He knocked. “Mom?” he called out.
When he heard the urgency in his own voice, he was not surprised that she responded with “Joshua, what’s wrong?”
“I think there’s another fire.”
“Come on in,” Sterling said, and Joshua pushed open the door but stayed where he was. In the dim light coming from the moon outside, Joshua could see Sterling was already out of bed and pulling on a shirt. “Where? Can you see it?” Though there was concern in his voice, he sounded completely in control.
“No. I mean, yes, but it was a . . .” Joshua hesitated. Would he ever get used to talking about this, even with those who understood? “I saw it. It’s a tree, a big one, and it’s burning in an open place.”
His mother was beside him in an instant, and they both squinted as Sterling switched on the bedside light.
“Where?” Not so much as a speck of doubt dulled her face or her eyes.
“I don’t know!” Joshua moaned. “I just saw the tree and I know that it’s happening now. Do you understand?”
“Of course I do.” Greer guided Joshua over to the bed and sat him down, lowering herself next to him. “Okay, let’s take a minute and you try to remember any other details, anything that would tell us where—” She cut off suddenly, and on her face was a look of startled realization.
“What? Mom? What is it?” Joshua felt two surges of emotion piston up and down forcefully inside of him, anxiety for his mom and relief that she might be able to relieve him of this responsibility.
“I think I know where,” she whispered. Then she turned a stricken face to Sterling, who had come around to stand in front of them. “I think it’s the development. Tonight, when I was looking at that painting, I saw the image of a blackened key over the painting R.J. had done of the area. I saw the same image over his painting of Oak Springs Canyon the day before the fire.”
Sterling ran his hands over his close-cropped hair and then scratched furiously at his scalp as though this would loosen his brain and clarify the situation. “Do you think we should call the fire department? I mean, if it’s a false alarm, they will not be happy, and if it isn’t, they sure as hell are going be suspicious of how you knew about a fire you couldn’t see, smell, or hear.”
“I know,” Greer stressed.
“I’m not even sure that they’ll respond if you call from here and tell them you dreamed it,” he said gently. “And as far as I know, there isn’t anyone living up there. Wait!” His face lit up. “I have the site number in my folder. I’ll call the mobile office, and if the security guard is in there, he can tell us. If he hasn’t seen it already.”
“That’s right,” Greer said, relieved. “There’s a security guard on. He’ll have seen it.”
Sterling scowled. “If he’s awake.”
“Why do you think he’d be asleep?” Joshua asked, his sudden elation deflating at the possibility.
“Wouldn’t you be?” Sterling said sourly. He left the room quickly, and Joshua and Greer followed. In the kitchen he opened his briefcase, found the folder and the number, and dialed it. As he waited for a response, he said, “The cell phone service is sporadic up there, so Rowland gave me this number to reach him.” He waited again, his brow creased with concern. “Damn it,” he cursed. “The machine.” He waited briefly again and then spoke. “Hello? Is anyone there? I’m trying to reach the night security guard. Can you please pick up if you can hear me? Anyone? This is an emergency.” He waited again, and then with a frustrated shrug, he hung up the phone. “Any other bright ideas?”
“We could drive up there.” Joshua said.
But Sterling was already shaking his head. “That’s at least fifteen miles from here. If there really is a fire in this dry heat, we need to do something now.”
Greer was staring at the floor, her lovely mouth puckered in tense concentration. Suddenly she looked up at them both, her face clear and her eyes bright. Then she spoke one word, and it sounded like a hurray.
“Leah.”
Next to the sleeping Clyde, the phone rang, its ringer muted by the music from the DVD, which had reverted to the title menu twenty minutes ago and had been repeating its thrilling but partial theme for as long. The top two feet of the mobile home were thick with smoke, an upside-down sea that was rising toward the motionless man below it.
The phone stopped ringing and the machine clicked on; a man’s voice spoke urgently but fell on deaf ears. Then it cut off, and for a few moments the only sound was the crackling flames against the outside far wall of the of structure.
