Summer of Fire (22 page)

If Devon moved out when she turned eighteen, what would Clare have to focus on? Not two months ago, she’d have answered without hesitation that the Houston Fire Department would receive her undivided attention. Now she wasn’t sure about anything.

What would she do when she saw Deering again? Cut him dead, or let his eyes entreat her? Just thinking of his long torso sliding over her back started heat coursing in her. If not for the blowup, she would have turned over beneath him.

If only Deering hadn’t lied.

Looking at the filtered stars, she remembered Steve Haywood’s love for the night sky over Yellowstone. In a way, the simple touch of his hand had been more moving than Deering’s sensual overtures. In Steve, she felt the same deep and lonely melancholy that often overtook her late at night.

Clare took a deliberate breath and closed her eyes. Against the backdrop of her eyelids, she saw the endless undulation of flames.

Atop the Washburn lookout, Steve turned the pages of an interview with a Nez Perce warrior. The man related seeing his mother trampled to death by a white man driving a wagon through her property. The interloper had been cutting wood for fence posts when she challenged him.

Steve knew about seeing your loved ones die. With Susan and Christa gone, he was a man without an anchor. He lifted his mug and grimaced at the acrid bite of cold decaf.

He pushed aside the kerosene lamp he preferred over harsher battery-operated lights and stepped out onto the walkway surrounding the lookout. Over the rail went the last of his coffee and he set the mug down. When the long summer twilight of the Northern Rockies gave way to velvet darkness, he found that substituting decaf or sipping at water did not satisfy his habit of having a glass in his hand. He still wanted a drink.

A check of his watch said he had read long into the night. Three o’clock and all seemed well, but to the northeast, the Clover-Mist illuminated the underside of smoke clouds. Overhead were the stars, but even with a new moon, the Milky Way’s trail was muted. He remembered it that way from when he was stationed at Interior in D.C.

There, his future had been laid out like Washington’s street system, wide smooth thoroughfares to success. A house with a green lawn that sloped to the Potomac, the start of Christa’s college fund, a recent promotion that came with a government car.

Life was narrower now and rough as a wilderness trail.

The reddish sky reminded him how Clare said the Houston lights also washed out the stars.

Where was she tonight? When she’d come to the mountain, the sight of her had set off a bubbling simmer of well-being that he hadn’t felt in a long time. She’d touched his hand.

At the rate things were going, she’d go back to Texas and he’d never see her again. That was probably just as well, but the prospect left a little aching void in his chest.

Due north, a light flickered in the sky as though a switch had been thrown and quickly extinguished. A gust hit the tower and the window glass shuddered. Steve’s cup leaped off the rail to shatter against the deck.

He sniffed the air. There was no hint of humidity, but maybe this storm would be the one to bring the blessing of rain. With the dry wind in his face, he hoped.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

August 20

Saturday dawned with a still heat that Clare felt inside the Smokejumpers’ dorm. Through the open window was the ubiquitous pine forest that surrounded West Yellowstone. In the lower bunk, Sherry snored softly.

In this night’s dream, Clare and Frank had been together on the North Fork. In her teaching mode, she’d shown him the proper use of Pulaski and shovel to make an effective fire break. The dry scent of duff rose as she struck, turned sod, and moved on.

“Like this?” The tool in his hand became his crash axe.

Frank looked at it and laughed, stocky and strong in his yellow shirt. The smile did not touch his empty-looking eyes. “Pretty easy duty.”

“Wait until you’ve done it for sixteen hours,” she came back at him like she always did.

“Ha!” He was weightless, floating magically and leaving a perfectly executed fire line. “I get done here, we’ll have us a weenie roast over what’s left of the North Fork.”

He drifted up a ridge. She followed. “Hold on, you don’t know these fires . . .”

Floating through the trees, Frank lifted like a helium-filled balloon Clare had accidentally released at her third birthday party. As the distance between them widened, acrid tears stung her lids.

Scrambling, she fought her way uphill in awful slow motion. There was no sound in the forest save Frank’s fading laughter and the warning cry of a Clark’s Nuthatch. It cocked its intelligent gray head at Clare. “Run away,” the bird said clearly.

She struggled after Frank, cresting the ridge just as flames surged over the top. They roared liked an open blast furnace, living fire, with long fingers that plucked at her retardant clothing. Red and yellow, kill a fellow, but how smooth and seductive the hands . . .

Born of man, Frank transformed into fire. “Come on, Clare.” He beckoned, his eyes blank as coal. “I’m waiting for you.”

Clare crossed the wide expanse of Yellowstone Avenue and slung her pack into the troop transport outside Fire Command. She was tired before the day had begun.

The troops milled on the sidewalk, some inhaling a last cigarette before the drive. Sergeant Travis stood by the passenger door, his booted feet planted. “Little late this morning, Chance?”

After lying awake for an hour, she’d fallen back into a deep and torpid sleep. Waking with a start, she’d found Sherry gone and sunlight filtering through pine needles.

She ignored Travis and started to climb aboard, but he jerked his head toward the building. “Garrett Anderson wanted a word with you.”

She stared across the lawn. A sleek raven reminded her of the bird that had spoken in her dream. “Any idea why?”

Travis shrugged. “He thought maybe you’d want to cancel today. Something about the weather kicking up.” He managed to make it sound like she was chicken.

Fear was a part of fighting fire, the pale underbelly no one cared to expose. From the training field to the midnight call, mum was the word. Call it a belief in bad luck, or maybe it didn’t go with the macho image, but the last thing anyone talked about was the ever-present specter of fate.

