Anna considered rechecking the scene. Hiding out and smoking was believable but there was something about it that rang a sour note. It'll come to me, she promised herself.
Lawrence was in search of embers. She schooled her mind. Steam, smoke, heavy fuel loads, melted snow: those were the things he would be looking for. Squinting against the glare, gray faded into gray, white jarred against black, and she wished she had the eyesight of a twenty-three-year-old.
The constant fog was wearing on Anna. She suspected it was partly to blame for the creeping insanity that darkened their minds: Black Elk's wandering, Jennifer's depression, Paula's sullenness, Pepperdine emerging as a closet bully.
Anna had spent a year of graduate school at the University of California in Davis. She remembered the weeks of heavy tule fog that smothered the campus for twenty-two days in January of that year. Students were jumping from the clock tower. Professors were beating their wives.
Dense unremitting fog filled the brain, chilled and clouded human thought processes.
A hallucination disturbed Anna's field of vision. Past the dry creek where Lawrence had bagged breakfast, over a low ridge, the texture of the world's walls looked slightly different. Asked to describe it, Anna would have been hard pressed to find words. The difference was minute, a mere disturbance of the air, like the first wavering of heat mirage rising off the desert in late morning. If she stared too long or thought too hard she couldn't see it anymore.
A set of boot tracks branched off in that general direction and she followed them. At the badger creek the trail veered again, the new track leading up the ridge, zigzagging around fallen trees. Snow over ash: each print was as clear as the painted footsteps in an Arthur Murray dance studio.
At the top of the ridge Anna could see what had drawn Lawrence so far from camp. Beyond a shallow valley and over another hill, slightly lower than the one on which she stood, the imperfection in the air was pronounced. Steam billowed up in clouds. A faint smell of rotten eggs tainted the air.
The view from the second ridge was considerably more startling. In the valley below a horseshoe-shaped depression cut into the side of the mountain. Steam poured up in veils, sinuous, live, sentient to a tired mind. Snow had melted in a wide irregular circle exposing gray earth and rivulets of smoking water of improbable aquas and oranges and lavenders. The sound of bubbling—bubbles primeval in size—percolated through the steam. Seated on a stone, his back to her, was Lawrence Gonzales, mother naked.
From her work in the northern midwest Anna knew it wasn't uncommon to find people frozen to death, their clothes torn off and strewn around. No one knew for sure, but the theory was that in the late stages of hypothermia, when the body's thermostat was going haywire, the victims felt suddenly hot and so divested themselves of garments.
Almost instantaneous with that thought, the pieces came together. Lassen Volcanic National Park. The entire mountain range from Canada on down was formed by volcanic activity. Lassen Volcano had erupted in the early 1900s, Helens in 1980. Thermal activity was a common feature in the park. Mud pots, fumaroles and boiling springs. Lawrence had found a thermal outlet.
One thought crowded all others from Anna's mind. She forgot she'd come to interrogate the man, she forgot all the dangers, she forgot Gonzales was naked.
It would be warm.
"Lawrence!" she hollered lest her sudden appearance startle him and he injure himself in the boiling stream.
"I'm naked," he called as in warning.
"That's okay." Anna hopped the last few feet, unlacing a fire boot as she came. Dumping herself on the rock next to him she finished unlacing and pulled her boots off with a grunt.
Lawrence had dragged his shirt modestly over his lap but Anna was beyond noticing. Thrusting her feet in the thermal pool next to his she threw her head back and laughed. "Who'd've thunk it? Heaven's a fire pit stinking of sulphur. We've got to call the Pope and let him know they've got it all wrong."
To their left a small lake, thirty or forty feet across, hissed and spat. The water backed up against a wall of dirty-white porous soil pocked with holes, some the size of pinpricks, some several yards across. Above the mud bluff were old growth trees, the bark blackened and the needles scorched but the tops still green. The Jackknife had gone around them. They would probably survive another hundred years if no one cut them down.
