Rain of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  Stanton’s eyes tracked to her right.

  She went on, “We saw so many bad signs at Nez Perce Peak that we sent out a warning.”

  “It got to Park Headquarters right before the latest big quake,” Wyatt said.

  Stanton shook his head with sudden vigor.

  Kyle moved closer to the bedside. “We were wrong to warn them?”

  Another headshake.

  “Wrong to go on TV?”

  Stanton nodded.

  She bent closer. “Because you think it’s unprofessional, like everybody says about Brock Hobart?”

  Stanton indicated that wasn’t it.

  Wyatt frowned. “My bosses in Yellowstone are okay with us going on TV. Are you worried what the USGS folks will think?”

  Not that, either.

  Stanton closed his eyes and made a fist of his good hand. His forehead furrowed and he got out, “Hell.”

  “Hell?” Kyle put a hand on his pajama-clad arm.

  He opened his eyes and tried, “Hall…”

  She looked toward the doorway. No, said another headshake. “Holl?” she asked. “Hollis Delbert?”

  “Yes!”

  “Has he been here?” led into “This morning?” and “Did he say something about us being on TV?”

  “How could he know?” Wyatt interjected.

  “I don’t know how he found out, and that’s only half of it,” she fumed. “I’m not letting Hollis dictate us off the show.”

  An hour later, Kyle stood in the Institute’s basement hall outside the seismic lab and stared into the blackness. Drawing a breath, she got ready to run for the light.

  Wyatt touched her arm. “I’ll get it.”

  He went into the room and threw the switch. The fluorescents blinked until they settled, shedding a sterile light. The faded map of the world, spotted with historic earthquake epicenters showed the Pacific’s ring of fire with Japan and Sakhalin Island as hotspots. The seismograph drums turned slowly as she approached the bank from Yellowstone.

  She stopped. “Oh, no.”

  Wyatt gave a soft whistle.

  All of the strip charts were busy with the chattering of almost constant tremors. They were mostly in the 1.0 magnitude range, but occasionally spiked to 2.0s or 3.0s.

  Kyle moved to the nearest computer terminal and began entering rapid commands. She brought up the signals from the newest stations they had placed around Nez Perce that were not represented by charts.

  Wyatt rolled a chair over and sat at her elbow. “Good Lord.”

  If she were a believer, Kyle would pray. Such constant tremors surely proved that the magma chamber had found an outlet and was working its way toward the surface. “I wish Hollis were here to see this.”

  “From what I know of the man, he wouldn’t care,” Wyatt said. “His vendetta against you is too personal.”

  A flashing message insisted Kyle check email. She ignored everything on the list except the one from Nick, sent from Wyatt’s account at the Resource Center.

  Looks like I’ll be waiting a day or so to head up. My equipment has been delayed by the winter storm on the coast. I’ve been in Wyatt’s office all day monitoring the seismic. Superintendent Bolido came over and asked me if she should consider an evacuation. When she heard I was mounting a helicopter expedition to Nez Perce, she decided to hold off.

  “She probably figured if Nick was going into the park interior it was safe,” Kyle mourned.

  She glanced at another of the workstation’s three monitors. The signal from Nez Perce showed that a new excursion of up to 3.5 had happened only moments before. In Kyle’s imagination, it rattled the rodeo trophy in Wyatt’s office, along with the nerves of people like Iniki Kuni, but then the little receptionist had already evacuated. “I’d feel a lot better if everybody got out of the park,” she told Wyatt.

  He didn’t reply as he stared at Nick’s message. The next sentence said, Tell Wyatt that Alicia Alvarez came by. Wanted to tell him goodbye before she left for Texas. She said he would understand.

  Kyle and Wyatt left the Institute van in the parking lot and took her Mercedes. It felt good to put her foot to the floor on the I-80 grade east of Salt Lake. She wondered what had happened between Wyatt and Alicia to send her away, but it was none of her business.

  Wyatt sat in silence beside her. By the dash clock, it was past ten. They’d stopped for fast food after leaving the Institute.

