Summer of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  He nodded.

  “I saw someone picked up by chopper.”

  Steve’s anger warmed him as he waded after her, twenty-five, then fifty feet from shore.

  The Shoshone burned hotly, crackling and roaring toward West Thumb’s boardwalks. He looked back at it … once.

  This summer’s fires were like nothing he’d even seen, not in the early seventies when he’d dug line a few feet from the creeping edge of flame or during his past three years in Yellowstone. The park’s recent wildfires had barely blackened the bark.

  The inferno came closer, right down to the water. Steve felt the heat on the back of his head, almost blistering despite his wet hair, and knew he would be burned even at this distance.

  “Survival floating,” the woman directed. Her short blond hair was wet, too, revealing dark roots. “You know it?”

  He answered by pushing off into a dead man’s float, then curled until only his back broke the surface. They would conserve their energy until they needed to take a breath, then draw their arms and legs together just enough to raise their faces for air. People could supposedly do this for hours, but that assumed the water was a lot warmer.

  It had been freezing that night in Alaska, too, when the 737 plowed into a snowbank and slid a thousand feet to crash into a cliff. Steve had thought he was dead until the cold rushing through the broken fuselage and the pain in his shattered knees had brought him around. Frantically, he had looked for Susan and Christa.

  The scientist in him knew the facts, but looking back on that night Steve always thought the cold had come from the frozen hollow heart of a man who had lost everything.

  The firefighter’s fingers encircled Steve’s wrist and held on.

  CHAPTER THREE

  July 25

  Clare’s strained face, streaked with soot, stared back from a mirror at the Lake Hospital. More of a clinic, the small complex beside the Lake Hotel was the best care available in the center of Yellowstone. They’d given her a room to take a hot shower and some green scrubs to put on in place of her sodden Nomex. Down the hall, the helicopter pilot and the ranger she’d rescued were being treated.

  Deep shadows marked the skin beneath her eyes. For years, she’d prided herself on being able to sleep through the station alarm when she wasn’t up on the roster, but since Frank had died, sleep was a nightmare landscape.

  Clare brushed sweaty bangs from her forehead, and checked for the gray she blamed on Jay’s leaving her. Although she frosted her coal dark hair to mask the evidence, the blonde in the mirror sometimes still surprised her. Stripping off her filthy fire clothes, she unhooked the damp bra that stuck to her and wanted to throw it as far as she could. With a silent entreaty, she turned the faucets.

  Steam rose. There was nothing like the sluice of hot water when you’d been shaking with cold. She and Steve Haywood had been in the lake for long minutes, until the Shoshone’s fury passed. Then they’d worked their way along the shore to West Thumb, where Javier had carried the ranger to the truck.

  Beneath the spray, Clare lathered luxuriously and lingered to soak in the heat with bent head.

  When she climbed out of the shower, the pale green of fluorescent lights washed out her naturally healthy color. For reassurance, she assessed her body. Not that there was or might be any man to appreciate the results of weightlifting during slow times at the fire station. Her upper arms and smallish breasts were firm. Dark aureoles reminded her that her great-grandfather had been a quarter Nez Perce.

  She’d asked her mother about her family and been told her great-grandparents William Cordon Sutton and his wife Laura had ranched in Wyoming through the nineteen twenties, along with their sons Cordon, Jr., and Bryce. “Why did my Granddad come to Texas?” Clare had been around ten, stirring a soggy bowl of Cheerios and hoping she didn’t have to finish breakfast.

  Her mother shrugged. “Your Grandfather Cordon was a man of few words. He once said his mother Laura was the writer in the family, but I’ve never seen any of the journals she was supposed to have kept.”

  Young and inspired, Clare had started a journal of her own that very afternoon, proudly opening a blank, lined notebook and inscribing her name in purple ink on the flyleaf. That was as far as her efforts had gone.

  Over the years, she’d often wondered about her great-grandmother’s life on the frontier. Now that she was in the West, she hoped to dig up some family roots.

  Dressed and in the hospital hall, Clare looked for a telephone. Although her wallet was damp, she extracted her long distance calling card and dialed Houston.

  Devon should be home from her job guarding at the Springwood Community Pool. Taller than Clare, she’d turned out big and muscled like her father. Her blue eyes still resembled the ones Clare had smiled into during diaper changes, but in recent years, those eyes had turned defiant. One semester her grades were As and Bs, the next incompletes, with screaming matches and door slamming. Clare wondered how she’d managed to make it through until Devon had achieved a spring graduation from Houston’s Stratford High.

