Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [54]
Clare gasped. She knew Steve had a problem, she’d seen him drunk and with hands atremble after a bender, but Deering’s words pelted like ice chunks. Steve’s family dead? Deering hadn’t said whether Steve was also on the plane, but his fear of flying made it sound as though he had been.
Suzanne listened with a serious look on her narrow face.
“When Steve got aboard that day, he was scared as hell,” Deering went on. “We started to go down and he jumped without a life jacket.”
Clare listened open-mouthed. Despite his problems, Steve must have had a strong will to live if he’d made it to shore without flotation.
Javier stood at a discreet distance, his big hands shoved in his pockets.
“I’ll need to interview him,” Suzanne said in a tone that Clare thought carefully neutral.
“You’ll have to hike up Mount Washburn, then.” Deering looked pointedly at Suzanne’s dress suit and heels. Clare couldn’t see Ms. Ho undertaking the expedition.
“Haywood’s on the mountain to dry out,” Deering finished.
CHAPTER TWELVE
August 11
In the east central part of Yellowstone, Looking Glass Lake shone beneath a sliver of new moon. The wind sighed through the lodgepoles, a stand of old growth that had been kissed by the sunrise for four hundred years. Here and there among the trees, silver ghosts stood sentinel, dead on their feet from the ravages of the pine bark beetle. Long trunks of lodgepoles that had succumbed to winter’s winds and the weight of heavy snow littered the forest floor.
A freshening breeze rippled the lake surface. On the beach, a pair of coyotes raised their muzzles.
A flash of light augmented the starlight and a low rumble descended. Ahead of the front, a squall line swept down, churning a path into the waters.
The sky went dark.
The wind increased, first to thirty and then blew at a steady forty miles per hour. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. Whitecaps whipped and splashed the beach. The coyotes trotted into the trees.
Lightning split the night, a long finger that stabbed sideways and illuminated the towering cumulus. Thunder rolled in the mountains. Wind-driven waves began a steady pounding.
With a sharp crack, the next bolt smashed into a live tree. Vestiges of moisture boiled and the trunk exploded, scattering shards of raw yellow wood. In the lee behind a log, a tentative smoke wisp coiled and was whisked away.
A bull elk moved through the woods, swiveling his rack at the unsettled night. He paused to rub his flank against rough bark, scratching luxuriously.
The next arc came down, a short, hot, blast that blinded the bull. He bolted, narrowly missing a dead tree. For a long moment, it seemed as though this strike would have no more impact than the last. The elk slowed his headlong rush, then gathered his dignity and walked more slowly toward the shore.
His nostrils flared as dry pine burst into flame.
No new smokes.
Steve radioed in his six a.m. report. To the east, the Clover-Mist’s smoke brightened from gray to pearl, reminding him of dawn in the Great Smoky Mountains.
At his grandfather’s cabin on the North Carolina-Tennessee border, he used to get up early and go onto the front porch. Holding the rough wooden rail, he had watched the seemingly endless ranges of mountains, blue swells like ocean waves. Sometimes on wintry days he couldn’t tell the difference between fog rising from the bottoms and wood smoke from backcountry chimneys.
Steve loved the soft, deeply weathered eastern mountains. With their ripeness of rotting leaves and mossy boulders, they were steeped in an overwhelming aura of richness.
When he went west for the first time, a college student on his way to fight fires, he’d discovered a raw new world of rock, sage, and towering heights. The thin atmosphere had seemed insufficient then, compared to the heavy humidity of the Carolinas.
Now the Yellowstone air was a tonic.
When he’d come to Mount Washburn, he had cursed Shad Dugan for sending him and himself for not smuggling in a bottle. The first