Murder on the Horizon

by M. L. Rowland

  Less than six hours later, only marginally awake, Gracie dragged on the clothes she had worn the day before and crawled out of her bivy tent. She washed her face and brushed her teeth at one of a row of outdoor sinks set up behind the Convention Center, poured herself a Styrofoam cup of coffee strong and black enough to turn her hair new-penny copper, and grabbed a piping-hot scrambled-egg burrito from an enormous stainless steel chow wagon set up in the parking lot.

  Taking bites of burrito between sips of coffee, Gracie stood at the back of a predominantly testosterone-filled ocean of yellow Nomex shirts, enjoying the rear view of hunky wildland firefighters waiting for the 6 a.m. briefing to begin.

  The Planning Section Chief, a short, squat, gray-haired man whose crinkling eyes made him appear as if he were smiling even when he wasn’t, walked up to the front of the crowd and stood next to an easel holding a giant map of the fire. As the man thanked everyone present for their hard work and dedication, Gracie glanced around at the mostly men and a few tough women with admiration and respect. Fighting wildland fires was the most physically taxing, most difficult job she knew—hazardous in the extreme, backbreaking, often literally scorching work.

  Her eyes wandered over to her left, spotting Sergeant Gardner standing with another man she recognized, after a moment, as her ultimate Search and Rescue boss, the Sheriff himself.

  Gracie studied the man. Good-looking with a cleanly shaven square jaw, dark eyes, and straight nose, he was what could almost be characterized as a pretty boy. He was slightly taller than the sergeant, with broader shoulders and less of a paunch, formidable in his neatly starched putty-gray uniform shirt and black Department ball cap. He looks more like a politician than law enforcement, Gracie mused. Curious that she had been a volunteer on the man’s busiest Search and Rescue team for ten years, logging the most hours on the team for the past three, and she had never met him. In fact, she had seen him only three or four times in the entire time she had been on the team. A sad reflection on someone, she thought. But whether on her or the Sheriff, she wasn’t sure.

  Gracie’s head snapped forward. She had heard the word, camp. Craning her neck to see over the tops of taller heads and yellow helmets, she could see the man at the front of the crowd indicating an area of cross-hatching on the fire map.

  Tossing her burrito and coffee into a nearby trash can, Gracie pushed her way through the crowd and up to the front.

  The cross-hatching on the map indicated the area that had burned the day before.

  Gracie’s heart sank to the ground.

  The fire had blasted right through the middle of Camp Ponderosa.

  “How much of Camp Ponderosa burned?” she blurted, not caring if she was interrupting, not caring if a hundred firefighters, Command personnel, and the Sheriff himself were waiting. She needed to know.

  Face sun-weathered, eyes bagging, with graying hair and a giant handlebar mustache, the man who Gracie assumed was the Operations Section Chief stopped mid-sentence and looked over at her.

  “I manage the camp,” Gracie said.

  In a booming voice, the man continued with his evaluation of the fire’s progress, giving Gracie her answer.

  The Timber Creek arm of the Shady Oak Fire had claimed 726 acres the previous twenty-four hours. That included 48 of Camp Ponderosa’s 210 acres, fingers of flame spreading out through the developed portion, burning some buildings and cabins, leaving others unscathed. Exactly which had burned and which remained, there was no way to tell.

  Lodges and cabins could be rebuilt. But all those beautiful trees destroyed! All those animals killed! Gracie fought back the tears, not wanting anyone to see her cry, not wanting to appear weak or soft in front of men and women who were heading out for the day to work at a job that might easily cost them their lives. A single tear snuck through to creep down her cheek. She slapped it away with her palm. Get a grip, Kinkaid. There’s nothing you can do right now, except your job.

  She shuddered in a breath, dragged a barely there tissue from her pants pocket, and blew her nose.

  She heard only snippets of the rest of the briefing, gleaning only peripherally that shifting winds were expected later in the morning, with a cold front, possibly even rain, moving in later that afternoon.