Steam poured from vents and Anna could hear the dull wet plop of mud pots. For twenty yards around the lake nothing lived, at least nothing larger than the rainbow-hued algae that lined the runoff beds. The ground was as barren and white as an alkali flat.
The thermal lake looked as if it came from one of the seven levels of hell. Colors were bright and unnatural, painted by algae that lived in the differing temperate zones. Water was opaque: milky green, then blue, then white. To the center and rear, where the mud pots boiled, the surface simmered, heat roiling, sending up belches of sulphur-scented steam.
Lawrence's perch was sensibly downstream from the burning lake where the water had been cooled by springs and melting snow.
Anna stripped down to her underpants and shirt. But for Lawrence's delicate sensibilities she would have chucked those aside as well. Sulphur water, stinking and warm, ran from her arms and face in black rivulets. Hot air billowed around her. The rock beneath her bare thighs was pleasantly warm.
"God, this is great," she said for the tenth time.
"Be careful," Lawrence cautioned. "There's a place like this over in the park called Bumpass Hell because the first white guy that found it fell through and got a leg burnt off. These places are weird. The ground is hollow like." Gonzales had spread his trousers around so they covered his crotch and most of his butt. He sat rigid as if afraid any movement would endanger this careful arrangement.
Anna realized she held him captive as effectively as if he were locked in an interrogation room and dragged her mind back to the reason she had tracked him down. Gratitude was getting in her way. A badger and a bath: Gonzales was proving an excellent friend. Anna shelved her generous impulses.
"You know this area pretty well?" she said for openers.
"I grew up sixty miles south of here," he replied.
Anna pondered what to say next. She was acutely aware that she was unarmed and semi-naked within throwing distance of a lake she'd not only never swim out of but from which her body would probably never be recovered.
"Susanville?" she asked, remembering a small red dot on the California road map. "You're a hunter, camper, hiker—that sort of thing?"
Gonzales shook his head. "A city boy without a city. I worked around here. Not up this far—down on the Plumas National Forest south of Westwood."
"For the Forest Service?" Anna asked. She was pushing close to potentially sensitive areas. Reluctantly, she pulled her feet out of the warm water and stepped into her pants. Maybe naked, Lawrence would be too shy to chase her if she had to make a run for it.
"The BLM," he said. A note of caution crept into his voice and he was looking uncomfortable. Unless a suspect was drunk or retarded, and even then about half the time, there came a moment when the conversation got too close to some core truth. Defenses went up. Anna watched for that moment with both anticipation and dread. If it came it meant she was on to something. It also meant they were on to her and getting what she was after became more difficult.
The summer job, the BLM was a raw nerve. She filed that away and backed off for the moment. "Reno's fairly near here, isn't it?" she asked.
Lawrence relaxed. The change in geography soothed him. Anna was interested. Susanville had the history of a lost summer job, Reno of assault and grand theft auto.
"Eighty miles southeast of my hometown," Lawrence said.
"Get over there much? Gamble? Take in a show?"
"I used to. I used to date a girl from Sparks. It bumps right up against Reno." Lawrence laughed.
"What?" Anna prodded. She was just curious. If it was funny to him it was probably of no use to her.
"Nothing." He poked his toes into the flame-colored slime at the bottom of the stream.
"Come on," Anna said. "I'm bored."
"Promise you won't tell anybody?"
He looked so charming and boyish that Anna promised. She could always break it.
"This girl's father was a jerk. A real jerk. I tossed him in the Truckee River. He was spitting water like a whale and he got out this badge he was always flashing to get out of traffic tickets and yelling 'I'm a federal officer, I'm a federal officer.' " Lawrence laughed again. "The guy was a meat inspector."
Anna laughed with him. So much for assault on a federal officer. No wonder the Washoe County sheriff's Department had no intention of extraditing the perpetrator. "Did he drown?" Anna asked to keep the story going.
