Summer of Fire (5 page)

The smell of fire grew stronger as she struggled. Hung up in ragged limbs, she twisted to the side, trying to ease herself out without tearing her trousers. A look ahead showed the potentially drowned person, lying between the approaching flames and the lake.

To hell with it.

She ripped her pants and splashed the rest of the way through shallow water.

A broad-shouldered man in fire-retardant olive trousers and the yellow shirt lay on the rocks, his clothing and dark blond hair streaming. He might be thirty or fifty years old, face down with one arm flung over his head.

The wind shifted to blow onshore as the convection cell sucked oxygen to feed the flames.

Clare crouched and called, “Are you all right?” She felt the déjà vu of the opening steps of CPR. The last time was in Houston on a heart attack victim and the man had died anyway.

She pushed away the vision of performing ventilations in waist deep water, for without a solid surface she would not be able to do effective chest compressions.

“Can you hear me?”

She checked for a pulse in the carotid artery at the side of his neck. Feeling a flutter beneath her fingers, she exhaled a sigh.

Not a hundred yards away, the Shoshone reared like a cobra.

Clare rolled the victim over and discovered a Park Service badge and nameplate. “Damn you, Steve Haywood,” she raged. “Talk to me!” That one wasn’t in the rescue manual.

He stirred and opened his eyes, silver gray like the sheen of light on a lake before a storm. The look on his face was one of confusion.

Flames spotted not thirty yards away. A two-foot thick pine blasted apart with a crack like a howitzer. “I hate to tell you this.” Clare forced a note of cheer. “You’re about to go swimming again.”

Steve was fresh out of adrenaline, but he knew he had to move. He felt the woman’s hand beneath his shoulder and, with her help, he managed to get to his knees. Although his legs threatened to collapse, he crawled back into the freezing lake.

She stayed with him, shedding her rubber boots. Dazed, he looked at her turnout pants and Houston Fire Department shirt. “What are you doing here?”

“I hope to God I’m saving your ass.”

He hoped so, too. Not because he looked forward to spending more time on this planet, but because he needed to survive in case Deering managed to dodge the bullet. If Steve had his way, he’d see to it that Deering never flew again. The Triworld Airlines pilot had paid the ultimate price, but late at night Steve still woke up sweating, wanting to kill Captain Todd Neville with his bare hands. After four years, the shock of Susan’s screams and Christa’s pitiful wail as the jet plunged was still as vivid as the night it happened.

“Deering?” Steve asked the woman helping him into the lake.

“The pilot?”

He nodded.

“I saw someone picked up by chopper.”

Steve’s anger warmed him as he waded after her, twenty-five, then fifty feet from shore.

The Shoshone burned hotly, crackling and roaring toward West Thumb’s boardwalks. He looked back at it . . . once.

This summer’s fires were like nothing he’d even seen, not in the early seventies when he’d dug line a few feet from the creeping edge of flame or during his past three years in Yellowstone. The park’s recent wildfires had barely blackened the bark.

The inferno came closer, right down to the water. Steve felt the heat on the back of his head, almost blistering despite his wet hair, and knew he would be burned even at this distance.

“Survival floating,” the woman directed. Her short blond hair was wet, too, revealing dark roots. “You know it?”

He answered by pushing off into a dead man’s float, then curled until only his back broke the surface. They would conserve their energy until they needed to take a breath, then draw their arms and legs together just enough to raise their faces for air. People could supposedly do this for hours, but that assumed the water was a lot warmer.

It had been freezing that night in Alaska, too, when the 737 plowed into a snowbank and slid a thousand feet to crash into a cliff. Steve had thought he was dead until the cold rushing through the broken fuselage and the pain in his shattered knees had brought him around. Frantically, he had looked for Susan and Christa.

The scientist in him knew the facts, but looking back on that night Steve always thought the cold had come from the frozen hollow heart of a man who had lost everything.

The firefighter’s fingers encircled Steve’s wrist and held on.

CHAPTER THREE

July 25

Clare’s strained face, streaked with soot, stared back from a mirror at the Lake Hospital. More of a clinic, the small complex beside the Lake Hotel was the best care available in the center of Yellowstone. They’d given her a room to take a hot shower and some green scrubs to put on in place of her sodden Nomex. Down the hall, the helicopter pilot and the ranger she’d rescued were being treated.

Deep shadows marked the skin beneath her eyes. For years, she’d prided herself on being able to sleep through the station alarm when she wasn’t up on the roster, but since Frank had died, sleep was a nightmare landscape.

Clare brushed sweaty bangs from her forehead, and checked for the gray she blamed on Jay’s leaving her. Although she frosted her coal dark hair to mask the evidence, the blonde in the mirror sometimes still surprised her. Stripping off her filthy fire clothes, she unhooked the damp bra that stuck to her and wanted to throw it as far as she could. With a silent entreaty, she turned the faucets.

Steam rose. There was nothing like the sluice of hot water when you’d been shaking with cold. She and Steve Haywood had been in the lake for long minutes, until the Shoshone’s fury passed. Then they’d worked their way along the shore to West Thumb, where Javier had carried the ranger to the truck.

Beneath the spray, Clare lathered luxuriously and lingered to soak in the heat with bent head.

When she climbed out of the shower, the pale green of fluorescent lights washed out her naturally healthy color. For reassurance, she assessed her body. Not that there was or might be any man to appreciate the results of weightlifting during slow times at the fire station. Her upper arms and smallish breasts were firm. Dark aureoles reminded her that her great-grandfather had been a quarter Nez Perce.

She’d asked her mother about her family and been told her great-grandparents William Cordon Sutton and his wife Laura had ranched in Wyoming through the nineteen twenties, along with their sons Cordon, Jr., and Bryce. “Why did my Granddad come to Texas?” Clare had been around ten, stirring a soggy bowl of Cheerios and hoping she didn’t have to finish breakfast.

