Rain of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  “Since that didn’t happen, Hollis may get our funding.”

  “I hope you’re wrong,” Kyle said, “but what really worries me is something I don’t even want to think about.”

  Wyatt studied her. “You mean what if Stanton doesn’t come back?”

  She nodded again.

  He considered the impact Stanton’s loss would have on both the Institute and the lives of people who cared for him. For his own part, Wyatt felt the older man was family. When he’d decided to start college, Stanton had been the catalyst to his choosing geology as his major.

  Struggling through his first mineralogy exam, Wyatt had wondered what he’d been thinking when he signed up. Just then, Professor Stanton passed through the lab.

  Wyatt fiddled with the bright yellow specimen he’d been examining. It looked like a piece of colored glass, but this was mineralogy.

  The professor peered at him through tortoise shell reading glasses and barked, “Hardness?”

  “Softer than the porcelain plate,” Wyatt said. “I’m not sure whether it’s harder or softer than glass.”

  Wyatt detected a gleam in Stanton’s pale blue eyes.

  He looked at the specimen one more time. “This really is a piece of manmade glass.”

  As Stanton smiled conspiratorially, Wyatt decided a guy with a sense of humor would be a nice place to start for a major professor.

  He’d never been disappointed.

  “If he doesn’t make it back,” Wyatt told Kyle, “you’ll carry on as the new head of the Institute.” Even as he said it, he realized she’d never expressed a desire to run the place.

  “It’s not up to Stanton,” she argued. “If he has to retire, he gets one vote as to who takes his place. That’s assuming he’s considered competent by the committee. Volcano Hazards or the National Park Service could come up with their own candidate.”

  “Then on Monday, you’ll have to convince them you can pour from the proverbial boot more neatly and spill less than anybody.”

  Kyle smiled. In the lamplight, her eyes reminded him of a tourmaline in a ring his mother had when he was young. A deep-green stone, but when you held it up and looked though the side of the long crystal you could see blue shining from its depths.

  Memory he had repressed stirred. Of a time or two when he’d found himself considering Kyle as a woman and not just a friend. He reckoned that happened every now and then whenever a man and woman spent a lot of time together, especially colleagues with similar interests. They might be well suited for each other, except neither he nor Kyle seemed to be looking for a long-term relationship. Better they be friends and not spoil it.

  Yet, the part of him that liked the color of her eyes and the way she brushed her hair back from her rounded brow… That part of him had hated to see her crying this afternoon.

  “Want to tell me what you were upset about earlier?” he asked.

  As Wyatt watched, her eyes changed from tourmaline to black onyx.

  The first time the tree stopped shaking, six-year-old Kyle thought it was over.

  Her wet clothes clung nastily. Below, in the blackness, water rushed and gurgled.

  Within moments, aftershocks erupted, though as a child she had no name for them. Each time the slender trunk whipped from side to side, she screamed and knotted her arms and legs tighter until blood ran down them. Continued grumbling came from the surrounding mountains as avalanches rearranged the debris. The wind lifted and lightning spawned a jagged streak.

  At home, Kyle and Max always waited out storms beneath the stairs. She’d press her face into his golden fur so she couldn’t see the flashes.

  “Max,” she called without conviction from her perch in the pine. “Here, boy.”

  As the storm approached, she closed her eyes. Without her dog to burrow against, violet daggers of light penetrated her lids. Once, she looked and saw in the eerie light a brand new mountain smack in the middle of Madison Canyon. Trunks of trees, tossed like matchsticks, protruded from the face of the slide.

  The rain continued to soak her. Her teeth chattered and she trembled so much she feared falling into the floodwaters. Mom, Dad, and Max, too, could all swim better than she, but what did that count for when rivers flowed uphill, mountains collapsed, and the moon was blotted out?

  “Kyle?” Wyatt’s sharp tone brought her back to the present. In the Red Wolf’s cozy amber light, he looked solid and friendly, a man she could trust with anything.

  “There’s nothing to tell,” she lied reflexively. How easy it would be to give in to the entreaty in his eyes.

