The Homeplace: A Mystery (18 page)

Bill was the third generation of Masons to live in the frame house at the curve of Sandy Creek. Like every other farmer in the county, Bill was apt to be too stubborn to do anything but fight to save what was his. Marty knew he might have to knock Bill on the head and throw him in the back of his car to get him to leave his farm to the fire. But Marty had to get Bill Mason and his wife out.

Flames crawled through the dead grass up from the creek and then flared taller than the barbed wire in the knots of tumbleweed caught in the fence. Fire spilled from the fence into Mason’s wheat stubble. Like falling dominos the fire moved from row to row through the knee-high stalks of cut wheat.

Marty bounced the car over the rutted road and into the Masons’ farmyard. Clothes on the line popped in the wind. Ash mixed with tongues of wind-driven dust blasted across the hard-packed ground. The back door on the faded white house swung open. Connie Mason, wide-eyed and with her grandbaby on her hip, came down the porch steps two at a time.

“Where’s Bill?” Marty yelled over the wind.

Connie met Marty at his car. “Bill’s not here.” She pushed the baby at him with both hands. “Take her. I gotta save the house.”

“No, you’re not.”

A fiery bit of trash carried by the wind fell in the dry weeds near one the outbuildings. Flames crackled to life.

Marty caught Connie’s arm and shoved the woman and baby into his car. “You’re gettin’ out of here now.” She fought his grip. “Where’s Bill?” he asked again.

“He’s with the others. Lookin’ for Pop Weber.” The old woman’s eyes pleaded. “The house, Marty. It’s all we have.”

Where the power lines crossed Sandy Creek, ugly flames climbed up a pole. The cable snapped like a rifle shot, and a shower of orange sparks arced across the sky.

“I’ll do what I can, I promise.” He pressed his car keys into her hand and pushed her and the baby down on the seat.

“Marty—” Connie’s tears spilled from her eyes.

“Where does Bill keep his tractor keys?”

“On a hook. Just inside the kitchen door.”

“Get outta here now.” He shoved the car door shut.

Connie held the baby tight to her chest with one arm. She reached across the steering wheel with the other, turned the key, and dropped the sheriff’s car into gear. The woman swung the car in a half circle and drove to the bridge across Sandy Creek and away from the fire.

Marty sprinted toward the farmhouse.

The back door wasn’t locked. It probably never had been in all the years the Masons had lived there. From a shiny nail on the wall, Marty tossed a ring of house and car keys on the floor and snatched a braided piece of leather with a single key he knew would fit the Massey Ferguson he’d seen parked in the shade of the barn.

He bounded off the porch and ran to the tractor, wind and blowing ash peppering his face. As if each row of wheat stubble was a fuse to the next, the wall of fire had burned row by row to a third of the way across the field. A dozen fiery tumbleweeds cartwheeled ahead of the marching inferno.

Marty jumped up onto the tractor and jammed the key into the ignition. The engine rumbled to life. The only chance he could think of was to get ahead of the army of flames and plow up fresh dirt so the fire would run of out of fuel before it could reach the house and barns.

But Bill Mason’s plowing discs sat in a tangle of dried weeds near the fence that separated the farmyard from the stubble field. The discs hadn’t been hooked to the tractor since spring. Two men could hitch the attachment onto the tractor in ten minutes. It would take one man most of an hour.

He shifted the tractor into gear and rumbled across the farmyard to the discs. He cut a sharp turn, backed up, and leaped from the tractor. Smoke and grit burned his eyes and wind popped in his ears. He fumbled with a spaghetti tangle of red and yellow hydraulic hoses knotted in the stalks of dried weeds and began to hook them to the tractor. The wind took his Stetson from the top of his head.

Marty glanced at the fire. He didn’t have an hour. And he wasn’t two men.

*   *   *

Red road dust swirled in the gray smoke. Far ahead, in the haze, Chase could make out the flashing lights on the county fire truck.

He pressed down on the gas pedal and raced down the dirt road. From the turnoff to the Masons’ place, a sheriff’s car that looked like the one Marty had been driving swerved onto the road ahead of Chase. A gray-haired woman sat behind the wheel. Not Marty.

Chase hit the brakes, and his truck slid sidewise on the washboard. He fought the steering wheel, righted the Dodge a dozen yards from the patrol car, and was out of the door as it slid to a stop.

