Dark Alchemy (12 page)

He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
Think.
How did the detectives on crime shows find bodies? Not the lame-­ass pogues around here that belonged to Rutherford, but the good guys with badges that existed on the other side of the television glass. They looked for disturbed earth. Right. He'd tried that. But if there was a body on Rutherford's land, his men would surely have found a good place to bury it . . .

Cops would bring in dogs. Yeah, dogs. But Cal didn't have a corpse-­sniffing dog. He remembered some guys on a television show looking for Jimmy Hoffa's body under Giants Stadium with some kind of sonar equipment that looked like a lawn mower . . .

Petra. The geologist. She knew dirt. She might know how to find a body . . .

Lights glinted in the distance. Cal squinted. Not flashlights. Something weirder. Like eyes. Lots of eyes, glowing like fluorescent coals that swam noiselessly over the landscape.

Cal didn't know what the fuck they were, but he knew to run.

He raced through the field, grasses whipping at the legs of his cargo pants in a
zip-­zip-­zip
noise that slashed in counterpoint to his heart. He ran until he thought his lungs would burst, until he reached the fence. Throwing himself on his bike, he cranked the starter, wrenched the clutch, and stomped on the accelerator.

Nothing happened.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he whimpered, struggling to start the bike. The glowing eyes were advancing, and he could see that they had roughly the shapes of men, advancing across the pale field in the wan moonlight.

The engine finally engaged as he let out the clutch with agonizing slowness, and he floored the gas. The little bike growled to life, and he retreated down the road in a cloud of dust that obscured the shining eyes behind him.

T
he drive home was quiet, with no other cars on the road. Petra's head hurt under the weight of her questions and the remains of her hallucination.

She switched on the radio, fiddled with the dial. A hint of country music bristled through the static, then slipped away. She spun past it, finding nothing but static bouncing off the mountains.

“
. . . the green lion . . .”

A voice emanated clearly from the speaker, over the roar of the engine and the crackle of the static. A familiar voice—­one that sounded like her father's. Impossibly just like him.

Her fingers stilled on the knob. She slammed on the brakes, causing Sig to slide off the seat and onto the floorboards. She cranked the wheel to guide the Bronco to the shoulder and shut off the engine. Sig grumbled and scrambled back into the seat.

“Hush,” she ordered.

White noise filtered through the speakers. She worked the knob a fraction of an inch back and forth. Broken words seemed to slip through, warped by distance, spoken in that familiar voice:

“
Go back . . . go back to the sea . . .”

The fine hair on the back of her neck lifted. It couldn't be him. Couldn't be. She cranked the volume all the way up, pressed her fingers to the plastic housing of the radio, as if she could crawl inside. Yet the voice on the radio sounded exactly as she remembered.

“Dad?”

“ . . .
nothing for you here . . . lion . . . gold and dust . . . go . . .”

The voice slipped away to soft static that filled the truck. Petra sat in silence, straining to hear it again, yearning.

Then sound roared back into the truck, a jolting wall of music that caused Sig to yowl and Petra to lunge for the volume.

“
Somewhere, beyond the sea . . . somewhere, waiting for me . . .”

“Bobby Darin,” she breathed. She hadn't heard that song since she was a child. The song seemed to crackle out of the speakers with a life of its own, Bobby's voice clear as a bell, as if she were in the parking lot of a radio station.

When the song ended, she waited with white-­knuckled hands to hear the soothing pitter-­patter of a deejay's voice—­a voice that she'd be able to rationalize belonged to a whole other man, that the coincidence of radio reception had dredged up something deep in her memory.

But the song ended, and there was simply silence. No pop and hiss, no jangly advertisements for car dealers or strip joints. Just the whoosh of air across some unfathomable distance.

It was a full fifteen minutes before she cranked the ignition and started toward home.

She swore to herself that she would not cry, no matter the terrible tricks her mind was playing on her, whether they were of her own doing or the lingering effects of Frankie's sweetwater.

She pulled up to the trailer, shut off the engine, and rested her head on the steering wheel. Sig jumped out and immediately began to find someplace to pee, nose to the ground.

After a long moment, she got out, slung her gun belt over her shoulder, and grabbed the Tupperware container of leftovers Maria had sent home with her. She trudged up the steps to the trailer and discovered that the door had a nice dent in the bottom. She pulled one of the pistols out of its holster and nudged the door with the barrel of the gun. The door swung open easily.

