The Fires Within: The Summer of ’88

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 1

1988 - Yellowstone National Park. Early August. Still no rain...

Alerts went out as far north as Cooke City, Montana.

Helicopters roared low across roads jammed with firefighting equipment, stranded tourists, sightseers, and locals trying to get home.

The wind had shifted.

That meant the danger, which for months had been off somewhere in the distance, was coming closer. Now, off somewhere was only a few miles away with smoke thick, black, dangerous and as mean as a disturbed rattlesnake. The winds were violently spewing leaping tongues of flames in every direction. The swirls of fire were creating their own super-hot blasts of winds which urged them to huge spouts of flames leaping from treetop to treetop looking, for all the world, like bursts from a huge flame thrower manned by some unseen giant.

With the normal temperatures soaring in the desert-dry August afternoon and the firefighting equipment losing the hard-fought war of attrition against the steadily increasing demands for their services, the combination was creating a desperate situation. It was already the worst fire season on record in the great Yellowstone National Park south of where the helicopters now searched for the trapped men, and everyone knew as they raced against the encroaching flames that the situation was just about out of control.

No one talked much about the body that the firefighters had accidentally uncovered while trenching in one of their many attempts to stop the spreading flames. The men were too tired and too busy with their own firefighting tasks to pay much attention. Since there had never been talk of a missing person in the general area for as long as anyone could remember, the discovery excited little attention other than the routine business of turning the remains over to the now besieged authorities for investigation and identification, if possible. Identification would be difficult since it wasn’t actually a body. Rather it was the skeleton of an apparently murdered woman hastily buried in a shallow grave some time ago. All that could be told from the badly decomposed remains was that the victim was a small-framed woman who had been shot through the head before being hidden deep in the woods under thick scoops of black earth. A single spent bullet was found beneath the skull. The firefighters who discovered Ginny Doe, as they dubbed her, and the investigators who followed, couldn’t tell for certain how long Ginny Doe had been slowly decomposing in her obscure grave. Probably four or five years. If the fire had not been heading in that particular direction, who knows how long she would have remained undiscovered.

Another five years? Forever? A crime well done.

When Jane heard about Ginny Doe, for some inexplicable reason she found herself fantasizing the girl’s murder over and over again. All the lurid imaginings were to become a bitter recurring dream.

Who was the murdered woman? And why was Jane so preoccupied with the long ago murder of a total stranger? She hadn’t the slightest notion.

Jane Marcheson was one of the locals trying to get home after putting in an uncomfortable day working at the library in Velusia. Only seventeen miles west of Cooke City, the library was in the direct path of the fires.

Jane was one of the many volunteers who, for most of the past week, had been helping to pack all the volumes in the Velusia library to be moved to a safer storage area until the danger was over. Maybe the building would fall to the fires, but at least the books, the essence of any library, could be saved. Tim Lunde’s mother, Gloria, had been the librarian ever since Jane could remember. When Gloria told her she needed help, Jane readily volunteered. It was a backbreaking task. But Jane was 23, tall for a girl, thin and physically quite strong. Living alone with her mother, Valerie, and hiking frequently through the woods, it was amazing how much power those extended hikes had given to growing young limbs. Even so, Jane’s arms were not as strong as her legs and the books seemed to get heavier with each passing hour. The smoky haze lingering over the area where the library was located didn’t help. Some of the volunteers had been wheezing and coughing all day.

Now the job was finally finished, her throat parched, her thick honey-colored hair crushed under a tight, sooty bandana, her hazel eyes tearing to a lucent green.

Thanks, Janie, Gloria Lunde said with her gravely voice and her expansive smile. You’ve been a big help.

I’ll think about you when I’m soaking out the aches in a hot tub tonight, Jane laughed, thinking again that Gloria Lunde, whom she had known all her life, was the only one she knew who still called her Janie.

Gloria thrust out her thickening middle with a groan and rubbed the small of her own sore back with both hands. I know what you mean.

Jane said her goodbyes quickly and jumped into the blue Ford Station wagon illegally parked in a spot reserved for the handicapped. No one seemed to mind the liberty during these hectic emergency days. Not too many handicapped still around anyway.

Knowing the back roads well, Jane managed to skirt the main roads where the luckless tourists and sightseers were hampering the steady flow of what, in these parts, was usually sparse traffic.

