Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [3]
Through the steam cloud from the power cone, she caught a shifting in the rafters, a barely perceptible sideways slide. She couldn’t grab Frank’s collar to warn him, couldn’t do a thing except scream his name into the maelstrom.
One moment, Clare was crawling toward him. The next, he disappeared in a shower of light.
CHAPTER ONE
Yellowstone National Park
July 25, 1988
Extreme Fire Danger.
Clare Chance gave a bitter smile at the warning sign on the Grant Village Laundromat. The lodgepole pines behind the building burned like merry hell. With the drought that had parched Yellowstone since May, moisture in the forest fuels had ebbed, making the park a two million acre tinderbox. The wind that came with the dry fronts completed the equation for disaster.
Clare hooked a hose to a hydrant and dragged the other end across the parking lot to water down the Laundromat roof. Beneath the heavy coat of the Houston Fire Department, sweat ran between her breasts and down her sides. At least it wasn’t as hot as it had been in Houston on that ill-fated July afternoon, over three weeks ago.
Quick agony swelled her chest until she felt it would burst. The flaming forest became a wavering vermilion blur as she blinked hard and hoped Javier Fuentes and the other men of HFD didn’t notice her tears.
Coming to the West to fight wildfire had seemed a convenient escape after she’d witnessed Frank Wallace’s death. If it could happen to him, it could happen to anybody. He was . . . had been . . . one of the good guys, an older veteran who’d acted blind to the fact that she wasn’t one of the boys.
Since becoming a firefighter, Clare had learned she didn’t qualify as a bona fide adrenaline junkie, but she’d tried to match anybody’s bravado. People who hadn’t seen her coach basketball or yell at her trainees at the Texas A & M fire school were surprised to learn what a thirty-seven-year-old woman did for a living.
Today, at Grant Village, she watched the younger men from Houston with a warning on the tip of her tongue. The wind shifted continuously, first a puff on the back of her neck and then relief for her heated forehead.
Watering down the buildings was a last ditch effort before they would have to fight the approaching flames face-to-face. Clare didn’t know what she’d been thinking when she’d assumed wildfire was somehow tamer than structural fire. Less collateral damage, maybe. In the forest, the odds were against her having to face another distraught mother.
A single look at Clare’s face when she emerged from the burning apartment house told Tammy Nguyen that her small son Pham was gone. Strangers, yet kindred in loss, the two women had gone into each other’s arms and sobbed. Channel Two News had carried it at six and ten.
Clare had forced herself to face Frank’s wife, Jane, too, beside the closed casket. Within the older woman’s kindly embrace, she had thought her heart would break.
On this, another sizzling afternoon, her hand on the rough-textured hose felt familiar, yet somehow distant. She was still getting used to the pungent incense of burning evergreen, so different from the grassy aromas of the Texas coast.
The two-way Motorola radio at her belt gave a crackling sound. She passed off to Javier Fuentes, who’d been first to sign on with her to fight wildfire. “Chance here.”
“We’ve got to get those civilians out of Grant Village.” Garrett Anderson’s deep Atlanta drawl came over the airwaves. She imagined him behind a desk in West Yellowstone, his ample stomach hanging over his belt while he chomped on Fig Newtons and drank mugs of creamed coffee. One of the seasonal bosses of big fire, he’d been the first black to make fire general at the training center in Marana, Arizona. He was also the man who’d arranged through Clare’s boss at A & M for her and the men from Houston to be here.
She put her foot onto the running board of the fire truck and pulled off her hard hat. God, her sweat-soaked head itched. The side mirror revealed heat-reddened cheeks beneath bloodshot