I ignored them all, stomping down the aisle and gaining a bit of feeling in my feet once I passed the potbelly stove that warmed our home away from home.
Shorty was lounging on his bunk with a magazine, my clothes and towel folded neatly beside him. He kept his rapt attention on the article until I cleared my throat loud enough to be heard over the growing snickers.
He looked up, a smile spreading across his face. “Gordon! Just the fellow I wanted to see. Seems there was a mix-up, and I took both of our clothes by mistake. Awful sorry about that.”
“Mistake, my eye,” I grumbled, though I shouldn’t have wasted my breath since he couldn’t hear me over the other fellows laughing and cheering. I grabbed my clothes, and, turning away for as much modesty as you could have in a communal bunkhouse, dropped the towel and Morrissey’s coat to yank them on again.
He nodded to the coat, now discarded on the floor like a banana peel. “Who rescued you, huh?”
“Morrissey.”
“Better than I could have planned it.” He grinned with such enthusiasm that I almost felt the corners of my mouth tilting up too, the traitors. That was the thing about Shorty. If you could stay mad at him for five consecutive minutes, you were a stronger man than most.
“If I get pneumonia and die, I’m blaming you.” I folded the towel I’d worn to give it back to Lloyd. “One minute you’re offering to do me a favor; the next you’re pulling a stunt like this.”
“This was your payment, that’s all.”
I flicked some dirt off the sleeve of the mackinaw where it had dragged on the path, then tucked it into a neat bundle. As I did, a piece of paper and a gum wrapper fell out of the pocket.
I passed the jacket to Shorty. “Here. You can give this back to Morrissey. It’ll give you an excuse to stop by his office.”
“What am I, the dry cleaner?” Shorty grumbled, but he took it anyway, returning to his magazine with a self-satisfied smile. He’d milk this story for the rest of his life, probably.
Before Thomas could come by and accuse me of trashing the bunkhouse, I picked up the litter that had fallen from the pocket of Morrissey’s jacket . . . and hesitated. Was that . . . ?
I unfolded the paper. Yes. Written in smudgy pencil inside the torn edges were four Japanese characters.
Dorie is going to want to hear about this.
FROM DORIE TO HER PARENTS
January 22, 1945
Dear Mother and Daddy,
The army managed to get word to me about Jack’s death. I didn’t believe it at first. Now I just feel numb, as if I’ll go to sleep and tomorrow morning someone will tell me it was all a mistake.
But I know they won’t. That’s the worst part of it.
I wish I could be there with you right now. Which is why I hate to give you more bad news.
I’m sorry, but I can’t come home for Jack’s funeral, not right now. I know you’d want me there, but trust me that I’m on a mission of great importance and can’t leave yet. If anyone in the family asks after me, I wouldn’t want them to think . . . well, that I wasn’t there because I was still angry. I guess you could tell them—oh, what are you supposed to say? All the neighbors, all the relatives know Jack and I quarreled before we left. I’m sure the whole town knows. It all seems so far away and pointless now.
We were hard on Jack, me most of all, but he knew we loved him. He must have. I only wish I’d said it more, near the end.
I asked a fellow here, Thomas, who knows Scripture better than me to suggest a psalm someone like Jack might like. He said the end of Psalm 85. I read it tonight, and it’s lovely. All about righteousness and peace and truth and heaven. Could you read that at the funeral on my behalf? I’ll make it up to you when I finally can come home, I promise.
All my love,
Dorie
INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES MAYES
January 23, 1945
Notes: Completed while unloading a delivery truck into the kitchen. How a camp of around forty people can eat so many loaves of white bread is beyond me.
Me: Tell me, Mr. Mayes, do you have any regrets about applying for conscientious objector status?
Charlie: Of course not. The army doesn’t want my kind anyway.
Me: Now, that’s just not true. There are plenty of black soldiers. Several of them served at Fort Lawton in Seattle where I was assigned.
Charlie: Mm-hmm. Then you’d know. Did they serve with the other troops? Eat with them? Were they treated just the same?
