Wildefire (22 page)

It took some rummaging in the lidded tool chest, but Ashline finally unearthed the first aid kit. Inside, sure enough, she found several ampoules of ammonia. With one in hand she knelt in the sawdust next to Colt, for once grateful to be wearing the orange jumper and not a pair of designer jeans. “When you wake up with sawdust and dried deer blood on your back,” she whispered to him, “you’re going to really wish you’d taken this truck to the car wash.” She snapped the capsule of smelling salts directly beneath Colt’s nose.

The ammonia took all of three seconds to kick in.

The odor was pungent and tangy, easily overpowering the stink of the truck’s rubber lining, and even Ashline had to lean away.

Colt stirred, and shook his head from side to side, until his eyes flickered open. He gagged. On the discomfort scale, waking to a foul smell in the back of a moving truck was probably equivalent to a painful hangover. But he swallowed, and his eyes, which had been staring up to the sky, settled on Ashline in the foreground.

212

“Hey,” she said softly. She tossed the vile of ammonia out onto the road. Her fingers tenderly pushed aside the hair on his forehead. “You hit your head in the canyon.

We’re headed back to school now.”

He opened his mouth, some question perched on his lips.
Oh, God
, Ashline thought.
He’s going to remember the
tranquilizer dart.

Instead, when he finally found the cognitive function to piece together the words he wanted to say, what came out was: “Pick you up at five on Tuesday?”

After dinner Ash set up the new alarm clock that Jackie had pilfered from the supply closet, then dragged her sore ass down the hall and into the shower. She slapped the showerhead a few times and cursed the dormitory for its flaccid water pressure, just one of the many “benefits”

of living on an eco-friendly campus. Even with the knob wrenched as far clockwise as it could possibly go, the stream was lukewarm at best. She resigned herself to the tepid shower and closed her eyes, letting it wash away the day’s debris—

The odor of death from the back of Colt’s truck—

The cold of the stream water as she knelt beside him—

The flash of terror as she watched him fall from the log—

The nauseating sight of Wolfe being sucked down into an early grave . . .

She felt grimy inside and out. Why had she forgotten 213

the damn loofah back in the room? A thorough scrubbing was in order.

Then there were the larger questions. The distrac-tions of school, and new friends, and lame but entertaining boyfriends had always provided enough background noise to keep thoughts of her birth parents at bay, but now that she was alone and saddled with a new “divine”

identity, the curiosity had found her again.

Ashline and Eve had, for obvious reasons, been aware from an early age that they were adopted. The story that the Wildes had shared with them growing up was brief but satisfying: They had been the only two siblings in the island orphanage, an infant and a girl who couldn’t have been far past her first birthday. Even though neither of them would have been old enough to have more than a fleeting memory of ever having a sister, Thomas and Gloria couldn’t bear the possibility that someone would adopt one without the other.

Maybe it had been the comforts of growing up upper class, or maybe it had just been selfish ignorance, but Ash had never probed her parents for more information.

Now, as her mind traveled halfway around the world to an island she couldn’t remember, she felt lost in the yawning abyss of one question: Where the hell had she come from?

With three half-apologetic beeps, the water shut off. The Blackwood showers were all set on five-minute timers, and Ash often found herself wondering whether 214

this was another green feature, or whether it was simply intended to cut down on the shower lines in the morning.

Either way, it sucked.

When she returned to her room, she was ready for a nap. She was ready for a daylong spa treatment. But above all, she was ready for a familiar face, so she did something fairly atypical for her: She followed her umbil-ical cord to her cell phone, texted her mother, and waited on her laptop for her to sign on.

When Ashline was first struggling to convince the Wildes to let her attend Blackwood for the rest of sophomore year, one of the final bargaining chips that she’d played had been a solemn pledge to remain in communication. The promise of a weekly phone call was not enough for Gloria Wilde, so Ashline had had to improvise.

Her solution? Two web cameras, purchased with the final vestiges of her bat mitzvah money, and a guarantee that they would set aside time every Sunday for long-distance face-to-face chats.