Then, with a crashing boom, there came furious banging on the locked door, and the sound of a woman’s screaming voice cut through the night. But still Clyde did not wake.
A scarf tied over her mouth, Susan Hughs stood on the ground beside the trailer steps, reaching up to slam the locked, hot door with her fist again and again. “Wake up! Wake up!” she shouted as loudly as her lungs, painful from the smoke around her, would allow. But there was no response. In her other hand she held her cell phone, desperately punching in 911 and then SEND. Three tries produced a shaky connection, a scratchy operator’s voice that cut in and out, and Susan shouted over it. “There’s a fire and a man is trapped in a trailer at the Golden Door development site off of Viewpoint. Please, can you hear me?” As she shouted into the elegant little piece of technology, she thought she heard a fraction of a response, but when she backed away from the door and pressed the phone hard to her ear, she heard nothing more, and when she peered at it, it read, Lost call.
“Damn it!” Susan yelled to the night that was angry with flame and smoke. “Goddamn it!” A kind of fury rose up in her and possessed her with a superhuman determination. She would not let this happen, not on her property, not while she was here to do anything about it. She looked desperately around, her brain kicking into overdrive to find a solution, refusing to accept that there was no answer, no option.
Then she had it. The walls of the mobile home were thin and seconds away from succumbing to the flames that licked at the far side. She ran for her weapon of choice.
“Leah!” Greer said eagerly when her friend’s groggy voice came on the line. “Are you awake?”
“Uh, who is this?” Leah asked, her head foggy and her mouth thick with the depth of sleep.
“It’s Greer. I’m sorry to wake you but it’s an emergency. Listen, I know you can see across the valley from your house to the new development. I need you to go look at it.”
Leah looked instead at the receiver in her hand. She shook it slightly as though that might help to straighten out the words inside of it; then she put it back to her ear. “What? What time is it?”
“It’s almost one o’clock. Please, I know it sounds crazy, but please do it!”
“Okay, okay,” Leah muttered, climbing out of bed. She got to the living room and walked to the back windows that led to her patio. “Okay, I’m looking,” she said in a tired voice.
“Do you see anything?”
“What am I supposed to see? It’s the middle of the night, everything is dark and . . . Wait.” Leah peered off into the distance. They were small, and hard to distinguish, but what struck her about the two bright lights was that they should not be there. Suddenly every fiber in her body snapped to attention. “Christ!” she exclaimed. “I think there’s a fire—two fires, actually.”
“Okay.” Greer’s exhale and single word sounded strangely relieved instead of surprised to Leah. “Can you call the fire department and report it?”
“I’m hanging up right now,” Leah said. She disconnected and then dialed 911. The emergency operator connected her to the Shadow Hills Fire Department, and she gave them the information about the fire and her own name and location as succinctly as she possibly could, then hung up, sat down on the sofa, and stared across the lights of the valley to the two strangely beautiful golden glows on the black hills beyond.
It was a long time before it occurred to her to wonder at the fact that a friend
of hers who lived deep in a valley miles away had called to waken her at one in morning about a fire she could not have known was burning.
The fire broke through the wall with a sucking swoosh of air. Clyde coughed once and then rolled unconscious out of the chair onto the floor. The orange light from the flames colored his otherwise deathly pale face.
Then, with a crash that literally turned the corner of the trailer inside out, a Range Rover smashed through the wall. The headlights pierced the smoke like lasers, their beams tracked and interrupted by the gray haze. There was a moment of confused noise, and then the wheels spun, caught, and the car jerked backward, taking part of the wall that was hooked onto the high bumper. A door slammed, and then Susan Hughs climbed up onto the floor of the room and crawled forward on her hands and knees, feeling in front of her, her eyes streaming with stinging tears. The trailer was fairly small, and in seconds she had located the inert security guard. Grasping him under his arms and staying low, she dragged him to the door, unlocked it, then heaved him halfway up, and, unable to carry him down the three steps, just fell backward onto the ground with him on top of her.
