Waiting for the Night Song

by Julie Carrick Dalton

  She slid the barrel into the waistband of her shorts. Garrett lay flat on his back, both hands clutching his head. She couldn’t find his gun in the dark mass of leaves and twigs covering the ground. Cadie needed to find his weapon before Garrett did. Before Sal did. She rustled the leaves, picked up rocks. It had to be there.

  “There.” Sal pointed at a glint in the leaves behind his head.

  Cadie nodded at Sal and picked up Garrett’s gun, smaller and sleeker than the one pressing into her hip. She tucked Garrett’s weapon into her shorts next to the other one. His gun felt cold against her skin. Cadie’s waistband pulled tight and cut into her stomach. Metal dug into her back with each movement.

  She beckoned Sal to come closer.

  “I need you to hold this.” She guided Sal’s hand to hold the shirt against Garrett’s temple.

  Sal knelt next to Cadie.

  “We need to get out of here,” Cadie said. “The wind could shift and bring the fire this way.” She tore at the paracord bracelet on her wrist with her teeth. It tasted like the sweat and tree sap from several years’ worth of just in case. Sal helped unwind the long cord.

  She pulled her head back immediately as she caught a whiff of his vanilla soap mixed with perspiration. And maybe a hint of her own body odor on his skin.

  He turned on his side and Cadie held his wrists together behind his back so Sal could tie them together.

  “Don’t do this. I’m not going to hurt you,” Garrett said in a soft, intimate whisper that made Cadie want to lean in closer. “I never would have hurt Sal. You know that.”

  “Like you would never hurt Juan?”

  “I was a kid. I made a mistake. I wanted to tell you.”

  “None of that matters.” Cadie turned him roughly onto his back.

  Sal sat back, pulled her arms tight around her knees, and seemed to shrink.

  “Sal pointed a weapon at me. I needed to calm her down. I wouldn’t have—” He stopped mid-sentence and tilted his head back to look at the sky as if waiting for an answer to the question rolling around in his mind. “Juan was going to turn Clyde in for shooting that store clerk.” Garrett looked over at Sal. “I just wanted to scare him so he wouldn’t turn Clyde in. I never meant…”

  Sal looked up and held Garrett’s stare. Her posture softened.

  “Don’t look at her,” Cadie said.

  “Clyde was, is, my only family.” He looked to Sal for sympathy. “I had to protect my family.”

  Sal let her gaze fall to the leaves at her feet.

  “You were protecting yourself,” Cadie said.

  Garrett’s police radio crackled on his hip. “Tierney? Where the hell are you?” a voice shouted through the line. “Fire broke through the ridge. We need to evacuate the Hook immediately. You copy?”

  “My house!” Sal jumped up.

  Cadie looked up and down the creek bed separating the Garcias’ property from hers. Fire crews had already widened the firebreak and hauled off the underbrush. She gave a silent thanks for the soft, muddy banks that never let trees take root. Including both sides of the creek, the firebreak spanned forty feet. In a raging forest fire, embers rising on hot air currents could breach a gap of that size with ease. But a small fire wouldn’t.

  Cadie, however, did not know which kind of fire approached.

  “My truck’s along your driveway. I need to get back to it so I can help with the evacuations.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Cadie said. “If it’s beyond the ridge, it’s not safe to go back toward my house. You have no idea how fast it’s moving.”

  “People are counting on me.” Garrett’s eyes flashed with the same panic Cadie remembered seeing on the Summer Kid’s face. “I’m getting my truck. You two need to get out of the woods. Can you get to the Garcias’?”

  Cadie nodded.

  Sal put her hand on Cadie’s shoulder. Her smile and dark eyes, so much like Daniela’s. Cadie wanted to grab Sal and wrap her arms around the girl. A fierce desire to protect Sal beat stronger than her fear of the fire or of Garrett.

  “Let him go.” Sal squeezed Cadie’s shoulder.