Her mother’s face appeared on the laptop screen, as eager and darling as Ashline remembered her. She must have been sitting out on the porch, because Ashline could make out the dark street in the background—it was three hours later in New York—and the porch light backlit her blond curls with a gentle glow. A smile crossed her mother’s face as Ashline’s image materialized on her screen as well, and Ash experienced a twinge of guilt for wondering so feverishly about her birth parents.
This
was her true mother.

215

“Only a minute to log on and set up the camera,”

Ash said. “You’re becoming a real technological wizard, Mom.”

“Oh, you know,” her mother replied bashfully. “I’ve got the step-by-step directions you wrote out for me taped to the back of my laptop. You lead a busy life over there. I wouldn’t want to keep you waiting while your mom fights with her Mac.”

Ash cringed. “Sorry I haven’t had time to chat in a few weeks. Life around here as been kind of—”

“What
is
that?” her mother interrupted, squinting at the computer screen. “Did you go shopping for an
orange
dress?”

It took Ashline a moment to realize that her mom must have been staring at something behind her. When she looked over her shoulder, she discovered her orange jumper, draped over the back of her reading chair, fully illuminated under the floor lamp. “Shit,” she mouthed.

She turned back to the camera. “Yeah, it’s a . . . sundress.

Weather’s warming up a tad around here, and I didn’t have much in spring colors, so Jackie and I took a day trip up to Crescent City.”

Gloria wrinkled her nose. “In last year’s tangerine too. I hope you got that on clearance.”

“Trust me,” Ashline said, “It was practically free.

How’s Dad?”

Her mother glanced both ways on the porch to make sure the coast was clear before she let out a sigh as long 216

as the March wind. She leaned closer to the microphone.

“He’s maddening, is what he is.” She threw up her hands.

“I always figured he’d have trouble living in an empty nest one day, when you would eventually go off to college, but his coping mechanism is completely busted. It’s like he’s grasping at anything he can stuff in here to fill the space. First he takes up yoga on Saturday mornings, which was fine, because—this is going to sound awful—at least it got him out of the house. But then just last week, he suddenly decides to become a vegan, and since he does most of the cooking, that means now I’m a vegan too.

It’s been nothing but soy and tofu and asparagus ever since. This morning I opened the
Times
after he read it and found two red circles in the classified sections, one around salsa dancing lessons at the Y, and another for a toy train collector set for sale. When I asked him about the trains, you know what he said? ‘It’s for the Holidays.’

It’s only May, Ashline. May!”

Even with a hand over her mouth, Ash couldn’t stifle her giggles. “Breathe, Ma,” she said. “Maybe there are some yoga relaxation techniques he can teach you.”

“I’ll breathe however he wants me too, but if I have to go one more week without a steak, I’m going to crack.

I swear, it’s like he thinks that if he flaps his wings hard enough, he’ll forget that it’s been almost a year since he heard from—”

Gloria stopped, her sentence derailed. It was a frag-ile thing, and Ashline knew that well. Ash had left Eve’s 217

name back in New York when she’d boarded her flight at LaGuardia four months ago, and she hadn’t said it aloud since. Eve’s memory was like a thawing pond: The sound of her name could send them all crashing back through the ice.

They were all just trying to forget about her in their own ways.

Her mother lifted her eyes from the screen and gazed directly into the camera, searching, pleading. “You haven’t . . .”

“No,” Ashline said firmly. “Not once.”

“But you’d tell us if you did?” Gloria looked tired, and for the first time since the conversation had started, Ashline noticed how much weight her mother had lost in the months she’d been away. Even her face had changed shape, as if the bones had rearranged beneath her skin.

The face of silent grief.

“Of course,” Ashline said, when what she was really thinking was,
But not if it would break your heart
.

When the break in conversation was too much for her to bear, Ash started to say, “I really miss—”

But it came out at the same time her mother said,

“I should get back to— I’m sorry, honey. What did you say?”

