Rain of Fire (8 page)

Then how come seeing her half-dressed today set up a thudding in his pulse?

“You go and change,” she ordered. Her strong fingers gripped his shaking arm. “I’ll take the wheel.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said through teeth that chattered despite the heater’s effort. “We’ll be at the dock in fifteen minutes.”

She made a move to shoulder him aside, and he caught a glimpse of scraped skin and swelling starting beneath her armpit. That was going to be a humdinger of a bruise.

As she readjusted her blanket, something in him was disappointed at the aborted glimpse of her small yet well-formed breast. For distraction, he studied the rough fabric with distaste.

“I’m allergic to wool,” he carped.

“Allergic to wool?” she whined back at him.

“All right,” he chuckled, “I broke the cardinal rule of the fieldtrip.”

“First one to bitch is a sissy.” She raised a sardonic brow and prodded him with her elbow. “If I’m going to dock dressed in this high style, you’re going to also.”

Wyatt stepped back and let her drive. Aft, the rough ride forced him to sit on a locker to take off his boots. It took longer than he expected, his fingers fumbling wet leather laces. Finally, he got them off and followed with his parka and uniform. Wrapping a folded blanket around his waist, he put another layer of wool around his shoulders and went forward.

He leaned against the dash, warming his hands and feeling the blanket scratchy on his skin. As Kyle drove competently, he saw no need to take back the wheel.

After a while, he pointed out the newly pink patches on his chest. “I really am allergic.” He gestured toward the blanket around his waist. “It’s all I can do to keep this on.”

She didn’t miss a beat. “I’m sure a naked ranger would be a hit at the marina.”

He laughed, both because he found the image preposterous and because they had finally broken the ice between them after last night. Despite his wool irritation, he felt good as he gazed out through the spattered windshield.

The view was of Gull Point, where wave-cut bluffs scarred the dense forest. On the north shore, the majestic structure of the Lake Hotel stood out, its pale yellow a contrast to the backdrop of green woods. Near the entrance to Bridge Bay marina, the highway crossing marked the opening into the sheltered cove. Wyatt could not remember when he’d been happier to end an outing on the lake.

Kyle pulled off throttle for the no-wake zone and the cruiser settled in the water. In a few minutes, they would be on their way to the hotel’s cabins. He planned on showering until the hot water heater drained, lying beneath blankets until it reheated, and doing it again.

Only a few nights ago, lying in his tent feeling tremors, he’d been excited about being on the scene for this latest chapter in Yellowstone’s seismic history. Today, he realized if the quake had kicked up a bit stronger, he and Kyle would have been swamped.

From there, it was a small reach to think of being dragged down by their sodden clothing and drowned.

T
wo hours later, Kyle felt warm again, but was still shaky inside. And hungry, a deep insistent longing for red meat or some other fatty delight. As she crossed the lawn from her small wooden cabin toward the three-story Lake Hotel clad in yellow-painted lumber, she noted a pair of buffalo lazing in the long golden grass. In the balmy afternoon, it was difficult to believe the wilderness had turned from menacing back to benign.

She entered the hotel through a side door and spotted a pay phone in the hallway. As her cell had drowned this afternoon, she took a moment to set down her leather portfolio of maps and called Stanton’s hospital room. Leila answered faintly.

“How’s our patient?” Kyle twisted the wire that connected receiver to phone.

“Sleeping.”

“Hope I didn’t wake him.”

“Actually, he’s sedated,” Leila confessed. “This afternoon he tore out his IVs, threw that green rock you gave him off his bed tray, and smashed it. The doctors say he’ll need to stay in the hospital longer.”

Kyle closed her eyes and leaned against the edge of the phone box. A pain in her injured side demanded she take the news standing straight. “I’m sure he’ll get through this stage.”

“They’re going to keep him sedated for twenty-four hours, then see.”

If Kyle were at the hospital, she’d put her arms around Leila; cry with her, but it was out of the question for her to break down with a busload of chattering retirees filing into the hall.

“Are you taking care of yourself?” Kyle raised her voice.

“Yes.” Leila didn’t sound convincing. “How are you doing?”

“Fine.” Kyle did not intend mentioning her and Wyatt’s dip in the lake.

“You don’t sound fine.”