  If Jay hadn’t left, things would be different. It had been damned sure her pittance from teaching P.E. and coaching girls’ basketball wasn’t going to cover the house payment, even with child support. The Houston Fire Department didn’t pay much more, but it was the most rewarding job she’d ever had. Each wreck she ran, every fire put out, made a difference in someone’s life. So far, she’d pulled in enough to keep her and Devon in their pleasant house on the west side of Houston, but that was going to change.

  In October, when Devon turned eighteen, the monthly money from Jay was going to cut off like a pinched hose. Clare had not had the heart to tell her daughter she’d already talked to a Realtor.

  The answering machine came on and Clare imagined her voice echoing in the empty house. She pictured the place in the fall, vacant, with silverfish in the sinks and a lockbox on the door. Even worse, with a new family’s indentions in the Karastan Clare and Jay had selected together.

  Two hours after being brought to Lake Hospital, Chris Deering took a bite of mushy meatloaf and wished for the veal cordon bleu being served in the Lake Hotel, not two hundred feet from his bed. He swallowed and thought that with the Park Service paying him a thousand an hour he rated better chow.

  Of course, the lion’s share of the money was for his pride and joy—the 206B Jetranger he’d bought new in 1981. Dark blue with gold stripes and her name, Georgia, painted on the fuselage. Of course, she wasn’t a thing like the real Georgia, who hated flying, so he secretly thought of her as Georgie. When he climbed into her cockpit and strapped on the pilot’s seat, everything was in its proper place. He’d always believed, like so many instinctive pilots, that it was he who truly flew, the machine an extension of him.

  Now it had gone to hell.

  He forced his fingers to release their clench on the hospital’s dull knife, and with an effort, decided not to play Monday morning quarterback. When a pilot flew that route, he wound up losing his nerve.

  As soon as a warm bath had brought his body temperature to normal, Deering had called his insurance company. First Annoyance, as he called them, had said that someone would get back to him.

  His fork clattered to the plate. He hadn’t given them this number so they would call his home. Shifting to find a more comfortable position for his tall frame, he set aside his dinner tray and pulled the phone to him.

  He winced when the receiver contacted the cheek he had bruised landing on the Chinook’s deck. At home, Georgia would brighten at the sound of the phone and hope it was he, never dreaming he’d ditched and drowned his helicopter. When she answered, he wasn’t ready.

  “Georgia?”

  “Who else?” He saw her slightly gap-toothed smile as if she were standing beside his bed.

  When he didn’t speak for a long moment, she said, “Where are you?” He envisioned the frown that spread across her freckled face, draining the joy from her eyes. His hand slicked with sweat on th
e receiver.

  “In the hospital at Yellowstone. I’m okay. “

  “Okay? What are you doing in the hospital?” Her voice went shrill, and Deering thought that she—five-feet-two inches of solid intuition with knowing green eyes—could always read him.

  He drew a ragged breath and felt the cold that had taken hours to shake creep back. “I had to ditch the Bell.” He drew the blankets he’d shoved down back toward him.

  “When will it be enough?”

  “It’s never enough!” All the years they’d been together and she still didn’t get that flying was his life.

  “Do you know anything about sitting here alone, knowing you could get killed any time?’

  The fight drained out of Deering, and he listened to the static whine of the connection.

  Finally, Georgia spoke, small and teary. “Are you hurt bad?”

  By instinct Deering reached for the Marlboros he always kept in his breast pocket and encountered the folds of his hospital gown. Damned thing let the breeze up his ass. “I told you I’m okay,” he grated. “I ditched in the fucking freezing lake and they warmed me up.”

  “Lake?”

  “The chopper’s in West Thumb. Map says it’s three hundred feet deep.”

  “I’m glad.” Her voice turned venomous. “I hope they never bring it up.”

  Before he knew he was thinking about it, Deering stabbed his finger and disconnected the call. The dial tone hummed harshly while a hot sting flushed his arms and burned his fingertips. Whenever Georgia pushed that particular button, the one that said she would never understand his flying, it shot him up with quick rage. Today, with their livelihood on the bottom of Yellowstone Lake, it damn near blinded him.

  “Excuse me.” The voice was low and husky, but the small person in hospital greens was clearly female. “I thought this was Steve Haywood’s room.”

  Deering had asked and found out Steve was recuperating in a room down the hall. At least he wouldn’t sue for big medical expenses.

  “Not here.” Deering still seethed at his wife as the diminutive woman paused on the threshold. A closer inspection revealed a heart-shaped face accentuated by streaked blond hair. Big eyes of a rich bronze hue seemed suffused with sadness.

  “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.