Chapter 40
NOLAN
Erin Kealoha was precisely the type of person who made Alexa uncomfortable.
Talkative, exuberant, tactile… The moment she arrived, she pulled Alexa into a hug, and Nolan stiffened along with his girl as she turned her head to the side and grimaced.
Rusty—the hockey player turned chauffeur—offered a handshake.
“Good to meet you,” Nolan said.
“You too, buddy. Uh, Erin? You need to let her go.”
“What? Oh, the hug. You don’t like being hugged? I guess I should have thought of that, what with you being a hermit and everything.” She looked around. “Cool library, but why is everything so dusty?”
“I’m not a hermit.”
“But you live on the internet.”
“I’m a digital nomad. That’s different.”
“Did you ever see that movie with the robot and the AI supercomputer that tried to protect humanity by killing a bunch of people? That’s what I thought you were.
The supercomputer, I mean, not the robot.
Not that I thought you killed anyone.” She hesitated a second.
“Probably? But Zach swore you were, like, a real person, so… Anyways, I thought you’d be taller. ”
“Babe…” Rusty warned.
“Not really tall. But Zach said you were short, and I’m not exactly a giant myself, so I figured we’d be about the same size.”
Alexa was grinding her teeth, and Nolan wished he had a straitjacket.
Or a gag. Or both. Ari had warned him that Erin could be a lot, but now he fully understood why Alexa had put off meeting her in person for so long.
And Nolan? He wanted to lock himself in a room and hibernate until all of this was over.
For the third time, he felt his life unravelling.
The curse that had followed him since childhood was striking again, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
But this time, things felt different. Not the wild freefall he’d experienced after his dad got arrested and again in Blackstone House, but more of a bungee jump. He was reaching the bottom of the elastic, and it was fifty-fifty whether the rope snapped or bounced him back up again.
The weirdest part? None of the other people who’d taken up residence in his home—Alexa, Jerry, Storm, Ari, Marcel, André, and now Erin and Rusty—seemed to consider this situation anything out of the ordinary.
Ari skidded in. “Sorry, sorry. Erin, let her go.”
Alexa finally managed to extricate herself. “Now that you’ve finished commenting on my height, do you think you could get some work done?”
“Shoes, right? I’m looking for shoes?”
Ari wrapped an arm around Erin’s shoulders and half guided, half pushed her out of the library. “Alexa got us access to a database that might help.”
Jerry had described Rusty as “a straight-up guy, surprisingly normal,” and he moved to follow Ari and Erin, then paused.
“So, you need a hand with any chores? I can stay till tomorrow, but then I have to get back to Fresno for training.”
Nolan opened his mouth to suggest Rusty ask Ari, but Alexa got in first, pointing at one of the remaining stacks of boxes.
“Those need to go somewhere else.”
“Sure,” Rusty said agreeably. “Where?”
“I literally don’t care. I just don’t like them in my eyeline.”
“We can stack them in the study.” Nolan cringed inwardly at the thought of going in there because he couldn’t get the sight of Marielle’s blood out of his head. “Nobody’s using it much at the moment.”
* * *
It turned out that Rusty knew André too, because the team from North of Market was helping with the redesign at the home he and Erin had just bought near Santa Cruz.
Between the three of them, they worked out which items needed to be moved, both boxes and furniture, and this was the most normal day Nolan had experienced in weeks.
He tried to push the investigation out of his mind and focus on the task at hand.
Rusty seemed like a nice guy, a man with the patience of a saint for putting up with Erin.
Although Nolan wasn’t totally lacking in self-awareness, so he knew Rusty was probably thinking the same thing about him and Alexa.
“This place reminds me of my dad’s office back home,” Rusty said as they lugged another box into the study. “He never throws anything out either.”
“Where’s home?”
“Kittson County, Minnesota. You’ve always lived in California?”
“I grew up in Washington,” Nolan admitted. “Then we moved to Pennsylvania. It wasn’t until my grandpa left me this place that I moved to Amador County.”
“Gold Country, right? Erin said there’s an old mine on the property?”
“I can give you a tour later. The deeper tunnels are blocked off, but we use the more accessible parts to store the wine barrels.”
“A tour would be great. I minored in geology at college, and rocks always fascinated me.”
Nolan’s ears pricked up. “Really? Uh, did Erin tell you much about the problems here?”
“Yeah,” Rusty replied cautiously. “Don’t worry, I know how to keep my mouth shut.”
“A question we had was whether there could still be any gold left in the mine. Maybe deposits that they couldn’t get out with the old mining methods during the Gold Rush.”