“I’m all right,” she insisted. Then, because it was Leila, “No, I’m not. Wyatt and I had a hell of an afternoon. There was a pretty significant quake.”

“Oh, dear.” Leila had never indicated she knew about Kyle’s past, but the warmth in her tone suggested Stanton had told and sworn her to secrecy.

Pressing her lips together to keep her secrets inside, Kyle changed the subject. “I’ll be back in town tomorrow, probably too late to visit. I’ll come Monday after the Consortium meets.”

After hanging up, she walked toward the lobby to meet Wyatt and passed a vending alcove. Appetite born of years of addiction seized her, not for a cola or chocolate bar despite her hunger, but for the heated swirl of tobacco smoke. The way things were going this week, she would no doubt have pulled out some cash and bought a pack but was saved by whatever Surgeon General had wiped out cigarette machines.

Entering the main lobby, she paused before the fireplace. Ceramic tile fired in the 1920s formed a lovely frame for a hollow promise. Since 1959, when the Hebgen Lake quake had weakened the chimney, the fireplace had remained cold and dark.

Crossing in front of the antique wooden bar, Kyle smelled spilled liquor. Broken glass littered the floor; the cleanup crew must have been overtaxed by damage from today’s quake.

In the middle of the lobby, a display of old-time photos demonstrated that the wide room, with its tulip light fixtures, columns, and polished hardwood floors had not changed much since the hotel opened in 1892. The sunroom, where she and Wyatt planned to meet, was a 1920s addition to the original lobby. The bright space formed a half circle with wide windows fronting the expanse of lake, mountains, and sky. People sat on couches and chairs, reading, or playing one of the board games set out for amusement.

Wyatt was seated in a cushioned wicker chair near the center-most window, his gaze on the cobalt water. Kyle looked and saw whitecaps roiling in all directions, peaking in points that shot up startlingly high. It looked odd, considering no appreciable wind ruffled the grass and trees. Although the earth movement seemed to have ceased, she suspected it had merely subsided to a level below which a human observer could detect.

Coming up behind Wyatt, she was struck by how nice he looked in the afternoon light. His jaw line was tight; he had good hair, too, wavy and full. She touched his shoulder, not a thing she would normally do, but today her frame of reference felt upside down. Still feeling shaky, she let her fingers rest a moment, feeling muscle and sinew beneath his well-washed red pullover.

He turned and gave a coconspirators smile that brought back shared danger. “You warm enough?”

She nodded at his glass of stout. “Enough to drink a cold one.”

He motioned to a waiter and ordered Kyle a light beer. “Sorry, I just assumed. You want something else?”

“That much you do know about me.”

“I also suspect you’re as starved as I am.”

She glanced over her shoulder toward the dining room entrance beside the bar.

Wyatt smiled. “Dinner starts in half an hour. We’re on the list.”

Sinking into the chair beside him, Kyle savored the view. Memories of having a drink here with Stanton after a day of fieldwork made her throat tight.

“You all right?” Wyatt asked.

She swallowed. “I called Leila. The doctors believe Stanton will be in the hospital longer than they thought.”

Wyatt pulled his jeans-clad legs in and straightened from his slouch. “What’s going on?”

“She said he was violent.”

He nodded. “My dad … He had a stroke when he was only fifty-seven. They had to tie him down.”

“Did he get better?” Kyle hoped so, though she knew Wyatt had gone into the family business after his father’s sudden death.

He shook his head. “He was trapped on the rim of the world … on life support for weeks.”

A lump thickened Kyle’s throat as he went on, “I took the night shift at the hospital so I could keep up work. Sitting there with machines humming, I’d study Dad’s hands, watching them get thinner and paler each day.” Wyatt stretched out his own hands, brown and strong-looking.

She reached and placed her palms over his. “That must have been difficult to watch.”

“I remember his hands when they were like mine now.” His expansive gesture broke their contact. “Threading line, teaching me to fly-fish the Yellowstone, steadying me on a log to bridge a stream.”

Tears stood in her eyes, for she knew Wyatt as a man of few words.

“Dad taught me to ride when I was no bigger than an ant on a huge hill of horse. He trained me to rodeo when I was thirteen, picking me up off the dusty dirt of the corral and setting me on my feet. ‘Good try,’ he’d say no matter how poor the ride. Then he’d point me back toward the wall-eyed horse and say, ‘Do it again’.”

