Fault Line Page 3

  “Maybe she won’t come. There’s been an earthquake. Remember?”

  Tom pointed toward the door to the garage. “March.”

  My mouth sagged open. I knew now what was really bugging Faye, and I had no doubt that she wanted Tom to leave for work before she would discuss it. She had merely taken advantage of an event that no doubt had awakened me to get me here as early as possible.

  I stared at Tom, measuring his resolve. A card-carrying workaholic, he was frequently off to his office by six, and he returned home only after what he termed his “half days—you know, twelve hours.” Not a man to love if you needed a lot of companionship. But on this morning, he was sticking to her like glue, or should I say, sticking to me. “Come on, Em, the garage is this way. You take her car, like she said.” He tossed me a set of keys off the hall table. “You go on home. Go back to bed. It’s not even light out yet. Wait until the birdies start chirping.”

  I said something like “Yup, okay,” and followed him out into the spacious garage, which still smelled of newly laid concrete. It was big enough to play touch football in. Not for the first time, I vowed that in my next life, I, too, would be a trust-fund baby.

  Tom hit the lighted switch that triggered the door behind Faye’s Porsche and walked out onto the driveway to his own car, a ten-year-old American-built sedan with a bashed front fender. I dithered around with the Porsche, pretending that I didn’t know how to get it started, but even this last stall didn’t work. Tom leaned patiently against his car, waiting for me to leave. He had even picked up his cell phone and was making a call, talking into the darkness.

  I backed the Porsche out next to him and waited, pretending that I was fiddling with the CD player. He finished his call, came over to my side of the sports car, and tapped at the glass. I lowered the window. He bent down and leaned in, bracing his hands on his knees. “What?” he demanded.

  “I’m … just worried about her.”

  Tom kissed the end of my nose. “Get out of here,” he said softly. “Scram. Faye will be fine. Just needs some sleep.” But as he straightened up, he folded his arms and just stood there, watching me, willing me to leave.

  I backed the car out of the driveway, but as I pulled away into the street, I glanced into the rearview mirror. He was still standing there, watching me. He looked gruff, but reassuringly solid in the bright light cast from the garage. I hit the remote control to close the garage door, dropping him gently into the deep ultramarine blue that presaged the coming dawn, and wondered if he, a detective of such repute, could miss the symptoms that Faye was displaying. Or did he interpret the signs exactly as I did, and feel an overwhelming need to stand guard over the tiny new life she carried inside her womb?

  3

  I heard about a man from Kodiak, Alaska. He saw the ocean pull out miles from the shore. The slope was terribly steep there. He knew what was coming. He ran downhill to get his family, who were down near the water, then ran back uphill with them. [The tsunami came and] the water came up and up and stopped just short of them. He’d run so hard that he had ruptured blood vessels in his lungs.

  The official death toll was much lower than the actual, because there were many transients living in hovels by the waterfront.

  —Carol Benfell, journalist, recounting events associated with the tsunami that was generated by the magnitude 8.6 “Good Friday” Alaskan earthquake of March 27, 1964

  WENDY FORTESCUE CLUTCHED THE MOUSE ON HER COMPUTER much more tightly than usual. From outward appearances, the four-foot-eleven-inch-tall blonde looked her everyday abstracted self, the temple pieces on her glasses askew and her third cup of coffee chilling on the desk beside her. She sat staring into the big, goggling, glass eye of her computer monitor, surveying a long, squiggly line. Across the room, an array of seismograph needles tickled out their giddy record of movement within the Earth on slowly revolving drums. The seismographs were hitched to the data-storage cold room to her right, and to the computer in front of her, and together, the extraordinary cluster of machinery was tallying the few paltry aftershocks of the morning’s quake as they arrived, plotting them in time and space. There … that’s another one, so small we didn’t even feel it. She shifted in her chair, irritated. Being shaken awake had been fun, and plotting that first big set of shock waves had been exciting, but now things were disturbingly quiet. C’mon … gimme some more here. Gimme enough to plot the fault plane at least!