  “Christ, Kyle. This is me, remember.” He bent forward beneath the mine lamp, looking determined. Though she was not a small woman, Wyatt’s size and sheer intensity made her feel delicate. “You were crying this afternoon. About Stanton, or some guy?”

  She shook her head, her hands clenched beneath the table.

  A shuttered look replaced Wyatt’s caring expression.

  With a sigh, she mourned the distance between her and the rest of the world. She particularly hated for her past to drive a wedge into her and Wyatt’s friendship. Back when they had worked together, she’d thought a time or two about revealing that dreadful night. Usually in a similar situation when the beer was cold and the bar cozy. Each time, she came to the same conclusion she did now.

  Never looking back was her best defense. Especially now, for she feared the swelling caldera was only the beginning of their troubles.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SEPTEMBER 14

  Saturday afternoon, Kyle rode the bow while Wyatt guided a Park Service cabin cruiser across Yellowstone Lake. Though the damp wind tugged at her braid she stayed on deck, feeling the unaccustomed distance between them. Ordinarily, they’d be laughing together, focused on the splendor of the world’s largest high altitude lake. Surrounded by mountains above 8,000 feet, the pristine water filled the deepest depression in the 630,000-year-old caldera. The Yellowstone River flowed north out of the lake and east to join the Missouri and Mississippi.

  The sky’s reflection deepened mysteriously to cobalt in the mirrored surface. On the western horizon, wispy horsetails materialized. The first Arctic front of the season was sweeping down from the northern Pacific, but was supposed to hold off at least through Sunday.

  Shoving her hands into the pockets of her field parka, Kyle raised her face to the sun. The pleasant drone of the boat’s engine underscored how peaceful everything seemed. Yet, the average tourist never suspected that nearly three hundred feet down in the lake, probes measured temperatures in the boiling range while remote cameras captured mineral spires around submerged hot springs.

  Visitors tended to view things as static, or thought they changed slowly, the way erosion washed mountains to the sea. Yet, when the Hebgen Lake quake had struck, geysers erupted all over the park. New springs started to churn and boil. Near Old Faithful, Giantess Geyser went off for one hundred hours instead of its usual thirty. Fountain Paint Pots overran the paved parking lot, and a geyser called “Steady” wasn’t anymore.

  The cruiser steered toward Dot Island, an isolated patch of earth that in the late 1800s had been a zoo, complete with buffalo and elk. Now it was deserted except for nesting osprey.

  When they were a hundred yards offshore, Wyatt stuck his head out the cabin door. “Ready with the anchor?”

  Kyle moved forward to the chain locker.

  Fifty yards out, he killed the engine and she splashed the anchor.

  Quiet descended.

  Wyatt ducked his head to get out the cabin door. “You should have stayed inside with me where it’s warm.”

  “I don’t spend enough time out in the park,” she equivocated.

  “Come more often.” Though his eyes were hidden behind prescription sunglasses, she sensed tautness in his apparent small talk.

  “The workload at the Institute … the students …” She would not tell him she had a superstitious sense that lightning did strike more than once in the sa
me place.

  With his tall frame propped against the cabin wall, Wyatt went on, “I’d be glad to have you help out, especially since Helen’s been spending a lot of time in Seattle.”

  “What’s there?” She hoped he’d take her cue and stop dwelling on the fact that there were questions she couldn’t bring herself to answer.

  “Helen’s boyfriend is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington.”

  “Any chance of her leaving you?”

  “Lord, I hope not. We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

  He turned his attention to the dinghy. “Give me a hand with this.”

  Together, they lowered the small boat. Once free of the cruiser, it looked like a plump toy bobbing. Nonetheless, Kyle handed down the seismograph and a pair of lifejackets and joined Wyatt aboard. As they headed toward shore, she told herself the lake seemed rougher because she was in a small vessel.

  Yet, by the time they were near the island, she was certain something was amiss. Though the wind was not any stronger, the lake churned with whitecaps that had definitely not been there before.

  A nasty wave slapped the side of the boat, sending her equilibrium haywire.

