I blinked at the abrupt change of subject. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Day before you came, he gathered us all in the cookhouse. Told us we’d got some conchies coming in to fill smokejumper slots. Now, some of the rangers—I won’t say who—had a problem with that. Before they’d met you and all. But Morris, he shut ’em all up. ‘Every fire they put out, they’ll be protecting our country just as much as the boys over there. I wouldn’t wish the front line on my worst enemy.’”
He wiped sweat off his forehead with the handkerchief, as if such a long speech had taken great effort.
“He said that?”
“The very words. And the rest of us all knew his son was serving. So he had a right to say it. No one ever complained again.”
Most larger CPS camps had a director and a few other staff members from one of the peace churches or another anti-war organization who shared their values. With only a handful of men at our spike camp, we couldn’t have that luxury. But even though every now and then we caught a sour look or a snide comment from the townie smokejumpers like Roger and Jimmy, the rangers had always held their peace.
And now I knew why.
The plot points were coming together, but they weren’t forming the crime scene Dorie seemed to want.
I had gotten my answers. The shadowed figure I’d seen had been Morrissey or Richardson searching the area for Jack’s body. Morrissey’s defensiveness when I asked questions was because he was reliving the loss of his wartime buddies. The only suspicious thing about it was why Jack didn’t call the fire in from the tower like he was supposed to instead of playing the hero.
And unless Jack woke up and remembered what happened, that might be a mystery we could never solve.
FROM GORDON TO HIS MOTHER
January 20, 1945
Dear Mother,
Thank you for your letter. I do think you’re wrong about Walden; however, the ideal location for reading it is surrounded by the sound of running water and the smell of pines. At least I’ve found that to be true. Someday, maybe you’ll give it another chance.
Given what happened to Jack, I understand your worry, but I can’t leave. Not right now. Maybe I’ll consider requesting a transfer come summer. I admit that the idea of jumping into wildfires doesn’t hold even the limited appeal it did when I knew Jack would be at my side.
But for now, I want to stay at Flintlock Mountain. I need the fellows here, my CPS brothers. And perhaps, in some small way, they need me too.
Before I sign off, I have a question. It’s about Great-Great Grandmother Clara’s diary. Were there any escaping slaves who didn’t make it North after passing through her home? I’m sure it’s nothing, but you’ve always said “nearly,” so I felt I needed to ask. You took such care in copying those stories that I don’t want to get any details wrong.
It’s one of my favorite memories of you, you know. Coming out late at night to get a drink of water and seeing you at the kitchen table, wrapped in your old yellow robe, painstakingly copying words from that diary. When you saw me, instead of ordering me back to bed, you invited me over, showing me how to tell the difference between a cursive e and an o in Clara’s hurried handwriting, pointing out the dates in the top right corner of every new entry, telling me the diary had been hidden for years in your great-uncle’s attic before being passed on to you.
“Stories have power, son,” you told me. I’m not sure if I understood at the time, but I know now. I joined the CPS because of the beliefs of my church, but hearing Clara’s stories made me brave enough to do it.
And it’s what’s left of that courage, passed down through the generations, that’s keeping me here.
Your son,
Gordon
INTERVIEW WITH LLOYD ABERNATHY
January 20, 1945
Notes: Completed while hauling and stacking wood. Awfully sore. Couldn’t ask much about Jack—as you can see, he was already hostile and suspicious. Didn’t want to make things worse.
Me: They certainly work you hard enough here, don’t they?
Lloyd: None of us are afraid of hard work, Miss Hightower.
Me: I’m glad to hear it. When it comes to your personal well-being, do you ever feel unsafe for any reason?
Lloyd: Sometimes. When I feel my rights are being violated by the government keeping us here in a condition barely over slavery. Or when military personnel interrogate us when we were promised the military would be removed from our daily lives.
Me: Do you really find me threatening, Mr. Abernathy? I’m only here to ask a few simple questions.