"Nah. It wasn't that deep. It was August. He didn't even catch a cold. Me and Justine jumped in his old Thunderbird and left him there dripping and waving his meat badge."
That must have been the grand theft auto. Anna was relieved. There were still a lot of questions about his summer working for Nims but this wasn't the healthiest place to ask them. Anna pulled on her boots and began lacing them up. For the first time in what seemed eons her feet were warm. "Too bad we can't bottle this and take it back to camp," she said. By the time they'd traversed the three-quarters of a mile to the creek bed any water they took with them in their plastic canteens would be cold.
"Could you turn around?" Lawrence asked. "I'm going to put my pants on."
Anna turned her back on the boy. He'd never know what an act of faith it was.
"We could bring Howard up here," Lawrence suggested. "It's warmer. Maybe he'd feel better."
The thought had crossed Anna's mind but she'd discarded it. "I don't think we'd better move Howard until we have to."
"It's bad then?" Lawrence asked, and Anna respected the concern in his voice.
"It's bad."
When they were within earshot of the bivouac, Anna returned to the subject of Leonard Nims. "When you worked with the Bureau of Land Management, what did you do?"
"Marked timber." Gonzales was walking in front of her and Anna noted the slight hitch in his stride.
"You worked for Leonard Nims?" Anna gave up pussyfooting. There wasn't time and Lawrence was already on his guard.
He stopped and turned to face her. Anna stopped as well, keeping ten feet of trail between them. "Checking up on me?"
Anna made no reply. The answer was obvious.
Behind Lawrence's dark eyes decisions were being made. Anna could see them working across his even features. None of the early warning signs of impending violence—tensing, changing the center of gravity, fist clenching, eyes skittering— manifested itself, so Anna stood her ground.
"There was a wildfire," Lawrence said finally. "Somebody lit it on purpose. Len said he was going to say I did it."
"Did you?"
"No. Len told me to but I didn't. He must've got somebody else to do it for him."
"Len told you to light it?" Anna was just confirming what she'd heard. The information was too new to process.
"Yeah. It was a bad summer. Everybody was out of work. Fire fighting's good money. It happens all the time."
"Len wasn't out of work."
Lawrence shrugged. "You think I'm making it up. Len said everybody would. So I lit out."
"I don't think you're making it up," Anna said slowly. She didn't know if he had all the facts straight, but she didn't doubt that he believed his own version. "That must have been hard to take."
"You're going to pin his murder on me, aren't you." Gonzales wasn't asking. His eyes narrowed, weight shifted, fists balled. Fear tuned up Anna's muscles, readying to fight or run.
"I'm not pinning anything on anybody," she said evenly. "I'm just asking questions. Did you see Hugh getting out of his shelter?" More than an answer, Anna needed to change the subject.
"He was already out. He helped peel the damn thing off me."
Gonzales didn't strike Anna as a thinker. He was a doer. She doubted he'd wasted much time figuring out the importance of fire shelters: how many, who was where, who could prove they had one. Pepperdine, on the other hand, was a thinking man, an educated man. He would have figured it out.
Somebody was lying. Given the choice of who, Anna tended to lean toward the man clever enough to come up with a reason he thought he needed to.
Chapter Nineteen
ANNA COULDN'T REMEMBER ever having been so tired. Her wristwatch told her it was close to one in the afternoon. Her stomach reminded her it was way past lunchtime. The gray skies told her nothing. It could be dawn or dusk or anywhere in between. The brief respite from the cold the hot springs had afforded was just a memory. The chill had returned, sunk back into her bones. It would have been worth the walk back up the hill to be warm again but Jennifer and Stephen had gone and Anna stayed to watch Howard. Soon after she'd relieved Stephen, Howard had fallen into an uneasy sleep. Paula Boggins, faithful to the job Anna had given her, took the opportunity to slip off to the "ladies' room." Anna smiled, the superfluous trappings of civilization suddenly striking her as dear, precious; humankind touching and admirable in its usually futile attempts to rise above a less than divine nature.
