Seasons of Death

by M. K. Wren

  A bright, jagged line split the black sky down to the topmost ridge of Florida Mountain. He hadn’t reached a count of five before the thunder came bounding across Silver to War Eagle and back again. The rain, chill on his face, beat faster, and he smiled. That was more like it. He felt for the ashtray on the railing and put out his cigarette. Perhaps he should light a lamp in his room so it would be obvious that he was awake and standing guard. No. A light would only serve to blind the guard.

  Another white bolt danced briefly, awesomely, over Potosi Peak; the thunder was only four seconds behind it and this time had an authoritative crack. He felt his way to the door, arm extended. The rain was coming harder, and the wind was definitely cold. He needed his jacket.

  He found it in the dark and pulled it on as he returned to the balcony, pausing to make sure the flashlight was still outside by the doorjamb where he had left it. Lightning flared again as he crossed to the railing, and there he stood frozen, eyes straining into the darkness.

  He had seen something moving on the road below.

  Thunder rolled down the valley, then a new flash, and he saw it again: a figure hurrying away from the house toward the school. He spun around, scooped up his flashlight, and by its light made his way downstairs. But he flicked it off when he went out the front door, delved in his pocket for the key, and locked the door behind him. He reached out with his right hand as he crossed the porch, found the post, then the banister, and used that to guide him down the steps, then proceeded haltingly across the rough ground toward the road, hoping for lightning. It came when he had nearly reached the crab apples, illuminating a snow of wind-plucked petals, and ahead near the school, the hurrying figure.

  He took advantage of the next flash of lightning to run a few yards down the road; the footing was treacherous, the rain slicking the raw granite. The nightwalker was at the front corner of the schoolhouse now. Conan stumbled and went down on his hands and knees, swearing aloud as he got back to his feet. He’d nearly dropped his flashlight and succeeded in disorienting himself.

  Give me some light, damn it. And he almost laughed when a forked bolt obligingly ripped across the sky, throwing everything around him into etched relief. The hurrying figure was still ahead, turning south at Morning Star Street. Thunder rumbled as he pushed forward into the wind. He guessed he was near the corner when he saw a light to his left. The nightwalker had waited until the row of houses on the east side of the street would hide the flashlight from anyone watching at the Starbuck house. Conan followed the tiny, bobbing gleam, moving in fits and starts, reorienting himself with each flare of lightning.

  Just before he reached the Masonic Hall he stopped. His quarry was apparently taking the long way around by the bridge. He waited until the bobbing light disappeared behind the bulk of the building, then chanced using his own flashlight as he turned right through the wind-tossed willows on the short-cut across the creek. He didn’t waste time trying to stay to the stepping stones, only gritting his teeth as the frigid water splashed over his calves. Once past the creek, he turned off his flashlight, depending on the electric cataclysms in the sky. He had nearly reached the back of the store when he saw the sustained spark of the nightwalker’s flashlight above him on Jordan Street and still some distance to the south. He took advantage of another spate of lightning to get behind the store, and there, where its light would be hidden from the nightwalker, turned on his flashlight and made his way toward the open space between the store and the hotel. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time, but when he reached Jordan Street, his quarry was still moving toward him from the south.

  Conan pressed against the wall of the store, watching the approach of that bobbing light. He knew what—and even whom—he was pursuing; the only reason for his pursuit was that he didn’t know his quarry’s purpose in this nocturnal excursion. Yet at the moment, with the wind howling out of the darkness, with the very existence of a real world in doubt except when it was limned in jarring explosions of light, he wasn’t sure he’d be surprised if that bobbing beam revealed itself to be an incorporeal phenomenon of the storm.

  But it was quite corporeal. It was nearly abreast of him when a series of three flashes revealed its tangibility, as well as the identity of the nightwalker. Amanda Count. The hood of her jacket was up, but as she passed Conan, a gust of wind threw it back. Her hair seemed black in the white glare of lightning; no blonde wig tonight.

