Summer of Fire (8 page)

At Clare’s senior prom, floral White Shoulders had been wasted on pimply, damp-palmed Billy Meyer. The football player she longed for dated a cheerleader, rather than a fellow athlete like Clare.

Jay hadn’t exactly told Clare she couldn’t wear perfume during their fifteen-year marriage. He’d just screwed his handsome face into a scowl and fanned away the smell, making the stale leftovers of Elyssa’s Obsession all the more hurtful. Before the ink was dry on the decree, Clare had launched an assault on the Houston Galleria’s perfume counters. A mirrored tray identical to Jewel McGrath’s occupied a place of honor on her sinktop at home.

This evening, in addition to wearing cologne, Clare had selected the one dress she’d brought with her. The slight slip of sundress in a deep violet was more suited for a humid Texas night, but it made her feel daring.

With the easy appreciation that liquor bestowed, Steve Haywood leaned against the dark wood bar in the Bear Pit. He’d walked out of the Lake Hospital yesterday and not been sober since.

Sea green light shone onto the glass screen dividing the bar from Old Faithful’s cavernous dining room. Etched into thick panels was a group of bears in nineteenth-century clothing, playing cards, dancing, and shooting one another with seltzer bottles. Party animals--and no matter how much Steve had drunk in the past four years, he’d never found that carefree plane of non-existence.

Maybe he’d find it tonight, with enough Jack Daniels.

He sipped and surveyed the summer crowd occupying heavy wooden tables and chairs in the half-round bar. Here was an eclectic mix of tourists and folks working the park. Bartender Annabel Eaton stood behind the long western-style counter and wiped a glass with a rag. They were old friends by now, and Steve could tell Annabel thought he’d had enough to drink. He’d need to slow down so the heavyset, earnest, kindergarten teacher from Des Moines would continue to serve him.

Over there was off-duty waitress Pamela Weber, with velvet, Italian-movie-star eyes that could have graced the pages of a men’s magazine. Tanned legs stretched a mile below tight white shorts. Steve hadn’t been to bed with her; in fact, he hadn’t slept with a woman in the four years since Susan, but, with Pamela, he’d come close. Back in June, she had attracted his attention while he was walking around the geyser basin. She’d invited him to go hot potting, the summer employees’ name for swimming in the thermal springs. He’d had too much to drink and the warm water had relaxed him so much he’d been unable to rise to the occasion.

Pamela spotted him, gave an airy wave, and turned her attention to the man buying her drinks this evening. Steve sighed and took another long and joyless swallow of whiskey.

Twenty feet away, Clare Chance paused in the doorway. Everything seemed suddenly sharp to Steve as she swept the room with that deliberately blind stare women bestow on a roomful of strangers. Those eyes, almost haunted—or maybe she just suffered from the lack of sleep of many on the fire lines.

In a bright dress that left her golden shoulders bare, with streaked tawny hair over her rounded forehead, she strode purposefully to the bar. Steve watched her stand on tiptoe in flat-heeled leather sandals, accentuating the corded muscles of her calves. Her extraordinary presence had caused him to forget that she was barely taller than five feet, and made it difficult to believe she had manhandled him into the lake.

With the champagne she’d ordered, Clare drifted toward the curved outer wall of windows. Steve cursed himself for not having noticed Deering before. The pilot looked as cocky as ever, lifting his beer mug and toasting Clare’s approach. A small sideways flick of eyes said he’d seen Steve. “You should have let me get your drink.” Deering’s proprietary note carried.

Steve decided he needed fresh air. His exit was marred by a stumble at the slight step up into the lobby. From the front desk, he heard an elderly woman shrill, “The bath is down the hall?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the clerk said. “The old wing does not have private baths.”

Steve turned right and opened the outside door. The combination of a difficult climate and the drought created earth covered with sparse brown grass and volcanic gravel. Moving away from the building, he inhaled the tang of smoke on the breeze.