Me: I . . . well, no. It’s not the way things are done.
Charlie: Mm-hmm. See, when Uncle Sam jabs that finger of his off a poster and says he wants “you,” he means he wants the white boys. Now, I don’t believe in violence, but even if I did, I wouldn’t put my life on the line for a country that took every chance it could get to shove me to the side. That’s just fool’s talk. But here, stuck in the middle of nowhere with nobody but each other, we’re brothers.
Me: I have noticed that. It’s . . . different.
Charlie: There’s a lot about us that’s different. You be sure to put that in your report. The army could learn a thing or two. When the whole rest of the world called us “yellow,” we stopped caring so much about who was black and who was white.
Me: So the COs all get along with each other, you’d say? And with the other rangers?
Charlie: Well enough. We’ve had some trouble with the boys from town. But it hasn’t been bad.
Me: What about that fellow who was killed in the fire? Everyone seems shaken by his death.
Charlie: Sure. We all loved Jack.
Me: It seems strange that there was a fire so close to a smokejumper base. Like some safety measure wasn’t being followed, maybe?
Charlie: I don’t know about that, but I’ve never seen a man so worried about safety as Earl Morrissey. All those lectures, shouting us through drills over and over, making us repeat our instructions like they were Scripture. He was shook up by what happened to Jack.
Me: Is that so? How can you tell?
Charlie: Well, for one thing, he asked to borrow my camera so he could take some pictures of the site.
Me: A camera? What good would photographs do?
Charlie: Mr. Morrissey said maybe he’d see something that could help keep it from happening again.
Me: Was there anything in the pictures that seemed . . . helpful?
Charlie: Can’t say, ma’am. Mr. Morrissey takes them to get developed, and he kept those and gave me the rest, mostly nature photos and birds. Ask me, I don’t think it’ll do much. You can’t prevent wildfires. You can only fight them—and sometimes it’s too late even to do that.
CHAPTER 21
Gordon Hooper
January 23, 1945
The woodpecker’s tufted head took shape under my pencil, beak aimed at the bark to bore out the beetles huddled inside. Just a few strokes at the nape, and I was ready to complete the most important part of the illustration: the eyes. I rounded the curve, shading life into the empty spheres—
“Good afternoon, Gordon!”
My hand jerked, giving the woodpecker a droop of false eyelashes, and I looked up to see Dorie swinging open the cabin door. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that,” I snapped, hacking my eraser with a pocketknife to get the point small enough to fix the blunder.
It’s not her fault. You’re the one who told her to meet you here. But I couldn’t admit that, couldn’t apologize to Dorie again. Once had been more than enough.
Dorie didn’t seem bothered by my outburst, stamping her feet on the thick mat by the door and wrinkling her cold-reddened nose in my direction. “If you didn’t hear the porch creaking to kingdom come on my way in, you’ll make a pretty poor detective.” She shivered and inspected the fireplace, standing empty against the wall. “Guess I won’t be taking my coat off. Aren’t you going to light that thing? It’s freezing in here.”
“I hadn’t noticed.” The chill focused my mind, and the birds that chatte
red in the trees just outside the cabin window helped set the mood. Those, at least, were the excuses I’d tried on Morrissey to get permission to use one of the empty tourist cabins by Antlers Trail to work on my sketches, since I couldn’t tell him I needed a place away from the other boys for a meeting with Dorie.
“I have news.” She turned the unoccupied wooden chair backward and sat with her legs sidesaddle, her wool beret askew and eyes bright. That was the thing about her that had caught my attention three years ago: Dorie crackled with energy. Every ordinary conversation with her turned into a Hollywood scene. “We might’ve finally caught a break.”
I forced myself to turn my attention back to the sketch in front of me, feathering out the woodpecker’s downy body. “Tell me it’s better than your news from breakfast.”
After I’d surreptitiously slipped her the paper with the Japanese characters wrapped inside a napkin, feeling for all the world like a criminal, we’d had a stilted conversation by the coffeepot, pausing when anyone came close enough to overhear. Eventually, I found out that Morrissey had been at a training for six hours before the fire—a story she’d verified with several witnesses.