  She reached to grab the gunwale and missed. It reminded her of when she was a kid and misjudged a leap from one tree limb to another. Almost in slow motion, she fell forward.

  Though Wyatt caught a handful of her parka, he couldn’t stop her. Her hand plunged into cold water and her sunglasses splashed into the lake. Then she crashed into the boat’s side, taking the impact on her chest beneath her right arm.

  Pain exploded.

  “You okay?” He still had hold of her coat.

  “Damn.” She squinted against broken diamonds of light and wished her glasses hadn’t sunk.

  Though the first sharpness of hurt began to dull, an experimental breath sent a stab through her chest. “I hope I haven’t broken a rib,” she managed. In a moment, she’d try and sit upright.

  Another wave smacked the engine, causing it to shift and turn the boat broadside.

  Wyatt let Kyle go and scrambled for the tiller. The engine sputtered and died, the dinghy tilted at a sickening angle, lake and sky seemed to spin.

  A bigger wave broke, leaving Kyle and Wyatt thigh-deep in the overturning boat as their personal flotation gear washed into the lake. If she’d thought the water frosty when she stuck her hand in, she’d severely underestimated.

  Wyatt abandoned ship. His angular face set in concentration as he fought to stand in the surf and drag the boat the remaining two yards to the sand. Trying to ignore her pain, Kyle scrambled out chest-deep and floundered toward the bow. Another comber washed in and she found herself swimming in waterlogged clothing.

  Over the slap and crash of waves, she heard Wyatt shout for her to try and grab the boat. The next deluge broke on top her shoulders and shoved her down like a huge hand.

  Kyle kept her eyes open to dispel the suffocating darkness, but the clear lake had turned turbid. She windmilled, imagining darker and dirtier waters.

  Another wave crashed, rolling her over. Her boot brushed gravel and she staggered to stand. Wyatt’s hand stretched toward her.

  Before she could reach it, the next swell lifted her to the foundering dinghy. The one after helped her and Wyatt push the boat onto the beach.

  As if a pack of hounds pursued her, she clambered out. Her parka must weigh a hundred pounds, water pouring out of its pockets and folds onto the gray pumice sand.

  “What in hell?” Wyatt said, just as she realized she was still off kilter, like riding an elevator that traveled in small jerks.

  “Earthquake,” she gasped.

  The first thing Wyatt heard when the ground stopped shaking was Kyle’s laughter.

  Not a merry sound, but the raucous guffaw that had seized him and his buddies in the old Bozeman neighborhood when Jules Feinstein fell off his bike. The kind of laugh you didn’t intend, yet, it was out there with an edge that bordered hysteria.

  “You okay?” he asked. He’d never thought of Kyle as anything but tough.

  It took her a few moments, but she finally swallowed her laughter with a gulp that sounded like a hiccup. “Fine.”

  She didn’t look fine. The rap on her side explained a lot, but there seemed to be more. She looked scared.

  “Kyle?”

  She seemed to shake herself mentally. “How big do you think that was?”

  He considered. “3.5 or maybe a bit more. Stronger than the one I felt the other day.”

  “A 3.5 shouldn’t cause that much lake turbulence.”

  “Underwater landslides,” he suggested. “Tsunami effect.” The creeping cold started him shaking. “We’ve gotta move.” He put a hand on the boat’s bow.

  “Not before we do what we came for.” She nodded toward the seismograph in its metal case, sitting in the boat bottom in eight inches of water. “Good thing it’s all-weather.”

  “No,” Wyatt decided. “If we take the time to dig a proper hole, we’ll both have hypothermia.”

  “I hate to have come all this way for nothing.” Kyle was shivering and her lips and fingernails had gone from healthy pink to blue.

  “Too bad.” The shaking had hold of Wyatt in earnest as he took her arm and urged her toward the dinghy. He wanted to get her … and him, someplace warm.

  She grabbed the seismograph and he thought she still meant to deploy it. Fortunately, she set it on the ground a little ways off and helped him grab the boat and tip it up on its side. Water poured onto the sand.

