Rain of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  He laughed, both because he found the image preposterous and because they had finally broken the ice between them after last night. Despite his wool irritation, he felt good as he gazed out through the spattered windshield.

  The view was of Gull Point, where wave-cut bluffs scarred the dense forest. On the north shore, the majestic structure of the Lake Hotel stood out, its pale yellow a contrast to the backdrop of green woods. Near the entrance to Bridge Bay marina, the highway crossing marked the opening into the sheltered cove. Wyatt could not remember when he’d been happier to end an outing on the lake.

  Kyle pulled off throttle for the no-wake zone and the cruiser settled in the water. In a few minutes, they would be on their way to the hotel’s cabins. He planned on showering until the hot water heater drained, lying beneath blankets until it reheated, and doing it again.

  Only a few nights ago, lying in his tent feeling tremors, he’d been excited about being on the scene for this latest chapter in Yellowstone’s seismic history. Today, he realized if the quake had kicked up a bit stronger, he and Kyle would have been swamped.

  From there, it was a small reach to think of being dragged down by their sodden clothing and drowned.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SEPTEMBER 14

  Two hours later, Kyle felt warm again, but was still shaky inside. And hungry, a deep insistent longing for red meat or some other fatty delight. As she crossed the lawn from her small wooden cabin toward the three-story Lake Hotel clad in yellow-painted lumber, she noted a pair of buffalo lazing in the long golden grass. In the balmy afternoon, it was difficult to believe the wilderness had turned from menacing back to benign.

  She entered the hotel through a side door and spotted a pay phone in the hallway. As her cell had drowned this afternoon, she took a moment to set down her leather portfolio of maps and called Stanton’s hospital room. Leila answered faintly.

  “How’s our patient?” Kyle twisted the wire that connected receiver to phone.

  “Sleeping.”

  “Hope I didn’t wake him.”

  “Actually, he’s sedated,” Leila confessed. “This afternoon he tore out his IVs, threw that green rock you gave him off his bed tray, and smashed it. The doctors say he’ll need to stay in the hospital longer.”

  Kyle closed her eyes and leaned against the edge of the phone box. A pain in her injured side demanded she take the news standing straight. “I’m sure he’ll get through this stage.”

  “They’re going to keep him sedated for twenty-four hours, then see.”

  If Kyle were at the hospital, she’d put her arms around Leila; cry with her, but it was out of the question for her to break down with a busload of chattering retirees filing into the hall.

  “Are you taking care of yourself?” Kyle raised her voice.

  “Yes.” Leila didn’t sound convincing. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine.” Kyle did not intend mentioning her and Wyatt’s dip in the lake.

  “You don’t sound fine.”

  “I’m all right,” she insisted. Then, because it was Leila, “No, I’m not. Wyatt and I had a hell of an afternoon. There was a pretty significant quake.”

  “Oh, dear.” Leila had never indicated she knew about Kyle’s past, but the warmth in her tone suggested Stanton had told and sworn her to secrecy.

  Pressing her lips together to keep her secrets inside, Kyle changed the subject. “I’ll be back in town tomorrow, probably too late to visit. I’ll come Monday after the Consortium meets.”

  After hanging up, she walked toward the lobby to meet Wyatt and passed a vending alcove. Appetite born of years of addiction seized her, not for a cola or chocolate bar despite her hunger, but for the heated swirl of tobacco smoke. The way things were going this week, she would no doubt have pulled out some cash and bought a pack but was saved by whatever Surgeon General had wiped out cigarette machines.

  Entering the main lobby, she paused before the fireplace. Ceramic tile fired in the 1920s formed a lovely frame for a hollow promise. Since 1959, when the Hebgen Lake quake had weakened the chimney, the fireplace had remained cold and dark.

  Crossing in front of the antique wooden bar, Kyle smelled spilled liquor. Broken glass littered the floor; the cleanup crew must have been overtaxed by damage from today’s quake.

