Anna switched on the mental video again and watched herself lift the edge of the shelter: Nims's arm, the gloved hands; LeFleur shaking the tent like a housewife with a dusty rug; Nims's body, tangled in the straps, tumbling into view. Anna stopped the action there and tried to concentrate on the picture.
At a crime scene in a normal place she would have had at least the rudimentary investigative tools at her disposal. A camera, for one. There were a number of reasons to photograph a crime scene, not the least of which was that often, after the dust had cleared and one viewed the event through the perspective of the camera lens, details not noticed at the time became apparent.
Holding the image behind her eyes, Anna tried to do that now. Nims had been poured out of the shelter on his side, left hand above his head, the right palm up near his face. Anna tried to see if there was any expression but the soot that blackened all their faces masked his as well. All she could recall was the startling opalescence of his eyes.
She tried to see the entirety of the body: the right hand, the left—glove caked with blood—hard hat knocked askew, yellow shirt, drab trousers, blood, brown and crumbly on his back and left side beneath his arm.
The picture wavered, disintegrating under so much scrutiny.
There was something wrong but Anna wasn't seeing it. Tomorrow—or today, she had lost all sense of time—she would make a proper study of the scene. At the moment the adrenaline had been reabsorbed and her body was claiming its right to rest. She drifted into sleep so deep and hard even dreams were shut out.
Chapter Eleven
ANNA WOKE FROM a nightmare and tried to sit up. Metal held her flat. Dream became reality. She was suffocating, life was being crushed out of her. Desperately, she began fighting for space and air.
"You're okay. You're okay. You're under a truck. I'm here. God damn it, Anna, cut it out!"
Stephen Lindstrom tweaked her ear hard and she began to put two and two together. The sum was not much more comforting than the nightmare had been. But there was light at long last and where there was light there was hope.
Faint gray pushed in around the sides of the truck's under-carriage but there was nothing to see: no stumps or ash, burned rubber; nothing but blank even-toned gray-white with light behind it.
"Snow?" she croaked through dry lips.
"Not much. I poked my fingers out. Maybe six inches or so. It kept us snug as the proverbial rug bugs."
Anna realized she wasn't terribly cold. The earth and the metal chassis had retained some heat from the fire. Snow had held it close overnight. "Probably the only reason we woke up at all," she said. Freezing to death in a fire would have been just the touch of irony the gods delighted in.
"I've got to get out of here." Long hours—even those free from consciousness—of suppressing the claustrophobia were over. Now that she could escape, it became imperative that she do so. Working through the shooting pains in her hips and shoulders, she forced the joints through their first movement in God knew how long, crabbing her way from under the truck.
Snow broke free, fell in clumps down the collar of her brush jacket, jammed up under the edge of her gloves. The bite of cold brought Black Elk and Boggins to mind. Their burns would weep, robbing their bodies of fluid, of heat, opening the door to shock and hypothermia.
Nothing she could do about it at the moment.
She took a mouthful of snow and held it on her tongue, letting the melt wet her parched throat and lips. Shuffling her feet and swinging her arms to pump life back into them, she watched Lindstrom crawl painfully from beneath the truck, his left glove clutched in his bare hand. Elbows out, body flattened, he put her in mind of a giant insect in a Jules Verne novel, something trapped in lava, released by the fires.
Oddly, it made her nervous and she looked away.
The world was much changed from when they'd gone under the truck. Like Rip Van Winkle, it seemed as if she must have slept for a hundred years. What had been a world of black was now so white it was hard to distinguish between hill and hollow. A white sky, sifting fine flakes of snow through utterly still air, pressed down on snow-shrouded ground. Here and there the black skeletal arm of a tree thrust up, often capped with a rakish point of snow. Tree trunks, ten, twenty, a hundred feet long, were scattered like jackstraws, crisscrossing each other in ragged confusion.
Nowhere was there any color; not a scrap of green or yellow or brown or blue. Even the red-orange of stray embers was quenched, replaced by steam as colorless as everything else. What had once been a living forest, a kaleidoscope of life and color, now resembled a Chinese brush painting. Black ink on white rice paper; starkly beautiful but without welcome.
Lindstrom pushed himself to his hands and knees and Anna grabbed an arm to help him to his feet. "Did we die?" he asked, yanking his glove on with jerky irritated movements. "I'm pretty sure we did. God, but I feel hung over. What a bender we must have been on." He began to imitate Anna's shuffling dance, moving with the clumsy inexperience of a new-made Frankenstein's monster. "Not dead," he said after a moment. "Got to pee. Ghosts moan and rattle chains but I've never heard of one taking a piss. My, but this is good news."
Anna obligingly turned her back. It was the one instance in life where she credited Freud's much-touted theory of penis envy. With the snow and the cold she didn't relish the dropping of drawers that was becoming more necessary with each passing minute.
"Bet you wish you had a handy-dandy picnic device," Stephen said.
Anna heard the workings of a zipper and turned back. "My wish list is longer than Santa's at the moment. A bath, breakfast, pancakes, coffee—"
"Cut that out."
"Right." Anna pulled the radio from her belt and turned it on. Hand-helds worked on clamshell batteries. They weren't meant to run indefinitely. When it came down to it, she could cannibalize the batteries from her headlamp but she doubted they had much more juice in them than those in the radio.
Static pulsed as she monkeyed with the volume and the squelch. "Damn."
"Losing it?"
She nodded and placed a call to Base. Nothing came back but static. "What time is it?" she asked.
"Just before six."
"They're up. We'll try again when the weather lifts or maybe with another radio."
"Anna." Her radio crackled the name in LeFleur's voice.