Which meant Morrissey couldn’t have set the fire himself for a controlled burn experiment. That theory, logical as it had seemed at the time, also didn’t fit with the army jeeps Lloyd reported, which I’d also told Dorie about. So we were back to the drawing board, so to speak.
“Nice illustration. I bet Charlie took those, didn’t he?” Dorie said, nodding at the photographs I’d spread out on the small pine table in front of me. I’d brought only the woodpecker and golden eagle, each shot from a few different angles.
“How’d you know?” I said, trying to shield my drawing from her. Suddenly, all I could see was what was wrong with it: the too-straight edges, the uneven shading on the wings, the roughed-in bark that looked like a child’s scribble.
Dorie, though, didn’t seem to be in the mindset of an art critic. “I interviewed Charlie after breakfast. And, Gordon, you’ll never guess—he told me Mr. Morrissey borrowed his camera to take pictures near the fire.”
“You didn’t give me much time to guess.” I gave a final pass over the bird’s neck before moving on to texture the branch it perched on. Get the major things in place first, then fill in the details—that was how my artistic process worked.
There was a beat of quiet, enough to make me look up and see Dorie tilting her head severely at me. “I don’t think you understand. There are pictures, Gordon. Actual photographic evidence of—” she flailed her hand in the air—“well, something. And Morrissey has them tucked away somewhere.”
“Which means we’ll never get our hands on them.”
“Oh ye of little faith.”
I knew Thomas would say that wasn’t the proper biblical context for that particular expression.
“What about the jeeps Lloyd told me about? How is the army involved?” I hadn’t had time to ask that at breakfast, even after Dorie “accidentally” spilled coffee on her sleeve and borrowed my handkerchief to blot it out.
Dorie licked a red-polished finger and paged through her notebook, as if the answer might be in there somewhere. “No idea. But it’s always this way in the best mysteries. Just when the detectives feel most confused, they find the clue that makes everything fit together.”
I barely kept from rolling my eyes, focusing on the drawing instead. “How many mystery novels or movies involve mysterious fires?”
“Plenty.” She sputtered for a moment. “Like in Jane Eyre, when Rochester’s house gets burned down. But that doesn’t help us, since we don’t have any delirious mad women wandering around.”
It was finally my chance to smirk. “Oh, I think we’ve got at least one.”
She shook her head sanctimoniously at me. “Why, Gordon, Edith Morrissey is the dearest person in the world, and you’re a brute for talking about her like that.”
“Very funny.” How did she do that? Always ready with a witty reply, when I only thought of good comebacks days afterward.
“Then there’s Dashiell Hammett—he’s the best living writer of hard-boiled detectives. He wrote a story called ‘Arson Plus’ in Black Mask magazine. It’s about a quirky inventor whose house burns down, killing him. The detectives think the servants murdered him, but something doesn’t quite fit.”
“So . . . how does it end?” I prompted.
“I don’t want to spoil it for you.”
“I am never going to read ‘Arson Plus.’ Or anything in Black Mask, for that matter.”
I glanced up from my sketch long enough to see a flash of pink as she stuck her tongue out at me. “Snob. It was the servants who set the fire, but the inventor is actually still alive. He planned the whole thing for life insurance money.” She twiddled her pencil against her cheek. “Say, do you know if Jack wrote you into his will?”
“Dorie!” That was going too far, even for her.
“Fine, fine.” She snapped her fingers. “I know! In Hitchcock’s Saboteur, an aircraft factory goes up in flames, and the hero runs to the rescue. A mysterious man hands him a fire extinguisher, but it turns out to be filled with . . .” She paused, slanting a dramatic look at me out of the corner of her eyes. “What do you guess?”
“Banana pudding,” I tried, mostly just to see the annoyed look that sprang onto her face, right on cue.
“It was filled with gasoline.”