Lloyd: I find what you represent threatening. And it makes me wonder: Why are y’all interested in us now, three years in? We’d gotten the idea you were content to let us live out the rest of the war in peace, as long as we didn’t bother you.
Me: That is a question better addressed to my superiors. I’m only here on assignment, and I do what I’m told. That’s the army way, you know.
Lloyd: And that’s why I’d never be in the army, even if I didn’t have a philosophical opposition to it. Free societies can only exist when citizens are willing to question authority at every level, to challenge the power structure—
Me: I’ll thank you for not trying to convert me, Mr. Abernathy. I’ve had two of your kind make an effort already, and as you can see by my uniform, it didn’t work.
Lloyd: All right, then. Have it your way, but just know that some of us aren’t the sheep you think we are. We see more than you know. And that’s all I have to say about that.
CHAPTER 15
Dorie Armitage
January 21, 1945
It took me only two days of investigating to discover that the Morrissey family was essentially the forestry equivalent of a mobster clan.
Earl was the head ranger and godfather; Edith the motherly cook; Sarah Ruth the secretary and chief gun moll, if Edith’s stories of her daughter’s hunting prowess were half true; and Jimmy the grunt doing all the work of chores and smokejumping.
Granted, the Morrisseys were more upstanding than the average gang, but all of the functions and information of their national forest district went through them. If I was going to find out what happened to Jack, I’d have to talk to one of them.
That was the only reason capable of bundling me out of bed at 5:30 in the morning on a Sunday to help in the kitchen, of all places.
“Sunday morning’s a big meal,” Edith explained, gesturing to the rashers of bacon, stacks of egg cartons, and loaves of bread arranged on the counter of the cookhouse kitchen, “because for Sunday lunch, the men are on their own with sandwich fixings and the like. A day of rest, you know.”
This doesn’t feel restful.
My brain, still half asleep, wasn’t quite up to its usual sharpness. How could I start without sounding suspicious? “I suppose it’s odd, working with all of these conscientious objectors.”
“Not really.” She handed me a whisk and a bowl filled with eggs bobbing around like two dozen gelatinous sunrises. “Most of them are as good as gold.”
I made a face at the eggs as I sloshed in a drizzle of milk. They winked back at me, so I started whipping them up to keep them from mocking me.
“So there isn’t any tension between the rangers and the COs?” I pressed.
She took my bowl of thoroughly beaten eggs and tipped it into the butter sizzling in a massive cast-iron skillet. “Oh, every now and then, there’s a spat. Some of the town boys calling names, a ranger who doesn’t like to see the COs at the movie palace, a quarrel about whether to use military-sounding terms around the camp. Those were mostly handled by their leader, though, Jack.” Her shoulders sagged like the Stars and Stripes on a line that hadn’t been pulled taut. “And he . . . he’s gone now.”
There. She’d handled the transition for me. “That’s the young man who was badly burned recently, isn’t it?” It was easy—too easy, maybe—to keep my voice steady, but I welcomed it. Nora Hightower would be
sympathetic but not sad.
“It’s dangerous work, smokejumping.” Mrs. Edith’s motions with the spatula intensified, decimating the eggs more than scrambling them. “I didn’t want my Jimmy to do it, but he and Earl insisted, so . . .” She threw up her hands, as if there was nothing more she could do.
Back to the subject at hand. “How did this Jack fellow come to be out at the site of the fire alone?”
“I’m not sure. Earl didn’t tell me.” Her eyes widened in alarm, as if remembering she was talking to an army investigator. “But it wasn’t my husband’s fault, none of it, you understand. The boy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I’m told he’s in a hospital, getting treatment. Do you happen to know which one?” I tried not to make it sound like I was too invested in the answer. But if I could find out where they were keeping Jack, if I could see him again, maybe . . .