Ten firefighters had been trapped in a sudden hotspot in the Eagle Bar Fire section. All avenues of escape had been cut off by the encircling walls of flames. Anyone close to the scene, aware that the ten endangered men had to be plucked out by helicopter, realized how out of control the situation was becoming.

C’mon, c’mon, shouted Bugger, a Vietnam vet pilot who seemed to be holding the roaring chopper in suspension by the strength of his wrists alone. In his forties, retrained as a ‘copter pilot specializing in circumstances where rappelling was essential, he was tough, seasoned and accustomed to hazardous situations. The ache in his teeth, clenched behind a tightlipped grimace separating the long straggly ends of his graying mustache, attested to the effort.

Hot sparks were scattering like huge, voracious fireflies igniting drought-dried limbs even before they touched.

C’mon!

Dangling by the horse-collar above the swirls of acrid smoke during the hastily rigged emergency rescue, the harshly seasoned firefighters knew they were being lifted out of the jaws of Hell. And none too soon. The last few to be pulled up were always the most anxious. Every moment counted and every moment they had to await their turn seemed a lifetime.

Help him get aboard, Bugger shouted hoarsely to Beethead, his ‘Nam buddy who had retrained with him for Forest Service. Not being able to separate at the end of the war, they had remained almost symbiotically attached to one another and, without discussion, paralleled their lives. Hurry it the hell up!

It’ll take as long as it takes, Beethead said easily, but he was working with quick, steady, nerveless precision while Bugger breathed his tension in and out with grunts and groans.

The ferocious sound of the fire was almost worse than the parching heat and the blankets of soot and ash spreading over miles of acres yet unscorched.

As the helicopter rescue scene played itself out over and over, the dangling bodies swayed in the hot wind for what seemed like interminable moments of helpless vulnerability until the gaping opening of the chopper’s belly was reached.

Finally.

Thanks, guys...

Safety. Coughing. Grim relief.

C’mon, c’mon. Get aboard! Bugger ordered brusquely, pushing aside the ‘thanks.’ You think this is the only fuckin’ hotspot around?

Months, Jane murmured aloud to herself inside the blue Ford tightly sealed against the smoke. That’s how long its been going on, she thought.

Seven separate fires raging through 375,000 acres of Yellowstone Park alone. Here, the danger was just as ominously real. Storm Creek Fire, their fire, was just west of Cooke City and slowly heading East in their direction. It consisted of 100,000 acres of 200 foot high flames.

Storm Creek Fire, Jane thought a bit derisively. Like the names given to hurricanes, each of the fires had such a pretty name. Fan Fire, North Fork Fire, Lovely Fire, Clover Mist Fire, Cub Fire, Mink Creek Fire, Falls Fire, Madison Fire.

Nothing in the names spoke of the death and destruction in their wakes.

She hated the fires. Hated that there had been no rain since well before Memorial Day and that Yellowstone was parched. The ubiquitous lodge pole pines contained less moisture than dead wood. It was as though they had been baked in a monstrous kiln. With lightening strikes, dead wood, fuel littering the forest floor jumped easily into flames. Jane resented that her world was burning up around her, resented being forced to deal with it when there were so many emotional priorities to consider.

But it was all anyone could think of since the strikes of lightning set off the first blaze in the drought plagued Park some time in late June. The decision to let it burn created the first controversy.

Let ‘em burn! was one of the conservationist policies Jane hated.

Fires rejuvenate the forest, was another.

To Jane, all she could think of was that forest fires burned and killed, not only trees, underbrush and flowers, but wildlife as well. Hundreds of Elks alone would perish by the time the fires were extinguished. And what of the homes in the path of a 200 foot wall of fire, she thought. Fires were freakishly erratic. One never knew whose home would get licked up out of existence. Maybe even her own.

She coughed in one quick rasp of discomfort as she drove closer to one of the fire stations where she was hoping to find Gloria Lunde’s son, Tim. No reason other than to ask him outright if he thought she and her mother would have to evacuate, she told herself. If anybody would know, Tim would tell her straight. No matter what had or, more to the point, had stopped happening between them, Tim was always honest with her. At times brutally so.

Jane jerked the Ford to a stop at the huge fire camp that supported the fighters on the Eastern wall of the fires. If she could find him amidst all the activity, which gave every impression of confusion but, in actuality, was professional, methodical and well organized, this was where Gloria told her he would be.

