Summer of Fire (6 page)

“If you like,” a slow smile spread over his face, “you can check under the bed.”

She grinned. It lighted her eyes, and Deering wondered if he had imagined her sorrow.

He considered the storm that roiled in Georgia’s eyes this minute. His wife had been trying to get him to stop flying for years, imagining somehow that renovating the Victorian house she’d inherited into a bed-and-breakfast could give him the kind of rush he was addicted to.

“I’m sorry to disturb you.” The woman in his doorway turned to leave.

All at once, Deering couldn’t stand that Haywood had all the luck this afternoon. “Chris Deering,” he offered. “Everybody calls me just plain Deering. My chopper went down in the lake.”

“Clare Chance.” Her arms crossed over small but well formed breasts that the hospital uniform did not conceal. “With the Houston Fire Department.”

“Say what?”

“The hospital gave me dry clothes. I was out at West Thumb looking for survivors and found Mr. Haywood on the shore.”

“Doctor.”

“Beg pardon?”

“It’s
Doctor
Steve Haywood, park biologist,” he finished, trying to sound neutral.

Steve Haywood shivered beneath the Lake Hospital’s blankets and wished he weren’t alone. It had been a long time since he’d desired the company of another person.

That made it tough to admit he wished his rescuer hadn’t disappeared when the ambulance unloaded him. He had caught her name when she’d given it to the driver—Clare Chance. With her fingers coiled around his wrist, she’d almost kept him from minding the cold water.

He could still see the concern on her face as she’d helped him out of the lake. She didn’t look a thing like his Susan, but in his mind, some essential nerve bound the two women.

Steve sipped lukewarm hot chocolate that needed a shot of brandy. That sickening plunge before he’d hit the water . . . he’d been falling, falling like the other time. The last moments of Triworld Air’s Flight 2072 had been the longest of his life, the screaming speed and wild gyrations in contrast with freeze-frame shots of his life.

Strange how nearly dying again this afternoon made him remember the things that were most important, like the day he met Susan.

He had been in his usual hurry that April morning in 1976, eager to check on the bacteria cultures he’d left at eleven-thirty the night before in his graduate laboratory. As was his habit, he pulled open the side door of Duke University Cathedral to take the short cut through the nave. He had crossed halfway, walking briskly in front of the ornate altar rail when a theme of what sounded like pure joy burst from the organ’s tall pipes.

He stopped.

Music poured over and around him, reverberating richly in the stone arches, enhancing the stained glass jewels of morning light. He’d heard the organ before, students practicing their scales and the staircase progressions of simple Bach. He’d paused to listen to the notes of Sunday’s hymn, the majesty of “Oh, God Our Help in Ages Past.”

Of all the music he’d heard swell to the rafters, Steve had never experienced anything like this score that began in climax yet climbed higher, striving toward the pinnacle a soul could reach.

Opening the gate that led onto the altar, he passed the lectern with no doubt that a visiting concert organist was reviewing his program. He planned to ask for the date and time of the performance as well as whether his works had been recorded. He hoped so, for this music could enliven his lonely rented room late at night while he pored over the results of genetic experiments on
Drosophila,
the common fruit fly.

Steve poked his head over the rail and looked into the organ box. Although the spilling progression of notes was stemmed, the nave reverberated with those already on the air.

“You startled me.” Sleek hair of gold spilled over delicate shoulders.

“I’m sorry, but could you tell me who composed that music?”

“Susan Sandlin.”

Steve nodded sagely. He had never heard of a composer by that name.

The organist smiled, her clear blue eyes on his. She put out a hand and he felt strength in her slender fingers. “I’m Susan. I wrote it.”

In his room at the Lake Hospital, Steve slammed his fist into his open palm and swore at whatever excuse for a deity ran this shithouse of a world. Christ, he needed a drink.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed. His right knee, the one he sometimes favored by limping or even bringing out his cane, protested his weight. Every time it pained him, he set his teeth against the associated overwhelming sense of loss.

He’d call Moru Mzima, the naturalist he’d been working with for the past year, and ask to be picked up in the sunroom at the Lake Hotel. The historic nineteenth-century inn, three stories clad in yellow clapboards, stretched for a hundred yards on a bluff overlooking Yellowstone Lake. The sunroom was one of Steve’s favorite places if he had to be inside rather than beneath the soaring dome of sky. One could look upon smooth cobalt water that could turn raging gray in minutes. On the far side of the lake, the Absaroka Mountains lifted their green heads.

Steve had often sat in the sunroom and thought about the days when the Grand Loop Road ran between the hotel and the lake, the Yellowstone and Monida Company bringing guests in stagecoaches. Although science was his livelihood, since coming to the park he’d immersed himself in stories of the fellow human travelers who’d passed this way. A connection with those long dead brought hope that Susan and Christa were not so far away.

Today, his focus on the sunroom was not about history, but the fact that cocktails were served in the lovely glass-walled lounge, beginning at noon.

In the hallway outside Deering’s room, Clare spotted a coffee machine and went for the dual jolt of caffeine and sugar. Sidetracked from her mission to check on Steve Haywood, she slumped into a plastic waiting room chair and cupped her hands around the warm cup.

The pilot . . . Deering was cocky. Especially for a guy who’d just crashed and, well . . . he hadn’t burned. Not in a lake kept cold year round by eight thousand feet of elevation.

Something about him reminded her of her ex. Jay was a hard driving, in-your-face kind of guy. It was what had originally attracted her and, ultimately, had been their downfall.

She’d known something was wrong with her marriage, but hadn’t wanted to face it.

First, the family suppers she and Jay had prepared together and called culinary delights gave way to his business dinners. A moderately successful homebuilder, Jay had told her, “You have to schmooze the clients.”

