Supervolcano: Eruption Read Online Free PDF

summer, he found his father reading a book about the geology of Yellowstone Park. In a way, that wasn’t too surprising. Dad had gone there on vacation, after all. The card he’d sent Marshall featured something called the Fishing Cone, and was postmarked at Old Faithful Station. That was kind of cool. Even so . . .
    “Geology?” Marshall pointed to the book, which had an aerial photo of some colorfully steaming pool on the cover.
    “It’s interesting—a hell of alot more interesting than I thought before I went there,” Dad said. “And besides, I’ve read everything there is to read about the South Bay Strangler. None of it does any good, or we’d’ve caught the son of a bitch by now. And—” He stopped short.
    “And?” Marshall prompted.
    “Nothing.” By the way his father said it, it was definitely something. Marshall didn’t have Dad’s experience at questioning suspects, but he didn’t need it to know that.
    “C’mon. Give,” he said. “Who am I gonna tell? The tabloids? Entertainment Tonight ? The Huffington Post?”
    Dad despised the Huffington Post—and, to be fair, its rivals on the right. He chuckled: uneasily, if Marshall was any judge. “I hope not,” he said.
    “Well, then? C’mon!”
    “I, uh, met somebody.” Yeah, Dad was uneasy, all right. What did he think Marshall would do? Tar him and feather him and ride him out of town on a rail? Tell the Huffington Post for real? Worse, tell Mom? Mom had always said she wanted Dad to be happy, but no, she wasn’t always a reliable narrator.
    “Cool! How’d you meet her? What are you doing about it? Does she live around here?”
    If not for the Cool! in front of them, all those questions asked at once would have made Dad clam up for sure. “We met during an earthquake at Yellowstone,” he answered after a pause to decide if it was okay. “She goes back and forth between there and Berkeley. We’ve talked on the phone a few times, and sent e-mails and texts back and forth. That’s about it.” He shrugged, as if in apology it wasn’t more.
    It was more than Marshall had expected, even as things were. “Cool!” he said again. “But what’s up with the geology?”
    “She studies it,” Dad said, which took him by surprise. “She was checking a seismograph when the quake hit.” Another chuckle. “Got more than she was looking for then.”
    “I guess,” Marshall said. “So you’re getting into it because she is?”
    “Maybe some.” His father was relentlessly honest—even about himself, as much as anyone could be. “But it turns out to be pretty interesting stuff.”
    “All the geysers and hot springs and whatever.” Marshall knew he sounded vague. He’d never been to Yellowstone, and what he knew about the place came from some half-remembered National Geographic documentary. Or was it Ken Burns? One or the other.
    “Yeah. All that,” Dad agreed dryly.
    “Would you still care about it if you didn’t find out about it from—?” Marshall stopped. “You didn’t tell me her name.”
    “Kelly,” Dad said. “You know what? I would. I really would. I don’t see how you could not be interested once you knew what was—what is—going on there.” He sounded convinced. Just because he sounded that way, of course, didn’t mean he was. And even if he was, that didn’t mean he was right.
     
    “Idiot!” Vanessa Ferguson said, her voce not nearly sotto enough. The idiot in question was her boss. Mr. Gorczany had written between you and I in a letter soliciting a bid on the widgets his firm produced. Vanessa wondered if she was the last person alive who could actually use English grammar these days. She changed the boner to between you and me , fixed a couple of other clumsy phrases, and printed the letter for his signature.
    Even if he wrote like a baboon, he owned the company. He lived on an acre and a half in Palos Verdes, and he bought himself a new BMW every year. Vanessa’s job title was technical writer, which