Rain of Fire (13 page)

Last June he’d been walking on Old Faithful’s main trail near Castle Geyser, instructing one of the summer student rangers, when a woman on a bicycle hailed them. She braked to a sharp halt and pointed back the way she’d come. “A little girl. She fell in!”

“Where, ma’am?” Wyatt asked.

“Morning Glory Pool.”

Radioing for the local ambulance, he commandeered the bicycle and left the student to calm the woman. It wasn’t a strenuous trail, wide and paved, but his heart pounded as he rode.

In a few minutes, he covered the mile and found a crowd beside Morning Glory Pool. Once of the hottest springs in the park, it had been named for its blue-white appearance and trumpet shape. Over the years, park visitors had thrown in things that blocked its neck and cooled it enough for algae to dull its sheen.

By the pool, a man bent over oddly, holding his arms to his chest. When Wyatt saw a woman in a lavender dress kneeling beside something on the white rocks, he realized the man must have burned his arms pulling the girl from the pool. “She slipped through the fence,” he moaned.

Wyatt found it odd that the mother wasn’t holding her daughter until he saw the bright, boiled look of the child’s skin. In places, it had peeled off, leaving bare flesh and muscle that looked like when you skinned a deer.

From the somber way people parted to let him through, Wyatt knew he was too late.

When he and Helen had walked for half an hour, he began to notice wisps of steam rising in places along the trail. That was odd, for he’d hiked this stretch with Alicia back in July and hadn’t noticed any. Of course, it was a lot warmer then, so he might not have seen them.

Another hundred feet, and he definitely saw a small field of fumaroles, vents like chipmunk burrows, except they blew steam like teakettles.

“Something new?” Helen asked cautiously.

“We’ll have to check them out later.” He kept up the pace.

A few minutes later, she stopped and held up a hand.

Wyatt listened. The wind tossed the tops of the pines, and a crow gave a raucous warning.

Then he heard a high-pitched call that sounded like a human voice.

He blew his whistle, cupped his hands, and shouted, “Halloo.”

“Over there.” Helen started down the hill at a right angle to the trail.

Wyatt followed, sliding in slippery evergreen needles. As they approached Bear Creek he could hear it rushing, normally a soothing sound.

Another cry, this one louder, helped them home in on a yellow tent beside the stream. Someone in jeans and a brown hooded parka knelt beside another person in a sleeping bag. A red North Face jacket lay on the ground near the remnants of a campfire.

“Hello, we’re with the Park Service,” Helen said.

The kneeling person turned, a slender woman of perhaps sixty years with the tanned and weathered look of the inveterate sportswoman.

“Gretchen!” Wyatt blurted. He’d had drinks with Gretchen and her husband only a few days ago in Mammoth.

She leaped to her feet. “Wyatt, thank God!” She cast a swift glance over her shoulder. “David doesn’t know how bad …”

“We’ll have a look.” Helen headed in.

Wyatt hung back, having trouble with the fact that the victim was one of the park’s own. David Mowry, a longtime naturalist and resident of Mammoth, was the renowned author of over a dozen books on the Yellowstone region. He worked across the hall from Wyatt in the Resource Center.

“What happened?” Wyatt asked.

Gretchen twisted her hands together and looked confused. As Wyatt knew her to be a bright and determined woman who never minced words, he wondered if she might be going into shock.

“Wyatt,” Helen said, in a calm voice he recognized as forced.

“Right here.” He moved closer.

David’s face and neck bore a parboiled look with the skin peeling away from the flesh. His eyes were wide open and their strange whiteness made Wyatt wonder if he was dead.

The fallen man writhed. “Christ Jesus, it hurts!” He waved an arm and connected with Helen’s shoulder.

She recoiled as his hand brushed her parka and left a patch of skin on the rough material.

Wyatt realized David was blind, his eyes cooked along with the rest of his flesh.

Helen pulled back the sleeping bag with care, exposing his bare torso. In places, his skin had sloughed to reveal weeping raw flesh. Wyatt made a guess at ninety percent/third-degree, which made it tough to imagine him surviving. Especially as he and Helen could not start an IV.