  As the lights of her subdivision came into view, it felt like she’d been gone a long time. She parked in the drive beside her townhouse and got her duffel bag out of the trunk.

  “My couch makes into a nice bed,” she said.

  Wyatt left his kit and dress uniform in the car.

  Inside her foyer, it was dark, but she didn’t want to look foolish. Without using her key ring flashlight, she went into the hall and turned on a single light.

  Wyatt followed her into the living room and turned on all the lamps.

  She set the laptop she’d brought from the Institute on the dining table beside her keys. “Down here’s a half bath, but you can shower in mine upstairs.”

  He glanced over his shoulder toward the door. “I’d better take your car and go to the hotel by the highway.”

  She tried to lighten the mood and keep him from going. “You been on TV before?” Even as she spoke, a frisson of stage fright sobered her.

  He grinned. “Mr. Rodeo, Live at Five in Bozeman. All the kids screaming and begging to ride the mechanical bronco on camera.”

  With an effort, she answered his smile. “I’ll bet you were right up front.”

  “Actually, I was hiding on the back row wishing I were home riding a real horse. Kind of the way I’ll feel in the morning.”

  “Too bad Nick didn’t come with us.” As soon as the words were out, she regretted them.

  Wyatt drew himself up, and she felt he was about to head for the door.

  “Don’t.” She put a hand on his arm. “It’s over with Nick … You must have heard him shoving me at you …”

  “I heard him. The volcano jock suggesting the stay-at-home guy would make a nice patsy. He made me feel like a damned fool.” Wyatt pulled away. “It was bad enough when Alicia called me a poor son of a bitch for …”

  A fluttering started in her stomach. “For what?”

  “For”—his voice dropped, but his dark eyes glowed—”wanting you.”

  “Is that why Alicia left?”

  “When I came back from the mountain, she sensed things weren’t the same.”

  “Nothing’s the same.” Her carefully planned existence blown to hell… Last night’s debacle with Nick … “Or everything’s the same.”

  Wyatt’s hand came up and her heart pounded. He touched her cheek and slid his fingers around to the back of her neck. “You were right the first time. The way we were together, friends, that’s all up in the air and it scares me to death.”

  “It scares me, too,” she whispered, feeling goose bumps from his light caress.

  “If this were simpler, I’d just grab you and let the chips fall where they may.”

  A feeling of shyness, as though they were kids getting together for the first time, made her hesitate.

  Wyatt sighed and held out his hand, palm up. “Give me your car keys and I’ll get that room.”

  Even as she reached to her pocket for her keys, part of her wanted to throw her arms around him, to embrace the change that had already taken place. “Wyatt…”

  He glanced at her wall clock. “We’re going to need what sleep we can get.”

  It was an excuse, as clear as rain, but he was right. As never before in their lives, they both needed to be their best for the show.

  She placed the keys in his hand. “Pick me up at three-thirty so we can make it to the studio on time.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  SEPTEMBER 30

  Kyle couldn’t sleep. Her light was on, but the brightest bulb could not hold back the darkness. With a muttered oath, s
he threw back the covers and grabbed her robe. The bedside clock showed two-forty. A draft swept her bare ankles as she went downstairs.

  Curling up on the couch, she thought of Wyatt, who in the old days of their comfortable friendship would have been sleeping here now under her spare comforter. Recalling her own breathless reaction to his recent embraces, she asked herself why she had always thought it out of the question. There was the issue of her being several years older, the fact that she’d been his major professor and dissertation advisor, but those were mere convenient excuses for the main reason. She had not been in the market for a man … unless he was Nick Darden.

  No wonder Wyatt had disliked Nick on instinct, grasping immediately that he had been the obstacle to both their happiness. And while she’d been mooning after Nick, Wyatt had been the one who built the fire that made her forget the mountain night around them.

  Kyle remembered asking Franny how she had chosen between the brothers who both wanted to marry her. She imagined the youthful Francesca, tall and slim like her daughter Rachel and her grandchild Kyle. With flashing eyes and a merry wit, Francesca must have had her choice of suitors, whether in her Tuscan home, New York, or Wyoming where she settled to start a family.