  In the middle of the lobby, a display of old-time photos demonstrated that the wide room, with its tulip light fixtures, columns, and polished hardwood floors had not changed much since the hotel opened in 1892. The sunroom, where she and Wyatt planned to meet, was a 1920s addition to the original lobby. The bright space formed a half circle with wide windows fronting the expanse of lake, mountains, and sky. People sat on couches and chairs, reading, or playing one of the board games set out for amusement.

  Wyatt was seated in a cushioned wicker chair near the center-most window, his gaze on the cobalt water. Kyle looked and saw whitecaps roiling in all directions, peaking in points that shot up startlingly high. It looked odd, considering no appreciable wind ruffled the grass and trees. Although the earth movement seemed to have ceased, she suspected it had merely subsided to a level below which a human observer could detect.

  Coming up behind Wyatt, she was struck by how nice he looked in the afternoon light. His jaw line was tight; he had good hair, too, wavy and full. She touched his shoulder, not a thing she would normally do, but today her frame of reference felt upside down. Still feeling shaky, she let her fingers rest a moment, feeling muscle and sinew beneath his well-washed red pullover.

  He turned and gave a coconspirators smile that brought back shared danger. “You warm enough?”

  She nodded at his glass of stout. “Enough to drink a cold one.”

  He motioned to a waiter and ordered Kyle a light beer. “Sorry, I just assumed. You want something else?”

  “That much you do know about me.”

  “I also suspect you’re as starved as I am.”

  She glanced over her shoulder toward the dining room entrance beside the bar.

  Wyatt smiled. “Dinner starts in half an hour. We’re on the list.”

  Sinking into the chair beside him, Kyle savored the view. Memories of having a drink here with Stanton after a day of fieldwork made her throat tight.

  “You all right?” Wyatt asked.

  She swallowed. “I called Leila. The doctors believe Stanton will be in the hospital longer than they thought.”

  Wyatt pulled his jeans-clad legs in and straightened from his slouch. “What’s going on?”

  “She said he was violent.”

  He nodded. “My dad … He had a stroke when he was only fifty-seven. They had to tie him down.”

  “Did he get better?” Kyle hoped so, though she knew Wyatt had gone into the family business after his father’s sudden death.

  He shook his head. “He was trapped on the rim of the world … on life support for weeks.”

  A lump thickened Kyle’s throat as he went on, “I took the night shift at the hospital so I could keep up work. Sitting there with machines humming, I’d study Dad’s hands, watching them get thinner and paler each day.” Wyatt stretched out his own hands, brown and strong-looking.

  She reached and placed her palms over his. “That must have been difficult to watch.”

  “I remember his hands when they were like mine now.” His expansive gesture broke their contact. “Threading line, teaching me to fly-fish the Yellowstone, steadying me on a log to bridge a stream.”

  Tears stood in her eyes, for she knew Wyatt as a man of few words.

  “Dad taught me to ride when I was no bigger than an ant on a huge hill of horse. He trained me to rodeo when I was thirteen, picking me up off the dusty dirt of the corral and setting me on my feet. ‘Good try,’ he’d say no matter how poor the ride. Then he’d point me back toward the wall-eyed horse and say, ‘Do it again’.”

  “He sounds wonderful,” she said. “I lost my mom and dad when I was six.” She stopped, for he’d heard that fact before, a
nd she didn’t care to embellish. “Franny’s Zeke died when I was eighteen. I guess Stanton is the closest to a father I have.”

  “God, I hope he gets through this.” Wyatt lifted his hand as though to touch hers, but the waitress arrived with her beer and he reached to drain the last of his.

  She took a bracing drink.

  He ordered another stout and gave her a long look. “You were mighty young to lose both your folks.” The question he’d never asked before hung in the air.

  “A terrible accident,” she tempered with her eyes on her glass. “My mother’s mother, Francesca di Paoli from Tuscany, I was the only one who ever called her Franny … She and Zeke raised me. You remember me telling you stones?”

  As though he understood she didn’t want to discuss her parents’ deaths, Wyatt nodded. “Seems I recall she was one tough broad.”

  “She worked on a dude ranch in Jackson Hole back in the 1920s, taught me to ride the way your dad did you. Her first husband, a Wyoming cowboy, was something like one-eighth Nez Perce.”

  Wyatt settled in his chair and gave her an easy smile. “Know any smoke signals?”

