Peter Hernon: 8.4

“Is that Mrs. Prable?”

Elizabeth nodded, wanting to look away, but unable to.

“She was probably sitting in the chair when he shot her,” the sergeant said.

Prable lay on a large bed with a mahogany frame. He was wearing a navy suit and tie. A clear plastic bag was pulled tight over his face.

“Is that him?” the sergeant asked.

Elizabeth nodded. It was the second time in her life that she’d seen a dead man. The first had been her grandfather, who’d lived with her family. He’d collapsed in the bathroom while shaving. An aneurysm had burst deep in his brain, killing him instantly. He’d struck his head on the washstand when he fell, and Elizabeth mainly remembered coming into the bathroom and seeing him sprawled in the narrow space in front of the bathtub with a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. She was a senior in high school. He was seventy-six when he died. He’d given her her first rock collection. She still missed him dearly.

The sergeant wanted to know whether Prable had said anything about a note, a will, or any personal papers.

Elizabeth remembered that he’d said he sent her a package with a videotape and some papers and that he didn’t want her to tell anyone about it until she’d examined the materials.

She took a final look at her former professor.

“No, he didn’t,” she said, recalling the desperate sound of his voice over the telephone. “He didn’t say anything at all about that.”

If Prable was so secretive and desperate to get some kind of information to her, then she felt the need somehow to see it for herself before she mentioned it.

WHEN HE LEFT KENTUCKY LAKE, ATKINS DIDN’T know what to make of it—first the rats, then frogs clawing their way out of the mud. Still skeptical this had anything to do with earthquakes, he had to admit that if they wound up having one, some excellent research material would be available.

More than ever, Atkins was looking forward to his meeting with Walt Jacobs. Following the short-cut directions Lauren Mitchell had given him, he made the drive to Reelfoot Lake in less than an hour. It was in the northwestern corner of Tennessee, 120 miles due north of Memphis. The Mississippi made a sharp S-bend a few miles to the west.

Atkins had arrived at the lake’s visitor center before Jacobs. He had a lot to think about as he sat in the Jimmy, which rocked lightly in the parking lot against the buffeting wind.

The day before, he’d arrived at the Center for Earthquake Studies at the University of Memphis. He’d dropped by Jacobs’ office on Central Avenue, hoping to catch his friend off guard, but he was teaching a graduate class. The center shared space with the USGS. Atkins found the agency’s part of the building and was going to introduce himself when he passed a partly closed office door. He heard two geologists talking to each other.

They were discussing him. They had some of the biographical details right, but not all of them.

Atkins had been to more earthquakes than anyone else on active service with the USGS, experienced more temblors, seen more of their massive destruction. No other natural force on earth compared with earthquakes. He was haunted by them, obsessed by their power. As a consequence, he was almost constantly on the road, which was how he wanted it. He had no relatives. Both of his parents were dead. His father had been a high school math teacher at a small school in northern Illinois. He’d taken him on extended hikes in the Tetons and Wind River Range, where Atkins had caught the geology bug. He was fascinated by the big mountains and the dynamic forces that had shaped them. He was still in grade school when he knew what he wanted to do with his life.

He’d inherited his father’s love of the outdoors as well as his rugged build and thick, dark brown hair. Atkins was six-foot-two and after the trip to Peru, where he’d battled an intestinal bug for weeks, he needed to put on some weight. He’d dropped nearly twenty pounds and it still showed, especially in his face.

“The guy’s a legend,” Atkins heard one of the geologists say as he stood in the hallway listening. “He’s been to every magnitude 6 or better going back fourteen years. Colombia, 1987. Nepal, 1988. Burma that same year. Armenia, 1988. Luzon, 1990. Kobe, Japan, 1995. And those are just some of the highlights. I don’t know if the guy’s even got an apartment in the States.”

“You can have that,” the other geologist said. “That’s no kind of life.”

How true, Atkins remembered thinking. Not much of a life at all, but the only one he knew.

They’d missed one of his trips. The big one. Even now, he could run through the scenes in his head like a movie. He remembered every image, every detail.

On September 19, 1985, at precisely 7:17 in the morning, he’d been in Mexico City.

As he sat in the Jimmy at the Reelfoot Lake parking lot waiting for Jacobs, Atkins closed his eyes and let it play again.

HE felt the tremor hit, a strong one. The ground swayed sharply, right to left. Then it happened again, only more violently. He rolled out of bed and glanced at his watch to check the time. It was like trying to keep his balance on a pitching surfboard. His legs almost buckled. He had to lean against the wall to steady himself.

The bed started sliding across the floor as if pushed by invisible hands.

A lamp toppled over.

A closet door flew open.

The glass shattered in the large window that offered a view of the skyline.

The small hotel trembled. Atkins tried to force himself to think clearly, not to get rattled. The earthquake’s tremendous power stunned him. He’d often wondered how he’d react, whether he’d be scared and freeze up. He had his answer. His stomach tightened, and he had to fight back what he knew was fear.

He checked his watch as soon as the heavy shaking ended. The peak intensity had lasted about forty seconds. That was way up at the upper end of the scale. Definitely a major earthquake.

“That’s a 7.5 for sure,” Sara said, slipping into her jeans. She’d been knocked over when she tried to get out of the moving bed.

Atkins shook his head. “More. Maybe a magnitude 8.”

Barely thirty years old, Atkins had earned his doctorate in seismology from Stanford University. He’d led a team of geologists who’d just finished setting up a network of seismographs and accelerometers in a thirty-mile loop that ran into the mountains north of Acapulco in the Mexican state of Guerrero. Prime earthquake country, the Guerrero Gap, as it was called, was due for a major quake.

They’d just returned to Mexico City the day before and had had the good luck to find rooms in a low, two-story hotel outside the damage zone. Atkins and Sara had been living together for the last nine months and were engaged. They were traveling with Brad Garvey, another USGS geologist.

The Mexican capital had taken a pounding. The main damage zone was the bed of old Lake Texcoco, which had been drained. Many of the newer skyscrapers and hotels were located there, built on the lake bed’s thick deposit of soft, high-water-content sand and clay. Hundreds of buildings were severely damaged or destroyed. Atkins, Sara, and Garvey went out to survey the damage.

They slowly worked their way through frantic crowds on the Paseo da la Reforma until they came to a new six-story apartment building. The facade, tan brick with large picture windows and recessed balconies, looked untouched, but the entire back end had caved in. It stood there like a Hollywood prop. Rescuers were bringing out the victims on stretchers or carrying them by the arms and legs.

The first aftershock was barely noticeable, a gentle swaying of the ground. Little more than a nudge. The second one, which immediately followed, was much stronger.