by Linda Jacobs
Kyle stood in the shower, letting hot water run over her aching neck and back muscles. If there had been a tub, she’d have drawn a bath and lay down in it. After the extremes of cold and heat of this day, the beating she’d taken from repeated falls on the mountain, and the sleep deprivation … Jesus, that had begun with the early rising for America Today, and it had been over thirty hours since Nick’s call had wakened her and Wyatt from their post-lovemaking nap. After all that, she should be thinking of nothing but a soft pillow.
Rather, she kept wondering what was happening at Nez Perce. Outside the door, she imagined Nick doing the same. As she had on the crater rim, she appreciated the lure of studying dynamic change in the earth. Now, she understood she’d been doing that all along, watching live earthquake records. She had simply been too shell-shocked from her childhood experience to risk going through it again.
Kyle turned off the water and dried herself on a thin towel. She caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror, her cheeks and neck laden with patches of pink, the remnants of burns from the nuée ardente. What startled her was the serenity she saw in her eyes, something that had been absent since her sixth birthday, in a peaceful campground beneath a silver moon.
Vowing to put that part of her past where it belonged, she focused on smoothing some of the hospital lotion onto a few of her more livid bruises.
With Kyle leaving the bath in her gown and Wyatt coming in wearing his briefs, they brushed past each other in the doorway. Though there was adequate room to get by without touching, Wyatt paused, cradled her cheek and pressed a light but lingering kiss onto her lips.
Nick was asleep in the bed, the room lights dimmed but not extinguished. Kyle smiled at his consideration, and without disturbing him, lay down on the room-wide window seat. The last thing she recalled was Wyatt curling up next to her.
At 2:41 in the afternoon, rested and ready for battle, Kyle stepped off the University shuttle bus in front of the Institute. Wyatt, with his ankle wrapped in an elastic bandage, came down the step behind her. Nick emerged through the door, gauze-wrapped to the eyes, and brandished a fist. “The mummy versus Hollis Delbert.”
Kyle figured Nick’s cocky attitude stemmed in part from a clean bill of health on his head scan. Yet, she said to him, “You take it easy. You’re supposed to be hurt, remember?”
“Wish I had my dress uniform for this,” Wyatt said. He wore his dirty fleece that he’d talked the ER staff into not cutting off him, as did Kyle and Nick, along with their parkas that she’d sponged off so they were merely dirty rather than disgusting.
With no campus security in sight, they marched three abreast up the sidewalk and entered the building basement, where it opened in the rear at ground level. Though she and Wyatt had been there only three days ago, she inhaled the earthy smell of rocks, the ink of the seismographs, and an academic chalk-like odor with a sense of wistfulness.
Hollis wasn’t in his office. His Tectonophysics class on the fourth floor would end at 2:50.
Kyle went behind Hollis’s desk, settled into his chair and nudged his computer mouse to see if his machine had the security on. Immediately, his screen came alive with the seismic signal from the Pelican Cone station, only a few miles west of Nez Perce.
“We’re in,” she said.
Nick pulled the guest chair away from the wall and brought it around behind the desk to straddle. Wyatt sat on the desk, his back to the door.
In the hall, the bell clanged, signaling the end of classes. A moment later, there came the sound of many feet and voices from upstairs as the classrooms emptied.
Kyle focused on the Pelican Cone record. The display was the one for yesterday’s eruption. It showed the twenty-four-hour record for October 1, starting with the oscillating sine wave of rising magma. At 1:10 PM the tornillo, or screw-shaped signal, appeared, signaling the final turbulent rise to eruption.
Later in the record of the afternoon, Kyle noted the continued quakes, background rumbling punctuated by the sharp excursions that had knocked her on her ass multiple times. There was the big one that had ripped open the Saddle Valley fault to form a fissure that fountained lava as they scrambled for safety.
Kyle clicked forward to today’s record.
Nick whistled. “Thar she blows again.” He pointed to another tornillo just after noon, followed by a large reverberation and more lower case grumbling.