  She passed without seeing him; he remained motionless against the building. The question of her purpose still wasn’t answered. She couldn’t be carrying anything larger or more menacing than her small handgun. Conan moved to the wall of the vault to watch her as she went straight to the hotel’s front door, opened it carefully to avoid ringing the bells, then slipped inside and closed it behind her.

  Conan stood encompassed in darkness, face and hair drenched with the rain that came in driving sheets now, his pulse quickening with apprehension.

  Why had Amanda braved this storm to go to the Starbuck house?

  He turned, putting his back to the wind as he started down the steep slope between the buildings, and it was then that he saw a distant, snaking ribbon of yellow light.

  Fire. The Starbuck house—it was afire.

  A triple-tongued bolt streaked over War Eagle, and in its quivering flash Conan saw the house clearly; the ribbon of flame was halfway up the northeast corner of the parlor wing. Thunder pounded the ground beneath him as he started down the slope, then abruptly about-faced.

  Help—he had to get help…

  He ran for the hotel, footfalls thudding on the planks of the porch. The door was locked; he pounded at it, the shivering jangle of the bells ringing against a new barrage of thunder. “Jake! Jake Kulik!” A pair of lights glared out of the darkness to his left, beams sweeping up the front of the building.

  A car. Conan ran toward it, waving his arms, and when it skidded to a stop, heard a shouted inquiry. “What’s wrong here?”

  Sheriff Andy Newbolt. Conan didn’t have time to wonder at his opportune arrival. “Sheriff, the Starbuck house is on fire! I’m going—”

  “Who are—Flagg?”

  “Yes. Get some help. I’m going back to the house!”

  Newbolt reached for the dashboard and hit the siren. “What about Delia and—” But Conan was already sprinting toward the opening between the buildings. He plunged down the slope and ran for the creek, cursing the slippery stones as he sloshed across it, while behind him Newbolt’s siren screamed the alarm. He pushed through the willows up to Morning Star, wet branches slapping at his face. Then a clear run. The wind seemed to take the breath out of his open mouth, and his muscles ached at the demand made on them in the thin, high-altitude air. By the time he turned the corner at the schoolhouse, the yellow ribbon was fanning out and reaching for the roof. Conan drove his heavy limbs forward, his heart hammering. The road’s ruts and potholes were canyons and cliffs in the weaving circle of his flashlight. When he reached the crab apples, he saw another flashlight moving toward him. Dex Adler, a shadow figure emerging into the sulfurous glare of the fire.

  Conan shouted, “The generator! Get it on—and the water pump! I’m going after Delia and Clare!”

  Conan didn’t wait for Adler’s reply, nor when he reached the front door did he pause to find the key in his pocket. He bludgeoned the glass out with his flashlight, reached through the jagged frame and opened the door from inside, then kicked it back and ran through the sitting room to the hall. A ruddy light shone from within the parlor; the fire was breaking through the north wall. An acrid fog of smoke billowed into the hall. He heard cries from above and took the stairs three at a time. In the upper hall, his light struck two figures ghostlike in long gowns and robes, pale hair falling loose. Delia was shepherding Clare toward the stairs. “We’ll be all right, Clare, just don’t—Conan! Oh, thank the Lord…”

  “Come on, Delia—hurry!” He held the flashlight on the stairs while they started down, Clare whimpering and cli
nging to her sister. A tinderbox, he thought grimly; this historic relic was one huge tinderbox, every piece of wood in it a century dry. He recognized the grinding murmur: the fire eating at the walls. The beam of his flashlight was webbed in smoke, and when they reached the foot of the stairs, Clare began choking and coughing.

  “Hold your breath!” he ordered, pushing them on to the sitting room. Light shone through the open front door. Newbolt’s car was parked outside, its headlights fixed on the house, double bars shaped by captured rain and smoke. More headlights gleamed from the road; a pickup careened to a halt beside Newbolt’s car, and Jake Kulik, his son, Bill Cobb, and Laurie Franklin piled out. With shouts and gestures, Newbolt sent the men around to the north side of the house, while Laurie took Clare in hand and helped her and Delia to the shelter of the trees.

  Conan caught Newbolt’s arm. “Can you get any kind of real help here?”