There was never a satisfactory explanation for why she could not join him. It was always “You’d be bored,” or “Devon needs somebody home.” After a while, she stopped asking and devoted herself to her job, with its evening basketball practices and games.

Then the scent of perfume, that Jay supposedly hated, came wafting from his size eighteen collar or maybe from his newly styled pale brown hair. “Oh, that damned Karen Eisner at the office,” he’d bitch. “She must bathe in the damned stuff.” Clare went along because Jay was so emphatic in his distaste when she wore fragrance.

The phone calls with nobody there were amusing at first. “If a woman answers,” Clare had teased. Soon nobody was laughing.

Finally, there had been the woman friend who was no longer a friend. Over chicken salad and white wine on the patio of a French-style café, at a table overhung by fuchsia bougainvillea, “I just think you ought to know, Clare, that everybody’s laughing at you.” The news came with a name, Elyssa Hendron, unmarried twenty-something with doe eyes and a developer daddy with a fortune.

Clare had asked herself the question Dear Abby, or was it Ann Landers, always posed. Would she be better off with Jay or without him? After studying how just-turned-thirteen Devon adored her father, Clare determined to stick it out.

Looking the other way and stomaching the nausea lasted a bare month.

Jay had breezed in at one-thirty a.m., smelling of Obsession and musk. That he lacked the garden variety respect to shower before coming home turned a key in the box she’d locked her feelings in.

“You want to go to her, then go!” Clare shouted.

Without hesitation, Jay roared, “If that’s what you want, you’ve got it.”

They stared at each other. Her pulse leaped at her temples while a vein in his forehead throbbed. She waited for his expression to soften, for him to take it back.

His footsteps sounded loud on the hardwood floors as he went back and forth to the garage. Devon crept down the stairs, her cotton nightdress flowing like Cinderella’s gown, golden hair the color Clare had seen in Jay’s childhood pictures, spread wild over her shoulders.

When Jay came out of the bedroom with a load of shirts on hangers, Devon clasped his arm with both hands. “No, Daddy!”

Jay shoved his daughter away. “Someday you’ll understand.”

All Clare understood after nearly five years was that she was alone, trying to raise her daughter as best she could, while Jay built his second wife a million dollar house. The contacts he’d made through Elyssa’s developer father had made him wealthy. Since it happened after the divorce, the judge had not seen fit to raise the child support.

Clare pushed to her feet in the waiting room and dumped her coffee in the trash. Once more, she searched for Steve Haywood, finding the room with the correct number vacant. Upon learning that he’d checked out without permission, she felt a stab of concern. She tried to comfort herself with how many times she’d transported someone and never learned his or her fate.

That was the norm. You used the Jaws of Life to open a car roof like a can of tuna, stabilized and packaged a young woman. On the jerky ride through Houston streets, you started an IV, noting the wide gold wedding band on her left hand. When she had trouble breathing, you started bag ventilating. At the ER, you stood by until the gurney smacked open the swinging doors and they took her into a treatment room. You stood hugging yourself and sent a little prayer down that hallway. And one for the husband whose phone would ring as soon as her wallet was searched for ID.

Then you walked away.

Today, Clare couldn’t shake the memory of Steve Haywood’s troubled gray eyes.

CHAPTER FOUR

July 26

Garrett Anderson towered over Clare as the heavyset fire general’s hand engulfed hers. She’d arrived a few minutes early for their meeting in West Yellowstone and seen him on the lawn as she parked her rental car on the street.

“Hear you had a bit of excitement yesterday,” he offered.

“You might say that.” She forced a smile, along with the signature casual tone of the fire fraternity.

“Are our mountain lakes a bit more refreshing than your blood warm Gulf of Mexico?” The tinge of Atlanta in his voice was even more pronounced in person than on the Motorola.

Her smile turned genuine. “You’re no more used to forty-five degree water than I am.”

“Don’t bet on it,” he chuckled. “I’ve been in Boise seven years.”

Clare was still getting acquainted with Garrett, having seen him only twice before. Buddy Simpson at A & M had warned her that beneath the deceptively soft-looking physique and laid-back manner was a man of steel.

Together, they approached the headquarters of the newly created Greater Yellowstone Unified Area Command, set up in what had once been the Union Pacific Railroad’s dining hall. At the end of the rail line to the park, late nineteenth-century tourists had been served on Limoges china while waiting to catch stagecoaches into Yellowstone.

Thirty-foot rock chimneys flanked both ends of the hundred-foot long construction of stone and weathered wood. Great walls of windows lined the sides. Behind, ravens strutted in an area that appeared to have been the railroad right-of-way, now devoid of tracks.

Garrett got to business. “Welcome to another level of fire management bureaucracy. You know I’m Forest Service, out of the Boise Interagency Fire Center. Our partner agencies include National Parks, Office of Aircraft Services, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Fish and Wildlife, and the National Weather Service.” Buddy had told Clare that Garrett was one of less than twenty Incident Commanders in the country, calling the plays in a military style organization.

“So where does this Unified Area Command fit in?” She paused on the stairs flanked by elegant rock walls leading up to incongruous modern wire mesh doors.

“Starting today, the National Park Service and Forest Service are to coordinate over the park and surrounding areas. They’ve put me in charge.” Garrett rolled his expressive eyes. “But I expect I’ll be acting more as referee with those two groups.”

Clare had not realized how influential Buddy’s friend in wildfire was.

Garrett reached for the door and held it open for her. “I’ll show you the latest fire extents map.”

Something dark in his tone made her say, “I have a feeling I’m not going to like it.”

In the doorway, they stepped aside to make way for two young men carrying a metal desk.