  He climbed in and waited for her to retrieve the instrument and shove the bow off. A wave broke over the stern and his boots were once more in the water.

  “Here goes nothing.” He pulled the rope starter and willed the engine to turn over without a hitch. Park Service maintenance tended to be variable.

  On the first try, the rope dragged at his hand. He pulled again, trying to steady his grip. The fifty yards to the cruiser would not be a tough swim in a warm pool.

  The afternoon sun shone mockingly.

  On the third try, the motor sputtered and died.

  The chop of the lake had not subsided with the earth’s shaking. It continued to roil the way water sloshes in a bowl long after the hand that shook it is withdrawn.

  Four tries, five. Wyatt closed his eyes and tried to forget the cold.

  The next pull on the rope starter rewarded him with a cloud of blue exhaust.

  As he guided the dinghy toward the cruiser, each cresting wave smacked the bow. Kyle hunkered down and pulled up the hood of her parka, while in order to steer he was forced to take each biting splash square in the face.

  When they reached the larger boat, Kyle gathered the painter and leaped aboard.

  Once he was on the cruiser, Wyatt started the main engine. In the short time they’d been gone, the motor had cooled and the heater’s flow felt like air conditioning.

  “We’ve got to get out of these wet things.” Kyle stripped off her parka, opened a bench locker, and looked inside. “Blankets?”

  “Aft.”

  Wyatt heard the rustle of her taking off her clothes and dumping them in a sopping heap on the metal deck. They’d been on a lot of fieldtrips together, coed treks to the Moenkopi Desert where there were no bushes and a potty stop consisted of boys on one side of the bus and girls on the other. He and Kyle had even shared a tent, waking to a frosty Colorado morning and slithering into jeans inside their separate sleeping bags.

  He checked the heater and found the flow warming.

  Kyle came up beside Wyatt with a faded red blanket wrapped sarong fashion and tucked beneath her armpits. Another draped her shoulders like a serape. She’d taken apart her fraying braid; strands of wet hair left darker spots where they dripped onto the wool.

  He’d seen the sprinkling of freckles that adorned her bare chest before, too. Fieldtrip skinny dipping in motel hot tubs had more than once resulted in the rowdy students being thrown out by ira
te proprietors, or passively forced by the less assertive who simply turned off the gas. Come to think, Kyle had been the only one who always wore a swimsuit, a long, slender black tank.

  Then how come seeing her half-dressed today set up a thudding in his pulse?

  “You go and change,” she ordered. Her strong fingers gripped his shaking arm. “I’ll take the wheel.”

  “I’ll be all right,” he said through teeth that chattered despite the heater’s effort. “We’ll be at the dock in fifteen minutes.”

  She made a move to shoulder him aside, and he caught a glimpse of scraped skin and swelling starting beneath her armpit. That was going to be a humdinger of a bruise.

  As she readjusted her blanket, something in him was disappointed at the aborted glimpse of her small yet well-formed breast. For distraction, he studied the rough fabric with distaste.

  “I’m allergic to wool,” he carped.

  “Allergic to wool?” she whined back at him.

  “All right,” he chuckled, “I broke the cardinal rule of the fieldtrip.”

  “First one to bitch is a sissy.” She raised a sardonic brow and prodded him with her elbow. “If I’m going to dock dressed in this high style, you’re going to also.”

  Wyatt stepped back and let her drive. Aft, the rough ride forced him to sit on a locker to take off his boots. It took longer than he expected, his fingers fumbling wet leather laces. Finally, he got them off and followed with his parka and uniform. Wrapping a folded blanket around his waist, he put another layer of wool around his shoulders and went forward.

  He leaned against the dash, warming his hands and feeling the blanket scratchy on his skin. As Kyle drove competently, he saw no need to take back the wheel.

  After a while, he pointed out the newly pink patches on his chest. “I really am allergic.” He gestured toward the blanket around his waist. “It’s all I can do to keep this on.”

  She didn’t miss a beat. “I’m sure a naked ranger would be a hit at the marina.”