Fire Crew Units of Rangers were sprawled in groups between open cargo trailers with heavy support equipment. Unit chiefs were briskly communicating intently with each other.

It took a full ten minutes before she finally spotted the familiar six-foot-two lanky figure of Tim Lunde in his Forest Service uniform, as usual looking accidentally elegant. He was standing with a group of Rangers dominated by the huge bulk of Big Ben Sharkson, the Incident Commander of the Forest Service.

Tim, she thought with a subtle ache somewhere deep inside of her rejected desires. He had made such a decisive point of avoiding her. She hadn’t seen him in months, not since the first lightening strike alerted the Rangers to the onset of the burn season. She tried to blame their separation on the work now consuming every Ranger in Yellowstone and its surrounding area, but Jane knew, down deep, that was not the reason he was avoiding her.

They had known each other practically all their lives. In another time and place, nothing and no one, could have wedged between them. It had always been there from the first time they had seen each other on the school playground when she was eight and he was eleven. They had stopped in their play, their movements suddenly immobilized, staring at each other across the sliding pond for a long moment, she, intrigued by the boy’s sudden intensity, he, by the brilliance of green eyes he had never seen before and the honey colored hair that looked to the boy like a tossed salad. Slowly he came around to her and took the hand she extended to him. They found themselves laughing aloud as they began to run, nowhere in particular, just running, instinctively, as though being together abruptly canceled out the rest of the world. From their beginning moments together on the playground, they were inseparable. Few could enter their private world, not even her mother, Valerie, or his mother, Gloria. Never understanding the source of their attraction to each other themselves, they simply accepted it.

The moment Tim spotted her, an ache began to develop somewhere deep inside him. He hesitated before he waved to her with a slow smile. This was not the time for personal problems right now, he thought. He knew he couldn’t avoid her here. The crisis burning around them was reason enough to necessitate putting personal matters on hold anyway, he told himself, denying to himself the familiar keen surge of pleasure he felt at seeing her again. Now that he had finally been able to put her in the proper perspective in his life, he could be friendly again, he thought, as long as he kept the relationship tightly bound within the parameters of friendship. With their volatile history, that was the only safe place. He couldn’t let himself get drawn in again. There were still too many raw aches.

Tired as he was from long hours on the fire line, he didn’t know if he could deal with it right now. He wished she would drive away, not wait for him to come over to her car. But he knew she was not going to leave.

Looking away, trying to concentrate on the words of John Elmer, a friend with whom he had gone to Forestry School, Tim found himself remembering how tall she was for a girl, five-seven or so. At the age of twelve, she was even taller than he. It took a few years for him to catch up and finally pass her in height. It had been an important contest to the boy. He had always been drawn to her brightness and her brashness. Mostly, he had been drawn to her wild imagination. But Jane’s agenda had always been quietly, but tenaciously, full of unsolved mysteries from her past.

Her mother’s past, anyway. The bitterly divisive vision of her mother, Valerie, instantly flashed across his mind.

Now that he had finally untangled himself, he stubbornly ignored the void the disentanglement had left in his private world. It was too late anyway. It didn‘t matter anymore. He had just become engaged to Allison.

Tim turned to John who was still attempting to get his attention. Tim tried to listen but his racing thoughts were drowning out the sound of John’s voice. From the corner of his eye he saw that she had not moved the Ford. He knew she was expecting him to cross over to her. Well why not. What was there to be afraid of! He was a Ranger and she was a citizen in potential peril he argued with himself foolishly. Even without looking at her directly, he knew she was staring at him patiently with those green eyes!

F’Christ sake, John Elmer exploded impatiently, knowing that Tim had not heard a word he had said. Go talk to her! You haven’t been listening anyway!.

Tim sighed an apology. Look, I’ll talk to you later, okay? he said to John.

Yeah, yeah, sure, John scoffed over his shoulder, as he walked away. Everyone knew about Tim and Jane.

Tim turned to her.

Hi! he finally called out to her.

What’s the latest? she called back to him, her question forcing him across the road to her. He could no longer deny that she had no intention of leaving until they spoke.

Terrible, he called back bounding across the filthy black road to the side of her car. Newly paved at the beginning of the tourist season, the road had been a beautiful clear grey-white only a short time ago. Now every boot that touched it was grotesquely engraved on its surface like huge smudged fingerprints. Tim leaned against the side of Jane’s car smelling like the inside of a well-used fireplace. Close up, his uniform was smudged and wrinkled as though he had been sleeping in it at a camp near one of the fire sources and his white-yellow hair, usually sparkling like a TV commercial, was darkly matted with gray soot. She could tell that he was tired and harried.

