Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [13]
“Deering?” Steve asked the woman helping him into the lake.
“The pilot?”
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