  Garrett’s face took on a blue pallor in the moonlight. The blood trickling down the side of his head matted his blond hair, blackening it in the darkness. The urge to wipe it away pulsed nearly as strong as the urge to hit him the way she had Ryan. The satisfaction of physical contact, the impact surging through her fist, to her shoulder, and into her gut, had made her feel powerful. The impulse unnerved her.

  She had spent years searching the foster system in New Hampshire, trying to find out what happened to that boy. She had lain awake at night as a teenager worried about him living with a killer. The little girl with the braids howled from deep inside her. She could taste the fire rising up from her lungs. Her breath felt so hot she imagined she could ignite the forest with one word.

  Garrett’s gaze landed on the butt of his gun sticking out from her waistband.

  Cadie backed up several steps. The weapons felt heavy, pulling against her clothing and digging into her flesh. She held his stare.

  She felt the fire thrumming in the earth beneath them, in the stillness of the trees, in the dry air. It was coming.

  Silence hung thick in the air. Cadie’s limbs felt heavy and her mind felt slurry.

  Ever since she moved to Boston when she was thirteen, Cadie had clung to the tenets of The Poachers’ Code as a plea with the universe to keep the truth buried. But that truth had always been a lie. Who had Cadie been protecting all these years? Garrett, Daniela, Raúl, Dolores, or herself? How would she explain it to her parents? To Thea?

  Breath from the approaching fire thickened the sticky air. There was no holding it back. None of it. The heat, the beetles, the fire, the truth. They were all closing in.

  Cadie didn’t move. She didn’t want to release Garrett, but what did she hope to accomplish by keeping him tied up?

  “I risked so much for you,” he whispered, looking over Cadie’s shoulder at Sal to see if the girl could hear them. Sal hugged her knees to her chest and buried her face in her knees.

  “What have you ever done for me?” Cadie said.

  “It’s a pretty big coincidence that a fire broke out in Hobson the night after you warned your boss that exact thing might happen,” Garrett whispered so Sal wouldn’t hear.

  “That was because of the beetles and a campfire.” Cadie tried to sound confident. Her arms and fingers felt cold as her blood rushed to her torso.

  “Sometimes nature needs a nudge,” Garrett said.

  “People could have died.” Cadie pumped her fist, trying to reignite the pain in her bruised knuckles, digging for a spike of pain to drown out the roar escalating in her mind.

  “But they didn’t.” Garrett smiled at her expectantly. “You broke the rules because you had a greater purpose. You know you’re right about the beetles, the fires that are coming. I took a careful calculated risk too. Close to a firebreak, far from residential areas. No campers in the area and near a fire station.”

  “I would never put people at risk just to prove a point.”

  “Didn’t you? What if you had gotten trapped up on Mount Steady and the fire had closed in? Would you have called for help? Would you have put firefighters’ lives at risk to come rescue you?”

  “It’s not the same thing and you know it.”

  “I did it for you, because I believe in you,” Garrett whispered in a soothing voice that caused gooseflesh to rise on her skin. He scooted toward Cadie until his knee touched her leg. “I know how much this forest means to you. Now you have a platform to do something to effect real change. Use it.”

  Cadie resisted the flicker of solidarity. Garrett saw her in a way no one else did. But, no, not like this. She pushed the comfort away and dug deeper for the rage, the fire inside her. Her seething hatred of Clyde, as much a part of her as her heart and lungs, now floated above her, disembodied. Her desire for Garrett’s breath on her neck morphed into revulsion,
leaving Cadie spinning like a compass with no true north.

  She felt sick. Would the ethics committee have been so forgiving if the Hobson fire hadn’t happened? Would they have reinstated her based purely on the strength of her research and projections? Or had they been scared into it by the fire? The exact fire she had predicted.

  “I’ve always been waiting for you,” Garrett whispered.

  “I was waiting too.” Heat in her chest burned as she spoke. She moved farther away from him. “But not for you.”

  The foundation of all her childhood dreams and nightmares shifted beneath her, new truths displacing the stories she had told herself for decades. All she had worked for might be stripped away from her if the university found out the man she had been sleeping with started a fire based on information Cadie had given him.

  “How could you think I wanted this?” she hissed. Heat rushed back to her numb limbs. “My goal is to prevent fires, not start them.”