It’s going like wildfire, he said grimly, determined to keep the conversation impersonal, and then he suddenly grinned in that warm way he had that always sculpted his face back to boyhood, Pardon the pun, he quipped.

She heard Big Ben Sharkson barking orders in the middle of the group. His booming voice was impossible to miss. God-damned fuckin’ greenhorns... they heard. She could sense the tension in his voice.

How are the guys? she asked.

Holding up, holding on, hanging in. At least they’re not caving in, even under Big Ben, he laughed softly.

They could use a break, Ill bet.

And a few laughs, he said. His blue eyes always had a trace of impertinence in them. I used to know a funny joke once, he grinned. He was okay. He was in control. I could tell it to them now. Brighten things up a bit. If I could remember it. But you know me. Brain like a sieve.

They softly burst out laughing. Despite their estrangement, there was always a hushed familiar joy whenever they saw each other.

Besides, he added, "We are on break. This is it."

You going in again?

He nodded.

They instinctively ducked as two huge low-flying Chinook helicopters roared low above their heads.

Big Ben’s voice burst up toward the racing helicopters. S’about time! he shouted, shaking his fist up at the sky.

Listen to that guy, Tim yelled over the sound, looking over at the big man.. Nothing but a 9th grade education. Still, he joked, without guys like him, who’d be around to hire us college grads.

She choked with giggles. When the thundering sound of the ‘copters had passed, he let himself look at her more closely, What about you? he asked quietly. How you doing?

Me? I’m an emotional cliché´ these days, Jane said laughing lightly at herself. Climbing the walls. Jumping out of my skin.

A moment passed as she looked up at him. The last six weeks seemed to disappear as they found themselves smiling at each other without words.

Hey, who isn’t, he finally admitted, ignoring the familiar intimacy.

Rough?

Scary as hell, he confessed turning his eyes away from hers again.

She looked at him with the apprehensive awareness of the dangers he and the other fighters faced on the line. Their fear of the imminent unknown, unacknowledged, yet always palpable, renewed the appreciation of the heavy demands on them. No matter how stoic they appeared, she knew they were acutely aware that when dealing with forest fires, there was always the grotesquely capricious element of the unknown, just behind where it could not be seen but where it could strike without warning.

What about where we are? Jane asked.

By Grange hill?

Yes, she said trying to hide her anxiety behind an edge of flippancy. It may need a new paint job, but it’s all we’ve got.

Look, he said very seriously now, the professional Ranger coming to the fore. So far, so good in that direction. But keep an ear to the bulletins. There was no mistaking the warning in his tone. That section hasn’t been put on evacuation alert yet. But who the hell knows!

And Yellowstone? she persisted. I just heard that the northeastern entrance near us has been shut down.

He nodded his head grimly. It’s not good. Reports are that there are at least seven major fires going down there, Tim was saying almost in echo of her thoughts. They’re pretty much getting out of control all over the place. The suppression ground crews haven’t been able to make a dent.

Yellowstone’s Canyon Village, close to the very center of the national park, was already seriously threatened by the North Fork Fire and although firefighters were concentrating their counter-efforts in an attempt to force the 100,000 acre fire into moving north of Canyon Village, Jane had heard that many roads were blocked and cut off. Almost a thousand tourists had already started the evacuation process from the famous campgrounds. The beautiful lodge she had visited again only last summer with her mother, Valerie, the two of them looking like sisters, the stores they’d shopped in, the restaurants where they’d eaten. The wooden tourist cabins, now ominously covered with a thick black coat of soot, were deserted and desperately vulnerable to the approaching walls of flame.

At the time, Jane had refused to acknowledge the tensions Valerie had brought to the outing Jane had insisted on. Valerie’s mind always seemed to be somewhere else as she stared at the campgrounds. Not like the ocean, she had murmured. I prefer salt in the air.

Salt. It never made too much sense. Always unwittingly teasing about unshared secrets from a life before Jane was born.

Jane watched Tim take out a huge ash-colored handkerchief to wipe the back of his neck. Christ! I could do with an ice cold shower, he grumbled as he looked at the haze and acrid smoke shrouding the afternoon sun.