The hard ground and Clyde’s weight knocked the air out of her. She lay there, winded for a few seconds, trying to draw in enough comparatively smoke-free air to enable herself to move again. In half a minute, she had rolled Clyde to one side and repeated her pull, dragging the dead weight of the guard away from the trailer, which, with the inrush of air, was rapidly engulfed in flames. Her back strained and aching, she stood up and looked around. Her car was wrecked, the front end seemed to be leaking gasoline, and she suspected it would explode any minute—that was not an escape option. She could not carry this man the two miles back to the main road, and her cell phone, on inspection, was still showing no service. Fighting off a growing panic, she set herself instead to care for the victim in front of her. He seemed to be breathing, but unconscious.
All around her the fire seemed to be moving, groping its way toward her, the smoke spreading its disorienting spell and choking poison in every direction, until she started to think that her only chance might be to leave him and try to get away on foot.
But still she doggedly willed herself to think of a way to save them both, determined that he would not die—she would not allow it. She got behind him and tried to find a way to lift him: If only she could get him up on her shoulder, maybe she could move them both to safety. The flames from the mobile home were so intense that she could feel the sting of the heat on her face, and a new, more lethal smell had joined the tang of burning sagebrush, chemicals and plastics releasing their toxic soup into the air that she was breathing.
She was still struggling a full minute later, when she heard the helicopters as they swooped in from overhead.
“Oh, thank God,” she exclaimed, and collapsed onto her knees with her face in her hands, her body shaking with sobs that she needed to exorcise, and then wanted desperately to hide away, locked back down out of sight with any other chinks in her painstakingly constructed armor. She would bury this loss of control deep inside, next to any other discernible weakness that might reveal to a predatory world that she was not quite as invincible as she so fervently pretended to be.
Chapter 23
It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, Joshua thought as he surveyed the shell of the trailer and the acre or so of burned underbrush at the Golden Door site the next morning. What would have happened if he hadn’t awoken, he didn’t want to think. He told himself that someone else would have seen the fires from across the valley. After all, it had been Friday night, only about one o’clock in the morning.
“Oh no,” he heard Sterling moan next to him, and turning he saw what had elicited this emotion. The magnificent oak tree, spared from destruction once by an act of law, was now a charred, grotesque skeleton. All its branches remained, but they were blackened and bare. Instead of offering shade for the body and relief to the eye, the ravaged, jagged form offended and alarmed. Joshua found he couldn’t look at it. The thought that it had stood sentinel in this valley, surviving the fires, droughts, and storms of nature for centuries only to be destroyed by a deliberate act of human vandalism in a single night, filled him with shame.
Sterling, however, was already walking toward it. Not knowing what else to do, Joshua followed him with the feeling that he was visiting the fresh grave of an old friend. They stopped near the charcoal black of the trunk and Sterling laid his hand on it in sorrow and apology, as he had done before in respect and admiration. “I’m sorry,” he said out loud. “I’m so sorry that we’ve forgotten.”
Joshua asked softly, “What have we forgotten?” “That we are the stewards of the earth. That we were given brains to take care of it, not to exploit and abuse it.”
He had never heard it put that way, but the words eloquently expressed a feeling that Joshua had had all his life. He began to circle the tree, letting his fingers trail along the trunk. On the far side, something brought him to a stop.
Into the trunk of the tree something had been carved. He didn’t remember seeing that before, and it was carved deeply, deeply enough that the fire had exaggerated the shape rather than obliterating it.
It was a spider, roughly drawn, with an hourglass body and eight spindly legs. They had been hacked into the trunk with rough skill. The fire had dried up any sap that would have told Joshua if the wound was a new marking, but he felt sure he would have noticed such a blatant act of vandalism.
“Look at this,” he said to Sterling, swiping his hands against each other, trying to loosen the inky dust that had stuck to them.
