Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [30]
Steve smiled and her soft brown eyes lighted. Harriet wasn’t bad, early thirties, medium build, and shoulder length chestnut hair. Although she had been pursuing Steve in earnest for the entire six months she’d been here, he figured that if there were a spark he would have known right away.
“I’ve got a roast in the oven.” She gave a come-hither look. “Plenty for two.”
He’d tried one of her dinners and come home with the conclusion that he was the better cook. “Oh, no thanks. I’m just gonna go through some documents here.”
“Your loss.” Harriet secured her purse, told Walt good evening and walked out with her shoulders square beneath her flowered print dress.
Steve watched her go and found the historian’s sharp eyes on him. For years, Walt had been trying to get him to come out of his shell as far as women were concerned. Now he said nothing as he prepared to leave for the day. Although the archives were officially closed, Walt seemed to understand that Steve’s fascination with history kept his mind off his lost wife and child.
He wondered what Walt would think of him comparing Clare Chance with Harriet. If Clare had invited him to dinner, he might have gone.
With careful hands, he opened a filing cabinet. The familiar and ordinary folders inside held treasure that could never be measured in dollars and cents. His cotton-gloved fingers skipped across the tabs that revealed the vintage of the ancient documents, primary sources of historic information. Here were the records of the military commandant of the park in the year 1892, handwritten notes that mentioned the grand opening of the new Lake Hotel, with a lavish party thrown by its owners, the Northern Pacific Railroad.
By 1900, park headquarters had acquired a typewriter and carbons. Tissue thin papers revealed a long correspondence with an eastern procurement officer, an effort to put the soldiers who patrolled the park into Norwegian cross-country skis. The letters began politely enough in January, but by April a single terse sentence appeared beneath the salutation—Send skis now.
With a grin, Steve opened the next file of letters. He turned a nearly translucent page and noticed a fresh wave of the familiar, faintly musty smell of the basement archives.
Beyond the windows, golden afternoon beckoned, so he took the folder to a picnic table beneath a spreading cedar. There, he immersed himself in the life of the old fort, where horses and Army wagons had used the very path he sat beside.
Half an hour later, a shadow fell across his notes. He heard a pressurized pop and release and looked into the label of an Olympia can. Walt, wearing jeans instead of his ranger uniform, slid a hip onto the table and climbed up, propping his booted feet on the seat. “Beer?” He set down a paper bag that looked to contain the rest of a six-pack.
Steve had never heard of Oly when he was growing up in North Carolina, but he’d learned to appreciate the finer things of the West. He could just about taste the clean effervescence as he reached.
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” Clare Chance had surveyed him coolly, with eyes that reminded him of the finest amber liquor. She was something else, as he’d realized last night lying in the bed of his truck, and again when Garrett Anderson had praised her on the trail up Roaring Mountain.
With his fingers almost touching the sweating can, Steve stopped.
A puzzled expression gathered on Walt’s sharp features.
With an effort, Steve lowered his hand to the weathered boards. “No,” he said roughly, “thanks.”
“Haywood turns down a brew?” Walt’s brows lifted.
Both men went silent as a pair of young male tourists, identified by their name brand sportswear and the fact that they were strangers, passed the picnic table. They started across the street toward the open field that had once been the parade ground for Fort Yellowstone. With the ancient letters still on his mind, Steve envisioned the afternoon review of cavalry