“What in hell do you think you’re doing?” Hollis shrilled from the doorway.
Kyle kept watching the computer. From the corner of her eye, she saw Wyatt turn his head with slow deliberation as though Hollis were the intruder. In the chair beside Kyle, she felt Nick’s body make a subtle transformation from alertness to a slack posture.
“I said, what are you doing with my computer?” Hollis advanced into the room.
Wyatt shoved off the desk and towered over him. “As Park Service, I have a perfect right to be here and look at the records.”
“Who’s that?” Hollis pointed at Nick, who lifted a hand to his bandaged forehead and grimaced as if he were in pain.
“That?” Wyatt echoed dryly. “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize Dr. Nicholas Darden of USGS Volcano Hazards?”
“Nick Darden?”
Nick turned. “The same. Haven’t seen you since the Geophysical Society meeting in San Diego, Delbert? Say what, ten years?”
Kyle pushed a button on the mouse and toggled to look at yesterday’s eruption from the Pitchstone Plateau station.
Hollis looked at her again and inhaled a big breath. “Kyle,” he said with tight control, “you’ve been fired. You have no right to be in this building, much less at my desk.”
She ignored him.
Wyatt moved a step closer to Hollis, who took an equal pace back. “That’s what we’ve come to talk to you about.”
He stepped. Hollis retreated.
“You remember when Kyle and I called you from my office, and I said nobody needed to know you’d cut off the park’s access to the website …”
“Right,” Hollis said warily.
“Well, we said that if nothing happened to Nick, nobody need know about your slimy little trick.”
Kyle turned and faced Hollis. “We’d be happy to keep our end of the bargain, but there’s just one little problem.” She gestured toward Nick, who appeared so infirm it was hard to see how he managed to stay in the chair.
Wyatt advanced again. “Yes, a problem.”
“What’s that?” Hollis blustered, fetching up against the wall.
“It looks to me as if something happened to Nick,” Kyle said.
Wyatt put a hand on Hollis’s shoulder. The smaller man looked scared.
“Now, here’s what you’re going to,” Wyatt instructed. “You’re going to turn in a letter of resignation addressed to Stanton, with copies to Colin Gruy and Radford Bullis. In this letter, you will indicate that you intend to pursue other interests and that you appoint Kyle Stone as your interim successor.”
Hollis started shaking his head.
“You can probably get on again at UCLA,” Nick suggested quietly, “as long as I don’t call my friend the Chairman and tell him you were responsible for nearly getting me killed. If Kyle had seen the tornillo before the eruption and warned me, those minutes could have made the difference between this,” he gestured toward his head, “and me walking away without a scratch.”
Kyle met Hollis’s eyes and shrugged. “Your choice.” She went back to dinking around from seismic station to station.
Hollis opened his mouth and closed it. He looked at Nick, who held out his hands and lifted his shoulders in a ‘what can you do?’ gesture.
“All right.” Hollis sent Kyle a glare of hatred, and without another word, left his office.
Wyatt was already heading for the door as Nick and Kyle scrambled to their feet. Hollis’s footsteps were rapid on the tile floor, so they had to rush to the hall to watch him reach the exit.
“Yee haw,” said Nick.
EPILOGUE
JULY 2
By midsummer, Nez Perce Peak had erupted twice more, building a lava dome inside the crater and spreading ash on the cities and towns to the northeast.
The Friday afternoon before the Fourth of July weekend found Kyle in the Institute lab studying the pattern of bumps and thumps that marked the new era in Yellowstone seismology. She brought up a map from the website that compiled the historic earthquakes in the area. The largest number and the most intense magnitudes had been in the western part of the park and outside it near the Hebgen Lake Fault System, as well as within the outline of the 630,000-year-old caldera. Next, she plotted the quakes since last September 10th when the swarm that led to eruption began. Contrary to the past, there had been a marked diminishment of activity in all the western areas.