“How is that even possible? For it to be correctly pressurized—”
“Oh, don’t ruin it, Gordon,” she interjected before I could finish, tossing her pencil at my head. It bounced off my shoulder and rolled across the oak drop-leaf table between us. “You have no imagination.”
This wasn’t helping us, only distracting me from my work. “Do you watch any movies that actually have artistic merit?”
Her eyes flicked to the window, widening slightly. Then, the next moment, her voice dropped into a husky register. “Well . . . I do like a good romance.”
What was going on? You’re imagining things.
“I don’t know how that relates—” I began.
She pursed her lips in a mock pout, leaning dramatically against the table. “Don’t be coy, Mr. Hooper. Do you mean to tell me romance wasn’t on your mind when you invited me to meet you here?”
Even as she said the words, she motioned for me to pass her my pencil.
I did, and she wrote person by window on the corner of my sketch.
Sure enough, I saw a shadow through the calico curtain, blocking the incoming light.
Someone was watching us.
“N-no,” I stammered, not sure what I was supposed to say but realizing I had to fill the air with something. “I thought you’d like to see my bird sketches, that’s all.”
Her laugh was like music. Like sleigh bells, I think I’d said once. She came up behind me and tugged on my chair, so I took the hint and stood. “Well, whatever you call it, I’d say this is a date. And whenever I go on a date with a soldier, I promise him one kiss before he ships out.”
Where was this headed?
She began edging closer, dancing around me so I had to turn my back to the door to see her. “No one’s ever managed to win my heart. Will you be the one, Mr. Hooper?”
And right there, with Dorie close enough for me to smell her floral perfume as she looked up at me under fluttering lashes, I knew.
It never would have worked.
Sometimes, in my weaker moments, I’d imagined what it would be like if Dorie changed her mind, wrote me a long letter saying that love could conquer any differences in disposition or beliefs.
And now here she was in front of me, all rashness and red lipstick, and it was easy to see that what we’d had together was as different from true love as a candle is from a wildfire.
“But what’s this? No uniform?” She made a tsking sound that brought me forward three years to the present, holding me at arm’s length for inspection. “It looks like you haven’t earne
d your kiss.”
“If that’s what I have to do to win your favor, I never will.”
For a moment, I saw her façade flicker. You know I mean it, don’t you, Dorie?
“At least you’re honest.” She smirked, knowing the listener wouldn’t realize the backward insult she’d delivered. “Well, I’d better get back to the camp. Wouldn’t want any rumors to get started.” She made for the door, hurrying the last several steps. “So long, Mr. Hooper. Best of luck with those birds.”
This time even I heard it, the squeaking groan of wood, pounding footsteps on the porch as whoever had been listening leapt the railing and ran. Dorie, craning her neck out the door, shoved it back inside. “Well?” she said, cold air whipping through the open door. “Don’t just stand there. Follow him!”
What good she thought it would do, I didn’t have time to ask. I just obeyed that command and ran after our silent eavesdropper, already with a good lead on me.
Whoever it was, he was jackrabbit fast. Branches trembled ahead of me from where the intruder had passed through, so the trail was easy to follow, but I couldn’t catch up.
My heart pounded with exertion—and questions. What had he seen? What had he heard? And why was he there in the first place?
Once, I spotted a glimpse of a dark coat disappearing into a stand of trees several dozen yards away. By then, my sides were heaving. Morning calisthenics or no, I wasn’t used to sprinting long distances. At least digging a fire line was slow and steady work.
When it was obvious I’d fallen too far behind, I circled back to the cabin. Dorie was waiting, pacing the cabin’s porch like she might wear a hole clean through it. “Well? Did you see who it was?” she called as I approached.
“No. You?”
She shook her head. “He vaulted off the porch straight into the trees before I could catch a look at his face. Even had a hat on, so I couldn’t get a hair color.”
“Do you think he heard anything?”
She shook her head. “I heard the floorboards creak right at the end, right before I . . . changed the mood.” She smirked, which meant I was blushing again. “Even if he did hear anything, it was only a list of mysteries.”
The Lines Between Us Page 18