In the past twenty-four hours, the North Fork fire had tripled from twenty-five hundred acres to over eight thousand. Although no evacuation had been called, some of the tourists feared getting caught by the fire that was still six miles from the inn.

He guessed people were frightened of things that spoke to them at a visceral level. Some kid who’d accidentally gotten locked in a lightless closet would spend his life sleeping with a nightlight. The very idea of flying turned Steve witless, and ditching in the lake had necessitated the liberal application of alcohol for its anesthetic properties.

Yesterday afternoon, Clare Chance had not been afraid. She’d faced the exposed fangs of the Shoshone . . . and saved his worthless life.

“What’s the word out of Fire Command?” Deering asked.

Clare looked across the Bear Pit table at the sharp-nosed pilot wearing slim fit Wrangler jeans, an open-necked shirt that revealed dark chest hair, and well-worn cowboy boots.

“Not good.” She shook her head and saw his eyes go to the gold hoops at her ears. “We’re in for a long haul.”

She traced a wet spot on the table and checked his sinewy left hand. A flesh-toned bandage there, but no sign of a wedding ring, or even the telltale band of shrunken flesh that said it was in his pocket.

A sip of champagne refreshed her throat that was dry from the high thin air. “Rumor has it we’re about to throw everything we’ve got at the fires.”

A deeper line etched between Deering’s brows. “You don’t sound like that’s a good thing. Most of the firefighters I know like saving the burning forests.”

Clare looked out the window, but rather than the dark shingled side of the inn’s opposite wing, she saw a wall of flame. “Yesterday, I got a close-up of the Shoshone at Grant Village.” She turned her gaze on Deering’s gaunt face, marked by the purpling bruise. “And you lost your helicopter. Before this is over, somebody is going to get killed.”

“Damned right. Haywood and I lucked out when we ditched, but somebody dies every season.” His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed beer.

Clare paid attention to her stemmed glass to avoid the intensity in Deering that she wasn’t ready for. “I’m going out on the lines west of here in the morning to try to keep the North Fork from burning this place down.”

“That would be a shame. One thing for sure, if it burned, they’d never be able to replace it.” Deering studied his own glass for a moment and then tapped it with a long finger. “If I were going up in the morning, this would be Coke.”

That was good, for she’d caught a glimpse of Steve Haywood looking soused—he’d even tripped going through the door. He was out there now, leaning against the wall of the breezeway between the old and newer wing of the inn. When she looked directly at him, he turned his head away as though she’d caught him staring.

She checked out Deering, comparing the sturdy blond scientist and the tall rugged pilot.

Deering met her eyes in a questioning, no, maybe a questing, way. “I need to get back in the air,” he said with an air of confiding.

Why did it not surprise her that this man was ready to fly again? “I can imagine you’d get antsy being grounded,” she sympathized. “Were you in Vietnam?”

“How’d you know?”

“Lucky guess. The right age . . . You have family?”

He cleared his throat. After a little pause, he said, “Wildfire’s tough on commitment.”

In her peripheral vision, Clare saw Steve reenter the Bear Pit, a man on a mission. “Annabel, I need a Jack,” he barked. “Make it a double.” When he leaned on the bar, his elbow slipped in a puddle.

“Excuse me,” Clare murmured to Deering.

She approached Steve from behind. Maybe because she’d rescued him, it disappointed her to see him like this. Before she knew what she was going to say, the words came out. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

Steve turned with the slow care of a man who’d had too much to drink. Her head barely clearing his shoulder, she looked up at him steadily.

“You again.” It sounded as though he was accusing her of something.

A flush rose from her chest and spread across her cheeks. “Why are you doing this to yourself?”

His silver-gray eyes went wide. “Whaddaya mean? I’m just having a few to celebrate . . .” He steadied himself on the bar. “ . . . tomorra’s visit of the honorable Secretary of the Interior and his muckey-mucks.” He made a bowing gesture that indicated obeisance, then met her eyes. She recognized the look of sadness and defeat she’d seen lately in her mirror.