  Newbolt’s face was grim in the frenetic light. “I radioed Homedale and Marsing. It’d take more than an hour to get a fire rig up here.”

  He didn’t have to add that it would be too late by then. Conan turned away and headed for the north wing. There in the carmine glare of the fire, Dex Adler commanded the counterassault on it. John Kulik was on a ladder against the wall of the rear wing, playing a stream of water from a garden hose on the flames engulfing the north wing, while his father was on the ground manning another hose, and Bill came swaying around the corner from the back of the house with two sloshing buckets.

  Adler called to Conan, “Delia and Clare—are they—”

  “They’re out. Around in front. What can I do?”

  Adler had a shovel in his hand, but as he turned toward the house, he threw it down; his angular face was slack with hopelessness. “Oh, God, I don’t know…”

  Conan nodded numbly. Garden hoses and buckets. The fire roared its disdain for those pitiful efforts, curtaining the walls, warping the corrugated metal on the roof. Even the torrents of rain didn’t deter this ravening beast, and the wind only goaded it on, driving tentacled sheets of flame before it.

  Adler shouted, “John, Bill—get away from that wall!”

  A dull rumble sounded from somewhere behind the house; it might have been thunder. Jake Kulik cried, “The water! There’s no more water!”

  Adler grimaced. “Generator blew. Come on—all we can do is try to save some of the furniture.” He led his erstwhile firefighters to the front of the house and directed the evacuation of the furniture out the front door. Conan doggedly hefted and carted with the others, joining the harried parade moving in and out of the smoke and glare. Chairs, tables, lamps, chests, armfuls of silver and china—it all seemed sardonically futile. He saw Lettie Burbage, wet hair plastered down on her forehead, go out the front door clasping a potted plant as if it were the crown jewels. Maggie and Vern Roseberry were there, too, Vern’s face an apoplectic pink, Maggie’s puffy cheeks streaked with tears and soot. The heat was as blinding as the smoke, the volume of sound staggering. The fire bellowed its jubilance, until at length Newbolt called a halt to the salvage operation.

  The defeated salvagers, with Conan trudging wearily in their wake, retreated toward the trees where they huddled like refugees in sodden coats and jackets over a motley of pajamas, nightgowns, and robes. Their eyes were fixed in a consistent attitude of bewilderment on the conflagration, all oblivious to the storm; its savage bolts and temblors seemed feeble against this storm of fire. It had totally engulfed the back and north wings now, and every window was orange. Fountains of embers and burning splinters rocketed on the roaring updraft, and the flames lighted a roiling pall of smoke. The harsh smell of it made breathing an effort even on the leeward side of the wind. The salvaged furniture was piled under the trees, forlorn and at the mercy of the rain, strewn with fallen blossoms.

  Delia slumped on the fender of Conan’s car clutching a man’s jacket around her. It was Adler’s, apparently. He stood nearby, his soaked, soot-smeared undershirt clinging to his bony torso, but he didn’t seem to feel the chill rain. Delia gazed bleakly at the fire, eyes reflecting the turbulent light. Conan glanced around at the numbed observers, noting absently that Laurie was weeping, and that Reub Sickle wasn’t among them. That seemed odd until he considered that even if Reub had heard Newbolt’s siren alarm, it would take him some time to reach Silver from his cabin. At the moment, Conan was more concerned with another absence.

  He leaned close to Delia, but even then she didn’t at first seem to hear him.

  “Delia, where’s Clare? Delia?”

  She frowned vaguely. “Clare? She’s right…here. Oh, my God!” She surged to her feet, hands pressed to her streaming hair. “Clare, where are you? Oh, no—the house…she must’ve gone back to the house! Clare!”

  Conan left it to Adler to restrain Delia. He ran for the house, pounded up the porch steps and through the front door. Within it, he felt as if he were caught in a cyclonic vortex of heat, as if it would pull him off his feet. He swayed toward the hall, his eyes registering nothing but black and incandescent-yellow abstractions obfuscated with glowing curtains of smoke. He pulled his rain-saturated shirt up and held it over his mouth and nose.