Jane, listen, he said abruptly turning back to her, his blue eyes flashing with frank urgency. I’m not going to kid you. Get hold of your mother. Keep her nearby, he said with a subtle meaning she understood only too well. Don’t let her out of your sight, and stay ready, he urged. Be ready for anything, he warned. The damn thing can jump in any direction in less than a minute.

Hey, Tim! Big Ben called rudely, "What the hell!"

Coming. He looked at her seriously before turning away. See ya, he called over his shoulder as he started back to the Ranger group.

Tim!

He stopped and slowly walked back to her. Yeah?

Take care of yourself, she whispered.

He nodded.

And Tim....

He waited, the dull familiar ache settling hard in the pit of his stomach.

It’s good to see you.

Yeah, you too, he muttered and slowly walked back to the Rangers waiting for him. Damn!

As the men at the fire camp busied themselves rechecking the more than sixty pounds of equipment they would each carry into the fight, Initial Attack teams, Helitack crews and Hotshots were regrouping in order to be sent out all along the lines again. Big Ben continued to shout at the Battalion Chief on his intercom, demanding that more natural resource teams be flown in. His men had been on steady, near round-the-clock duty for a month. Their ongoing training kept them in sturdy physical strength but they were showing signs of excessive fatigue. He wanted some relief for them. Tired firefighters were often a great danger to themselves. Where are the fuckin’ extra teams we been promised!

Listening to Big Ben, John Elmer shook his head and looked over at Tim with a tired, friendly grin as they each reassembled their packs. Hey, he deliberately teased his friend good naturedly. How’s Allison?

Tim’s angry Fuck off! stunned him. It was more explosive than he had ever heard from Tim. John muttered a quick apology and backed off, unnecessarily adjusting his hi-visibility vest for the third time. They were on a brief break after a sixteen-hour shift on the line. Maybe Tim was even more tired than he was. Then again, bringing up Allison when he had just been talking to Jane...well, he thought, not cool. He shook his head at his own blunder.

Despite Tim’s urgent warning, Jane didn’t want to think about the fires, or evacuation, or her mother, Valerie, or anything! She wanted to think only of Tim. How he stood so close by her window and yet remained so distant. How he looked. The sound of his voice, how, despite his resolve, she could feel his eyes embracing her as he lowered his voice and looked directly at her. She did not realize how much she had missed him until she watched him walking away from her.

At first, her anger at his rejection insulated her. Now all protection seemed to be stripped away and she wanted to cry. But she wouldn’t. She blamed instead the wall of smoke that was watering her eyes during the short time she had her car window open to talk to Tim.

An unexpected sob surged in the back her throat. She swallowed hard, stubbornly refusing to give vent to all the anxieties converging in her mind at the same time: the approaching fires; possible evacuation; Tim’s rejection; the awesome dangers he faced every day; her mother’s illness closing in on them again.

But despite the confusion created by all the conflicting stresses, Tim’s warning kept echoing back to her as she drove off. She had to pay attention. Keep her nearby. Don’t let her out of your sight.

Beautiful Valerie, Jane thought with a surge of bitterness. From the time Jane could remember she had always called her mother by her first name. She never questioned it. Valerie was only 43 years old but she looked younger than her years, with the kind of thick, naturally wavy raven hair that Jane had always secretly envied. And although they were often mistaken for sisters, Jane was only quietly pretty. It was Valerie who was the beauty. She had skin like the proverbial porcelain doll, a body that still made men ache, Jane smiled to herself, and delicate nerves that had always kept her out of life.

The smile faded at the sudden sense of...of what? Of waste, she thought as she wiped her eyes.

Damn the smoke.

What a time for Valerie to get sick again Jane thought resentfully. Tim knew. He could always tell. His clear perceptions about her mother had contributed greatly to the growing bitterness that ultimately drove him away from her.

Valerie was definitely looking as though she was taking a nervous turn for the worse, more serious than Jane wanted to admit. It was a desolate feeling to watch her mother incrementally deteriorating before her eyes. Only last night, she had spent the entire evening compulsively rearranging items in the living room. A nervous habit. One that brought her even greater distress than it brought Jane watching her going through her obsessively relentless reorganization.

It’s never quite right, you see, Valerie had said worriedly. It’s not the same.

The same as what? Jane thought disheartened as she watched Valerie move the tall delicate figurine off the mantel and place it on the end table. Then back again. Then on the other side of the mantel.