She turned from the computer monitor to Stanton, who sat beside her in his wheel chair.
“One should never assume they’ve got things figured out,” she tempered, “but I think the opening of the Nez Perce vent released some of the pressure we saw building for years beneath the caldera.”
“I wouldn’t argue with that,” Stanton replied with the slow and deliberate speech he’d developed through long months of therapy. Fortunately, he was right handed so his still-drooping left side did not prevent him from light duty as a Professor Emeritus, filling in some for the void left when Hollis returned to UCLA.
“Knock, knock,” said Leila from the door. She looked as lovely as ever in silk and pearls, her silver hair in soft waves. In contrast, Stanton was tieless and wore khaki trousers; having declared that life was too short to go around overdressed when he had trouble keeping his fork steady at the dinner table.
“What are your plans for the weekend?” Leila asked Kyle.
“Thought I’d drive up to Yellowstone this evening.”
Leila checked her watch and advised, “You should get on the road so you’ll get there before dark.”
Kyle looked at the wall clock and found there was probably just enough time to make it to Mammoth before summer night fell. “I’ll go soon.”
But once Stanton and Leila had gone, she turned back to the computer and brought up her email.
Nick’s latest message was from the Andes, where he and a group of South American geophysicists were conducting gravity studies on a newly smoking crater that had been dormant for over sixty years.
As soon as this project is wrapped up, I want to come back to Nez Perce. Some folks may think the small eruptions released the energy, but you and I both know Yellowstone is the world’s largest supervolcano.
“Thanks, Nick,” she thought. “Here I was feeling pretty good about things, and you have to bring me back to earth.”
In the meantime, you keep watch over Nez Perce and the Wasatch, and I’ll see you in the fall. P.S. I miss your smile.
Kyle’s lips curved into a full-blown grin. If she and Nick had been friends first, instead of lovers, they might not have lost all those years.
She pushed back her chair, locked up the lab and went out to her Mercedes. Her overnight bag was already stowed in the trunk.
Anticipating a lot of traffic if she drove through the park from the south, she took the longer but faster route around the west side. It was high summer, the potato and wheat crops of eastern Idaho emerald green where elaborate aluminum irrigation machines rolled through the fields. The air was so clear that she could look to the east and see the tips of the Grand Tetons. About fifty miles south of West Yellowstone, she entered the Targhee National Forest.
The ‘Land of Many Uses’ had been intermittently logged with vacant fields of stump stubble alternating with deep forest. The afternoon sun set off a strobe effect of light and shadow on the highway.
Kyle knew that beneath the mantle of vegetation lay the Island Park Caldera, the relatively small fifteen-mile-wide crater from the eruption of 1.3 million years ago. It also happened to mark the edge of the gargantuan two-million-year-old eruption, which had left a hole fifty by forty miles and rained ash over the western half of North America.
Once in the park, she drove through the open meadows along the Madison River. Here she crossed into the youngest 630,000-year caldera. Spying grazing elk and buffalo alongside wading fly-fishermen, she lowered her window and drew a breath of clean mountain air.
North of Madison Junction, she passed back out of the caldera and headed for Norris Geyser Basin, occasionally closed due to soil temperatures in the boiling range along the nature trails.
Dusk was falling when she caught sight of the small Headquarters community. Inhaling the familiar scent of sage, pine and earth, she felt she was coming home.
When she turned in at his duplex, Wyatt was waiting in the shadow of the porch.
As she got out of the car, the moon began to rise over the eastern horizon.
Wyatt came to her through the blue twilight, wearing faded jeans and a pullover, carrying a bottle of Lite and a Guinness. “Little late tonight?”
She took the proffered beer, knocked it against his and drank. “Made it by dark.”
“Only just.”
She looked again at the lemon orb of moon.
“Full tomorrow.” Wyatt took her drink, placed it with his on the trunk of her car, and put his arms around her from behind.
She leaned back, enjoying the feel of his muscle and warmth. “I’m learning to see the full moon as something other than a symbol of a single disastrous event in my life.”