  The parlor was a glare of searing light, the hall a Stygian well, but the fire hadn’t reached it yet; the stairway was still clear. He shouted for Clare, but he could barely hear himself for the furious din. There was no way to guess where she might be, and even as he stood undecided, the door under the stairs into the kitchen hall seemed to disintegrate, the furnace behind it blustering savagely.

  His eyes ran with tears at the acid assault of heat and smoke. He climbed the stairs, shouting through fits of coughing, “Clare! Where are you? Clare?”

  The only answer was a shriek of outraged timbers and a prolonged crash. But the stairs were still solid under his feet. He reached the landing, but there stumbled and fell. From somewhere near him came a faint cry. “Help…”

  “Clare!” She was huddled in the corner of the landing, hair in a turmoil, face contorted with spasmodic coughing. Her arms were folded oddly across her bosom, clutching something against her; something flat and rectangular. He didn’t take time to see what it was.

  “Clare, can you walk?” He pulled her to her feet, but she sagged limply, only repeating her weak cry for succor. Yet she wouldn’t relinquish whatever it was she was carrying.

  He picked her up, putting his shoulder against the wall for balance and guidance, and started down the stairs, holding his breath against the smoke, wondering whether the trembling he felt was his taxed muscles or the stairway on the verge of collapse. Voices below him, shouting his name; figures materialized out of the caustic fog. Newbolt and someone else. Jake Kulik. They took Clare from him, and he staggered against the banister, one hand clutching at the newel-post, and briefly, with trenchant clarity, he remembered the sheen given it by generations of hands, and his would be the last to touch it.

  “Come on, Flagg!” Newbolt was pulling at him. From the dining room came the crash of splintering glass; the windows blown out by the heat. Conan stumbled through the hall and the sitting room to the front door, then across the porch until he caught the post. There he paused, pulling in gasping breaths of chill air.

  “You all right?” Newbolt was still at his side.

  Conan nodded, and when he could speak, said, “Thanks for coming after us.”

  “Sure, but this is no place to stop and rest.”

  The heat seemed to follow them into the rain, and Conan’s eyes were so inflamed that at first he thought he was still immersed in smoke. But that cleared enough as he crossed to the crab apples so that he could see Clare sitting on the Jaguar, sagging against Delia, with Adler hovering near. Clare was conscious, if incoherent, her arms still folded protectively over the object—

  Conan rubbed at his eyes. Everything seemed hazed in errant lights. Clare was clutching an old-fashioned, leather briefcase, and she wouldn’t let go of it even when Delia and Adler got her to her feet, and
Adler called to Newbolt, “We’re taking her over to my place.”

  Newbolt nodded. “I put in a call for an ambulance—”

  “No! Don’t let her get away! She has it!”

  Delia and Adler, with Clare supported between them, had already started for his house, but they stopped at the sound of that strident voice. Everyone turned, staring at the figure that appeared, as if brought into existence by the dire light, near the last crab apple tree. A woman with the hood of her jacket thrown back, rain-black hair streaming into a white face in which her dark eyes seemed a demonic invention.

  Conan doubted anyone here recognized Mimi Bonnet, and only he recognized Amanda Count.

  No. Someone else recognized Amanda. Clare loosed a shrill scream.

  Conan shouted, “Adler! Get her out of here!”

  “No—damn you!” Amanda started toward Clare, but Adler and Delia were hurrying away with her, while she struggled irrationally, still screaming.

  Newbolt grabbed Amanda’s arm and spun her around. “What the hell is goin’ on here?”

  “Stop her! You’ve got to—she has it! The proof!”

  “Lady, I don’t know what you’re—”

  “The proof!” she repeated, shrieking the word, the tendons of her neck strained. “The briefcase—she has the—”

  “Amanda!” Conan was suddenly gut angry. He gestured toward the clamoring inferno behind him. “Damn it, isn’t that revenge enough?”

  She glared at him, lips drawn back from her teeth, then spat out, “No! That’s not enough! I want justice!” She twisted out of Newbolt’s grasp and stumbled after Clare, whose piercing cries never stopped. And Amanda screamed, “I want justice!”