Jane felt guilty for the conscious resentments she couldn’t help harboring. She almost welcomed the feeling. The guilt placated her sense of disloyalty. After all, it wasn’t really Valerie’s fault. The last time she showed this much obsessive behavior, it was the preamble to an intensely prolonged period of serious illness. Even now, it was difficult for Jane to acknowledge the alarming diagnosis at the time: ‘nervous breakdown.’ She had had to accept it. Still, sometimes Jane couldn’t help becoming angry at the impact it had on her own life. As a girl, growing up under the perennial clouds of Valerie’s brooding moods, she couldn’t help getting caught up in what she sometimes interpreted as the self-centeredness of her mother’s constant depression. The emotional impact of those feelings only made her feel more guilty. How could she be so disloyal? Val had always been there whenever the child needed her. Listening to Jane’s daydreams. Telling her of her own. Sharing with her, through photos in an old photo album, the intimacies of her past, embroidered with a sense of beauty and romance as though it came out of a fairy tale, but always stopping short of what was to be an elusive ending. An ending that Jane was sure had to do with her missing father.

There it was again. Him.

To Jane, the most important question that Val always avoided, the root of her own passion was, which of the faces in Val’s album was his, the man Val would never speak about. Negating to herself the romantic visions that always illuminated her mother’s depiction of the people in the photos, Jane’s missing father had always subconsciously fueled the search for answers. There was an aching need to know who he was. Maybe he was one of the handsome young men of her mother’s youth captured again and again in the bright photos set against the ebony pages. The album continued to conjure up images of another life, another time, another world gone somehow. Lost to her mother. Lost to her too by virtue of never having been a part of it.

Inevitably, after a while, the girl began confusing her mother’s stories with her own. She could not understand the undercurrent of hostility in Val’s disapproval when Jane became too engrossed in it. You don’t understand! It’s dangerous. her mother warned her. But warned her of what?

Never any answers. Just secrets.

And the silences. Sometimes that was the worst part, Jane thought. Seeing Val stare off into some inner world. Jane instinctively knew that somewhere in that lost world was the answer to her mother’s illness hidden between the covers of a photo album. And ever since Jane could remember, always the feeling that something terrible was going to happen.

As an early teenager, when Jane’s need for self-identification was the strongest, when her rebellious nature was not yet softened with the tact of maturity, they had many arguments about him.

I have a right to know! Jane would scream.

And then the arguing stopped when Jane realized that Valerie had started to develop the first frightening signs of severe emotional instability. The strain of all the secrets of her past life had finally reached her present life.

One day, when Jane was less than fifteen, Valerie had been found by state troopers wandering miles away from where she had simply walked away from her car, motor still running, walking along the edge of the highway. And Jane realized with a maturity far past her years that she would have to stop pressuring her mother. The tables of authority between parent and child had begun to shift as early as that.

Jane was not consciously aware of the turmoil reflected in her emotional shifts regarding her mother. Sometimes the extent of her resentments went beyond her most hostile imaginings. There was a betrayal of trust.

But who had betrayed whom?

It had been Tim who made her talk, made her realize that what she was feeling was the natural anger of those who are left to live in its wake when a consuming illness dominates everyday life.

It was around that time that her mother’s photo album disappeared.

Last night it had taken a long time to persuade Valerie that everything in the room looked perfect. But in the morning, Jane found every item in the room had been rearranged again during the night.

Do me a favor, Val.

Of course. What?

Don’t go out today. I shouldn’t be gone too long and...

Oh, I have no intention of going anywhere, she said quickly cutting her off. I’m so sick of all that smoke. I have everything I need right here.

Jane was relieved. Promise? she said gently.

Promise what?

That you’ll stay home.

Of course, her mother said almost gaily.

It’s just in case I have to get to you in a hurry, Jane explained a bit lamely.

A hurry? How silly you are, she scoffed with a smile. Now don’t go making a face, Jane. All right, she said, all right. I promise.

Why had Valerie locked the door? They usually left it unlocked without concern for intrusion. From the moment she turned the key, Jane knew something was wrong. There was the smell of burnt coffee in the air. Or was it only that everything smelled scorched to her these days?

Valerie? Jane called out to the empty room.

Valerie had promised her she would not go out. But she wasn’t around. And now she may have to know where she was at a moment’s notice.