  Gracie returned to the present, braking the Suburban to a stop at the intersection of two streets.

  She rolled down her window and stuck her arm outside. The air felt cooler than before. And the wind had indeed shifted from southeast to north-northeast.

  A north wind would blow the fire back on itself, away from the residential areas, away from her own cabin. Good news all around for firefighters and everyone else. Rain would be better still.

  Ken was still talking, this time about a mistake someone on his team had made at some time. In the backseat, Bryan remained sullenly silent.

  “Für Elise” played from Gracie’s shirt pocket. Pulling out her phone, she looked at the number, not recognizing it. Figuring anything was better than listening to Ken, she answered it. “Hello?” she said, voice sounding as if she were talking in a cave. She pulled up her air filter and said again, “Hello?”

  “Gracie?” a tremulous female voice asked.

  “Yah.”

  “Baxter’s gone!” Sharon Edwards wailed into her ear.

  CHAPTER

  29

  BAXTER’S grandmother’s words tumbled out so fast and garbled, Gracie couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was saying.

  She swerved the Suburban to the side of the road and stopped.

  “What are we doing?” Ken asked in a loud voice.

  “Sharon,” Gracie said. “Slow down. I can’t understand what you’re saying. Start over.”

  She and Baxter had agreed in advance, the woman told her, that if an evacuation order for the valley was issued, they would meet at the end of the compound driveway and she would bring him with her down the hill. “But he was acting so strange when I picked him up,” she said.

  “Strange how?”

  Leaning forward and staring at her, Ken asked, more loudly, “Why are we stopped?”

  Gracie held up a finger to indicate “just a second,” then used it to plug her ear.

  “Keyed up,” Sharon was saying. “Like he was scared. He kept babbling on and on about how something was going down and he needed to call you.”

  Oh. Shit. “Where is he now?” Gracie asked.

  “I don’t know! We were driving down the hill the back way. I slowed down because all the cars were backed up and he jumped right out of the truck and ran into the woods. I couldn’t follow him! I didn’t know what to do! The Sheriff’s Department’s not going to do anything. They’re so busy with the fire and everything. The fire! Oh, God! I just didn’t know who else to call!”

  “I’ll go look for him. I’ll call you when I know something.” Gracie disconnected and let up on the brake.

  “Finally,” she heard Ken mutter.

  She swung the Suburban around in the middle of the intersection and drove back out of the development.

  “Where are we going now?” Ken asked.

  “Back to the ICP,” Gracie said. “I have a family emergency.”

  “But this isn’t our team’s vehicle. What are we going to ride around in?”

  Unable to stop herself, Gracie said, “With all your experience, I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

  * * *

  GRACIE SWEPT BACK the branches of the hideout and shined the beam of her flashlight into the murky interior. “Bax?”

  “Gracie?” Baxter’s dirt- and tear-smeared face rose up out of the depths of the shelter, then he threw his arms around her. “I knew you would come.”

  Gracie could feel the boy’s thin body shaking. “You’re shivering.”

  “It got cold.”

  “That’s a good thing. Maybe it’ll actually
rain and help put the fire out. Let’s get you out of here and warmed up. My truck’s at the bottom of the hill.”

  With Baxter following, Gracie backed out of the shelter.

  As hoped for, a cold front had moved into the valley. The entire plateau lay in heavy cloud, the moisture in the air palpable.

  Gracie and Baxter walked down the more stable, brush- and grass-matted incline paralleling the gravel road leading down to the top of Arcturus. “What are you doing here?” Gracie asked as she stood on a mound of grass waiting for the boy to negotiate his way down to her. “Even though the smoke’s almost gone, it’s very dangerous up here.”

  “I was waiting for you to find me,” he said as he landed on the grassy mound next to her.

  Gracie continued on down the incline. “How’d you get all the way back up here? Gran Sharon told me you jumped out of her car halfway down the hill.”