  Wendy’s array lurked deep in an inside room in the engineering building on the campus of the University of Utah. Most days, she was alone in her domain, which suited her fine; her close friends had nicknamed her “the gnome” clear back in high school. Why disappoint anyone by suddenly becoming a social butterfly? That would shake people up as much as … as this morning’s quake. Wendy shook her head at the screen, ignoring the raft of reporters who stood watching her. As a seismology technician, she had known a quake could occur at any time along the Wasatch fault; in fact, she found it more surprising that the human settlement had existed this long in Salt Lake City before experiencing a “big one.” A 5.2 is chump change, she mused. A couple chimneys down, grandma’s Delft figurines bite the floor. But this fault can deliver a 7.0 or larger, almost 1, 000 times the jolt. She thought it appalling that the news sharks who now circled her could be so blase about the threat. Hadn’t any of them been here in 1983, when a 7.1 cracked off in southern Idaho? Well, okay, I wasn’t here myself; I was just in high school back in Santa Barbara, but hell, everybody knows about the Idaho quake … .

  A giddy vibration ran through the room, and Wendy heard several of the journalists suck in their breath. “Another earthquake!” someone said, and the hubbub of voices started anew, swapping speculations on how big that one was.

  Three point five, Wendy wanted to say, but she kept her mouth shut. She had long since learned not to say anything she didn’t want repeated, out of its proper context, in some damned newspaper. What do they expect? We’re sitting practically right on top of the damned thing.

  A big man with one bushy black eyebrow that framed both eyes strode into the room. “That was an aftershock,” he informed the reporters, keeping his voice level. “To those of you who have just arrived, I’m Hugh Buttons, director of the Seismic Center. As I explained earlier, aftershocks are to be expected. It’s just Mother Earth’s way of releasing the stress. We’ll be triangulating responses from several stations to plot the precise locations of these shocks. With any luck at all, this will give us a much-needed picture of the fault trace. Three or more points, or in this case earthquake hypocenters, describe a plane. As you know, the Wasatch fault divides into an array of fractures under Salt Lake City, but until this morning, none of these had produced an earthquake that we can definitively ascribe to the Wasatch fault.” He pointed to a map on the wall. “Most people don’t realize that the majority of earthquakes do not cause ground rupture—our name for a crack at the surface. As you can see, we’ve had to infer the precise locations of several of the branches of the fault. This is because they are covered with regolith.” He smiled, which produced an eerie, toothy effect on his craggy face. “That’s soil to you. Surface cover. Although surface cover includes houses, what we call the ‘built environment.’ The really large earthquakes that have occurred on the Wasatch fault—those measuring six point five or seven—all of them struck long before Salt Lake City was built. Before white people came to the area. There was presumably nothing here then to fall down. Nothing built, you see.”

  One of the reporters asked a question. “How big an earthquake before we’d see a crack in the ground?”

  Dr. Buttons smiled. “That would take one of the big ones. They don’t leave cracks, exactly. They leave a ‘scarp,’ a small cliff, perhaps three to ten feet high, where the valley drops down and the mountains stay high. Another term is surface rupture. With an earthquake of this size—just five point two in magnitude—the actual rupture and movement do not propagate to the surface. The area of rupture in modera
te-size quakes is relatively small, and quite deep. Several miles, perhaps ten. The Earth is fairly elastic, you see.”

  Wendy shifted again in her seat. Hugh Buttons was her boss. His name had won him highly predictable nicknames, and the fact that he was six foot-four-inches tall made them stick. Huge Buttons, Wendy mused, noticing that once again the man had dressed entirely in clothing that had not one such fastener, not even a zipper or a snap. Poor sot. The same assholes call me “thinker Bell.”

  As Dr. Buttons droned on for the press, the phone next to Wendy’s computer monitor warbled. Automatically, she plucked it up, positioned it by her ear, and nipped her shoulder in to pin it in place. “Seismograph Station,” she said into it, pitching her voice into a throaty tenor from the long habit of making herself sound bigger and more authoritative than she looked.

  “Wendy?” The voice was familiar: Ted Wimler, down at the state Geological Survey. He sounded breathless, as if his asthma was acting up.