Sterling came around and peered intently at the form. “That wasn’t there yesterday,” he said sternly. He looked back at the fire chief, who was standing next to Susan and Rowland Hughs near their cars. “Hello,” he called out. When the fireman looked up, he shouted, “You might want to see this.”
Gray-haired and with the rounded belly of a once-active man who had retreated to a supervising job, the man strode across the open space and up the incline to where they were standing. He introduced himself as Captain Williams. Sterling showed him the spider and told him it hadn’t been there before.
“It’s a shame this tree got caught in this fire,” Captain Williams said.
“It didn’t ‘get caught,’ ” Sterling said, giving the man a sideways glance. “You know as well as I do that these trees . . .”
But Sterling was interrupted by a shout from one of the firemen who was still at work down below. The man beckoned to Captain Williams with a grim, exaggerated movement.
“Excuse me,” Captain Williams said, and hurried off down the hillside, his large bulk slipping in the loose earth as he went.
Curious, Sterling and Joshua started to follow, but then stopped next to Susan and Rowland. Her left arm was bandaged and she held herself rigidly at a slight angle, as though it pained her to stand upright.
“What is it?” she asked Sterling anxiously. “What have they found? Do you think it’s some kind of clue to who did this?” Her last word was spoken with such venom and disgust that Joshua thought for a moment that she might be sick.
Sterling answered her calmly. “I don’t know yet.”
Rowland’s eyes were misty as he looked around at the burned trailer and land. “Why would someone want to do this? What on earth would possess them to attack us this way? And poor Clyde.” He rubbed his eyes furiously for a moment. “If Susan hadn’t come to get those papers last night—which I tried to talk her out of; thank God I didn’t—he’d be dead now.”
“Oh, how is he?” Joshua asked.
“Not real good,” Susan said sarcastically. “I mean, he’s closer to seventy than sixty, and he inhaled enough smoke to cure a ham.”
Though her words were curt, Joshua saw her repress a wave of emotion. He said, “That was very brave what you did, getting him out.”
“I don’t know about brave,” she said dismissively. “I was really angry, I’ll tell you that.
Can you imagine what that kind of publicity would do to the sales? Mostly, though, the thought that someone was going to die working for me was just plain unacceptable. I wasn’t going to let it happen.” Her voice had risen in pitch, and she took two deliberately deep breaths. The effort seemed to hurt her, because she let out a small exclamation and put both hands against the small of her back. “Damn it. I threw my back out pulling Clyde. It’s harder than it looks on TV.” She paused again and her eyes swept the ruined trailer. “Bastards,” she said quietly.
“Do you come up here in the middle of the night very often?” Sterling asked.
Rowland was the first to respond. “The woman sleeps four hours a night. She’s always working at some ungodly hour.”
“It’s quieter. I get more done. And in answer to your question, no, not very often, but last night I was getting ready for the citizens’ committee meeting this evening, and I couldn’t locate copies of some zoning papers that we have to keep on file at the site. So I decided to drive up here.” She scowled furiously. “They’re dust. Now I’ll have to go back to the county records to get copies. Damn waste of time and energy.”
“Could someone have wanted to destroy them?” Sterling asked, as though it were a casual question.
Rowland looked from Sterling to Susan. “You mean, you think somebody might have set this fire to destroy documents?” he asked incredulously. “I don’t see why. We can get copies. I just thought it was kids vandalizing and it got a little out of control. But . . .” His voice trailed off and his usually carefree face creased with worry. “I just don’t know,” he said at last with a shake of his head. “I just don’t understand why anyone would want to do this.” He looked up at the charred oak. “And it even burned up that tree. I loved that tree.” His voice actually broke as he said it.
Captain Williams was making his way slowly back toward them. Several of the firemen clustered around one small area behind him; they stood, picks and shovels forgotten in their hands, talking quietly among themselves or gazing at the ground.
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