  “Sometimes you have to start a small fire to stop a big one,” Garrett said.

  “I smell smoke,” Sal called to Cadie.

  Cadie pulled her pocketknife from her backpack and flicked the blade open. She met Garrett’s eyes. The amber specks glittered like stars against the blue she had held in her mind since that first time she saw him on his pier. He seemed unnaturally calm, resigned, focused.

  “This fire. You didn’t…” Cadie squeezed the grip on the knife.

  “God, no. Of course not.”

  She cut through the cord around his wrists, but he did not move. Her fingers lingered on his skin.

  “Go,” Cadie yelled at him.

  “I can’t leave my weapon with you, you know that.”

  “How do I know you aren’t going to turn it on Sal and me?”

  “Cadie, I’d never—”

  “Just give it to him,” Sal said.

  Cadie pulled both weapons from her waistband. She lay Garrett’s gun on the ground and held the old one in her hands, arm stretched out straight, her finger around the trigger.

  “What are you doing?” Sal tried to pull Cadie’s arms down so the weapon didn’t point at Garrett. Cadie shrugged her off. She kicked Garrett’s weapon toward him and backed several steps away from him.

  “Put it in your holster and walk away with your hands in the air so I know you aren’t going to turn it on us.”

  “Cadie, please don’t be like this,” he said, but followed her instructions.

  He disappeared into the woods, sprinting toward his truck in Cadie’s driveway.

  Cadie turned back to Sal, who sat with her back against the beech tree that once hid the gun Cadie now carried. Tears streaked Sal’s cheeks, but she no longer cried. “You and Mom didn’t kill that guy?”

  “No.” Sal deserved more than a one-syllable answer. Cadie had spent a lifetime deconstructing Juan’s death and what her role in the story had been. She took cover in the looming fire to avoid putting the story back together. “Come on, we need to get out of here.”

  Sal kept pace with Cadie as she moved in the direction of the creek and the Garcias’ home.

  “Did you leave that note in the tree?” Cadie asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “But why would you threaten your own family?”

  “I didn’t.” Sal looked up.

  “‘Go Home. Or someone will get hurt.’” Cadie quoted the note she found in the tree.

  “I was threatening you. I wanted you to go home and let the past be before my family got hurt.”

  “Oh.” Go Home. She had assumed the note was meant for the Garcias. Her own arrogance burned.

  Cadie folded a pine needle, green and waxy, between her fingers. Even with the drought and the dead wood, most of the trees in this forest still had life. They would not give in easily to the flames. Without wind to carry it, the fire would move slowly.

  Cadie had time. But not much.

  They ducked under a low-hanging branch and emerged on Cadie’s bank of Silas Creek.

  Cadie surveyed the wide berth on her side of the water and on the Garcias’ side. Fire crews—the crews that had discovered Juan’s remains—had already cleared the brush on both sides. Mounting heat warmed her neck like a lover’s breath as she unzipped her backpack and rummaged in the bottom for the matches she had taken from the hardware store. Adrenaline surged and her fingers trembled as she tore a matchstick from the cardboard book.

  “I’m going to try to save your house. But you have to do everything I say, okay?”

  Sal nodded.

  “I’m going to light a back burn on my side of the creek. If the wind remains calm, the fire will consume everything on this side of the water, and it will move into the woods, away from us. When the big fire catches up to it, there won’t be any fuel left to burn between the fire line and the creek. It won’t be able to jump to your side.”

  “But your house.” Sal’s eyebrows arched high and her dark eyes widened with alarm.

  “It’s just wood and stone.” Cadie tried to sound as if she didn’t care, but her voice quivered. If the fire had already broken past the ridge, her home was directly in its path. Even if, by some miracle, the main fire didn’t make it to her cottage, the fire she was about to ignite definitely would.

  Cadie licked her finger and held it in the air. Barely a breeze, for now.

  Be still, she begged the wind, and struck a match.

  The match erupted in the darkness. The stick burned slowly, the warmth edging closer to her skin. She cupped her other hand around the flame, letting the heat rise under her chin. The tiny flicker sucked oxygen out of the air, out of Cadie’s own lungs.