  She gave a soft laugh and flicked one of her turquoise earrings, setting it swinging. “At maybe one thirty-second Nez Perce, I think I’d be better with a signal flare.”

  A piano player began his first tune of the evening, a haunting rendition of “Clair de Lune.” The moon was waning now, after being full the day of the Sakhalin event. Outside, the lake continued to dance in the fading afternoon light.

  It was so nice that Wyatt seemed at ease with her again that it was a shame to disturb the mood with work. Nonetheless, the sight of plaster dust on the floor, which had no doubt fallen during today’s quake, made her point to the portfolio. “Shall we look at tomorrow?”

  “That would be a trick,” Wyatt chuckled. “Isn’t Brock Hobart the one with the crystal ball?”

  “He gets lucky.” Nevertheless, his aim had been troubling her for years, especially since she and Stanton saw Brock on TV.

  Wyatt gave her a serious look. “Everybody says predictions are so much bunkum, but don’t you still hope to warn the innocent before nature goes on a rampage?”

  She’d figured he shared her dream, but hearing him speak it made her chest swell. “I suspect it’s the dirty little secret of most seismologists.”

  His eyes were on a level with hers. “It’s always been mine.”

  “And mine, since I was a child.” She turned her attention to rummaging in her portfolio. “Have you found out the magnitude of this afternoon’s quake?”

  “I phoned Helen. She said 4.0.”

  “Epicenter?”

  “Nez Perce Peak.”

  Kyle drew out a geologic map of Yellowstone and Wyatt moved his wicker chair closer to hers. Behind them in the main lobby, some woman’s heels made a hollow tapping on the hardwood floor.

  “Here.” Kyle put a fingertip onto Nez Perce on the map.

  East of the lake, the Absaroka Range where Nez Perce Peak was could be seen from the sunroom window. Green and peaceful looking, the mountains were born of fire fifty million years ago. The exception that pierced the range’s heart was Nez Perce; a volcano that Stanton and his graduate students had discovered was only 10,000 years old.

  “It escaped notice for a long time,” Kyle reminded Wyatt. In an age of satellite telemetry, with NASA bragging that everything from foliage to mineral content could be detected from space, lots of people lost sight of the fact that remote sensing was limited.

  Wyatt leaned forward, their heads closer together. “Following the trajectory of the hotspot all the way from Oregon, it’s always made sense that the newest volcanic events should be northeast of the lake.”

  Kyle clanked her beer bottle against his. “Here’s to it being another 10,000 years before anything new happens.”

  Wyatt’s expression suggested the chances of that were slim.

  Thinking how rapidly the ground beneath the lake was rising gave Kyle a shiver, as though something wicked approached.

  The tapping heels came closer and a feminine cry came from behind them, almost making Kyle drop her drink.

  “Alicia!” Wyatt got to his feet and headed with a long-legged stride to meet the woman rushing at him.

  Kyle had a fleeting impression of huge dark eyes in a tanned face before Alicia buried her head against Wyatt’s shoulder. Whereas most tourists sported casual clothing, she wore a little black dress that looked expensive, as did her high-heeled sandals and the simple yet heavy gold chain around her slender neck.

  This must have been the woman in Wyatt’s bed Thursday evening.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SEPTEMBER 14

  Meet Alicia Alvarez with Wolf Advocates,” Wyatt introduced, his arm around her yielding waist.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Kyle’s hand extended to Alicia, though she did not smile. “Your group had a major influence in getting the wolf back into the park.” Her voice sounded a little stiff.

  Wyatt smiled at Alicia. “You remember I told you about my dissertation advisor, Dr. Kyle Stone of the Utah Institute of Seismology.”

  As the two women shook hands, Wyatt marveled at the differences between them. Though many would have judged Alicia more feminine, Kyle’s combination of confidence and handsome carriage carried a powerful punch, as evidenced by a passing male who took in the way her jeans fit before checking Alicia out. Come to think, the distinction between the women went deeper than the physical. Kyle was the person he’d most like to have a beer with and talk about what made Yellowstone tick.