  “How did I choose?” Franny had mused with a soft expression. “I thought about living without each of them in turn. And the idea of losing one of them made my chest hurt… so bad I had trouble catching my breath. He was the man for me.”

  For all these years, Kyle had thought Nick was the man for her, yet, how could she ask what her life would be like without him? He had never been there to begin with.

  As for Wyatt, she recalled how safe and warm she’d felt after telling him her greatest secret. How he’d understood her fears in a way Nick could not begin to comprehend. A vision of the yearning in his eyes as he’d left her tonight started an ache beneath her breastbone.

  The hands of her wall clock moved toward three. She went into the dining room to the laptop. With feeling of dread, she turned on the machine and logged into the database.

  The activity in Yellowstone was even more volatile than before. Kyle wished she had more experience with what the charts had looked like at Mount St. Helens or Mt. Pinatubo. She could call up some of the signatures from the Earthquake Center, but what she needed to know was how things had looked in the weeks and months before an eruption. Nick would know but, of course, there were no phones in the rooms at the Mammoth Hotel and his cell was in the bottom of a canyon.

  Recalling the people in Yellowstone, the road workers and the mother with the crying daughter, the doctor who’d treated Nick, Joseph Kuni staying while his daughter fled … thinking of their fitful rest this night, while the background of constant quakes ramped up enough to frighten even the bravest … Kyle felt colder than she should wrapped in fleece.

  It finally started to sink in that she was going to be on television. With the realization, came the weight of responsibility. People were going to watch, believing that she had a track record of success at warning of disaster.

  She went back upstairs and showered, a quick hot blast that failed to warm. Dressed, with her hair caught up in a smooth knot at the back of her head, she peeked out the window at scattered snow flurries. Thankfully, the roads were clear.

  While waiting for Wyatt, she scribbled a few introductory remarks about the Institute and the partnership of the National Park Service and USGS in Yellowstone. Her pen scratched as she slashed out most of it.

  When she heard her car horn out front, she wasn’t ready.

  Wyatt made no move to let her drive, so she headed for the passenger door. Though it was warmer here in than in Yellowstone, her dressy black coat, low-heeled pumps and pantyhose were inadequate for the misty autumn weather.

  The instant Kyle slammed the door, Wyatt prodded the gas pedal. Something in the set of his profile said he wasn’t happy about the choice he’d made to leave her for the hotel.

  She reached to touch his wrist. He kept his eyes on the road.

  “About last night…” she tried.

  “Nothing happened last night.” He kept his eyes on a stoplight, waiting even though the streets were deserted. On green, the Mercedes accelerated down the mountain, but Kyle sensed the control Wyatt exerted over both the car and his emotions.

  She had the same problem, torn between wanting him and trying to focus on America Today. “Nothing physical happened …”

  On the I-80 on ramp, Wyatt glanced at her. “We’ve got too much else on our plate to do anything but drop this subject.”

  She resisted the urge to reach toward him again. “We’ll let it go … for now.”

  They drove awhile in silence. Finally, as they pulled into the TV station parking lot, he turned his head. His expression filled her chest once more with longing.

  “I’ve been throwing myself at you, ready or not.” He stopped the car and turned off the engine. “I’m afraid you’re not.”

  Of course, he’d think that. The last concrete thing she’d said last night was to agree that she was scared to death. He seemed to have forgotten saying it, too.

  Well, maybe she had been frightened before, but there was no arguing with the wisdom of Franny and this ache beneath her breastbone.

  The station’s front door opened and a young man waved them in.

  The TV studio made the seismograph lab look low-tech, with cameras on trolleys, wheeled ladders, banks of sound mixing equipment, and TV monitors everywhere.

  As Kyle and Wyatt waited for the looming airtime, she gave her hair a self-conscious smoothing. “I told the guy I don’t wear foundation, but he put on extra pancake and shadow.”

