It affected Gordon too—I could see it in the way his Adam’s apple rose with a swallow. “I could do that. Anything else?”
This was the opening I’d been waiting for. “Well,” I said, trying to sound confident but knowing Gordon would probably see through it anyway, “there’s just one more small thing. . . .”
CHAPTER 18
Gordon Hooper
January 21, 1945
Did God have a special punishment for skipping church to investigate a murder?
That’s what Dorie assured me we were doing. “It might be our only chance to visit the scene,” she insisted, following me down the broad main trail into the woods, the same direction I’d rattled in Morrissey’s Ford the day of the fire. “And you’ve got the perfect excuse to be missing. Everyone knows you’re grieving too much to sit through a church service.”
“Isn’t church supposed to be the place you go when you’re grieving?” I challenged.
That paused whatever she was going to say next. “I suppose. But isn’t God here too?”
I looked around the mild, sunny day, thinking about it.
The only music came from the flutter of the hatch-patterned wings of sparrows, and the only stained glass was the design the light made through the evergreen needles on the path. Lloyd claimed “communing with nature” on his daily walk was a suitable substitute for church. That was a step too far for me, but it had always been easier for me to listen to God here in the quiet . . . as well as easier to hear the questions I’d crowded out. Loudest of them now was Why did Jack have to die?
No answer, just the wind in the trees. I’d studied the philosophy and ethics behind questions like that back when I was eighteen and setting out all the religions of the world before me to select the best one to join.
I’d come out of that experiment right back where my great-great-grandmother had started: the Quaker faith, with its convictions and equality and contemplation. Everything my father wasn’t. Peaceful. Self-reliant. Dignified.
But could it answer this awful question?
I glanced over at Dorie, stumbling down the path in the hunched-shoulders way of someone trying to tuck into themselves to conserve warmth, a few dark curls poking out from under the red beret jammed nearly to her eyes. No chatter or small talk today, thank goodness. Maybe she’s grieving too, in her own way.
When we’d walked for a few miles, close enough to see the edges of the burned area, I pointed it out to Dorie.
By now, the forest felt less comforting and more like something, or someone, was watching me—but not the peace of Inner Light I felt when close to an all-seeing God. No, this was a crawling unease, like a character from Jack’s noir mystery script.
Stop it. Dorie’s made you paranoid.
“It’s awful,” Dorie whispered, and I remembered that she was seeing it for the first time.
Though the trees still stood, the smaller ones were naked of their lower branches, leaving swaths of matted gray instead of dense green. The wafting scent of stale ashes hung in the air even more than a week later. Whenever we smokejumpers trooped back over a burn site the next day to find hotspots and scatter their buried pockets of coals, it struck me like that. Not a pungent rot, but the odor of death just the same.
Dorie picked her way along the edge of the exposed earth of our fire line, staring like a medic overlooking a battlefield cluttered with wounded and dead.
It wouldn’t do any good to tell her this was a small fire compared to some I’d seen, infernos that swallowed up hundreds of acres, leaving behind crumbling gray ashes as far as the eye could see. The size didn’t matter to her. This fire had killed Jack.
When I looked over at her again, she had her gloves pressed to her mouth, like she was filtering the air from the ashes stirred up by her footsteps—or holding in a sob.
What could I possibly say to help?
“This is going to be a meadow someday.” The way Dorie looked over at me, skeptical and sniffling, made me feel foolish, but I pressed on. “Sarah Ruth Morrissey said so. The fire cleared away the undergrowth, and we’ll come back and cut down any dead trees. In a few years, it’ll be pocked with burrows and lined with long grasses for birds to use in nesting. Wild flowers will grow, attracting butterflies. . . .”
I couldn’t finish. In the middle of winter, it was hard to remember what spring felt like, and from the way Dorie stared down at the cold, dead ground, I knew she couldn’t picture it either.
“It doesn’t seem right. Like nothing should live here again after what happened.”
