Fault Line by Sarah Andrews Page B

land as I followed the zigzagging trail, noting the sizes of boot and dog prints that had become implanted after the several cycles of freezing and thawing that had visited the area since the last snowfall. Something in me soon found this concentration of so many people’s journeys annoying, even intolerable, and I stepped off the path, crunching through the crust of old com snow. I stomped straight up the slope, dodging only as I reached the more sizable rocks or arrays
of stunted oaks. I marched resolutely toward the biggest boulder in the neighborhood, a slab of sandstone the size of a small truck, figuring I’d sit on it and read. It lay at the edge of a great train of boulders that filled the slope immediately below the mouth of a narrow canyon above.
    Somewhere in there, I realized that I was following tracks left very recently by another adult human. The afternoon sunlight glinted in gemstone flashes off the snow, an array of whiteness rhythmically disrupted by the blue shadows that filled the shallow boot prints. Laid over the icy crust of the snow were small sprays of older, more powdery snow that the boot-owner’s strides had brought up from underneath.
    I decided the footprints belonged to whoever had parked the pickup truck at the end of the pavement below.
    It was not long before I caught up with a man about my age, who was dressed much as I was: blue jeans, hiking boots, and a down parka. He had heavy shoulders and a wide face to go with them. His nose was broad and rounded, terminating neatly over a thick beard that curled away from his cheeks. Together with his high, boxy cheekbones, the combination of nose and beard gave him the air of a kindly lion I remembered from a picture book I had had as a child. He was leaning jauntily against one of the boulders, making notes on pages fastened to an aluminum clipboard. His jacket was open down the front, exposing a plaid wool shirt and a telltale cord that led down inside his shirt toward a small round bump about an inch thick in the middle of his chest.
    â€œDoing some geology?” I asked pleasantly.
    He looked up abruptly, feigned surprise, and then set to examining himself as if he were covered with some odd substance. “Does it show, really? I mean, I can never understand how people guess so easily,” he replied, in a perfect deadpan. Then he gave me a sly grin.
    I smiled back. “It’s the hand lens around your neck, the basic
pragmatism of the attire, the ‘I set my own fashion’ beard, the chapped hands, the stoical use of a metal clipboard even on a cold day, the ease with which you sit on a nice hard rock. More comfortable here than on an office chair, your posture suggests. Add to that the pickup truck down the hill, the fact that I’m finding you out on a potentially unstable slope the afternoon after an earthquake, and—”
    He held up a hand. “That’ll do. But tell me how do you know these things, O ye who climbed out of a Porsche even though you look like you’d be more at home on a horse.”
    I grabbed the side seams of my jeans and dropped a prim curtsy. “Because I also am a geologist.”
    He somberly put his lips together and whistled the tune that goes to the words, “You can see by my outfit that I am a cowboy.”
    Smiling at his musical quip, I acknowledged the rest of his observation. “And yes, I’ve done my time on horseback. The fancy car belongs to the friend who also belongs to the house. My pickup truck fell on its sword this morning as I was driving up here to check on my Porschely friend, who was not as sanguine about the trembling of terra firma as I.”
    The man nodded. “Ah. Yours was the twenty-year-old beige half-ton getting towed.”
    I winced, then looked down the hill toward where it should have been. “I guess some chichi neighbor reported it abandoned,” I muttered. “A towing bill. That’s all I