Wyatt’s embrace tightened.
“I’m even trying to enjoy this time of evening. It’s as though everything is more sharply defined before darkness falls.”
He bent and his lips and moustache brushed her neck. “I wish you could spend more time here.”
She smiled. “I may be able to soon. I just hired Cass Grain out of Menlo Park, and she loves the kind of administrative nit-picking I plan to hand off to her.”
“Cass is a true supporter of romance,” Wyatt said dryly. “Hungry?” he went on. “I’ve got rib-eyes from the Firehole Inn.”
Picking up their beers, they got her bag out of the trunk and went inside.
Over dinner, she told him her theory about Nez Perce easing the pressure on the magma chamber beneath Yellowstone.
Wyatt forked up some baked potato. “Don’t let Superintendent Kuni hear you say that.”
“How so?” Kyle sipped some of the red wine Wyatt had poured for them.
“Now that the park has reopened, Joseph plans to use the proceeds from the Wonderland Campaign to augment the scientific program. He doesn’t ever want to be caught asleep at the wheel like Janet Bolido.”
Thinking how much better suited the former Chief Ranger was to manage the park, Kyle said, “I wonder how Janet’s doing since she fled back across the Potomac.”
“Do you really want to know?” Wyatt asked.
She took another bite of the succulent steak Wyatt had cooked medium rare the way she liked it. “That’s great about Kuni’s commitment to research, since my theory about things being quieter since Nez Perce blew could be totally wrong. In fact, I got an email from Nick today, warning us not to get complacent.”
Wyatt grinned. “You know it’s against Nick’s nature to want anything calm.”
She toyed with her wineglass. “It’s funny. Carol Leeds’s latest series was about how we were ‘wrong’ to warn of a major eruption at Yellowstone.”
He rose and picked up both their plates. “I guess she didn’t think Nez Perce put on a big enough show.”
Kyle joined Wyatt at the sink and started rinsing the dishes.
He turned off the water. “Leave those.”
In his room, Wyatt snapped on a lamp. “We were wrong … this time.”
Kyle faced him across the bed, her fingers on the buttons of her blue cotton shirt. “It may not happen in our lifetime …”
He
shrugged off his pullover.
“Or for thousands of years …” She stripped her shirt down her arms and dropped it, stepped out of her jeans and left them in a heap on the floor.
Wyatt slid beneath the covers and held them back in welcome.
She climbed in and his long limbs twined around her. Their mingled exhalation warmed the pillow.
“But it will happen,” Kyle said.
Closing her eyes, she took a second to perform what had become her ritual since last fall. She sent up a prayer for frightened little girls and everyone else who relied on fate to get them through the night.
“Wyatt,” she murmured against his chest.
He spread his hand warmly over her back. “Hmmm?”
She drew a deep breath. “Turn out the light.”
ALSO AVAILABLE BY LINDA JACOBS,
SUMMER OF FIRE
PROLOGUE
Houston, Texas
July 1, 1988
Black smoke billowed from the roof vents. At any second, the flames would burst through, adding their heat to the already shimmering summer sky. Wood shingle, Clare Chance thought in disgust, a four-story Houston firetrap. She drew a breath of thick humidity and prepared for that walk on the edge … where fire enticed with unearthly beauty, even as it destroyed.
Fellow firefighter Frank Wallace, over forty, but fighting trim, gripped her shoulder. “Back me up on the hose.” Although he squinted against the midday glare, his mustachioed grin showed his irrepressible enthusiasm.
“Right behind you,” Clare agreed. In full turnouts and an air pack, she ignored the sultry heat and the wail of sirens as more alarms were called. Helping Frank drag the hose between gawking by-standers and shocked apartment residents, she reflected that the toughest part of the job was watching lives inexorably changed.
A commotion broke out as a young Asian woman, reed thin in torn jeans, made a break from the two civilians holding her. She dashed toward the nearest building entry crying, “My baby!”