“Damn it,” she said. Heart hammering, she flipped on the light.

The trailer had been tossed. Well, as tossed as the meager shelter could be. The futon had been overturned, and the refrigerator stood open. Her spectrometer had been torn apart, and the paneling had been peeled from the walls. Even the stupid note that Mike had left for her about the equipment was wadded up on the floor. She kicked it.

“Fucking tweakers.” She was gonna lose her deposit, for sure.

She jammed the door back in its frame as best she could, tearing out a damaged piece of weather stripping. With that out of the way, the lockset still worked, for all the good it did. She locked the door behind her and set the kitchen table up against it. If it moved during the night, she'd hear it. She righted the futon, rearranged the blankets, and opened the windows for some air. Petra figured that the food in the fridge was a loss, but shut the door anyway to save power.

She hung her gun belt up on one end of the futon, turned off the light, and stretched out. She was too tired to drive to the lodge in Yellowstone; she'd stay here tonight. Just for a few hours. Tears of anger and exhaustion dribbled down her nose. She balled her fists against her eyes and gave in to a good cry.

Something scraped the skin of the trailer outside. Petra peered out the window, reaching for her guns, but it was only Sig. He hoisted himself up through the window and lay down beside her with his head in her lap. When she'd been reduced to hiccups, she gingerly stroked his rough fur.

“This place fucking sucks, Sig.”

She wondered what her father saw in it, what he'd found to make him think otherwise.

 

Chapter Twelve

Digging in the Petrified Forest

P
etra dragged herself out of bed at dawn and lured Sig out of the trailer with a slice of lunch meat. He was irritated when she shut and locked the door behind him, thrashing his tail in the dirt.

“Look, you're just gonna have to find somewhere else to sleep today,” she said. “It's not safe for you in there.”

Sig sulked and skulked beneath the trailer.

“Come out of there,” she insisted. “You are not on guard duty.”

She feared what might happen to him if the meth heads came back. Maybe Sig could hold his own, or at least would have enough sense to run.

She plodded sourly over to the Bronco. She'd slept like shit, and was considering taking a detour into town to pick up some coffee at Bear's before she showed up at the ranger station for work. The Bronco had no cupholders, but she'd figure something out.

She opened the door, threw her gun belt on the seat, and checked her bag of geology equipment in the back. The compass and her remaining cash were tucked safely in with her tools. She'd no sooner hopped up on the running board than a tawny mass of fur wriggled past her into the truck.

“Sig! Get the fuck out of there!”

The coyote plunked his ass on the passenger seat and stared at her. His lips parted in a canine grin, and his tongue snaked out from behind his teeth.

“Sig, honey, I have to go to work. It's a few miles away. If you get lost, you might not be able to find your way back home.”

Sig turned away from her and looked out the window.

Petra crossed to the passenger side, opened the door. She returned to the driver's side and tried to push Sig out. The coyote growled at her, and she backed off.

“So, you're coming.” It was a statement, not a question.

Sig slapped his tail on the pleather seats.

“You have to stay with the truck, okay? All day.”

Sig looked down his long nose at her. As he panted, it seemed that he was laughing.

“Damn it,” Petra muttered. She shut the doors and jammed the key into the ignition.

She decided to nix Bear's in favor of getting to work early. First day, and all. The territory roughened as she drove, and forest began to reach green fingers into the landscape, grass fields giving way to aspen with yellow leaves quaking in the breeze. Petra followed the road signs to the northeast park entrance. Craggy mountain peaks rose around the road with lodgepole pine trees clustering at their feet. Some stood upright, while others had fallen victim to forest fires from years ago, charred and broken and still not decomposed.

She turned on the radio, hoping to hear some snippet of the voice she'd heard the night before, but she only caught fragments of weather reports and country music. A pang of disappointment lanced through her chest, but she left the music on, hoping.

The Bronco's engine growled as the altitude increased. The Lamar River wound up and around the road, alternating from the right to left side as she crossed bridges. Moose waded in the cool water up to their necks. Bison wandered in fields burned golden by summer's heat and spangled with purple lupin flowers. She could imagine that this place had truly been untouched for centuries, that it had shaken off all efforts at human habitation.

She followed the road signs to the Tower Yellowstone cluster of buildings. She passed the lodge that Mike had spoken of, a charming log and stone building with a gravel lot half-­full of vehicles. For a moment, she thought longingly of a full-­sized bathtub and bed linens that didn't smell like stale tobacco, but she was certain that coyotes were not allowed. And it did have the distinct disadvantage of being located across the road from the Tower Ranger Station. She pulled into the parking lot beside Mike's Jeep and rolled the windows of the Bronco halfway up.