  Alicia’s eyes, rimmed in something that made them look larger than usual, continued to dart from Kyle to Wyatt. “What are you two doing at the hotel?”

  Her implied accusation set him on edge.

  “Fieldwork,” he replied. “We’re staying in the cabins.” He glanced at her fancy dress and sandals. “You?”

  “I’m meeting some people for dinner … staying here tonight…” Her look suggested an invitation to her room. “Tomorrow I’m taking them wolf watching in Hayden Valley.”

  “Do you have time to join us for a drink?” It might smooth things over.

  “I’ve got a few minutes,” Alicia allowed.

  As they settled into chairs, she continued to eye Kyle. “Have you ever modeled?”

  “Goodness, no.” Kyle looked as if the idea was preposterous. “I was in one university or another for eleven years, and after that I did research and taught.”

  “Very well, I might add,” Wyatt interjected.

  A strained silence fell.

  Reaching for her beer, Kyle winced and lowered her arm gingerly.

  “Are you okay?” Wyatt leaned forward.

  “What’s the matter?” Alicia asked.

  “We were out on the lake this afternoon during that quake,” Kyle said. “I slipped and banged myself on the side of the boat. It’s nothing.”

  “It didn’t look like nothing,” Wyatt disagreed. “You have a bad bruise under your arm.”

  “How did you see her naked side?” Alicia asked tartly.

  Kyle met the challenge in the thirtysomething woman’s snapping eyes. In the academic environment where both sexes worked together on as equal a footing as possible, she wasn’t used to dealing with insecurity. For that was clearly the root of Alicia’s animosity, along with an apparent fantasy that there was something between Kyle and Wyatt.

  As the silence lengthened without her or Wyatt explaining how he had seen her bruise, she decided to change the subject. Figuring women liked compliments, she nodded at the collar of gold that lay heavily around Alicia’s neck. “That’s a lovely necklace.”

  Alicia’s gaze took in Kyle’s earrings, along with the ring of fine webbed turquoise from the Kingman mine in Arizona. Kyle had selected it because it reminded her of one her mother wore on her sixth birthday. That ring had not been recovered.

  “I understand academia doesn’t pay,” Alicia observed, e
vidently finding the silver jewelry wanting.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Wyatt said. “Being a ranger doesn’t either.”

  Kyle had had enough. She rose to her full height, suppressed another wince at her injured side, and looked down at Alicia. “I disagree about the pay. Teaching is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done, turning out fine students like Wyatt, who take jobs that pay not in dollars but in quality of life and helping others.”

  Someone called Wyatt’s name from the entrance to the dining room.

  “There’s dinner,” Kyle said. She walked away toward the podium where the dining room manager waited.

  After a hearty steak dinner alone, while Wyatt remained with Alicia and joined her and her clients in the dining room, Kyle walked beside Yellowstone Lake. The darkening water was still unsettled, but now she could blame the brisk wind that had blown up in the past hour. The temperature was dropping rapidly, clouds rolling in from the southwest. She’d not checked the forecast since morning, but the unmistakable smell of snow emanated from the thick-bellied bank as it approached.

  Despite the cold, she was still steaming at the scene in the sunroom. She and Wyatt were here to work, as Alicia was supposed to be. The very suggestion that Kyle and he … her face warmed even with the lake wind buffeting her cheeks.

  She turned her attention to the road rimming the shore. A lobby exhibit informed that the present hotel drive was once part of the Grand Loop Road, back in the stagecoach days.

  Franny had told Kyle that her first husband’s parents met at the Lake Hotel at the turn of the twentieth century. She tried to imagine the Chicago heiress and the Westerner, a man a lot closer to the family’s Nez Perce roots due to his mother being a half-breed. That must have been an even more brow-raising combination than Francesca di Paoli turning up to wed a Wyoming dude rancher.

  Kyle envisioned the old days; the hotel drive lined with carriages, the lobby alight with electric bulbs. Each evening an orchestra had played after dinner, now echoed in the piano player or sometimes a string quartet in the lounge. She found it interesting that people thought of the 1890s as a long time ago. When your focus measured geologic time, man’s tenure in the park seemed the blink of an eye.