Jane Was Here (39 page)

She came again at the end, to the snowy mountain pass, when there wasn’t much left of him but breath and bones, and he was long past hunger.

A burst of wind brought the sound of wood creaking: the ribs of the covered wagons groaning, forsaken in deep drifts. A clatter of wings nearby. Though he could not turn his head, he knew a dark bird had come down to peck a crumple of rags in the snow. Many like him lay about in the limitless white. It had been a long time since he heard their prayers.

All of Gabriel Nation were dead now, except him.

His eyes beheld the canopy of heaven as he stared fixedly upward. The sky seemed to sink lower; its burden of snow would be his shroud.

Flakes big as thistles came down, no warmth left in his cheeks to melt them. The snow fell straight into his eyes. A curved film of ice prevented his eyelids closing; a white mask formed on his face, snowflakes meshing over his sight.

She knew his last thought:
Jane
.

And then she visited no more.

When it came her turn again, to quit the Realm for the Colony, she begged her teachers:
Do not make me forget. I want to remember, when I see him again.

JANE LOOKS DOWN
into her uncovered grave. Among the scattered bones pricking through the soil are small vertebrae, which alone have maintained their fragile row for more than one hundred and fifty years.

“Hope you’re done now,” Hoyt calls over his shoulder as he strains against the stone. “‘Cause I can’t hold it anymore, kid.”

Jane gets to her feet. Something troubles the air. Black smoke billows across the sky overhead. The atmosphere has grown suddenly very hot, hazy; it smells strongly of wood ash.

But there is something that disquiets her much more. She moves around the perimeter of the hole to stand over Hoyt.

His chest pressed against the rock, he glances up.

She stares into his blue eyes.

I want to remember, when I see him again.

“I remember you.” She chokes on the memory, as it bears down like a thunderhead. “You put me in this grave.” Backing away in horror from the rim of the pit, she cries, “It was you!
You!”

“What—?” In his surprise, Hoyt relents his pressure on the rock for a brief moment. A moment is all that is needed for the stone to fall.

He tries to scramble out of the way, managing to move his upper body clear; but not in time to drag his legs out of the way. The stone crashes down; he hears both thighs snap.

He hollers in agony, “God damn! Fuck!” He tries to push the stone off, to no avail. “Holy Christ! Jane, get help!”

Jane is already running away, lantern in hand, vanishing into the woods.

“Jane!”

Hoyt’s cries follow her, but she holds no mercy.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-F
OUR

D
own at the St. Paul’s Fair, Bern D’Annunzio is the first to see the thin furl of smoke from Rowell Hill. He pulls Thom Sayre away from the firemen’s grill to come look.

“Oh, shit,” says Thom.

“Maybe it’s somebody’s camp.”

“I’ve never heard of any hikers going up Rowell,” Thom says. “There’s no trails, no access, not even a fire road.” The land belongs to Elsa Graynier, not the state.

“Let’s hope nobody’s up there,” says Bern. “That’s a lot of dry timber.”

“Uh-huh. All it needs is wind.” As Thom says it, a sudden gust flutters the bunting above the Dog ‘N’ Patty stand. The cold front is coming in.

The breeze picks up; the smoke on Rowell Hill blooms. As the first orange ribbons of flame erupt above the treetops, Thom calls the firehouse.

FIRE TRUCKS FROM FOUR
surrounding counties arrive, sirens weaving through the air.

People rush to buy tickets for the Ferris wheel: an excellent vantage point to watch Rowell Hill burn. Others simply stand with their mouths open, never having seen a wildfire up close, as their children slip away unnoticed and run about in overexcited packs. Country-western songs play over the PA, warring with the carousel’s recorded calliope music. As the drifting smoke from the forest blaze dries people’s throats and eyes, the concession stands run out of soda.

Someone thinks to console Elsa Graynier, whose hill is burning.

“I’m only happy no one lives there,” she says, blinking back tears. “The forest will grow back. Though maybe I won’t be around to see it.” She manages a philosophical smile. “When you get old you know that everything comes and goes and then comes along again.”

Smoke floods the sky with the darkness of night, as the north wind builds to twenty miles per hour. Driven by its force, the flames are boiling down Rowell so fast there is no time for the fire teams’ bulldozers to cut breaks on the hill.

To protect the surrounding property and houses, they decide to contain the fire at the base. Crews string out along Upper Old Spruce to meet the advancing fire, using the road as a natural firebreak.

Then Thom Sayre remembers Hoyt Eddy’s isolated bungalow at the foot of the hill. He sets off with a small team on foot.

When they arrive, the house is alight, its flames too intense to approach without hoses.

By the time they return with trucks, it has burned almost to the ground. Hoyt’s pickup is in the driveway, as well as someone’s beat-up Cavalier. Then his dog appears out of nowhere. Eyes scared, tail wagging incongruously, he attaches himself to the crew, following them everywhere.

Thom assigns two volunteers to search the house for bodies. The others set spot fires to keep the runaway blaze from sweeping into the town.

At sundown, the wind abruptly reverses, propelling the flames back uphill. More trucks and dozers arrive on the opposite side of Rowell to light a backfire.

With any luck, the two blazes will meet at the top and burn each other out.

HERE HE IS IN A PIT
again, unable to climb out.
Sinkhole redux.
It’s almost funny.

Hoyt knows Jane isn’t coming back. The look on her face told him, when she cried, “It was you!”—what did she mean? Why was she so angry?

That’s what you get when you finally care about somebody. When you finally give a shit. She runs out on you, no reason.