Her mother shrugged. “Your Grandfather Cordon was a man of few words. He once said his mother Laura was the writer in the family, but I’ve never seen any of the journals she was supposed to have kept.”

Young and inspired, Clare had started a journal of her own that very afternoon, proudly opening a blank, lined notebook and inscribing her name in purple ink on the flyleaf. That was as far as her efforts had gone.

Over the years, she’d often wondered about her great-grandmother’s life on the frontier. Now that she was in the West, she hoped to dig up some family roots.

Dressed and in the hospital hall, Clare looked for a telephone. Although her wallet was damp, she extracted her long distance calling card and dialed Houston.

Devon should be home from her job guarding at the Springwood Community Pool. Taller than Clare, she’d turned out big and muscled like her father. Her blue eyes still resembled the ones Clare had smiled into during diaper changes, but in recent years, those eyes had turned defiant. One semester her grades were As and Bs, the next incompletes, with screaming matches and door slamming. Clare wondered how she’d managed to make it through until Devon had achieved a spring graduation from Houston’s Stratford High.

If Jay hadn’t left, things would be different. It had been damned sure her pittance from teaching P.E. and coaching girls’ basketball wasn’t going to cover the house payment, even with child support. The Houston Fire Department didn’t pay much more, but it was the most rewarding job she’d ever had. Each wreck she ran, every fire put out, made a difference in someone’s life. So far, she’d pulled in enough to keep her and Devon in their pleasant house on the west side of Houston, but that was going to change.

In October, when Devon turned eighteen, the monthly money from Jay was going to cut off like a pinched hose. Clare had not had the heart to tell her daughter she’d already talked to a Realtor.

The answering machine came on and Clare imagined her voice echoing in the empty house. She pictured the place in the fall, vacant, with silverfish in the sinks and a lockbox on the door. Even worse, with a new family’s indentions in the Karastan Clare and Jay had selected together.

Two hours after being brought to Lake Hospital, Chris Deering took a bite of mushy meatloaf and wished for the veal cordon bleu being served in the Lake Hotel, not two hundred feet from his bed. He swallowed and thought that with the Park Service paying him a thousand an hour he rated better chow.

Of course, the lion’s share of the money was for his pride and joy--the 206B Jetranger he’d bought new in 1981. Dark blue with gold stripes and her name,
Georgia,
painted on the fuselage. Of course, she wasn’t a thing like the real Georgia, who hated flying, so he secretly thought of her as
Georgie.
When he climbed into her cockpit and strapped on the pilot’s seat, everything was in its proper place. He’d always believed, like so many instinctive pilots, that it was he who truly flew, the machine an extension of him.

Now it had gone to hell.

He forced his fingers to release their clench on the hospital’s dull knife, and with an effort, decided not to play Monday morning quarterback. When a pilot flew that route, he wound up losing his nerve.

As soon as a warm bath had brought his body temperature to normal, Deering had called his insurance company. First Annoyance, as he called them, had said that someone would get back to him.

His fork clattered to the plate. He hadn’t given them this number so they would call his home. Shifting to find a more comfortable position for his tall frame, he set aside his dinner tray and pulled the phone to him.

He winced when the receiver contacted the cheek he had bruised landing on the Chinook’s deck. At home, Georgia would brighten at the sound of the phone and hope it was he, never dreaming he’d ditched and drowned his helicopter. When she answered, he wasn’t ready.

“Georgia?”

“Who else?” He saw her slightly gap-toothed smile as if she were standing beside his bed.

When he didn’t speak for a long moment, she said, “Where are you?” He envisioned the frown that spread across her freckled face, draining the joy from her eyes. His hand slicked with sweat on the receiver.

“In the hospital at Yellowstone. I’m okay. “

“Okay? What are you doing in the hospital?” Her voice went shrill, and Deering thought that she—five-feet-two inches of solid intuition with knowing green eyes—could always read him.

He drew a ragged breath and felt the cold that had taken hours to shake creep back. “I had to ditch the Bell.” He drew the blankets he’d shoved down back toward him.

“When will it be enough?”

“It’s never enough!” All the years they’d been together and she still didn’t get that flying was his life.

“Do you know anything about sitting here alone, knowing you could get killed any time?’

The fight drained out of Deering, and he listened to the static whine of the connection.

Finally, Georgia spoke, small and teary. “Are you hurt bad?”

By instinct Deering reached for the Marlboros he always kept in his breast pocket and encountered the folds of his hospital gown. Damned thing let the breeze up his ass. “I told you I’m okay,” he grated. “I ditched in the fucking freezing lake and they warmed me up.”

“Lake?”

“The chopper’s in West Thumb. Map says it’s three hundred feet deep.”

“I’m glad.” Her voice turned venomous. “I hope they never bring it up.”

Before he knew he was thinking about it, Deering stabbed his finger and disconnected the call. The dial tone hummed harshly while a hot sting flushed his arms and burned his fingertips. Whenever Georgia pushed that particular button, the one that said she would never understand his flying, it shot him up with quick rage. Today, with their livelihood on the bottom of Yellowstone Lake, it damn near blinded him.

“Excuse me.” The voice was low and husky, but the small person in hospital greens was clearly female. “I thought this was Steve Haywood’s room.”

Deering had asked and found out Steve was recuperating in a room down the hall. At least he wouldn’t sue for big medical expenses.

“Not here.” Deering still seethed at his wife as the diminutive woman paused on the threshold. A closer inspection revealed a heart-shaped face accentuated by streaked blond hair. Big eyes of a rich bronze hue seemed suffused with sadness.