“It’s true that mining techniques have changed over the years, but you’d need to ask someone who specialises in exploration or economic geology. I was more focused on earth history—sedimentology, palaeontology, that kind of thing. When I was a kid, I’d spend hours collecting fossils with my dad.”
“I used to collect interesting rocks with my grandpa, and I think there were a couple of fossils.” Nolan skirted a pile of cardboard boxes and lifted a smaller wooden box off a shelf behind the desk. “When I moved here, it turned out he’d kept everything.”
Every rock, every photo, every letter and card Nolan had ever sent.
One of Nolan’s bigger regrets was that he’d lost touch with Grandpa Calder, but he also understood why his mom had wanted nothing more to do with that side of the family.
Perhaps that was why he hadn’t tossed out any of this old junk?
Because it was the one way he could feel close to the childhood he’d lost?
Rusty began rooting through the box and picked out a rock. “Yeah, this one’s an ammonoid. You found it around here?”
“They all came from here on the property or close by. The gold flakes were in the stream up on the hill—they’re not big enough to be worth much.”
Rusty held the ziplock bag up to the window and squinted. “A few bucks. If you panned for long enough, you might find enough to make a pair of earrings or a ring.”
A ring? Hmm. That put an idea in Nolan’s head… True, Alexa had looked slightly freaked out at the mention of marriage, but she was still here.
“Try looking around where the larger rocks have accumulated,” Rusty continued, “especially if there’s a bend in the stream. That’s where the gold gathers.” He picked up another rock. “This is a fossilised leaf, but I’m not sure what type.”
“Damn, I remember finding that one,” Nolan said. On the last day of his last visit to California before the cops arrived with handcuffs. “You think it would be possible to polish a piece?”
“How big a piece?”
Nolan held his fingers a quarter inch apart. “This big?”
He didn’t have the money to buy Alexa a huge rock, and she wasn’t the sort of woman who cared about size anyway. But a ring crafted with love, using materials found on the property…
“You could ask a jeweller,” Rusty suggested. “Or use this stone.” His eyes widened. “Do you have a safe?”
“No, never needed one.” The most valuable thing Nolan owned was his barrels of vintage Syrah, and now that Alexa had installed cameras and motion sensors at the entrance to the mine, he slept easier. “Why?”
“This looks like kimberlite. Or maybe lamproite—you’d have to check with an expert because they’re both igneous rocks, but their mineral composition—” Rusty shook his head, then pointed to a greyish lump in the rock. “Anyhow, they both contain diamonds.”
Nolan peered closer. “That’s a diamond?”
“You’d have to get it tested, but I believe so. A rough diamond. You’re saying you found this nearby?”
“Probably?”
“That’s weird. There aren’t any kimberlite pipes in California, at least none that have been confirmed. And they usually form in cratons—the oldest and thickest parts of continents. Geologically speaking, the Sierra Nevada is much younger, and the conditions aren’t favourable for kimberlite. But…”
“But what?”
“But more diamonds than you’d expect have been found in California, almost all of them around the Sierra Nevada or the Klamath Mountains, and they’re quite the geological mystery.
The most common hypothesis is that the source is an ophiolite complex that formed during a tectonic plate collision, and the diamonds eroded from their original source and washed down into placer deposits. ”
“I don’t understand most of what you just said.” Nolan had never been to college. Hell, with all the family drama, he’d been lucky to graduate high school.
“TLDR: there are a bunch of diamonds around here, and nobody knows for sure where they came from.”
Nolan screwed his eyes closed, trying to remember where he’d picked up that lumpy rock…
He recalled splashing in crystal-clear water, diving to the bottom, seeing how long he could hold his breath.
Spying treasure. Proudly bringing it up to show Grandpa Calder.
Losing interest when he spotted a raptor hovering above the trees.
“It was in the swimming hole, I think.”
“Well, damn. It could have been transported there by the stream.”
Yeah, the way those flecks of gold had. Grandpa Calder had explained all about placer deposits as they paddled in the water, rinsing stones and grit in their pans, looking for the telltale glint of gold.
But he thought…he thought there might be more of those rocks up there by the swimming hole.
Juno had brought him one, just dropped it in his lap and waited expectantly.
Usually, she preferred sticks. He’d laughed, tossed it back into the water, and given her a treat in exchange.
Nolan jolted as the pieces slotted into place.
The pasture.
The list of names.
Alexa’s ceaseless snooping.
A fucking diamond.
“We need to tell the others about this.”