Anger had been eating at Clare since she awakened from her latest dream of fire. Now came determination that she would not let fear alter her schedule, or her life. With a look at the clear sky and reasonable if a bit lively wind, she said, “If it kicks up later, we can always back out. The guys in the air and on lookout will give advance warning.”

“I’m sending a chopper to pull you off there,” Shad Dugan radioed Steve Haywood on the Mount Washburn lookout.

Steve’s stomach knotted. He wished Dugan had let him drive up the mountain, but his boss had insisted he be dropped off. “I can hike down to the parking lot and you can send a truck.”

“That’ll take too long. We’ve had a tourist report of a massive elk kill. I want you there within the hour.” Dugan’s tone was final.

It was nine-fifteen a.m., with a brisk dry wind out of the north. The airwaves were alive with exchanges that bore out Garrett Anderson’s dawn prediction; that today would be the worst yet. No rain since Memorial Day and here came another dry front with a forecast of up to eighty mile-per-hour winds.

Hoping that this excursion might be his ticket back to the real world, Steve packed his gear, gulped a second cup of coffee and went to wait outside. The usual daily weather pattern was already shot to hell. Instead of morning smoke lying in the lows, boiling convection cells rose like thunderheads off every major fire in sight. Haze crept over the flanks of the mountains and cut visibility to ten miles.

Steve’s palms were wet. Before he was ready, the dreaded whopping approached.

The helicopter came in, an olive drab Huey with an intimidating military look. The wash of wind from the blades flattened the dry grass around Steve’s feet. His heart raced and he bit the inside of his cheek to get some saliva flowing.

The skids were down.

The pilot reached across and opened the passenger door. Steve ducked his head and hurried to climb aboard. Putting on headphones, he heard a western drawl, “No way this was my idea,
Doctor
Haywood.”

“Deering!” Steve gripped the door handle. He almost got out, but Shad Dugan wouldn’t buy cowardice.

Before he was strapped in, the chopper lifted rapidly over the treeless patch of summit. Within fifty yards, the slope dropped away and they were flying at a thousand feet.

Steve’s stomach rebelled. He clapped his palm across his mouth and took a frantic look for a barf bag. Deering lifted his hand from the collective and plucked a small sack from a pocket on the side of his seat.

Steve choked back the acid liquid, but kept the bag close at hand. He’d never been prone to motion sickness, it was just those last ill-fated flights. He didn’t need three strikes.

Although Deering appeared to handle the controls deftly, sweat trickled from Steve’s brow to his cheek. Looking out, he tried to concentrate on the land.

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone yawned, a steep-walled, towered chasm striped in shades of burnt orange. Hydrothermal waters had altered the rock, turning it so rotten that the river easily cut a deep gorge.

South of the canyon was another world. There, the Yellowstone meandered peacefully across the golden, grassy expanse of Hayden Valley, oblivious to its upcoming wild ride.

The Huey turned west into the wind. Steve made a conscious effort not to clench his fists.

“I was directed to drop you at Norris.” Deering’s voice penetrated the overpowering white noise of the engine.

Steve frowned. Just yesterday, the North Fork front had been five miles southeast of Norris Geyser Basin. He wouldn’t have thought it possible, but once more, Garrett Anderson had accurately predicted trouble.

“Look,” Deering went on, “about that day we went down . . . “

“I’d rather forget it.” Keeping his head averted, Steve concentrated on the horizon and keeping his stomach tamed.

“Believe me, I would too,” Deering went on, “but my Bell’s rusting in a shed in West Yellowstone.”

“Tough.” Steve’s hands fisted on his thighs.

“If I don’t get my insurance money, the salvage company can claim her.”

“What’s that to do with me?”

“The insurance folks want to talk to you.”

Steve gritted his teeth as the Huey flew like it was driving the potholed stretch of road between Madison and Norris. Black smoke roiled off the North Fork and the rest of the sky had a reddish cast.

Deering said, “Getting that money will help get me out of a jam. My wife’s pissed off enough.”

“I don’t care about your personal problems.”

“You don’t have to worry about them blaming you for screwing up the bucket.” Deering persuaded. “I told them I got set by wind off the firestorm.”

They were coming in fast. Steve held his breath and tried to make sense of what he’d just heard.

The Huey set down. Steve crumpled the barf bag and threw it in the floorboards. “Blame me?” He opened the door and let in the howl of wind. “When I finish telling them about you,” he shouted above the din, “you’ll be walking.”

Deering’s hands shook as he landed at West Yellowstone. He tried to tell himself that it was because gusts kept buffeting the chopper, but he knew better.

God damn the day he’d first set eyes on
Doctor
Steve Haywood. Within two hours of Deering meeting the man, his helicopter had been at the bottom of the lake. If that Smoke-jumper hadn’t broken his leg, Deering would still be schlepping retardant onto aerial tankers.

As hot as his rage was, he couldn’t completely ignore its cold companion, a stony feeling in the pit of his stomach that reminded him where the real fault lay. Georgia was right about him being a daredevil. If only he could turn back the clock, take the time to find a landing spot and make sure the bucket was suspended properly beneath his chopper.

When Deering found out whom he was going to pick up this morning, he’d been half-afraid that Suzanne Ho had taken his advice and hiked up Mount Washburn. Instead, it appeared that the corporate wheels were turning more slowly.

Deering’s momentary relief that she had not talked to Haywood had been wiped away when he realized his claim wasn’t going to be paid until she did. Now that he knew how Haywood felt, he was sweating large caliber bullets.

Pushing away his unpleasant thoughts, he wondered where Garrett Anderson was. He’d been instructed to pick him up near the charter trailer.

At the sight of the nearby Smokejumpers’ Base, Deering thought of Clare and the day she’d helped him in the rescue. The urge to see her again rose as it had with unruly regularity in the past week.