“Stay here,” she told Sig. She had visions of getting charged with poaching by some less friendly ranger than Mike.

Sig lay down on the seat and yawned. It seemed that he might behave. Maybe.

Mike was waiting for her at the door, with two cups of coffee in hand. He handed one to Petra. “Good morning, sunshine. Just saw you roll up.”

“Thank you.” Petra slurped the coffee greedily.

“Sleep well?”

“Not so much.”

“I saw your handiwork around town. Nice wallpapering job with those flyers, but that's not a good way to attract attention. Now every nut job in the county has your phone number.”

“Yeah, well. That's the least of my problems.” She made a face. She didn't want to tell him, but she had to. “Some idiots broke into my trailer yesterday while I was gone.”

Mike's brows shot up. “What happened? Why didn't you call? What did you see?”

She took a deep breath and told him what she knew. Mike listened with narrowed eyes, one hand hooked in his gun belt as she described the damage.

“Nothing was taken,” she said. “I think it's gotta be those tweaker kids. Hopefully, since they didn't get anything, they won't be back.”

“Maybe. But they seem awfully fixated on you. I'll call the sheriff this morning to get some paper on this. I don't think they'll do much. However . . .”

Petra suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. Here it came.

“ . . . You should stay at the lodge,” he said.

“The lodge doesn't take coyotes.” She wasn't going to abandon Sig for the sake of convenience.

“You can stay with me.”

“I appreciate it, but I can't.” She couldn't, for a whole helluva lot of reasons.

“Look, you're lucky, but luck's only gonna get you so far around here.”

“I'll call Maria, okay?”

Mike's chin lifted. “That would be an acceptable compromise.”

Petra nodded.

“C'mon. I'll show you what the USGS sent for you.” He gestured for her to follow him inside the station. “They shipped you a whole load of stuff.”

A long counter held informational pamphlets and forms for fishing and camping permits. The building smelled the way most old buildings did to Petra: like earth and dust. Mike led her to a back room filled with radios and weather monitoring equipment. Tucked in the corner were two large wooden crates with Petra's name on the manifest.

“Presents from Uncle Sam.” Mike sipped the dregs of his coffee. “Want a crowbar?”

“Please.”

Petra worked the lid of the first box open. Inside, she found a file folder with instructions. Nothing exciting. Her assignment was to take soil samples from Specimen Ridge and the surrounding areas. The majority of the contents of the box were plastic vials and forms to attach to them, plus return postage cardboard boxes and packing materials. But USGS had seen fit to give her a few additional tools: maps, a bucket augur, a GPS-­based Azimuth pointing device to record exact information about the soil samples, sample bags, a compass, rock pick, altimeter, a soil sampling equipment kit in a case, microscope, binoculars, hand lenses, and a stereoscope. She'd brought many of her own tools with her, including the lenses, picks, rock climbing gear, and compass. But the USGS items were shiny new, and she looked forward to playing with them.

The second box was filled with packing peanuts. Petra scooped as many of them aside as she could, but static electricity stuck them to her shirt. She dug until Mike turned the box over on its side, spilling the peanuts out on the floor. She dragged out a red metal device with wheels and a handle.

“What's that? Looks like a lawn mower.”

Petra grinned. “It's a ground penetrating radar device. It allows me to study bedrock without disturbing soils or rock layers.” She paged through the instruction manual that came with it, showing him fuzzy pictures of stripes. “This stuff is used from everything to finding lost utility lines to land mine detection and archaeology.”

“Cool.” Mike squinted at the striped drawing. “How deep does it go?”

“Depends on the soil composition, clay properties, and conductivity. Could be as little as one meter for really opaque soils to more than five thousand for clear ice. The average is about thirty meters under normal conditions, though.” Petra grinned. She couldn't wait to use the new gadget; she hadn't handled one since grad school.

“You can leave as much stuff as you want here,” Mike said. “I can't imagine that you're gonna take all of that with you up the mountain.”

“Thanks. I appreciate the storage space.”

After cleaning up the staticky packing peanuts, she sat down on the floor and started dividing up what she'd need for the day. Mike went to answer the ringing phone, and she arranged the equipment and forms into the backpack she'd bought at Stan's Dungeon. She tucked the rest into the crate and shoved it back out of the way.

