Peter Hernon: 8.4

“They’re over here,” he said.

Lauren and Atkins followed him down a narrow trail that descended steeply to the water.

“This is one of his favorite places,” Lauren said over her shoulder. “In the nice weather he likes to sit on the rocks and eat his lunch and fish.”

They could barely keep up with the boy. The lake was lapping against the rocks that lined the shore.

“When it gets choppy, you can’t even see those rocks,” Lauren said. “It was like that yesterday. It sounded like the surf out here.”

When they got closer to the water, Atkins stopped in his tracks.

“Grandma, look at them!”

As far as Atkins could see, the curving shore was littered with the frozen bodies of frogs. There were hundreds of them. All of them dead, along with a number of snakes. A big blue racer lay curled up in some brush. Atkins guessed it was at least five feet long. And frozen stiff.

“Here’s one,” Bobby said. He stood by the edge of the water. “It’s still alive.”

Atkins went over to look. A frog was struggling out of the mud. It managed to pull itself out and make two or three feeble hops before it stopped moving.

Atkins had no idea what was happening. Frogs and snakes hibernated during the winter. But something had awakened them and driven them up out of the ground.

He saw more frogs emerging from the muck. The shore was covered with dead or dying frogs.

Lauren took her grandson by the hand and started pulling him away.

“Grandma, no. I want to watch. What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” she said, wishing to God she did.

She looked at Atkins. The playful flicker that he’d noticed in her eyes back at the boat dock had disappeared. Her sharp stare was deadly serious.

“Maybe this man here can tell us,” she said.

Atkins swept his eyes along the shore, taking in the numbing sight, trying to make sense of it. He didn’t know what to say.

BEFORE SHE LEFT POINT ARGUELLA, ELIZABETH Holleran called the police from the trailer at the dig site. She described her disturbing conversation with Otto Prable and her fear that something might have happened to his wife. Then she told Jim Dietz where she was going in a few hurried sentences, jumped in her car, and headed for Los Angeles. She went straight down Highway 101, often pushing the speed over eighty.

Elizabeth kept thinking about what Prable had told her and his strange, almost frightened voice. It was uncharacteristically faint, a whisper.

She made the trip in less than two hours, arriving at Prable’s secluded home at dusk. Four police cruisers and an unmarked blue van were in the driveway. The home was in Parkside, an upscale neighborhood just north of Beverly Hills.

Elizabeth noticed that her hands were trembling when she got out of the car and walked to the front door of the sprawling ranch house. She’d been there a few times before. Prable frequently hosted parties for his grad students, who gathered to drink beer and eat cold sandwiches on the rear deck, which cantilevered off the side of a bluff and offered a sweeping view of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Elizabeth felt light-headed. She put a hand against the wall to steady herself.

A detective in plainclothes met her at the door. A sergeant from homicide. He looked in his mid-fifties, heavyset and balding, with a pockmarked face.

“Miss Holleran, I want to thank you for calling us,” he said. “Why don’t you come inside and sit down, and we can talk.”

Elizabeth followed him into the living room. It was as she remembered it, wide and spacious with a double fireplace. A row of small, hand-painted ceramic dolls stood on the mantel. Native American dolls. Joanne Prable had collected them on their many trips to New Mexico.

Elizabeth heard men’s voices in another part of the house.

“Can you please tell me what’s happened?” she asked. “I don’t think I can take this much longer, not knowing.”

The sergeant nodded as if to say he understood. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt that looked too small for his thick arms. His neck bulged at the tight collar. “They’re both back in a bedroom,” he said. “The woman, Mrs. Prable, was shot once in the head. The man, I assume it’s her husband, is lying in bed with a plastic bag over his head. It looks like he swallowed some pills first. There’s an empty bottle of Seconal on the floor. One-hundred-milligram tablets. You can go back there in a couple minutes. I’d advise against it, but if you think you can identify them, it’d be a help.”

Elizabeth sat there, fighting the urge to scream. It was what she’d feared ever since Prable had called her.

“Could you tell me about the Prables?” the sergeant asked. He had a deep, yet gentle voice. “Do they have any relatives we could call?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “They didn’t have any children. Doctor Prable may have had a brother back east somewhere. I’m sure the university would have that in his personnel file.”

“What exactly did Prable do?” the sergeant asked. He was writing notes on a small black pad.

“He was a geophysicist. He studied weather systems, climate.” Elizabeth could hear her voice, but felt detached from what was happening outside herself.

“Could I ask what you do?”

“I’m a seismologist.”

“You study earthquakes?”

“I try to,” Elizabeth said.

The sergeant frowned. “Were you here for Northridge?”

“I was out of the country. I was doing some fieldwork in Chile, near Santiago. I missed it.” Elizabeth bitterly regretted her bad luck. She’d been in dozens of small shakes before. But she’d never experienced a bad one, and then when it finally happened in the L.A. suburb of Northridge in 1994, almost in her backyard, she wasn’t there.

“I was with a traffic detail,” the sergeant said. “They sent us out to the I-10 freeway at La Cienega. One of the overpasses had collapsed, broken in two. We took fifteen bodies off it, most of them pretty badly mangled. There were a couple of young kids.” He hesitated. “I was born in this state. Earthquakes never bothered me much until Northridge.”

Elizabeth had studied the quake in detail. A magnitude 6.7, it had struck around dawn on January 17, jolting much of Southern California, especially the Simi and San Fernando valleys. It killed fifty-seven people, injured more than nine thousand, and left another twenty thousand homeless. It was the most costly earthquake in U.S. history. And yet they’d been exceptionally lucky. The quake’s strongest seismic energy was directed away from Los Angeles, out toward the sparsely populated San Fernando Valley. If it had gone the other way, the results could have been catastrophic.

“Was he despondent?” The sergeant’s question broke her trance. He was asking about Prable’s telephone call, how he’d sounded.

“He said he had cancer and that his wife had begged him to do something. Can I please see them?” She was certain that someone who’d known and admired the doctor and his wife should be with them at a time like this.

The sergeant left the room and returned a few moments later.

“You can go on back,” he said. “If you’re not used to something like this, it can hit pretty hard. Don’t be afraid to sit down if you feel faint.”

Elizabeth walked down a long hallway lined with framed photographs of New Mexico. The sergeant led her into the master bedroom.

Joanne Prable wore an expensive blue-and-white dress. Later, Elizabeth remembered how the pleats were crisply folded, how the white pearls and black patent leather pumps looked so carefully selected. She was crumpled on the floor in front of a chair. Her head was turned to the side. Part of her forehead was missing.