"We're still alive," she told the crew boss. "Howard? Paula?"
"Everybody made it down here. Lawrence and Joseph kept the home fires burning. They're beat." Anna could hear the pride in his voice. "I heard your call to Base. Any response?"
"Not yet."
"Sounds like your battery is going. Save it when you can. What kind of shape are you two in?"
Anna looked to Lindstrom and he shrugged. "Good. We're in good shape."
"Could you check on Newt? It's a long shot, but if..."
"I'd forgotten all about Newt," Stephen said in a stricken whisper.
So had Anna.
"Will do," she replied. If Hamlin had survived the fire only to die of exposure because of their neglect it would be unconscionable. There were enough bad dreams to go around as it was.
HAMLIN WASN'T ONLY merely dead, but, as Anna couldn't help parroting Munchkinlike in her mind, really most sincerely dead.
They brushed off enough of the snow to determine that the lump beneath was indeed a human form. During the firestorm his shelter had blown off. The body was burned till it was unrecognizable.
Fire had robbed the corpse of all the trappings of life: hair and flesh and eyes. There was no odor but the clean, slightly acrid scent of dust and Anna didn't find the body as upsetting as she'd feared she might. In fact, she was strangely untouched by it personally, feeling rather a generic sadness for those left living who had loved the boy.
Mostly, as she and Lindstrom slogged back up through the snow, climbing over downed snags heaped together like pickup sticks, Anna's strongest feeling was of hunger. Life asserting its dominion. After a grilled cheese, fries and a vanilla shake she would be better fortified to contemplate the great beyond.
From the ridge she radioed John and told him the news. It was expected. "Thanks" was all he said, and: "Had to make sure. Try Base again," he told her. "Meanwhile, I'll get another radio up to you. Pepperdine needs airing off anyway."
Anna called Incident Base again. The Motorola bleated static and she was surprised to hear Gene Burwell's voice rasp back.
His words were hard to understand and harder still to accept. Winds had felled snags across the logging road. How many miles he didn't know, but estimated the burn had covered at least four. The ground rescue unit had been recalled. Crews were already clearing away the deadfall but trees had come down by the hundreds. Weighted by six inches of new wet snow, more were falling all the time. Conditions were hazardous and the going slow. A helicopter was on standby. As soon as there was a break in the weather it would be dispatched. Till then the crews would keep on working but rescue by road wouldn't be that day. Possibly the next.
Disappointment, as strong and petulant as that of a child, swelled in Anna's chest and she had to keep her mouth shut to avoid saying something snippy.
"The weather will lift before then," Burwell promised.
"Does he think he's Willard Fucking Scott?" Lindstrom hissed.
Stephen's pique helped Anna rise above her own. "We're fairly stable up here, considering," she shouted into the radio as if volume could cut through the interference. "Hungry mostly."
"Stand by."
A long silence followed and Anna felt herself irrationally wishing for a reprieve.
"Maybe the cavalry arrived," Stephen said hopefully, and Anna laughed.
"My thoughts exactly. Not bloody likely. The cavalry's out clearing deadfall."
"Spoilsport."
The radio came to life again in a series of squawks and hisses. "Anna, this is Frederick, Frederick Stanton of the FBI."
If Anna had believed in prayer and believed they got answered she would have had to admit that at least this once the answer had been "yes." A hundred questions came to mind. The need to bawl and babble like a child threatened to overwhelm. Frederick Stanton.
Anna's throat closed and her eyes filled with tears.
When she'd been in second grade, she'd broken her leg in a sledding accident at school. Brave and jaunty, she'd allowed herself to be towed in from the playground and carried to Mr. White's big oak desk. Then, when her mother arrived, she'd dissolved in tears. Because she could afford to.
"Ten-four," she said idiotically.
"Are you clear to copy?"
"Yes," Anna said, wanting his voice to go on.
By the time it dawned on her that "Are you clear to copy?" was NPS code for "Is the bad guy standing there ready to clobber you the moment his cover is blown?" the damage had been done.
Chapter Twelve
STANTON FINISHED RELAYING the criminal histories from Timmy Spinks's background checks. "Anything more to transmit?" Anna asked politely. Receiving a negative, she made arrangements to call in every three hours and turned off her radio to preserve what was left of the battery. Depression settled over her in a palpable cloud, filling her lungs as surely as the smoke had. Safety, home, was held only by a tenuous channel forged through unstable air by a wave it took faith to believe existed. Withdrawal, Anna thought: the high, the crash. Hope and cocaine.
Any comfort she'd gotten from the first strains of Frederick Stanton's voice was blasted away. Suddenly, irrationally, she was angry at the man. Trundling through the friendly skies with hot and cold running stewardi, warm dry clothes and food, to broadcast criminal histories up to her private patch of purgatory.
Trapped on a ridge in the Cascades, one did not wish to know one's fellows that well. Untold secrets were the safest. Anna would keep her eyes open, learn what she could. None but a lunatic, armed with only a Swiss Army knife, her backup a grieving seasonal and a pudgy neophyte, would go hammer and tongs after a murderer.
Knowing would be dangerous.
Not knowing would be worse.
Stephen was standing close, shoulders hunched, his hands deep in his pockets, looking as forlorn as Anna was feeling. "I really, truly, deeply, honestly want to get the fuck out of here," he said morosely. "I promised God I'd never put my peas on my brother's plate and tell Mom I'd eaten mine if He'd just get me an Egg McMuffin this one time."
Anna laughed. "Obstructing traffic? I can't remember if that's a venial or a mortal sin. We're probably all being punished for your transgressions."
"He didn't mention indecent exposure, did he?"
Anna shook her head.