“He sounds wonderful,” she said. “I lost my mom and dad when I was six.” She stopped, for he’d heard that fact before, and she didn’t care to embellish. “Franny’s Zeke died when I was eighteen. I guess Stanton is the closest to a father I have.”

“God, I hope he gets through this.” Wyatt lifted his hand as though to touch hers, but the waitress arrived with her beer and he reached to drain the last of his.

She took a bracing drink.

He ordered another stout and gave her a long look. “You were mighty young to lose both your folks.” The question he’d never asked before hung in the air.

“A terrible accident,” she tempered with her eyes on her glass. “My mother’s mother, Francesca di Paoli from Tuscany, I was the only one who ever called her Franny … She and Zeke raised me. You remember me telling you stones?”

As though he understood she didn’t want to discuss her parents’ deaths, Wyatt nodded. “Seems I recall she was one tough broad.”

“She worked on a dude ranch in Jackson Hole back in the 1920s, taught me to ride the way your dad did you. Her first husband, a Wyoming cowboy, was something like one-eighth Nez Perce.”

Wyatt settled in his chair and gave her an easy smile. “Know any smoke signals?”

She gave a soft laugh and flicked one of her turquoise earrings, setting it swinging. “At maybe one thirty-second Nez Perce, I think I’d be better with a signal flare.”

A piano player began his first tune of the evening, a haunting rendition of “Clair de Lune.” The moon was waning now, after being full the day of the Sakhalin event. Outside, the lake continued to dance in the fading afternoon light.

It was so nice that Wyatt seemed at ease with her again that it was a shame to disturb the mood with work. Nonetheless, the sight of plaster dust on the floor, which had no doubt fallen during today’s quake, made her point to the portfolio. “Shall we look at tomorrow?”

“That would be a trick,” Wyatt chuckled. “Isn’t Brock Hobart the one with the crystal ball?”

“He gets lucky.” Nevertheless, his aim had been troubling her for years, especially since she and Stanton saw Brock on TV.

Wyatt gave her a serious look. “Everybody says predictions are so much bunkum, but don’t you still hope to warn the innocent before nature goes on a rampage?”

She’d figured he shared her dream, but hearing him speak it made her chest swell. “I suspect it’s the dirty little secret of most seismologists.”

His eyes were on a level with hers. “It’s always been mine.”

“And mine, since I was a child.” She turned her attention to rummaging in her portfolio. “Have you found out the magnitude of this afternoon’s quake?”

“I phoned Helen. She said 4.0.”

“Epicenter?”

“Nez Perce Peak.”

Kyle drew out a geologic map of Yellowstone and Wyatt moved his wicker chair closer to hers. Behind them in the main lobby, some woman’s heels made a hollow tapping on the hardwood floor.

“Here.” Kyle put a fingertip onto Nez Perce on the map.

East of the lake, the Absaroka Range where Nez Perce Peak was could be seen from the sunroom window. Green and peaceful looking, the mountains were born of fire fifty million years ago. The exception that pierced the range’s heart was Nez Perce; a volcano that Stanton and his graduate students had discovered was only 10,000 years old.

“It escaped notice for a long time,” Kyle reminded Wyatt. In an age of satellite telemetry, with NASA bragging that everything from foliage to mineral content could be detected from space, lots of people lost sight of the fact that remote sensing was limited.

Wyatt leaned forward, their heads closer together. “Following the trajectory of the hotspot all the way from Oregon, it’s always made sense that the newest volcanic events should be northeast of the lake.”

Kyle clanked her beer bottle against his. “Here’s to it being another 10,000 years before anything new happens.”

Wyatt’s expression suggested the chances of that were slim.

Thinking how rapidly the ground beneath the lake was rising gave Kyle a shiver, as though something wicked approached.

The tapping heels came closer and a feminine cry came from behind them, almost making Kyle drop her drink.

“Alicia!” Wyatt got to his feet and headed with a long-legged stride to meet the woman rushing at him.

Kyle had a fleeting impression of huge dark eyes in a tanned face before Alicia buried her head against Wyatt’s shoulder. Whereas most tourists sported casual clothing, she wore a little black dress that looked expensive, as did her high-heeled sandals and the simple yet heavy gold chain around her slender neck.