Jane would bring up the subject of packing tonight, calmly over dinner. She couldn’t put it off any longer. She knew she would have to tell her mother carefully. Val had seemed so much better this morning, bright, alert, even cheerful.

Damn! Where was she!

They would have to start making plans, thinking of where to store everything, where to go. They had no relatives. They would have to begin dealing with the possibility that they might not have a home left after this conflagration was over. Besides, sick or not, Valerie was no fool. Jane was sure her mother knew how serious the situation was.

Jane stood at the huge bay window that walled one side of their living room, To bring the fresh outside inside, Valerie always said, and wondered again where her mother had gotten the money to build such a beautiful house in this secluded wooded spot in southern Montana. Valerie never did tell her. But then, Valerie had many secrets that she shared with no one.

Evacuate, Jane thought grimly. The very idea was frightening. Packing up the books in the Velusia Library was one thing, straight, methodical, no thinking, just clear the shelves. But how does one pack up one’s life? To think of moving all of their belongings out of the way and then returning after the eventual all clear to find there was nowhere to restore them, that there no longer was a home...

In the deep distance beyond their window, she could see the smoke of Storm Creek. Storm Creek might just get around to them yet, even though it seemed too far away to pose a threat to Cooke City. Sometimes the apricot glow dominating the sky looked so pretty, even festive, hanging across the horizon like long strings of Chinese lanterns. But close by, the shadows seemed to have fingers crawling closer. She thought of Tim, wondering in fearful awe of the dangers in the center of a forest burning out of control.

And now there was Allison....

Outside Jane could hear a sudden hot wind raised to a howl like an angry animal of prey looking to devour the stillness of the night. It frightened her. She looked out again into the evening that glowed far off like a lazy sunset coming out of the west. Then, just as suddenly, the wind quieted down to a soft moaning whisper.

Something strange was happening, she thought uncomfortably. She found herself listening to the stillness through an eerie feeling of suspension.

Then she heard it; the soft static sound of the radio from behind the closed door of her mother’s bedroom. She could feel the hair on the back of her neck suddenly crawl into stiff attention.

Something was wrong.

She moved quickly towards the door, hesitated through a moment of intense dread, almost afraid of what she would find once she opened the door. Taking a deep breath, she grabbed the brass knob.

Someone keeps knocking at the door, she thought wildly somewhere in the back of her mind.

Why won’t it open? It actually took an intense moment of concentration to realize the door had been locked from within. She heard the static within the room clearer now. Dissonant. Grating. Continuing.

Valerie! she called.

Even though she shook the knob furiously and pounded on the door with the side of her fist, she knew her mother wouldn’t open it.

Drawer after drawer in the kitchen was yanked open before she could find the tools. The few moments it took to fidget with the screwdriver until the lock gave way seemed endless to her. But the door finally burst open.

There she was. Lying motionless on the floor, on the thick wool carpet at the foot of her bed. Her face, pressed against the lavender color of the carpet, seemed bloodless.

Valerie...

Chapter 2

Windstorms riding into the Northwest quadrant on cold fronts...

She’s okay for now, Doctor Andercroft said to her in the bustling hallway outside the emergency room. He was a strongly built, authoritative middle-aged man with hair so thick and black that, to Jane, it had always seemed like a Russian bear hat. It’s late, Jane. Go home now

I’ll wait ‘til they move her to a room.

We’re not going to move her yet. His voice was clear and clipped with preoccupation. It was a busy night in the emergency room. Several firefighters had been brought in only an hour earlier with injuries sustained in a collision of fire trucks. We’ll keep her closely monitored here.

Was it a heart attack?

Maybe.

Maybe? What kind of an evasive answer was that, Jane thought tensely.

Now don’t get your nettle up, he said. Knowing your mother’s history, I’d say it’s more nerves than anything else.

I have to know the truth, Jane said stiffly.

She’s under observation, Dr. Andercroft said firmly. I’m not going to give you a diagnosis unless I know the whole story.

Then he looked at her closely and finally took her into the realm of his preoccupation. His voice suddenly softened. He knew how close they were. Now what are you worried about? he admonished gently. Would I ever let anything happen to your mother? You know I’ve always been a little in love with her. I’ll keep an eye on her...

His voice faded as Jane slipped into the busy world of her thoughts.