Edith frowned. “I assume it’s the post hospital at Fort Missoula, since the central branch of smokejumpers is there, but I can’t say I’ve thought to ask. I know they’ll do the best they can. But Earl doesn’t think . . .” She set the spatula down and brought up the corner of her apron to wipe her eyes. “My, I haven’t seen him so broken up since—”
Every detective knows to always press for more when someone trails off. Often, those are the most important leads to follow. “Since when?”
“Since our son William died in the war. That was . . .” She frowned as she seemed to flip invisible calendar pages. “Sixteen months ago next week.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said in the same way I did if a fellow on the base drifted into a blue mood and talked about the buddies he’d lost. It was impossible to say much more.
She peeled off the first strips of bacon from a thick rasher and slapped them into the pan. “Thank you, dear.”
Funny, I hadn’t seen a Gold Star Service Flag displayed around the Morrissey home, usually a bloodred-bordered banner of sorrowful pride for war widows and grieving mothers. Then again, tucked into the forest like they were, I suppose they might have felt it wasn’t worth displaying, since no one would see it.
Edith’s hand stilled on the skillet. “It wasn’t so terrible the day we got the news.” Her eyes looked somewhere far away. “It was the day after. I could hardly get out of bed.”
I thought about Phyllis hauling me out in time for roll call the morning after I’d heard about Jack’s accident. “I can understand that.”
“One of the COs came by and offered to make breakfast so Sarah Ruth and I wouldn’t have to.”
“Word spreads quickly around here, I’m sure.” I tried to picture it—the conscientious objectors murmuring the news that the boss’s son had died in the war they’d refused to join. Did they feel ashamed? Relieved that it wasn’t them? Renewed in their conviction that fighting in a war was evil?
She nodded. “The biscuits that poor fellow made were absolutely inedible.” The sad lines on her face lifted in an abrupt chuckle. “Like lumps of coal, better to burn than to eat. But I’m told the sausage turned out all right. I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t eat a thing all that day, or the next.”
I looked around for a way to make myself useful and settled on stooping over the wooden cutting board dominating the counter, slicing bread—unevenly, but still sliced. “Where was your son serving?”
Her answer came quick and bitter. “We don’t know. It was classified.”
I frowned. Yes, the army was cagey with details before operations were carried out—that was the whole point of censoring mail and news reports—but afterward, grieving families were given the respect of knowing how their loved ones had served their country. “Surely they at least told you where he was buried?”
“Don’t you think if they had, I’d know? His own mother?” Edith slapped the uncooked side of the bacon strips down, spattering me with stinging droplets of grease. If she noticed my sharp intake of breath, she didn’t apologize.
“I’m sure the army had their reasons.” But it made me wonder: What kind of work had William Morrissey been involved with before his death?
“That’s what Earl said too. At first anyway.”
Outside, the now-familiar bell rang, bright and cheery as Christmas morning. Edith gasped and looked out the door toward the benches of the cookhouse. “Here come the teeming masses. Oh, and we haven’t even started the toast!”
Since that seemed about my ability level, I took on the duty myself. Not using one of the shiny models lined up at the Sears store back in Seattle, just a grill to place a half dozen slices out on at once.
As I dutifully flipped the bread every minute on cue before setting out the slices to be coated in jam and devoured by the men in the hall—smokejumpers only, the rangers were off on Sundays—I tried to think about what I’d learned, like Philip Marlowe or Hercule Poirot would. Use those “little gray cells,” as the famous detective liked to say.
I had to get to the scene of the crime, but to do that, I needed both means and motive. No one I’d talked to had described the fire’s location, even when I’d dropped hints. As for motive . . . what line could I use to explain why I wanted to investigate the fire?
You could ask Gordon. Then you wouldn’t need to give an excuse.
Annoying how the simplest answer was also the most complicated. Because Gordon Hooper had made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with me, and I was more than happy to oblige. If he wanted to pretend the fire was an accident, well . . .
