Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [16]
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,