  “Speaking,” she replied in a voice cool enough to freeze ether. What was Ted calling about? Looking for juicy tidbits about the aftershocks? Couldn’t the putz wait like everybody else for her to analyze the results and pass them upstairs for the official announcement? Male gossips, she thought disparagingly. Worst kind. Gotta have the most about the latest, and the grislier the better.

  “Wendy, are you sitting down?”

  Wendy contracted her eyebrows toward her nose, as if something stank. On an ordinary day Ted’s tone was melodramatic, but this time, it was cracking, even shaky. The guy was going to have to get a life. “Spill it, Ted. I’m busy.”

  “‘Spill it’? My God, Wendy, it’s Dr. Smeeth. She’s—”

  “Who?” Wendy asked, knowing exactly whom Ted meant. Sidney Smeeth, state geologist. And, incidentally, her landlady. She glanced at her boss. He was just finishing up with the reporters, now managing to extract himself from the room with the suggestion that he’d be back in half an hour with another report. She gazed at the center drum, checking the latest aftershock. Sure enough, it had again registered the broadest needle sweep of the group. Same cluster. Ride ’em cowboy.

  In her ear, Ted’s voice said, “She’s dead, Wendy! Christ, she’s the state geologist and we’ve just had an earthquake! And I mean, you live in her basement! What are we suppose to do? One moment your life is going along normally, you’re maybe getting a good night’s sleep for a change, you’re—”

  Wendy shifted her crosshairs and clicked the mouse. She didn’t have time for Ted’s hallucinations today. On the best of days, she greeted Ted’s idiocy with the same affection she would afford the discovery that ointment prescribed for an embarrassing rash was sticky and stank conspicuously.

  “State the circumstances,” she said abruptly.

  “Christ, Wendy, you’re like a … a navy colonel or something.” He repeated her command in a high-pitched, nasal, kindergarten-sassy kind of voice: “‘State the circumstances! State the circumstances!’”

  Wendy sighed heavily. So she’d had a little dalliance with him on the AWG raft trip the summer before; did that mean she had to tolerate every little perturbation and fantasy that flitted through his beleaguered skull? Or was he suffering the postquake shockiness that was so often reported? Now, that would be interesting … . “For your information, Ted, the navy has commanders. Colonels are with the army or the air force.” A moment later, realizing that the obnoxious voice of her one-night paramour was still yammering in her ear, Wendy said, “Ted, get yourself a cup of coffee and go smell it or something. I’ve got a seismic event going on here, so, like the man said, unless you’ve got good news or money, get off the line.”

  Ted’s voice rose to an hysteric screech. “Good news? Good news? She’s dead, Wendy, not late for a meeting!”

  Mother Smeeth isn’t there holding your little hanny, so you lose that itty-bitty marble you call a brain, Wendy thought angrily as she trailed the phone back to its cradle and dropped it with a thunk. Overdosed on Aspartame at long last, she decided, settling her mouse-driven crosshairs onto the beginning of the P-wave portion of the newest wiggly line that she had conjured on her computer screen.

  Almost instantaneously, the phone rang again. Swearing under her breath, she plucked it back up into position next to her ear, ready to hang up if it was Ted. “Seismograph Station,” she barked.

  The voice she heard this time was Hugh Button’s. “Wendy,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion. “I got some bad news. Sid Smeeth was just found dead.”

  “Yow,” she whispered. Wendy’s brain rocketed through a series of tight calculations of how this might affect her immediate future, not to mention the closely knit world of professional interaction in which she moved. “Give me a mo’,” she said, then rose from her chair and turned to the journalists who stood all around her. She heard a cell phone warble. “That would be your editor calling,” she said tonelessly. “I have to clear the room a moment, okay? You take that call out there in the outer room, and take everyone with you. I’ll get back to you.” She stood up and waved her arms, hurrying them through the door.

  Eager but a bit confused, the journalists shuffled through into the outer office, craning their necks to listen in on the conversation their colleague was now having through his cell phone. Another phone rang, and another. Wendy closed the door behind them and returned to her desk. She found that her hand was trembling as she raised the telephone back to her ear.