Fire. I sniffed, then flicked the spatula under one of the pieces of bread, revealing the black underside, just like the biscuits in Edith’s story.
I glanced around the corner to the dining hall, where several of the men stood, as if ready to don canvas coveralls and form a bucket brigade, or however they put out wildfires.
Lesson learned. If you want to avoid drawing attention to yourself, never burn something in a room full of smokejumpers.
“Everything all right?” one of them asked.
“Oh my.” Edith nudged me to the side and used her own spatula to assembly-line flip the burnt toast over to the waiting plate with enviable efficiency. “We’re fine, just fine!” she trilled. Then, to me, “I’d better take over, dear.”
I thought about giving the burnt pieces to Thomas to feed to the birds he loved watching.
No. Even they probably won’t want them.
“But I should—”
She tsked, cutting off my protest. “Now, now. You go along and grab your grub before the boys get seconds. I’ve seen Dust Bowl locusts that haven’t cleaned out a place as well as those fellows.”
My empty stomach wasn’t about to offer a counterargument, so I hung up my apron, loaded a plate from the chow line, and surveyed the cookhouse for a likely table.
There. Charlie, who from what I’d observed seemed like the friendliest of the COs, sat with three other men, chatting quietly, not in a sleepy stupor like some of the fellows.
It was interesting, the way the COs were so casual about their bold integration. Coming from the army, with separate facilities based on skin color, it had taken me by surprise at first, Charlie eating and sleeping alongside all the rest, but already it had gotten so I hardly noticed.
“I’ve been exiled, boys,” I said, plunking my tray down beside them and dazzling the table with a smile that took a bit more effort after an earlier morning than normal.
It was clear they didn’t mind my ratty old sweater or unbrushed hair from stumbling out of bed before dawn, each greeting me pleasantly.
“Do any of you gentlemen go to church?” I asked, even though I knew the answer. Most COs were as religious as saints.
“Mr. Morrissey and Mr. Boyd, one of the other rangers, take us in an hour or so,” one of the Johns said. Was it First, Second, or Third? I couldn’t keep the nicknames straight. “We all pile into the bed of their trucks.”
“Will you be coming with us?” Hank, the round-faced fellow with a hook nose who looked like the Quaker Oats
man without the white wig, looked hopeful.
“Sorry, no.” I hated to disappoint him, but then again, I’d already disappointed Edith this morning when I said I’d rather not go. Church was all well and good, but remaining behind would give me several precious hours of solitude to go over notes from my investigation.
Before I could ask them about their church experiences, the cookhouse door flung open, and Morrissey stepped in. He stood resolute, like a man with something to say, but instead of demanding attention, he waited as table after table noticed him, their conversation slowing.
I shushed First John, who turned to see what the rest of us were staring at. Finally, Morrissey spoke. “This morning, I received a call at my office.”
It was how he said it, more than the words itself, that seemed to fall over the room. And I knew what he was going to say, so that when he did, I almost wondered if it had been out loud or in my own slowed-time imagination.
“Jack Armitage is dead.”
CHAPTER 16
Gordon Hooper
January 21, 1945
No. Every part of me throbbed at that one word. My tray fell to the table, knocking over a glass of milk, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.
“. . . complications of his accident,” Morrissey was saying. “He was not, as far as anyone could tell, in any pain.” He looked at me, when all I wanted in the world was for him to look anywhere else. “The doctors did all they could, but he died sometime between 3 and 4 AM.”
The world was frozen silent as the news hit us like an unexpected blizzard.
Dorie. Where’s Dorie? I found her two tables over, her face placid as a summertime meadow. Almost blank.
That cut through the ache. Jack’s own sister didn’t care that he was dead.
Dead. As surely as if I’d traced his name in the newspaper listing of the missing and fallen on the battlefields of France or North Africa or the Philippines.
The anger in me found a target, and I narrowed in on Dorie, daring her to look my way, willing her to show any emotion.
The Lines Between Us Page 14