  “You told her what Jordan did to me.”

  “I know. I’m sorry I broke my promise to you. But let’s talk about that later. How did you get all the way back up the hill?”

  “I hitchhiked.”

  “Someone actually gave you a ride up the mountain?”

  He nodded.

  Moron. “What’s going on, Bax? Your gran said you told her something was going down.”

  “I had to see you, to talk to you and I didn’t know any other way to get ahold of you.”

  Gracie stopped and turned back to face the boy. “So now you got me. What’s up? What’s going down?”

  Baxter slid to a stop beside Gracie, looking up at her, eyes huge, reflecting back fear. “I heard my grandpop Martin talking with my dad and Uncle Win. It’s going to go down soon. Tomorrow morning.”

  “What’s about to go down? What are they planning?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  Gracie inhaled to protest.

  “But I saw a bomb.”

  Gracie’s heart kicked up a notch. “A bomb?”

  “I think it was a bomb. A metal tube thing with lots of wires sticking out of it. I could show you.”

  “I wouldn’t know a bomb from a friggin’ engine piston,” Gracie said. “Where’d you see this bomb . . . thing?”

  “The Inner Sanctum.”

  “What the heck is the Inner Sanctum?”

  “At the compound. Down in the bunker.”

  Gracie stared at the boy. “We are not going to the compound. Are you out of your mind crazy?”

  “If it’s dark, nobody would see us.”

  “N-o, Bax.” She turned and continued the descent.

  “We can wait until everyone’s in bed. You have to help me, Gracie. You just have to.”

  “What I just have to do is go to the police, the authorities, someone,” Gracie said, reaching the bottom of the steep incline and stepping between two of the giant boulders marking the beginning of the pavement. “They can go in and stop them.”

  “You think they’re going to listen to us?” Baxter asked, following her to where the Ranger was parked at the top of the road.

  “Probably not,” Gracie said, unlocking the passenger’s seat door of the truck and pulling it open. “Get in.”

  Climbing into the driver’s seat and shutting the door, Gracie pulled out her cell phone. “I’m not calling 911,” she said. “They have their hands so full already. If this turns out to be nothing . . . The last thing I need on top of everything else is to be labeled one of those crackpots who calls 911 when they can’t get through on the Butterball turkey hotline.”

  “What’s a Butterball turkey?”

  She looked sidelong at Baxter. “Never mind.” She looked down at her phone. “No reception here. We’ll have to go to my cabin. Use the landline there.”

  The air inside Gracie’s cabin was stuffy and warm, but free of smoke. Gracie grabbed up the phone on the kitchen counter, dialed the non-emergency number for the Sheriff’s Department from memory, listened to it ring on the other end, then to a recording saying the Timber Creek valley was under a mandatory evacuation order and where emergency shelters down the hill were located. She hung up. “What’s your gran’s cell number again?”

  Gracie dialed the number Baxter provided, telling Gran Sharon that she had found Baxter. “He’s safe with me,” she told the woman, who was weeping with relief. She winked at Baxter, who was sitting sideways in a chair at the table, elbows on knees, chin on hands. “Right now, we’re at my cabin. I’ll keep him with me for right now. I won’t let him out of my sight. I promise.”

  Gracie hung up and stood looking down at the phone in her hand.

  Then she punched in 911.

  * * *

  “THANK YOU, DETECTIVE,” Gracie said and placed the receiver back in its cradle.

  “Are they going to do something?” Baxter asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Gracie said, sitting down at the table opposite the boy. “It all depends on if they consider it a credible threat. And if they think you and I are credible sources or not.”

  “What if they don’t believe you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We have to go anyway.”

  “No.”

  “We have to do it.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “I’m beginning to regret giving you all those books to read.”

  “If you won’t help me, I’ll run anyway again.”

  “That’s blackmail.”

  “You promised Gran you wouldn’t let me out of your sight. A promise is an oath. Your word of honor. A sacred bond.”