  4

  “HOW FAR ALONG ARE YOU?” I ASKED AS I TURNED THE TELEVISION off again. I had gone back to my apartment and taken a bath, changed into something a little more organized, and circled back up to Faye’s house. She had greeted me without words and led me back to the kitchen, where she had taken up a position in front of the incoming news. She preferred CNN, but they had passed the morning’s event off in sixty seconds at the top of the hour and were now giving chapter and verse about a prayer meeting the president had presumed to intermix with international politics. The local network affiliates were zeroing in on the sobbing relatives of the baby boy who had been injured at the time of the earthquake—a bookcase holding stone carvings had fallen on him while he was in his crib.—Faye had watched the ghoulish close-ups of the unfortunate parents in silence; biting her nails, tears streaming down her face like rain. It seemed that the trials parenthood had taken on greater meaning for her in light of her recent events.

  Faye cradled her head in her arms. “Five weeks.”

  “So you just found out.”

  “This morning,” she sniffled. “Mere seconds before that damned earthquake hit.”

  “You took the test at four A.Mt.?”

  She nodded. “You know, first pee of the morning. Supposed to make it register more accurately. I’m in there with a flashlight so I won’t wake Tom up, staring at the watch, timing the thing. Pee on the stick. Ten minutes, I’m supposed to give it. I’m staring at the watch because I don’t want to set the timer and wake Tom. The little LCD is blinking away the minutes, the seconds. Finally—blink—it’s four-fourteen. Don’t make a noise, I tell myself. Just look at the stick and take it like a grown-up. Don’t wake Tom. I take a deep breath, lift up the damned stick, and the whole room starts jumping around on me. Don’t wake Tom, hah!”

  Wow, I thought. What are the chances of that happening? “So it kind of shook you up,” I ventured.

  Faye lifted her head just far enough to give me a dirty look.

  “Sorry,” I said softly. “Just trying to lighten the mood.”

  Faye dropped her head back into her arms and began to wail. Let me tell you, it’s tough watching your big stoic buddy lose it like that, upset hormones or no. The linen place mat she had her face on was dark with tears. I put out a hand and touched her back, which was heaving with the effort of working her feelings to the surface.

  “Sorry,” I said again.

  “Oh, it’s okay,” she whimpered. “I—I’ve always wanted to have kids. I’d begun to wonder if it was going to happe
n, because I’m such a washout in the marriage department. Now here I am!”

  “A washout? What you talking about?”

  “High school: Johnnie Edmonds asked me to marry him. I said no. College: Frank Leibowitz and Terry Perry. I said no. Graduate school—

  “Terry Perry? Of course you couldn’t marry anyone named Terry Perry. I mean—wait, you’ve turned down three men and you feel like a washout?”

  “Six.”

  “Six? Darling sweetheart, that’s not a washout; that’s a flood!”

  Faye started bawling anew.

  “No! Wait! I said that all wrong! I mean, there’s nothing wrong with you; it must be them. I mean, you had good reasons for turning down each one of them, right?”

  Faye lifted up one gimlet eye. “I suppose.”

  “Give me one.”

  “Well, first I was too young. And then, well, Terry had a little thing about alcohol, and—”

  “See? Gotta kiss a lot of frogs before one of ’em turns out to be a prince.”

  Faye’s eyes glazed again. Suddenly, she jumped up and ran for the bathroom, where the now-familiar sounds of Faye Carter tossing her cookies reverberated off the splendid tile job.

  “Does Tom know?” I asked as I arranged myself against the doorjamb.

  Faye was bent over the toilet. She shook her head dejectedly.

  “Let me rephrase that,” I said. “Have you told him? Because, trust me, he knows.”

  A look of panic crossed her face.

  “Hey,” I said. “Tom’s okay. He’s not going to run out on you just because—”

  “No! You don’t understand! If he knows, then that means I no longer have a choice.”

  “Wait a minute. A choice? I thought you just said—”

  “Of course I want this baby!” Faye squealed, her voice tightening up like someone was squeezing her throat. “It’s just that—just that—”

  “You want it to be you who’s deciding, not Tom. And not an accident.”