Ash bit her lip. “I was just saying I’ve got some work I’ve got to do. Econ reading.”

Her mother reached out and touched the side of the camera, like she was trying to brush Ashline’s bangs out 218

of her face. “Okay, sweetheart. Let’s do this again next Sunday?”

“You bet,” Ashline said. And then she closed the laptop screen down to the keyboard, severing the connection.

She was grateful her roommate was still three thousand miles away so there was no one to see her cry herself to sleep.

She woke up clutching her pillow to her face, with only the knowledge that it was most certainly too dark for it to be morning already. In fact, there was no way to immediately know how long she’d been out, because the digits on her brand new alarm were unlit. She flicked her desk lamp a few times just to be sure, and, yup—the power was out.

Ashline rubbed her face. The air in the room was warm—no, “sweltering” was a better word, given the humidity. But that couldn’t be right, since Blackwood had turned off the heat for the last time in March. Sure enough, when she put her fingers to the sheets, they were slick with her own sweat. Maybe she was just running a fever?

She needed air. She shuffled over to the window and pushed aside the curtains.

The image she saw framed in the glass was enough to rip the breath right from her lungs.

There, in the middle of the Blackwood quad, stood a girl with long dark tangles of hair. Ashline couldn’t make 219

out her face, but one thing was instantly clear even in the low light.

She was staring up at Ashline’s window.

The girl cocked her head to the side, and Ashline wondered whether she could actually see her through the parted curtains. But seconds later she had her answer.

The girl pointed directly at her and then took off running across the quad, her footsteps quick and light, heading in the direction of the academic complex.

“Shit,” Ashline said. She’d fallen asleep in her pajama pants and a camisole, but there was no time to change.

She slipped on her sneakers without bothering to put on socks, and stepped out into the hallway.

It must have been late, well past midnight, because the dormitory was as silent as a forgotten cemetery.

Blackwood students were easily excitable. Had the girls been awake for it, a blackout would have proven an all-too-tempting opportunity to give the middle finger to curfew and wreak havoc in the dead of night. Impromptu games of hide-and-seek, dangerous flights down the hallway waving contraband candles, voyages over to the boys’

dormitory, and retaliatory invasions.

Instead the girls of the B pod slept undisturbed, and would probably continue to sleep right through their first-period class when the alarms failed to go off.

Ash crept down the hallway and out the front door.

She was grateful for the night chill after the startling heat of her bedroom. She cast one cautious glance across the 220

quad at the teachers’ residence before darting across the lawn and to the front door of the academic complex.

With a twist and a tug, the door opened, and Ashline cringed as she waited for the alarm to go off.

Silence. The security system was down, voiceless without the campus generator online to power it.

A whisper guided her toward the nearly pitch-black staircase, like an invisible, impalpable hand pressing into the small of her back. She could all but hear it echoing down the stairs.

The ground floor and stairwell nearly suffocated her with darkness, and she had to use the handrail to navigate her ascent, without even the auxiliary lights to guide her way. But when she reached the third floor, she knew before she even pushed through the double doors leading into the hallway that something was amiss. A gentle light, like the flicker of the walls of a pool house, thrummed steadily against the walls.

“Hello, Pandora’s box,” Ashline said to herself, and she pushed through the doors.

The hallway was empty.

As Ashline trod down the hall, past the rows of unused lockers—Blackwood students kept their books and supplies in their rooms—a whistling pierced the silence. Not a musical human whistle, but the sound of air flowing past an open . . .

Door.

Halfway down the hall, recessed into a passage that 221

was roped off with several cords, was what the students had not so originally dubbed “the Forbidden Stairwell.”

It was a well-known fact that the tiny metal door at the top was an access point to the roof. It was also a well-known, well-tested, and twice-punished fact that the door was locked and connected to the security alarm, which even the most technologically savvy seniors had failed to disarm. The roof of the academic complex was a veritable Shangri-La for the students of Blackwood, one they’d never seen.

And here it was, its alarm hushed, with the promise of the night outside slipping through the unlatched door as the wind whistled past.