  Gracie shot him a look. “Like I said about those books . . .”

  “You already broke one promise,” Baxter said carefully.

  “That’s not fair and you know it. I had to tell your gran—”

  He threw out his hands. “Come on, Gracie. You have to help me. You just have to.” He stood up, pushed his arms through the straps of his backpack, and walked to the front door, his hand on the knob. As if reading her mind, he said, “I’m scared, too, Gracie. And I don’t want to get caught either. But what if that detective didn’t believe you? What if they don’t come? I have to do what I can to stop them. I have to try.”

  Gracie looked over at the boy who was turning into a man in front of her eyes, willing to take an enormous risk to do what he felt was the right thing.

  Baxter pulled the door open. “I’m leaving now. Are you coming with me or not?”

  * * *

  GRACIE TURNED THE Ranger off the highway onto Maple and drove up the long incline to the little community of Pine Knot. At the fire station, she made a left turn, then another immediate left into the parking lot of the local park. She backed into a spot so she could keep an eye on the road and shifted into Park.

  As the afternoon had faded, Gracie and Baxter waited, the boy sitting cross-legged on the living room couch, engrossed in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, Gracie, gnawing on the same reluctant cuticle while standing at the front window watching rain splatting against the glass, mood equally somber, thinking of how the fortuitous shift in weather had come a day too late to save the camp she loved.

  While eating two MREs Gracie had dug from her emergency stash in the bed of the Ranger, she and Baxter talked about books, about families and fathers and being strong within oneself in spite of what people who are supposed to love you say or do.

  “How’d you turn out so well?” Gracie asked.

  The boy shrugged. “Grandma Sharon, I guess.”

  “You’re really lucky to have her.”

  Baxter looked at her. “She says I’m better than all of them put together in a blender.”

  “She’s right about that,” Gracie said. “She’s right about a lot of things.”

  Before they left the cabin, Gracie had sh
own Baxter the flyer with her face pasted in the bull’s-eye. “Have you seen this before?”

  He shook his head, staring at the flyer.

  “Know who would have made it? Sent it to me?”

  “No.”

  “Could Jordan have made this?”

  Baxter frowned. “It could be Jordan,” he said. “He’s a sucky speller.”

  At full dark, they had left the cabin and driven up to Pine Knot to wait for nine o’clock, the family’s usual bedtime.

  Baxter had nodded off and Gracie had given him the extra minutes of sleep, giving herself the extra minutes to fortify her nonexistent courage.

  As the boy slept, rain drenched the surrounding ground and trees, rivulets of water running down the gutters on either side of the road. Gracie stared at the fogged-up windshield, wringing the steering wheel, fretting, fidgeting, knowing she was being foolhardy, boneheaded, and every other adjective she could think of, that she should just drive Baxter down the hill and let law enforcement do whatever they were going to do, knowing that if she did, the moment she slowed the Ranger, Baxter would hop out of the truck and disappear into the woods. Short of hog-tying him to the fender, there wasn’t much she could do.

  Gracie checked the glowing dial of her watch, leaned over, and patted the boy on the leg. “Baxter. Time to wake up.”

  At Baxter’s direction, Gracie wound the Ranger through the streets of Pine Knot, up this hill, around that corner, until eventually he pointed to a driveway up ahead and said, “Turn in there.”

  Gracie turned into the driveway of a house, stopped, and turned off the engine. “Whose house is this?”

  “I dunno. But everybody’s gone, remember?” he said, shouldering open the passenger’s door. “We’re not very far from the compound.”

  The rain had stopped, but everything was sodden, dripping. Clouds hovered low on the tops of the trees and their breath showed in bursts of white vapor.

  Gracie reached behind the seat for her Search and Rescue fleece jacket, then thought better of it. Bright orange probably wasn’t the ideal color for cat burgling. Instead, she grabbed up her black North Face rain jacket and threw it on, zipping it up to her chin.