Maybe she conveyed something, for the bluster went out of him. “I’m sorry. I shoulda thanked you . . . saving my life.”

She started to soften, but he caught his boot toe in the bar’s brass foot rail and lost his balance. Blind anger that she knew was irrational turned her back toward Deering with a tart, “Someday when you’re sober you can thank me properly.”

CHAPTER FIVE

July 27

The next morning Clare found it hard to believe there could be any threat to this pristine forest. She rode in a troop carrier with ten other firefighters on their way to divert the North Fork from Old Faithful. Almost everyone had his or her head down trying to catch a last few minutes of sleep despite the hard bench.

Although the rising sun angled through the trees on the small forest track, its warmth did not reach beneath the truck’s canvas tarp. In Houston, the July temperature and humidity had both hovered near one hundred.

Before leaving, she’d visited her mother. They had sat in Constance’s back yard in suburban Bellaire, ignoring the glass-walled office building that towered over the squat, one-story bungalow. The roar of traffic on Loop 610 formed a constant stream of white noise.

Pouring lemonade from a sweating pitcher, Constance said, “Are you sure about this Wyoming, dear? You’re still suffering over your . . . friend.” Her arch pause suggested Frank might have been more than a co-worker.

That was ridiculous. Frank had treated Clare like the big brother she’d never had, being an only child. Without bothering to correct her mother, she said, “That’s precisely the point. I need a change and my job will be waiting when I come back.”

She didn’t say that one more night in Houston, where nightmares wakened her with almost hourly regularity, was more than she could stand.

“But, dear, Devon is at a delicate age.” A stranger might believe that Constance, with her wide dark eyes and innocent delivery, was being sweet. Clare knew better. “Mother,” she warned, “one of the A & M trainers called a friend in fire command at Yellowstone. Garrett Anderson is expecting me.”

“Of course, dear, but Devon . . .” Constance pushed back her silver hair where it had fallen over her forehead.

Clare sipped her mother’s perfect lemonade deliberately. “Taking care of Devon is just an excuse. She could stay with you, but you haven’t been willing to have her overnight since she set her mattress on fire.”

“Can’t you teach her safety? And you a firefighter.” Constance’s tone said she regarded her daughter’s profession as no better than ditch digger.

Clare busied herself selecting a fat oatmeal cookie from the symmetrical arrangement on a platter.

“She still smokes, you know.” Constance lowered her voice as though Devon could overhear. “I smell it on her.”

“A lot of the other kids smoke. She gets it on her clothes from being around them.” Clare defended Devon even though she knew her daughter probably did smoke, and lied about it.

“I hope you’re right about her being okay at Jay’s while you’re gone. Her visits there are usually shorter, and you know that fish and family . . .”

“Stink after three days.” She didn’t need to check her watch to know that she and Constance had exceeded the three hours they usually required. “Devon needs a relationship with her father,” she parroted, from years of repeating the mantra.

Her mother’s mouth made a line. “You ask me, you should have sole custody, after he . . .”

Clare had emphatically not asked, but every time Devon left for visitation, she stifled the same thought. “You know that in family law court, you get all the justice you can afford.”

Beaten back on the new front, Constance returned to the West. “This Wyoming . . .” She gave another of her signature pauses and smoothed the skirt of her yellow-flowered house-dress. “You know they have bears up there.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“I’m serious.” Constance’s hands fluttered, a sure sign that she had found something to worry about. Her vigilance was steadfast, such that she fretted over everything from refusing to get onto an airplane to shredding magazine covers marked with her name before putting them in the garbage.

Clare had learned to live with it, but the familiar charade rankled. It had gotten worse in the seven years since her parents divorced. Her father kept busy with his new wife and twin baby sons, reminding her too painfully of losing Jay to ten-years-younger Elyssa Hendron.