“I’ve been making him drink water,” Gretchen offered.

“That’s good,” said Helen.

Numbly, Wyatt reached for his radio and called the base. “We need a chopper
stat
! Victim is David Mowry, Caucasian male around sixty years, third-degree burns over most of his body. Conscious … at this time.” He gauged the small clearing. “With the trees in here, the stretcher will have to be roped up into the chopper.”

Helen poured water from her bottle over David’s torso and he seemed to become calmer.

“We’ll have you in the hospital in no time,” Wyatt said loudly.

“It doesn’t matter.” David’s voice was faint.

Wyatt drew Gretchen aside. “He’s going to have to go to Burn and Trauma in Salt Lake.”

Gretchen picked at her sleeve and nodded. She was shivering.

David went into another fit of screaming. Helen moved back a few feet.

Wyatt decided to examine the scene. He and Alicia had actually been right here two months ago, dropping down off the trail to hike the creek bottom. That big fir with the moss on it leaned a little farther out over the cut bank now. On the sandy beach below, where the bank sloped gently, they had taken off boots and socks and cooled their feet.

He’d mentioned at the time that this would make a nice campsite.

“Where was David when he got burned?” he asked.

“Just there.” Gretchen pointed to the place where Wyatt had gone wading two months ago. He didn’t see anything that looked like a thermal spring, none of the usual white or buff-colored mineral deposits, no colored algae.

He walked closer and stopped. Faint wisps of steam rose from the edge of Bear Creek. Another step forward and he saw the boiling, where sand spun in hundreds of tiny caldrons. Mindful that many visitors got an unpleasant surprise when they couldn’t resist testing the water temperature, he put out a careful hand.

An inch or so from the surface, he felt the heat.

“Did David fall in?” The footing looked solid enough.

“We both swam there yesterday,” Gretchen said. “The water was so cold that we sat by the fire when we got out. This morning, he decided to go skinny-dipping and dove straight in.”

Wyatt let himself down and sat on the creek bank.

Gretchen spoke slowly, “When he staggered out, he kept saying, ‘I’ve killed myself.”

On the one hand, David Mowry had done something stupid, but the signs were so very subtle. Who was Wyatt to say he might not have done the same? The first time he and Alicia had hiked into the backcountry, they’d made love on a sun-warmed rock beside a sparkling stream and dived in naked without testing the waters.

Wyatt pushed to his feet and moved upstream. He knelt and refilled his canteen with cold water to ferry to Helen.

Gretchen went to her husband’s side and spoke words of encouragement that Wyatt felt rang hollow. He squatted on his heels near David. “Hang in there, buddy.”

Over the burned man’s head, he met Helen’s serious dark eyes. She gave a barely perceptible shake of her head.

Minutes passed and David thrashed less. His respiration became labored, making Wyatt suspect fluid buildup in lungs seared by boiling water.

Finally the chop of an approaching helicopter sounded. As it came into view, Wyatt recognized a Bell 206, the kind he’d done some fieldwork out of in the park interior. He dug in his pack and sent up a flare, then stood in the center of the clearing and waved. Dark clouds scudded across the patch of sky and the chopper danced and shuddered as it lowered.

Shielding his eyes from flying grit, Wyatt watched a man descend a cable carrying a folded stretcher and an equipment bag. Once he got to the ground, Wyatt led the way.

Helen had her back to them, hugging herself as if she felt cold. Gretchen Mowry knelt beside her husband, cradling his red jacket instead of his disfigured body.

The dead man looked smaller somehow, as though more than breath had left his body.

K
yle’s blood surged as she stared at the tagline on the breaking news page of her Internet provider. Sitting up straighter in her office chair, she clicked on the story.