  “Got to have some color for the camera.” Looking a little orange himself, and with his black eye effectively masked, Wyatt repeated the litany he’d been told. His scrutiny, from her mascara-laden eyelashes to lips slicked with a slash of color, made her feel less a child playing dress-up and more a woman. She smoothed the skirt of her black dress and checked the set of Franny’s small diamonds at her earlobes.

  “You look nice,” he offered, his voice pitched low.

  They may have tabled the subject of each other, but her cheeks grew warm. She thought he’d never looked better, standing tall among the studio workers scurrying around to meet the on-air deadline. He wore his ranger’s dress uniform with ease, his badge bright on the formal dark jacket bearing the National Park Service crest. At the last minute, he’d decided to forego the hat. “No need looking like Dudley Do-Right.”

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Did you check the stations again?”

  “I logged on around three. The activity was stronger than ever.”

  “Uh-oh,” he said. It took a second for her to realize his focus was on something past her shoulder.

  “I see you made it,” said a snide voice at her elbow.

  With a sinking feeling, she turned on Hollis Delbert. “What are you doing here?” The makeup on his face above his best navy suit gave her the answer.

  “Making sure you don’t get the Institute in trouble.” Hair lacquer made Hollis’s blond comb-over look darker than usual. “When the network called looking for you, I made sure they understood who was in charge.”

  Before she could come up with a retort, Wyatt shook his head. “Brother, you are a piece of work.”

  “Dr. Stone? Dr. Delbert?” said the studio aide. “We’re ready for you and Ranger Ellison now.”

  “That’s Dr. Ellison,” she informed the slender young man who didn’t look old enough to shave.

  They picked their way over snaking cables to a bare table with three waiting chairs. Kyle’s image of her and Wyatt being interviewed by a friendly anchorperson, maybe sitting around in armchairs or a couch, evaporated.

  The aide directed them to sit with Kyle in the middle, helped everyone put on microphones and showed them the earpieces. “Keep your eyes on me at all times. I’ll be sitting across from you, pretending to be your audience.” />
  Her mouth went dry. Though she tried to call on her years of lecturing to induce calm, whatever opening remarks she might have come up with flew out of her head. Moreover, if Hollis were going ahead of her, in his capacity as the Institute’s Acting Director he’d probably steal whatever intro she came up with.

  The studio aide turned on a TV about five feet away and she heard the opening bars of the America Today theme. Sometimes, she watched snippets of the show in the morning, standing around half-dressed or brushing her teeth. She had never imagined entering the nation’s collective bathroom or joining millions in breakfast.

  Kyle pressed her lips to keep in an obscenity. Nick had promised a media circus. She shot Wyatt a glance. “Let’s just get through this without losing our cool.”

  Gene North appeared on the set decorated as Everyman’s living room. His black hair contrasted with crow’s feet that Botox and a facelift hadn’t quite eliminated. Kyle wasn’t speculating; he’d had his plastic surgeon on the show.

  “Welcome to America,” Gene greeted. “Today is Monday, September 30.”

  His very blond and thin co-anchor, Mitzi McMahon, introduced terrorism, baseball playoffs, and the weather. A winter storm was moving onshore into Washington and Oregon, likely to become a major blizzard. Unfortunately, Kyle didn’t think weather would deter Nick in his return to the field.

  Gene North was back. “Let’s get to our feature of the day. In less than a month following the September 10th earthquake disaster at Sakhalin Island, there have been two strong shakes in Yellowstone Park.”

  “Yes, Gene,” Mitzi agreed. “What brings these events together is the question of whether earthquakes can be predicted before they do the kind of damage the world saw at Sakhalin.”

  Gene took over. “This is especially important for the many earthquake prone areas of this country. Everyone thinks of L.A. and San Francisco, but did you know that in 1811 and 1812 the central Mississippi Valley was rocked by three massive quakes on what’s known as the New Madrid Fault Zone? That Charleston, South Carolina was nearly leveled by shaking in 1886? Even Manhattan Island is underlain by ancient faults which could be reactivated.”