I knew what she meant. “Don’t you think Jack would rather have a meadow than a graveyard as a memorial?”
She lifted her head, straightened her shoulders, and for a moment, looked every inch a soldier. “He would, wouldn’t he?”
I nodded. “Now, what are we looking for?” The sooner we got the job done, the sooner we could leave. I didn’t believe in ghosts, of course, but neither did I feel entirely comfortable here.
A small notebook with V for Victory in red on the cover appeared out of her coat pocket, and she took up a stub of a pencil like she was going to make an itemized list of every snapped twig. “Notice every detail. Anything might be a clue.” She’d lost the dazed look, and it was replaced with the grit I’d come to expect from her.
Given the task before us, we were going to need it.
There was plenty of debris, splintered branches and charred underbrush, springy-soft layers of ash that would eventually get washed away. Lots of boot prints in the muddy ashes, too, more than I would have expected, but then again, there had been a crew of us digging that day. Douglas firs stripped bare of needles on the bottom branches, juniper bushes twisted and charred, everything colored in muted greens, grays, and black.
But as I circled the burn area, one detail didn’t make sense. It wasn’t a clue so much as a lack of one.
There has to be another explanation.
Think, Gordon, think.
No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn’t come up with one.
You’ve got to tell Dorie. Regardless of how much it played into her suspicions.
After I’d made the rounds, hopping over nearly every charred log and crumbled bit of underbrush, I spotted Dorie in bright blue on the north side of the burn, the mountains behind her, where the fire lookout’s roof could be seen, barely, in the distance. I jogged over.
“Didn’t you say it rained after the fire?” she asked before I could get a word in, flipping back to earlier in her notebook.
I nodded. I could almost feel it on my skin, the stinging cold of that winter rain, just barely on the up side of freezing.
“Hard enough to wash away boot prints?”
“Probably.” I saw what she was driving at. Why could we clearly see disturbed ground and prints when the rain should have wiped them out . . . unless it wasn’t us smokejumpers who made them. I bent down, looking at a clear print just inside the fire line. The line of the sole was pressed into mud, not ash. Mud that would have formed after the rain but not before it.
“Someone else has been here.”
“Several someone elses,” Dorie corrected, “and not just on the perimeter.”
Right. I’d seen the prints even in the center of the burned area, but I’d attributed them to Richardson’s story that he and Morrissey had walked through, searching for Jack.
“Has it rained or snowed since the day of the fire?”
I thought back, the days blurred together in my mind. “No.”
“Blast,” she muttered. “That might’ve given us a timeframe.” She wrote it down anyway.
It was time. I took a breath and braced myself. “Also, I noticed . . . there aren’t any fallen larches.”
I’d circled the burned area twice, just to be sure, wondering if maybe I’d missed it, and come up with nothing.
Instead of jotting that down, Dorie just stared at me, and I noticed the smudges of ash on her cheeks that we’d have to clean off before
going back to camp. “I don’t follow.”
“Morrissey told me a dead larch fell on Jack, trapping him.”
“Ah.” She tapped her pencil against her mouth, perfectly applied lipstick gleaming. “Could it have burned up in the fire?”
“Doubt it. It wasn’t a hot enough fire to leave no trace at all.”
She accepted that with a nod, probably knowing as much about forest fires as I had two years ago. “Maybe Morrissey had someone cut it apart for firewood and haul it away?”
It was a reasonable guess. We had so many stockpiles around camp that I’d hardly notice if one suddenly grew larger. “But there’s no sawdust or wood chips on the ground that I could find. Any project that large would have left debris. Besides, Morrissey told me it was a snag, mostly rotten. No good for burning.”
Before I’d even finished, Dorie was writing something in her notebook. I took a step closer and saw, in all capitals, MORRISSEY LIED.
Even though it was the logical conclusion to what I’d said, I still hated making that jump. “It could be that a branch fell and knocked Jack unconscious, and Morrissey exaggerated.”