Lord, not David Mowry. She hadn’t known him personally, just read his books, but…

First on the scene, Park Rangers Helen Chou and Wyatt Ellison told reporters waiting in Salt Lake that Mowry was so thoroughly scalded he never stood a chance of surviving. The search and rescue helicopter pilot, Chris Deering, a veteran of Vietnam and many western fire seasons, said the pickup was routine, Mowry having passed away just before he arrived
.

Mowry, who lived in Clancy, Montana, was camping with his wife Gretchen east of Yellowstone Lake. She told doctors he got up early for a swim in Bear Creek and dove into the same pool they’d been swimming in the day before
.

This time it was boiling
.

Kyle’s heartbeat slowed, yet deepened to a steady thudding.

It
remains to be determined whether Mrs. Mowry was mistaken about the hot spring appearing overnight
.

Carefully, Kyle placed the printout on her desk atop a pink slip that said Wyatt had called at noon. It was after five now; she’d been busy advising graduate students after making her useless spate of calls for seismic equipment and picking up a new cell phone.

She dialed his cell. He answered in a tired voice.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“You heard.” Her tone must have tipped him.

“Read it on the Internet.”

“With no one there to pronounce David … Helen and I carried out the rescue effort and flew down with him to Salt Lake.”

“Are you still in town?”

“We’re at the airport in West Yellowstone.” He sounded distant. “Caught a ride back up with the pilot.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’ve been better.” She knew Wyatt and David had been close.

Something twisted inside her. “If you’d stayed in Salt Lake, I could have bought you dinner.”

“Rain check.” His voice brightened a little.

“What’s this about a new hot spring? Did you get a chance to ask David about it?”

“He was beyond that.”

She felt a dry spot in her throat as she waited.

“I did talk to his wife Gretchen … She’s certain the spring went from cold to hot overnight. Even if she’s wrong, I was there two months ago with … we waded in that very spot.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. And this morning walking in, Helen and I saw a dozen fumaroles along the trail. I’d swear they weren’t there in July.”

“I’m coming up,” Kyle said.

“We’re losing Helen to Bill in Washington, so be sure to bring Xi.”

“Double damn. Colin took Xi on the Sakhalin tour.”

“Just you and I, then. Bring more equipment.”

“One way or another, I’ll get what we need,” she promised.

As she replaced the receiver, her bruised side gave a twinge. The echo of what could happen with nature on a rampage, along with the still indigestible knowledge that David Mowry had lost his life, made her stare at the telephone after she’d set it down.

She’d assured Wyatt she would come through, yet she’d called everybody she could think of this morning.

Except for one man.

There must be some way other than calling Nick. After all, Hollis had probably already reached him and poached whatever spare hardware there was in his group.

She wouldn’t know unless she asked.

Still, she hesitated, a fluttery feeling in her stomach at the thought of speaking to Nick. Would he be all business, or would his manner grow warm and teasing when he recognized her voice?

This was ridiculous. Behaving like a college kid when lives were at stake … there was no excuse not to follow up the lead Cass had given her.

With a sigh, Kyle dialed the Cascades Observatory main number and asked for him.

His extension began to ring. She gripped the phone.

“Hello,” he said in his cheery distinctive tone.

“Nick, I…”

“… I’m not available right now, but leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

Sweat gathered on her palms and she slammed the phone down. “Goddamn answering machines!”

Though he might be out of the country or merely down the hall, Kyle decided to call him tomorrow from Yellowstone. With Wyatt there, she’d be better able to handle her end.

Between stuffing her portfolio with maps and checking email, she telephoned a professor in the Geology Department who agreed to take her seminar. Next, she packed her laptop, auxiliary solar power pack, and looked at the empty place on the credenza where her lucky malachite had rested.

Down the hall, she scribbled her name on the sign-out sheet for the van and took the keys off the nail. She’d leave her Mercedes in the lot; ask a friend in campus security to keep an eye on it.

She went looking for Hollis, intent on convincing him a dead man was reason enough to free the hidden equipment. Unfortunately, a check of the office and labs found him gone. No doubt he was at the Faculty Club sitting at the table Stanton always used for after-hours visiting with fellow professors.