Sweetheart (32 page)

Above them, a few hundred feet straight up to the right, a cliff side was being held together with chicken wire. A yellow sign warned
ROCKS.

“Found it,” Claire’s voice said. “Heather Anne Gerber. Archie added the phone to his family plan. He said she was his daughter.”

“Give me the number,” Henry said, tearing a Post-it off the pad affixed to the dash. “Then get a trace on it and call me back.”

Claire read him the ten digits and Henry wrote them down.

“Well?” Susan asked when he hung up. With the leaking ice pack against her face, Henry could barely make out anything she said.

He didn’t answer. Instead he punched in the number of the phone Archie had registered to a dead girl.

The phone went right to voice mail.

“It’s me,” Archie’s recorded voice said. “Hurry.” The voice mail beeped.

“God fucking dammit,” Henry said into the phone. “You better have a fucking epic excuse for all this.” His voice thickened and he swallowed hard, turning his head to hide his emotion from Susan. “I’m on my way.”

He hung up and turned to Susan.

“It’s him,” he said.

His phone rang and he snapped it to his ear before it could get to the second ring. “There’s a timber road at mile post 92 off Highway 20 near the Metolius River. We’re getting a hit two miles up that road. Flannigan checked and there’s only one house up there.”

They had just passed mile post 38. Susan had been right. It had been Gretchen. And Henry had headed in exactly the opposite direction. No time to kick himself now. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going up there. Get everyone you can to that house.”

“You know there’s a fire, right?” Claire asked.

Henry flipped on the siren, pulled into the oncoming lane, and executed a U-turn. Up ahead a plume of flesh-colored smoke rose ominously from the horizon. “Yep,” he said.

Henry hadn’t said ten words since he’d gotten off the phone with Claire. He was white-knuckling the steering wheel, taking the curves fast, his aviator sunglasses reflecting the road. There was no traffic to impede them now. They passed Big Charlie’s gas station and continued farther up, snaking through the Doug firs, siren wailing.

The trees were getting taller, the sky a skinny river above their heads. Dark shadows dappled the road. The ice had melted.

They cleared a curve and saw a Forest Service roadblock up ahead. It was Susan’s first glimpse of the fire. An orange wall of flame formed a squiggle along the back of one of the tree-thick ridges ahead of them. Beige smoke blocked out the whole eastern sky.

“Jesus,” she said.

Henry pulled up to the roadblock. The westbound lane was still open to let through the stragglers fleeing the fire, but the east-bound lane was blocked with sawhorses. A big sign read
ROAD CLOSED DUE TO FIRE
.

A park ranger with a ponytail walked up to the car. He wore a standard-issue brimmed ranger hat and a wet bandana tied around his nose and mouth. “You have to turn back,” he said to Henry, motioning back down the mountain.

Henry pointed to the siren on the hood. “Portland PD,” he said.

“Have you come to arrest the fire?” the ranger asked.

“I need to get to a timber road near the Metolius,” Henry said.

The ranger shook his head. “Fire’s too close to the road. It’s closed. You can go around.”

“Can’t,” Henry said. “I need to get through now. I think Gretchen Lowell’s up there. With Archie Sheridan.”

The ranger lifted his chin and surveyed the fiery hillside. For a second Susan wondered if Henry might just drive through the roadblock.

But he didn’t have to. “If the fire overtakes your car,” the ranger said, “stay in your vehicle. Lie on the floor and cover your head and face. Breathe shallow breaths through your nose. If you have to get out of the car don’t run uphill from the fire.”

Susan leaned forward so she could speak across Henry. “Why?” she asked.

The ranger took his handkerchief off and wiped the back of his neck with it. “Because heat rises,” he said, “and the fire will outrun you.”

He motioned to one of the other rangers to move the saw-horses so the Crown Vic could pass.

“Now go,” he said. “If the fire jumps the road get the hell out of there.”

Henry looked at Susan. She knew what he was thinking. “No,” she said, crossing her arms and facing straight ahead. “I’m staying with you.”

There were wildflowers along the highway; great fields of pink and purple carpeted the north shoulder where the hillside rose at a one-hundred-twenty-degree angle of rocky outcroppings. Susan had put her boots on and had her feet on the floor so she could lean forward and watch the smoke, a plume so huge it looked like a mountain. The road was eerily quiet. They had gone several miles and passed only a few yellow Forest Service trucks. Henry had the light and siren on and no one in the trucks had given them a second look. They had other things on their minds. The Doug firs were giving way to ponderosa pines. Just beyond the next hill, Susan could see two planes dropping red fire retar-dant. The red retardant looked like blood hemorrhaging from the planes’ split bellies.

A doe lay dead on the side of the road.

A bullet-riddled sign marked a
SNO-PARK.

The smoke was thick enough now that Henry snapped on the headlights.

Susan glanced down at her cell phone. She’d been on roam for the last few miles. Now she didn’t have any signal at all. “I’ve lost service,” she said.

“Me, too,” Henry said.

Susan felt a cramping in her stomach that seemed a lot like fear.

It started to rain. Henry turned on the windshield wipers and the raindrops smeared gray along the glass. It wasn’t rain.