  I stop fires. I don’t light them.

  Cadie had spent three decades standing with her back to a precipice, her arms open wide to hold back everything she feared, beating down truths that were always meant to rise, like stones in the New Hampshire forest. Pressing back against new species that threatened to throw the woodlands off-balance. Stopping fires that needed to rage. Swallowing words that needed to be spoken.

  Now, standing on the edge of Silas Creek with a lit match, she imagined her forest the way it would look the following day. Charred. Barren. Dead. But not really dead.

  Piper was right. This forest would rise up stronger.

  Under it all, beneath the matted leaves, the rocky soil, and the tangled tree roots, the story of Juan Hernández was scratching its way to the surface. Cadie no longer wanted to stop any of it.

  When the flame touched her skin, she dropped the match.

  It fell slowly, leaving a streak of light like the tail of a comet as it landed in a nest of crisp beech leaves. Cadie dropped to her knees and blew into the kindling. The fire inhaled her breath and crackled with life.

  Her nemesis. Her partner.

  Two things could happen. If the wind kicked up, embers, even from a fledgling fire, could sail the expanse over the creek toward the Garcias’ house. But if the wind remained calm long enough, the fire would stay on Cadie’s side of the creek, retreat into the woods toward her cottage, and spare Daniela’s home. She closed her eyes, trying to remember the firefighting training the forestry department required her to take part in. How many feet did a firebreak require?

  Wisps of flame climbed the parched branches of a shrub, instinctively clawing its way toward the dry wood in the direction of her home. Cadie dropped another match twenty feet downstream, and another, until the bank alit with a string of tiny, hungry flames.

  She handed Sal a lit match and gestured upstream. Protecting the flame with a cupped hand, Sal ran beyond the edge of the small fires Cadie had lit and looked back. Cadie nodded at her and Sal let the match drop into a pile of dried leaves.

  Flickering flames drew Cadie’s eye to beech nuts scattered on the ground. If this forest was going to burn, she would take part of it with her. She slipped them into her pocket.

  A scream rose above the hissing flames. Cadie thought she’d imagined it until Sal jumped up.

  “Sal,
” the voice called from the other side of the back burn Cadie had lit.

  “Mom!” Sal shouted.

  Daniela was in the fire gap, wedged between two fires moving toward each other.

  Sal started running toward Daniela’s voice, but Cadie grabbed her arm.

  “Wade through the creek. See that path? It’s overgrown, but it goes to your house. Get the canoe out and wait for me on the beach for ten minutes. I’ll be back with your mom.”

  “I’m not leaving until I see her.”

  Cadie squeezed Sal’s arm hard. “Do what I tell you. We’ll be right there. It will take me longer to find your mom if you’re with me. Do you want me to find her?”

  Sal nodded. Tears glistened in her eyes.

  “If we aren’t there in ten minutes, take the boat and row to the marina, then walk to the rec center. Your grandparents are waiting for you there.” Cadie pointed to the path. Sal splashed through the water and stopped midway to look back at Cadie.

  “Go. Run!” Cadie yelled. Sal climbed the opposite bank and disappeared into the trees.

  35

  PRESENT DAY

  “Daniela?” Cadie shouted as she surveyed the back burn she had started. She could circumvent the fire by running downstream. But she had to get back before the entire bank caught or she would be trapped between firewalls with Daniela.

  Cadie ran downstream twenty yards and into the woods.

  “Daniela?” she shouted. She pulled her tank top up to cover her face against the smoke. “Where are you?”

  “Over here.”

  Cadie crashed through underbrush, half blind in the dark. Don’t lose your bearings. Stay focused.

  “We’re here,” Daniela called.

  “Keep yelling,” Cadie shouted. “I’m coming.”

  Cadie followed Daniela’s voice, imagining her younger self chasing Daniela through these same woods, breathless just for the sake of being breathless.

  Cadie found Daniela standing with Dolores.

  “Where’s Sal?” Daniela grabbed Cadie’s arm. “Garrett said she was with you.”