“Where’s Marty?” he bellowed into the wind.

The window was down on the sheriff’s car. Chase recognized the woman. It was Connie Mason. She’d been one of the few women in the county who visited his mother after the accident. She came almost every Tuesday and always brought something she’d baked.

“Oh, Chase. Thank God.” Her face was wet with tears. She hugged a bundled baby close to her. “You’ve got to get him out of there. I shouldn’t have let him make me leave.”

“Who, Connie?”
Was she talking about her husband? Or Marty? Why’d she have his car?
The thoughts raced through his mind as fast as the prairie fire.

“It’s Marty.” She patted the baby’s head and mumbled something comforting. “He’s trying to save my house.”

Smoke stung Chase’s eyes. The flames had crawled up the creek bottom to within a hundred yards of the road to Masons’ place.

“Get him out of there, Chase. He’s goin’ to die.”

Chase bit down on his tongue.
Damn it, Marty
. “You go, Connie. I’ll get him.”

Like a cloudy sky that refused to let the wind take the smoke away, the terror came like a nightmare. Yellow flames in the distance. The whoosh of the wind. The cries of a frightened horse. And everything murky with gray smoke.

But dreams come in random bursts and float in one’s mind without sequence. Everything about this horror had purpose. The wall of flames marched like an angry army across the field. Smoke clung to his tongue and teeth in grainy, bitter fragments.

He wheeled his truck into the yard in front of the farmhouse.

A chestnut mare tossed herself, wild-eyed, against a corral fence. Her lips drew back from her teeth, and her scream of pure terror iced Chase’s veins. Chase jumped from the truck, threw open the corral gate, and slapped the horse’s rump as she fled by him.

At least she’ll have a chance.

Then he spotted Marty. His best friend was backlit by the wall of fire. He knelt behind a tractor and dug with his hands into the dry weeds around him—dry weeds that could explode with the next spark.

What the …

Then Chase saw the plow.

Damn him. He’s going Eastwood.

Eastwood. That’s what they’d dared each other sixteen years ago. Going Eastwood. Racing tractors, bull riding, surfing on the hood of a speeding pickup, or any of the dozen other stunts they did when they were seventeen and bulletproof, immortal. When a mistake meant a chipped tooth or scrapes and cuts, and anything worse happened to someone else. Back then Marty would never back down.

Damn him.

Chase ran to his friend. He grabbed Marty’s shoulder and pulled him around. “We got to get out of here.”

“No, Chase. Help me.” Marty tugged away from Chase’s grip.

“It’s no use.”

With each second the fire gobbled up another stubble row. Now it was just fifty yards away.

Chase grabbed at Marty again.

Marty batted Chase’s hand from his shoulder. “No. I almost got it.” And he snapped the quick connectors of two hoses together. “Help me with the hitch.”

“Leave it to burn, Marty.”

“Chase, we can do it.” He grabbed another set of hoses from the tangle in the weeds.

Chase shook his head.
We’re both fools.

But Marty scrambled up onto the tractor seat, jammed gears, and moved the tractor back a foot.

A burning tumbleweed somersaulted into the weed patch with the plow. Chase stomped the sparks before they could flare. He straddled the hitch and heaved up. The ball was still inches from the tractor. “More.”

Marty let off the clutch and tractor rolled a few inches.

“Good.” Chase dropped the coupler over the ball. Hydraulic hoses stiffened with life. Chase heard the whoosh of oil moving to the plow. He snapped the hitch lock closed. “I’ll get the gate,” he hollered.

“No time.”

The tractor lurched forward through the weeds. In two running steps, Chase caught hold of a bracket on the tractor’s rearview mirror and swung onto the machine’s side steps.

“Hold on,” Marty yelled, and he aimed the tractor at the fence.

A cedar fence post exploded into a thousand splinters at the front of the Massey Ferguson. Barbed wire stretched tight across the tractor’s cowl and sang out as each strand broke away. A ragged end whipped by Chase’s face.

With a jolt, Chase, Marty, and the tractor were in the field with the fire.

Chase held tight. Marty swung the tractor parallel to the coming flames. The deputy pulled a lever on the hydraulic pump. Behind the moving tractor, on the plow they’d worked so hard to hitch up, the silver discs began to spin. Marty jammed another lever, and the discs lowered to the ground and fought to cut into the dirt.