“What is it?” asked Susan.

“Did I ever tell you the story of how I ended up married to a Lummi Indian princess?” Henry asked.

“It’s not rain,” she said.

Henry accelerated. “It’s ash,” he said.

Susan rolled up her window. She did it quickly, putting her whole arm into it. The ash fell from the sky like snow, covering the car and the road with a fine gray dust.

The highway curved and opened up as they cleared the hump of the pass. The road began its descent into forest as far as the eye could see, half of it on fire, the sky orange with it, a weird psychedelic sunset.

“How much farther?” Susan asked. Her eyes burned from the smoke. It was getting thicker, so Henry had to slow down to stay on the road.

“Five miles,” Henry said.

The fire had burned the woods to the south of the highway. The ground was black, the ponderosas white stalks, their branches curled and naked. The woods to the north, where the fire hadn’t jumped the highway, were pristine, tall pines and alders, prairie grass an unbelievable yellow-green. And then, every so often, a single tree would be burning like a torch.

“It’s jumping the highway,” Susan said. It was getting hard to breathe and Susan closed the vents on the dash, though it didn’t do any good.

“I know,” said Henry.

Susan coughed and lifted a hand to her mouth, trying to filter out the ash with her fingers. “The ranger said that if it jumped the highway, we should turn back,” she said. Breathe through your nose, the ranger had also said. But her nose was packed with cotton.

“It’s too late,” Henry said. He jammed a finger behind them and Susan turned to see that both sides of the road were on fire now.

There was an explosion and Susan braced herself, hands on the dash, thinking that a tire might have blown. But the car stayed on the road. She was disoriented for a moment and turned to Henry for an explanation, but he was leaning over the steering wheel, trying to see through the smoke. Then she realized: It was the trees. The trees were exploding.

Susan heard Henry say “Shit,” and looked up just in time to see an elk, standing stock-still in the center of the lane.

Henry slammed on the brakes and the car spun.

Susan squeezed her eyes shut as the inertia of the car pressed her against the passenger-side door. She heard the tangled metal sound of the car hitting the guardrail and opened her eyes long enough to see orange sparks fly as the car ruptured it. The car lunged down the hill and then flipped, and she was upside down, hands pressed against the roof of the car. She closed her eyes again. The sound of the metal roof of the car sliding down the hillside smashing into the charcoaled skeletons of trees was loud, like an animal baying, and she thought of Parker in that moment, going off the bridge. How time slows down during car accidents, so he must have had time to think, to know what was happening, just like she did now.

And then it was quiet.

She was still alive.

She did a mental inventory of her body parts. Feet. Legs. Arms. Hands. She was still whole. She opened her eyes. Dust swirled inside the car and stung her eyes and made her cough.

“You okay?” Henry asked.

“I think so,” Susan said. “Did we hit it?” She didn’t know why she was so concerned about the elk.

“Can you get out?” Henry asked.

She struggled to get out of the car, unclipping her seat belt and falling on her shoulders and then to a fetal position on her side. The car was full of glass and dirt and her shoulder hurt from the impact but she made herself keep moving. The windshield was broken and she slithered out onto the blackened soil. It was still warm, the charcoal like burned toast in her mouth.

She scrambled away from the car, trying to get out of the dust storm of soot that the crash had stirred up. The car had come to rest against a blackened tree. It had spun entirely around and was facing the road, the trunk against the tree, the hood up the incline. The wheels were still spinning. Susan shook the twigs and beads of auto glass from her hair and stood up, but a wave of light-headedness forced her back to her haunches, coughing.

Her nose. She touched her face. The bandage was still on. Her face hurt. But not more than normal.

She looked up. They were thirty feet from the road, overlooking the lake. She blinked against the blinding smoke. Beyond the lake the surrounding hillsides were devastated, charred relics of trees; it looked like the end of the world.

She heard Henry get loose with a thud, and in a minute he pulled himself through the windshield. “Radio’s busted,” he said.

He moved around to the back of the car. “Fuck,” he said. “Trunk’s jammed.”

Susan half slid down the embankment to join him. The trunk of the Crown Vic was wrapped around the tree.

“You think?” she said.

“Emergency kit’s in there,” Henry muttered. “Flair gun, flashlight, everything.” He rubbed his forehead for a minute. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll have to walk out.” He started up the darkened hillside.

“Come on,” he said, turning back.

Susan didn’t budge. “The ranger said to stay in the car.”

“The car is upside down,” Henry said.

Susan crossed her arms. “I’m staying here.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Henry said, holding out a hand.

“No, really,” Susan said. “It’s okay. Leave me.”

“Come on, Susan. It’s going to be dark soon. We’ll have a better chance on the road.”

Susan stared at him for another minute and then turned back to the car, got down on her hands and knees, and crawled halfway through the passenger window.

“Susan,” Henry groaned.

She saw what she was looking for in the backseat and grabbed it. “I’m getting my purse,” she said. She backed out of the car and stood up, pausing to brush the glass off the knees of her jeans.

Henry held out his hand again and she took it. “I’m never coming to the woods again,” she said, as he pulled her up the hillside.