With her gear slung over her shoulder and pushing the GPR cart before her, she met Mike in the main room.

“I'd be happy to give you the nickel tour,” he said, leaning on the counter.

“I don't want to take you away from your work.”

He shrugged. “I'm the only one at the station right now, but I can give you the tour after work.”

“Okay. I'll come by when I'm done.” Maybe she was being too suspicious, but most men who'd showed any interest in her wanted something. Maybe Mike only wanted someone to talk to, and was just clumsy about it.

“Take a radio,” he said. He plucked a walkie-­talkie out of a charger and shoved it across the counter to her. “Just in case you need anything. Which way you headed?”

“Thanks. My instructions are for Specimen Ridge.”

“Trailhead's two miles down the road, leading from the parking lot. Take one of those.” He pointed at a display on the counter of what looked like tiny fire extinguishers.

She picked one up and read the label. “Bear spray?”

“Better than mace. Stay upwind of it, and be careful.”

“Will do.” She gave Mike a smart salute that made him smirk.

Petra clomped out to the parking lot with her gear, scraping the wheels of the GPR unit in the gravel. Sig scrambled up off the seat of the Bronco and pressed his nose to the window as she loaded her gear. All the windows were already smeared with snot marks.

As she pulled the Bronco out of the parking lot onto the main road, she wondered if he'd ever been in the park before.

At the trailhead, she parked the Bronco and popped open her door. Sig clambered over her lap and bounded to the pavement of the empty parking lot, wagging his tail. She reached for him, and he ducked away.

“Don't let anybody see you,” she grumbled, grabbing her gun belt. When she put it on, the guns were concealed neatly beneath her jacket. She didn't expect to be charged with carrying a concealed weapon—­even though, from what she'd seen, the only law enforcement around here was Mike.

Consulting her map, she set off toward Specimen Ridge.

I
t felt good to be working again.

The thinness of breath that Petra had felt when she first arrived in Temperance was diminishing. She found that she could fill her lungs without struggling, and she pushed forward, hiking through a sea of wild grasses and sage dotted with elk. The trail dropped away where a creek met the river, splashing a cool mist of water against her face. She even stopped to strip off her boots and socks and soak her feet in the tempting shallows. The river was bracingly cold, coming down from the mountain. Completely unlike the warm, sluggish springwater from yesterday. The sun was warming overhead, and she closed her eyes, listening to the gurgle of the current.

This far out in the wild, she felt safe. Not like she did in Temperance, with the ­people with their guns and odd blood and strange history.

Sig followed her dutifully throughout the morning, though he was irritated by the squeak and clattering sounds that the GPR cart made as she pushed it along before them. He was doing a good job of pretending to be a dog; the few tourists that she encountered didn't look twice at him. Once, he tore off after a rabbit, and Petra feared that she'd lost him. But he returned a few minutes later with the rabbit clutched in his jaws. Petra figured that it was simply good manners to take a break and allow him to eat his prize.

She continued south and east to Specimen Ridge, the slopes covered in tall grass and yellow mustard. She climbed the ridge slowly. This was higher than she'd ever gone, and she was determined to pace herself. She'd read that this was a place where amethyst and opal were often found. Volcanic ash had insinuated itself into trees, petrifying them. They stood at the summit, broken stubs among the rubble of yellow rock and pine, pale as bones. This layer was one of dozens of fossilized forests that lay beneath the ridge. Each successive forest had grown atop the one before, to be subjected to the same fossilization process.

She powered up her handheld GPS device, wrestled the clipboard out of her backpack, and logged her position. Switching on the power of the GPR cart, she was rewarded by the glow of the readout screen between the handlebars as it booted up. In an environment as fragile as Specimen Ridge, she'd only be able to take soil samples at a limited depth. The GPR would allow her to see beneath the surface, to see what had lain in darkness for thousands of years.

She pushed the cart along the surface of the ridge, watching how the radar waves created a striated picture of the world below. She could see striations that suggested levels of porous volcanic rock, thick streaks of basalt, and dark black shadows that could be obsidian. She saw drifts of buried ash and the sketchy shapes of petrified tree roots, deeper layers of the buried forest. The surface levels were squiggled, indicating uneven erosion as the petrified trees resisted and the minerals around them washed away. It was a ghostly image, sketching out a past that no living person had ever seen with their own eyes, a history of fire and silence sealed up in the earth. She watched, riveted, as the hidden forest revealed itself to her.