my strike-out record with women, it never occurred to me I’d get married.”

Maybe Misty thought you were a nice man.

Maybe she wasn’t very smart.

Elizabeth bit her lip against the sarcasm and the pain.

“Later, after we were together, Misty told me she liked me the very first time she saw me lecture. Liked my enthusiasm for my work. Liked the way I respected my students, even the beautiful ones.” Charles still smiled, but he brushed away a tear that trickled down his cheek. In a lower tone, he said, “I should have known a woman as glamorous and as charming as Misty would fall in love with another man.”

Elizabeth couldn’t keep quiet any more. “So she killed your dreams—and you killed her?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Charles looked at Elizabeth in confusion. “Killed Misty? No, I can never hurt a hair on her head. Perhaps she doesn’t love me anymore, but I still love her. I will love her forever.”

He was talking about Misty as if she was still alive, saying stuff that made Elizabeth vacillate between wanting desperately to believe him, and wanting desperately to slap him.

He didn’t notice her reaction. Or maybe he did, because he got quiet. He turned his head as if he was listening. Then he lifted one finger. “Here comes another one.”

“Another one … what?” This aftershock hit with the suddenness of a plane crash, jolting Elizabeth half out of bed, making her press one hand against the wall and the other against the bed frame.

The aftershock threw Yvonne out of her chair.

Screams echoed down the corridors from the patients’ room.

Yvonne clutched the nurses’ station desk to steady herself, glanced at Charles and Elizabeth, glanced down the hall, and made her decision. She ran for the patients’ rooms.

The earth was still shuddering when Charles said, “With the earlier quake of such a magnitude, multiple aftershocks of six-point-zero and more are to be expected. But it’s always a surprise, isn’t it? And there’s that element of fear, that the shaking will grow until it’s greater than the last earthquake, and we’ll all be killed in the cataclysm.”

“It is unlikely that we will top the big earthquake we had today, but you and I both know that—” why was Elizabeth discussing this with him? “—that earthquakes are unpredictable at best and therein lies the excitement.”

He leaned forward, eyes gleaming. “Were you out there? Did you see it? The tsunami? How big was the tsunami?” He was so excited, like a kid seeing the Batman movies for the first time.

“I was out there,” she said. “The tsunami was larger and more impressive than even I had imagined.”

“I knew it.” His knobby fists clenched on his knees. His eyes closed as if he could see it in his mind’s eye. “I wish … well.” His eyes opened again, and he sounded absolutely pragmatic and totally sane. “I wish a lot of things. Seeing this tsunami is pretty far down the list.”

Still moving slowly—she didn’t want to set him off—she sat all the way up. “I, um, videoed it.”

“What? You … you filmed it?” His faded blue eyes sparkled.

“I did. I ran from the town to the canyon and got there before the first wave washed in.” She glanced around. Yvonne had plugged the charger into the wall and placed the video camera on the battered table beside the bed. The battery light now glowed green. Elizabeth reached for the camera. “Want to see it?”

A flush rose in his cheeks. He trembled with excitement. “It’s all right? You’ll show me?”

He looked so much like the man she remembered, the man on the seashore who had shown her the wonders of the universe, that the fear retreated to that place inside her where it resided.

Besides, she had the knife close at hand, under the covers, and she had removed the sheath. The blade was bare. She could defend herself.

“Yes, of course.” She unplugged the camera and flipped open the screen.

He scooted around so his back rested against the cot.

Even from the side, she could see his eager anticipation. She started the video, saw her opening shot, heard her own voice saying, “I’m Elizabeth Banner of the Banner Geological Study…,” and once again the wonder of the day’s events overwhelmed her. Her hand trembled as it held the camera.

Charles put his hand on her wrist to steady her.

And they both watched in rapt attention as the tsunami swept up the canyon.

Charles exclaimed several times, “I said that would happen!” and “Oh, I never imagined that.” Once he had her stop the video while he showed her a small whirlpool she hadn’t noticed, and once he corrected her commentary.

It was odd to talk with someone like this, someone who understood the ramifications of a tsunami, studied and filmed by a professional. Perhaps Alzheimer’s disease had wiped out memories of where he had been and what he had done, but it had apparently done nothing to wipe away the knowledge and intelligence that made Charles Banner a scientific legend, and she glowed with a sort of pride that this man was her father.

When he heard her wrap up, he sat with his knee in one hand, and nodded, and thought. Then he scooted away and asked, “What happened to the bones?”

“The bones.” Her mouth felt stiff. “The bones?”

“Didn’t you find the bones?”

Shock held Elizabeth rigid, and she stared at Charles Banner in disbelief and terror. “How did you know there were bones?”

“Misty told me,” he said.

Elizabeth couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t speak coherently or ask the right questions because … because no matter how she looked at it, this didn’t make sense.

And her father sat on the floor, his head tilted, and watched her with eyes both wise and innocent.

How could she have forgotten the crime he had committed? How could she have forgotten the house drenched in blood? Yet she had forgotten all of it, or at least wiped it from the memories of her childhood.

He had forgotten what had happened.

So had she.