“Maybe,” Dorie said slowly. “If Jack got hit in the head and couldn’t move, a branch could’ve done it, I suppose.”
I’d seen Jack’s body. He’d been injured and burned, no question about that . . . but what if it wasn’t from a fallen tree?
That one question opened up a dozen I didn’t want to think about. Dorie already was. I could tell from the way she was pacing the fire line, muttering to herself. I heard a few of the phrases: “cover story,” “What’s the motive?” “attempted murder.”
It’s not possible . . . is it? I tried to imagine anyone hating Jack enough to kill him and just couldn’t do it. Even if it was possible, why would someone kill him here? Had they started the fire, or merely used it? And what reason could Morrissey possibly have to lie about it? None of it made any sense.
And into the doubtful quiet that followed those questions was an intuition, a snatch of remembered conversation, the first hint of the motive Dorie was muttering about.
Images and memories played through my mind.
Morrissey’s guilty conscience.
The cross rubbed smooth at the front of the church.
The way the fire had grown so quickly less than three miles away without anyone noticing.
Wild flowers.
My words came out dull and heavy. “I think I might know what happened.”
That got Dorie’s attention, her eyes bright and pencil poised. “Talk, Gordon.”
“It’s not like your spy thrillers or noir mysteries,” I warned. Then again, few things were. Maybe most tragedies came from ordinary people making terrible mistakes.
“Just tell me.” The words practically exploded out of her as I tried to figure out where to start.
“Sarah Ruth told me her father believes some fires could benefit a forest. He thinks our total suppression strategy isn’t healthy. But of course he’d lose his job if he started advocating for controlled fires without any evidence.”
Understanding slowly softened the look of concentration on Dorie’s face. “Wait. You think Morrissey set the fire himself? As some kind of . . . experiment?”
“Yes.” I tried to trace out the steps my mind had gone through to give her a picture of what could have happened.
Morrissey waited for a stormy day, a day he knew would provide a cover for how the fire started, then lit a dry pile of underbrush only a few miles away from the camp. He figured if the rain didn’t put the blaze out, Jack, a vigilant lookout, would call it in, and with a fire squad so close, no one would be the wiser. He’d get a burnt-out clearing to study and could return for tests over the course of years.
What he didn’t count on was Jack seeing the fire and hiking down to it alone, hoping to prove himself. Maybe it was a broken tree limb that injured him, maybe he just inhaled too much smoke, maybe it was something else altogether. Either way, it explained Morrissey’s panic and guilt, why he seemed to feel so deeply that the fire was his fault.
Because it was.
“That’s awful,” Dorie breathed, and we stood in silence for a moment, looking out over the ruins.
“So . . . what do we do now?”
My question seemed to snap her out of a trance. “I’ll find out where Morrissey was the day of the fire. You talk to fellows working out in the woods that day, in case they noticed anything suspicious. Especially Lloyd.”
That was a surprise. Of all of us, Lloyd, with his polished prose and Southern gentlemen airs, seemed like the last one who would be in the know about something this seedy. “Why him?”
The shoulders of her coat rose in a shrug. “I don’t like the look of him, that’s all. He’s hiding something.”
It couldn’t hurt to humor her. “I can do that. But, Dorie, remember: This is just a theory.”
“Maybe,” she said, putting her notebook away, “but I think we’re closer to the truth than we’ve ever been.”
CHAPTER 19
Dorie Armitage
January 21, 1945
“You know,” I said, digging through the battered box for the missing edge piece, “I always thought jigsaw puzzles were mostly put together by bored rich people, like in Citizen Kane.”
Edith’s chuckle caused the knitted afghan around her shoulder to slide down slightly. “Goodness, no. In fact, they’ve gotten more popular since the war started. I adore a good puzzle.”