He slides in and out of lucidity, his trapped legs alternating between numbness, pins and needles, and searing pain.

All he can do is wait, lying in a mess of someone’s old bones, his own broken bones mingled with the shards of a stranger.
Sacrum, femur, patella, tibia,
he recites. Absurd to know a lot of nothing, for nothing.

He stares up into darkness. How can it be night so soon?

He smells smoke. Hears distant sirens, shouts.

The wind changes abruptly, now seething up the hill. It scoops into the pit, buffeting Hoyt’s face and driving thick smoke down his throat into his lungs. The sky fills with an eerie apricot glow, soon spinning into a glory of scarlet, orange, and rose.

His lungs labor as oxygen is sucked from the air; he chokes, throat squeezing shut. The air scorches his nasal passages.

A second roar comes from the opposite direction. Fire is closing in on both sides.

It’s over. To state the obvious.

Then thought ceases.

A slender thread of mercy raises his soul out of Hoyt Eddy’s doomed body, just before it perishes; sparing him his own end.

WILDFIRE AND BACKFIRE
meet. As awestruck firemen and townspeople watch, curling crests of treetop flames merge, in a shimmer of gaseous heat. Then comes the crash, and a tremendous gyre of flames whooshes up: the death spiral.

The fire begins to destroy itself.

Rain starts before morning. Four hours later, when the rains slacken, the fire is all but dead. The bleak scorched stubble of Rowell Hill stands revealed. Ninety acres in all have burned.

Awake more than thirty-five hours, stretched to their physical limits, Thom and Bern refuse to shuck their gear and go home to bed. The conflagration is in their blood; they don’t want it over. They join the volunteers climbing Rowell Hill to put out spot fires and assess the damage. Hoyt Eddy’s dog trots anxiously alongside them.

To walk the ashy terrain is unsettling; it’s a world of phantom limbs, gaunt specters of trees, blackened and still smoking. The crew finds it comforting to follow the track of a human element: a centuries-old tumbled stone wall, whose meanderings used to be concealed by living greenery, now burned away.

They pause in a small clearing when someone treads on metal objects among the cinders: butane canisters. Sifting around, they find a pot, a camp stove, and the upper half of a patio torch.

The fire may have originated in this area. Several of the men stay behind to collect evidence and look for human remains.

Soon they will find the charred body parts.

Hoyt’s dog suddenly breaks ahead, galloping over the crest of the hill. They find him in a second clearing, where he’s sniffing excitedly around a pit.

They are afraid to touch the body they find in the hole. It’s wedged under a heavy stone that takes two men to lift. One guy argues that it’s not a body at all, but a charred log. A metal belt buckle embedded in the shape decides the matter. They call for a forensic team.

Bern and Thom leave their comrades to puzzle out the scene.

Bern says he feels disconnected, like his head is separated from the rest of him; maybe it’s the adrenaline, or too much coffee.

It’s like being in a movie, Thom says.

The woods are utterly quiet: no insects or birds. The men’s boots crunch on the still-smoldering residue on the forest floor. They follow the stonewall mechanically as their amazement fades into stupor.

Then they hear the child’s cries coming from Pease Pond.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-F
IVE

“W
hat were you doing there?”
They can’t get anything out of him. Police, fire forensics, the trauma specialist, the grieving Poonchwallas, his grandparents—they’ve all tried to find out why Collin was on Rowell Hill that day.

The boy won’t say a word. All he does is grunt.

“He’s waiting on his mama,” says his grandfather. Veronda is on her way back from Ghana. They’ve barred Brett from visiting his son in the hospital.

Everyone agrees Collin is severely traumatized.

No one suspects him of starting the fire. The newspapers report that it was caused by a chemical explosion at a homemade meth lab in a hunting shack: not a rare occurrence, unfortunately, in economically depressed rural areas.

Three people are dead.

The body parts found at the site of the meth lab were identified as belonging to Seth Poonchwalla, an honors student with a bright future in robotics. Everyone is shocked except Graynier’s crank addicts, now going through withdrawal.

The forensic specialists are waiting to do tests on the second body, believed to be Hoyt Eddy. They are waiting for a DNA sample from his brother in Kentucky.

At first there is some confusion over the Jane Doe found roasted beyond recognition in Hoyt’s house. A detective from Virginia claims it is Caroline Moss, a fugitive autistic who was spotted in Hoyt’s pickup on the day of the fire. However, the Chevrolet Cavalier in his driveway is traced to Marlene Walczak.

Her distraught daughter Pearl confirms the vehicle is her mother’s. She has not seen Marly since the day of the fire, when she went to the carnival, leaving her mother asleep in their trailer. After spending the night with a roustabout, she returned home to discover her mother missing and her car gone.

The police take a cheek swab from Pearl. The body on Hoyt’s floor is confirmed to be Marly Walczak’s.

Later the medical examiner will report that Ms. Walczak did not die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The bullet took out her left eye and a piece of skull but missed the brain. She would have been conscious, though unable to move, when she died of smoke inhalation.

Gita Poonchwalla is also missing. Since no fourth body was found in the ashes of Rowell Hill, her parents remain hopeful she’s alive. They could not survive the death of both children. As it is, the Poonchwallas are now pariahs in Graynier: greedy upstart aliens whose son turned a clean, law-abiding community into a cesspool of vice, nearly burning down the whole town in the process.

The police, for their part, believe Gita ran away from home. Judging from the strange contents of her room, she seems to have been a troubled adolescent and a kleptomaniac besides. They put out an Amber Alert. Posters are distributed nationwide: “HAVE YOU SEEN HER?”