Marty edged the tractor closer to the moving flames. He looked over his shoulder. “Shit. It’s not bitin’.”

The silver discs danced over the surface of the drought-hardened ground, refusing to cut in.

Chase remembered how his father, in the dry years, had tied bags of cement, cinder blocks, anything that would add weight to the top of their plow just to make the sharp discs break through the hard crust and tear in. Sometimes just a few more pounds was enough.

“Slow down,” Chase yelled, and dropped from the side of the tractor.

“What are you doin’?” Marty slowed the tractor to a crawl.

“Eastwood.” As the plow rolled by, Chase sprawled his rangy length across the top of the machine. The toes of his boots dangled close to turning discs, and the fingers of one hand gripped just inches from a turning wheel. He turned his face to where the discs met the ground.

Damn it. Cut.

Brittle stalks of wheat stubble snapped as the plow passed. Just inches from his eyes, the discs carved through the crusty soil, churning up fresh dirt and biting deeper with each turn. New dirt churned into the air. He turned away and clamped his eyes shut. The tractor jerked as Marty shifted gears and moved faster.

Chase heard his friend bellow out, “Eastwood.”

*   *   *

A chocolate stripe of fresh dirt, three plow-widths wide, separated the scorched field from the rows of wheat stubble the color of dirty honey. Here and there flames sputtered on the blackened, burned ground, and while the wind held its breath, thick dust hung in the smoky air.

Chase rolled off the plow. Bruises on his shins and thighs ached, and his fingers cramped into twisted hooks from clinging to the plow. He crawled to the back of the tractor and propped his head against the knobby tire treads so he could see where the Masons’ farmhouse still stood. Safe and untouched.

Marty cut the engine and slid down beside his friend. He found a shaft of straw on the ground, hung it between his lips, and leaned back against the tire. “You know, if you hadn’t gained all the weight after you quit playin’ I don’t think that would’ve worked, Eastwood.”

“Shut up.” Chase tried to spit out the dirt that caked his mouth. “I got a mouthful of cow shit.”

Marty huffed out a breath and pushed his fingers through his dirty hair. “No, that’d be horse shit. If you came back home more often, you’d remember how the two taste different.” He plucked a dirt clod from the ground and lobbed it out into the field. “We did it, didn’t we?”

We did it, didn’t we?
The last time Chase had heard Marty say that was in the big-city locker room after Brandon won the state title. Everyone else was gone except the two senior boys. Chase and Marty couldn’t let that minute end.

Brandon had been down five points with twenty-eight seconds left, when Marty was fouled making a layup. The guy who couldn’t make three out of ten free throws in practice swished that one. Chase got a steal and hit a jumper to tie the game at the buzzer and then scored sixteen in overtime and was carried off the court on the shoulders of half of Brandon. The town still talked about that game, and Marty’s three points had been forgotten by everyone but Chase.

He looked up at his friend, too sore and too tired to move. “Yeah, Marty, we did it.”

The deputy brushed dust from the front of his shirt and leaned back against the tractor tire. “You know somethin’ else?”

“What’s that?”

“You let Mason’s horse out of the corral, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re gonna hafta catch it by yourself, Eastwood.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

At the bridge to the Masons’ farm, Birdie gave the finger to the volunteer fireman who waved for her to stop. She dodged around the back of his pickup and sprayed gravel at the man’s truck. When she checked the rearview mirror he had his hands on both hips and was shaking his head. She didn’t care. She had to get to Chase and Marty.

In the farmyard, the door to Chase’s Dodge hung open and the wind banged a corral gate against a rail fence. Spirals of broken barbed wire stabbed the sky on both sides of a busted fence post. She pointed her pickup at the tire tracks from the tractor and drove through the opening in the fence out into the field.

Just where the wheat stubble met the plow-turned dirt, Chase stretched across the ground with his head resting on his folded arms. Marty sat on the ground beside him with his back against the tractor tire. Wisps of smoke from the dying fire drifted around the silent Massey Ferguson.

Her heart climbed into her throat.

One of ‘em’s hurt.

She pulled up close, opened the door to her truck, and before her stubby legs touched the ground, Birdie heard something that made her red-faced mad.