I couldn’t say the same, but it was an excellent cover for conversation—so far about the routines of the national park, area wildlife, and the best recipes for working around ration restrictions. No more mention of Willie, though. I’d surreptitiously poked around the house, seeing if I could spot a Gold Star Service Flag in his memory, but the Morrissey family clearly kept their grief private.
In the time it took me to locate one border piece, Edith had filled in a three-inch square of seascape. “I must say, it’s nice having another woman about. I love our rangers, but they’d sooner use a jigsaw to cut down half the forest than put together a jigsaw puzzle. And Sarah Ruth hates being cooped up indoors.”
I’d determined that much from the three simple Sunday dresses that hung in Sarah Ruth’s closet alongside slacks and even a pair of muddy jeans. It was hard not to snoop, staying in her room like I was.
The screen door banged open, and I looked up to see Jimmy hovering at the threshold, cheeks chapped with red, twisting his hat around in his hand.
“Jimmy, don’t stand there with the door open,” Edith said in the patient, rote way of a mother who’s given the same instruction a thousand and one times. “We’re not paying to heat the entire national forest.”
He stationed himself on the welcome mat instead, pulling the door shut behind him, but didn’t move to take off his coat. “Dad wants to talk to Miss Hightower.”
“Oh?” I said lightly, even as my stomach sank like a safe thrown down an elevator shaft.
Stop that. It could be something perfectly harmless. He couldn’t know what Gordon and I had talked about this morning at the site of the fire.
Edith looked pointedly at her son over her spectacles, the same eyes that could spot a puzzle piece with the right amount of seafoam now focused directly on him. “And where is your father, Jimmy? I haven’t seen him since lunch.”
Jimmy shifted uncomfortably. “He’s . . . in his office.”
“Working?” She said the word as if it was as bad as carousing or bank robbery.
Jimmy’s answer came out as a mutter. “Yes, ma’am.”
From the way she pursed her lips, I knew Earl Morrissey was going to have some explaining to do when he got home.
“It sounded important,” Jimmy added meekly, casting a look at me that practically begged me to rescue him.
“It’s no bother, Edith.” I pushed aside my feeling of dread along with the blissfully cozy blanket she’d smothered me in. “Now, don’t put in too many pieces whil
e I’m gone.”
With that, I snatched my coat off the wooden tree by the door and lit out of there, Jimmy at my heels.
“Sorry about that,” he said, ducking his head. “Ma’s real big on resting on the Sabbath.”
I’d gathered that much. “You should have said your father was on a walk. That’s allowed, isn’t it?”
He scrunched up his nose. “You mean lie?”
“Of course not. Just a little fib. After all, when your goal is a good one, it doesn’t really matter how you get there.”
From the frown on his face, it seemed like this was the first time he’d ever considered such a thing. “Do you really think so?”
“Well, not in every case—it’s not like I’m a criminal.” I laughed lightly. “But anything’s game when the greater good is at stake.”
Gordon wouldn’t say so.
Well, of course he wouldn’t, with his strict religious beliefs. But he hadn’t gone and turned into my nagging conscience.
Jimmy kicked a rock down the path. “Superman doesn’t kill anyone, even if they’re criminals.”
It took me a moment to figure out what this had to do with anything. “Yes, well, Superman is also broader than the average football field.”
“You mean player.”
“I mean field,” I insisted, “and when you have the luxury of being able to fly and lift cars and turn invisible—”
“He can’t turn invisible.”
“—then you can cling to your ideals. But the rest of us live in the real world with no superpowers, and we have to do what’s necessary to get by. We can’t all be Superman or Colonel America.”
“Captain America.”
“He’s only a captain?” Another nod, and I shook my head as we climbed the three steps to the ranger station porch. “Gosh, who is in charge of promotions in these comics? Saving the world should get him to major, at least.”
He held the door open for me, and I rewarded him with a brilliant smile that made him actually stumble as he walked away.
The Lines Between Us Page 16