In love with her. Jane didn’t doubt it. Val was so beautiful and so helpless. Jane had often seen men bending over backwards to do things for her in order to become special to her. But Val rarely responded with anything other than friendly but indifferent acceptance of these attentions. Eventually it became known in Cooke City that Valerie Marcheson was disinterested. But no one seemed to mind that she was almost regally unavailable, and she was ultimately placed in a special category where she could be admired from afar, a spot in which no real intimacy was required.

When Jane became a teenager and began looking upon males as more than just schoolmates, she often wondered at her mother’s lack of interest in men, and she made up long romantic stories about a lost love and deeply unrequited or unfulfilled passions, still too in love with a ghost from the past, definitely one of the handsome men in the album, to seriously take anyone else who had to pale bitterly by comparison. Yes. Certainly. Someone in the album. Again, the visions lent a romantic air of mystery to her mother that Jane deliberately perpetuated in her fantasies.

The immediate crisis is over. She heard the doctor’s voice break through her racing thoughts, all of which were covered in less than an instant. Go home, Jane. Gently. Persuasively.

I’ll stay! she insisted.

Dr. Andercroft reached down and squeezed her hand reassuringly. She may look tender, he said now with the warm toothy smile Jane had known since she was a little girl, but she’s tougher than you’d think. Now don’t get yourself all worked up. Stick around if you have to for while, but you’d better get some rest, he ordered. You look worse than she does.

And he was off before she could question him further. She watched him walk away down the hallway of the emergency room pressed by the needs of other patients. He called over his shoulder, Go to bed, Jane...

How often Jane had heard those very words.

Go to bed, Jane, Val would say softly.

Often battling the demons of insomnia, Val was never one to go to bed early, so from the time Jane could remember, they often spoke late into the night, until the child’s head would nod with fatigue.

Go to bed now, Jane.

Echoes.....

Little Jane would hear Val’s gentle voice through the haze of the approaching sleep she tried to resist.

Then Jane would smile lightly, get up and see herself to bed.

And Val would stay up doing whatever it was she did all those long hours she spent alone at night before she was able to close her own eyes. Jane never knew what time she went to bed. She only knew that Val never rested her head on her pillow until the late hours of the night. Still, in the morning, Val was always up before Jane, breakfast prepared, a melancholy little smile of welcome on her face.

Then, the last few years, after that alarming incident when she had been found wandering the highway, Val no longer made breakfast. Instead, every morning, she would go out walking no matter what the weather, even if it was wet and so brittle that the clouds seemed to be spitting rain. Gracefully muscular from so much hiking through difficult crunchy trails, Val would come back flushed, windblown, beautiful and always preoccupied. Valerie’s morning hikes worried Jane. They seemed to be driven by a haunted inner compulsion Jane could not identify.

Sometimes Jane looked up and found her mother staring at her strangely, as though puzzled.

What is it? Jane would ask.

Jane could almost see Val shake herself free of her rigid self-absorption and smile. Nothing, she would say. The reflective look would instantly vanish as she came back to the present moment from her inner travels to a past in which Jane could not participate.

Alone in an isolated corner of the emergency room corridor at the hospital, Jane could not sit still. Dr. Andercroft’s comforting words were not enough to assuage her anxiety. Val had seemed dead when Jane called for emergency help. Was she breathing? Was she alive? She had to see Valerie for herself before she could leave the hospital.

Silently, unobserved, she moved into the bay in the Emergency room where Val was lying immobile behind the pale green curtain that isolated her from other patients. She moved to the side of the bed where Val lay looking frail and pale against crisp white sheets. She touched her mother’s thin arm lightly above the point where the intrusion of IV tubes penetrated her delicate skin.

To her surprise, Val shook off her hand so suddenly that the IV pole to which she was attached rattled and slid closer to the bed on its casters. With her eyes shut tight, Val grabbed Jane’s hand in a viselike grasp. Her lips moved slowly. She was trying to say something. Startled, Jane moved close and put her ear next to her mother’s mouth. At first she could not understand her words. Then finally, after several attempts, Jane could make out Val’s raspy whisper. Burn it.

What...?

Find it...in the...back of log bin...burn it.

Startled, Jane fell away from the bed. Once the words were out, Val’s grip on her hand softened. Her face slipped back into an unclenched pose and she seemed to fall into a deep, heavy, impenetrable sleep.

Jane knew immediately what Val was talking about although neither one of them had mentioned the album ever since it disappeared, several years ago.

She slipped out of the emergency room and leaned against the gray corridor wall outside the room. In the back of the log bin. So that’s where she