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Four hours into the flight, Vernon and Wayan Bagus were asleep. Riley and Emerson were wide awake.
“What’s your plan?” Riley asked Emerson.
“I reserved rooms for us at the Old Faithful Inn. It’s right in the center of the park and where the newlyweds were last seen. So I think it’s a good base of operations for us.”
Riley ate a strawberry off the catered fruit platter. “Search parties looked for them for two weeks, but the park is a thirty-five-hundred-square-mile wilderness. Nobody found anything.”
“They didn’t know where to look.”
“And you do?”
Emerson nodded. “If our theory is correct and the disappearances have something to do with the locations of mantle plumes, then our search area is limited to the blob of lava bubbling underneath Yellowstone.”
“That blob is enormous,” Riley said.
“Fifteen hundred square miles.”
“Criminy, Emerson, that’s the size of Rhode Island. It would take a hundred years. Maybe five hundred years.”
“As I could only reserve the hotel rooms for five days, I’ll just have to be extra discerning,” Emerson said. “Between my ability to discern, Vernon’s unagi, and Wayan Bagus’s special talents, it should be a piece of cake.”
Riley didn’t think it was going to be a piece of cake. She thought the investigation was going to be difficult and dangerous. Even if the homicidal lunatics didn’t show up at Yellowstone, there were the bears. She wasn’t a fan of bears. She could grab a snake with her bare hand and squash a spider with her shoe, but she didn’t like bears.
“What’s my role?” she asked Emerson.
“You’re the glue that holds our disparate personalities and talents together. You’re our Professor X.”
“The bald guy in Marvel comics? The founder of the X-Men?”
“Exactly! Only instead of being a bald dude, you have a lot of pretty red hair and you’re a girl.”
Riley stared at Emerson, trying to decide whether he was complimenting her, coming on to her, or just being, for lack of a better word, Emerson. She settled on just being Emerson.
“Thank you for thinking my hair is pretty,” Riley said.
“No problem,” Emerson said.
“So, what are Wayan Bagus’s special talents? Can he really disappear?” she asked.
Emerson gave a noncommittal shrug. “Some Taoists believe that it’s possible to develop certain supernatural powers, or siddhi.”
“Like being able to disappear.”
“Something like that,” Emerson said. “One of the siddhi is supposed to be the ability to move the body wherever thought goes.”
“Are there any others?”
“There are five primary siddhi. They include clairvoyance, being able to tolerate extremes of heat and cold, and being able to read minds. There’s also a bunch of secondary ones. Things like being undisturbed by hunger or thirst, being able to hear or see things far away, being able to assume any form desired, and being able to make yourself very big or very small.”
“Your Aunt Myra calls it all a lot of hogwash and magic tricks,” Riley said.
“It’s difficult to dispute Aunt Myra. On the other hand, there are things that defy explanation.”
The plane landed and taxied down the Jackson Hole Airport runway. Emerson gathered his papers up and dumped them into his knapsack.
“If you had told somebody in the year 1800 that there were invisible things called germs and that they were responsible for the common cold, he would have thought that you were crazy and believed in magic,” Emerson said. “Today, everybody simply accepts it as fact, despite that they’ve never seen or knowingly touched a germ.”
“Assuming it’s possible, how would you go about learning to read minds or make yourself small?”
