Summer of Fire Part 24

"Cream and sugar?" Asa stumped into the room behind the library.

"Just black." She raised her voice, for she'd noted her host wore a pair of large, old-fas.h.i.+oned hearing aids.

Asa returned. Coagulated lumps of powdered creamer floated in both brimfull Styrofoam cups. "What brings you to Jackson?"

"I'm a firefighter."

"Whee . . ." Asa set his coffee on a worn antique table, hitched up his pants and sat down. "Many women do that now?"

"Some," Clare said, then admitted, "not many."

"We're hearing they can't stop those fires. Just plain burning out of control, and all you firefighters do is toast marshmallows."

By now, she should be used to peoples' att.i.tude around the park. No matter how skilled the generals and their troops, or how many millions were spent, all they could do was try to keep the fires from damaging life and property.

Clare set her coffee aside. "My family was already in the valley around the turn of the century."

"Not many folks here then," Asa said.

"Their name was Sutton."

Asa nodded. He was silent for so long that Clare wondered if he had heard her. Finally, he said, "Suttons lived out north in what's now the National Park."

"My great-grandmother Laura was supposed to have kept a journal. n.o.body in the family has it and I wondered if it might have wound up here."

"We don't have anything like that," he answered immediately.

"How can you be sure?" Clare gestured toward thousands of books.

"Been working here since forty-nine. Know every volume on every shelf."

There were a lot of books, but she figured that in thirty-nine years she could get through them all. "Did you know the Suttons?"

Asa dipped his head. "They sold out to the Snake River Land Company after the flood. Their ranch ended up inside the park, just the way Rockefeller wanted it."

"What do you mean?"

"John D. Rockefeller, Jr. hated the gas stations, billboards, and cheap tourist camps near Jenny Lake. He decided to buy up all the private land and donate it to the country for a national park."

"What's wrong with that?" Clare asked.

Asa scowled. "If you'd been here then, you'd understand. They set up a dummy corporation and kept folks in the dark about what all the buying was for."

"My family sold out?"

"Yup. After the Gros Ventre flood, people were nervous and took whatever offers they could get. Your folks got taken to the cleaners along with my father."

"Do you know the way to their place?"

"Ask at Grand Teton Headquarters," Asa said.

Clare thanked him and headed for the door. She wondered if Devon would show any interest in knowing about the family.

While she killed more time in town before heading for the airport, she felt torn between antic.i.p.ation at seeing Devon and an ache over what might have been with Steve.

Two hours later, Clare watched as the 737 taxied up to the Jackson Hole Airport. The small terminal squatted on the sage-covered flats beside the startling wall of the Tetons. Smoke hung in the valley, giving a filtered view of the mighty bulwark.

After twenty or so vacationers had picked their way down the stairs to the tarmac, Clare saw Devon. Her unruly hair was more golden than usual; she must have hit the Summer Blonde too hard. Charcoal rimmed her eyes and her cutoffs and tank top were tight. When Devon got to within three feet, Clare smelled gin.

Before she could berate Devon for getting the flight attendant to serve someone underage, a low male voice spoke from behind her. "How about introducing me to your daughter?"

Her two worlds collided.

"Hey, Mom." Devon tossed off her greeting, and checked Steve out, from his red western s.h.i.+rt and faded jeans down to scuffed leather hiking boots. She raised an inquiring brow that made Clare feel as though she was the one who had some answering to do.

"This is Dr. Steve Haywood." Clare did not meet his eyes. She wasn't prepared for what she might find there. Truth to tell, she wasn't ready for him to see how foolishly happy she was to see him.

"h.e.l.lo," Devon responded, "Doctor Steve Haywood."

Clare could tell by the knowing look that her daughter thought they were an item. Not ready to admit how it made her feel, she stood on tiptoe to kiss Devon's cheek. "Hi."

"What kind of doctor?" Devon asked. "Are you sick?"

"Yeah." Clare figured that about summed it up. "Sick of eating smoke and watching the fires outstrip anything man can throw at them."

She was tired of everything about this wild country, except the man who smiled indulgently at Devon. "I'm a biologist. The past few years I've been counting elk."

"Elk," Devon echoed flatly.

Steve cradled the back of Clare's arm with a persuasive touch. Gone was his mask of anger, replaced by the warmth she remembered in his eyes. That spark she'd felt in him just before he threw off their flimsy fire shelter.

From the corner of her eye Clare saw Devon notice.

"I happened to be in the neighborhood." He grinned. "I wondered if I might buy you two ladies dinner."

"Steak?" Devon qualified.

"The best in town," Steve agreed.

Clare let their momentum carry her to baggage claim and out into the yellow afternoon light. After all, Devon already thought she and Steve were together.

He carried Devon's duffel bag to Clare's rental car and showed off the clunker of a truck from the park motor pool. "A hundred eighty thousand miles and she shudders when I brake. It's a wonder I made it over Teton Pa.s.s."

"I'm glad you did," Clare told him.

Devon gave him a funny look.

As he held Clare's car door for her, he murmured, "If I didn't catch you at the airport, I was going to check the motels."

A little stab went through her at the thought of what people could do in motels. This evening, though, she had a duty to her daughter.

At Jackson's Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, the main room boasted a dance floor, pool tables, and long bars on either side. Gla.s.s cases displayed a stuffed grizzly, bighorn sheep, and game birds. When Devon mounted a vacant saddle that served as a barstool, Clare smiled at a wisp of memory; her tiny blond child bouncing a hobbyhorse until the springs squealed.

"I'll have a Coors," Devon directed the young man wiping the knotty pine bar.

Clare lost her smile. "You will not." She ordered c.o.kes for them both.

"One more," Steve said.

Devon looked softer in the golden glow that illuminated the Cowboy.

Steve slid some bills across the bar to pay for their drinks. Clare liked that he was taking care of them.

"Have you been to Jackson before?" he asked Devon.

She shook her head.

He looked at a faded sepia print of men dancing to a fiddler's tune. "Jackson was a pretty wild place around the turn of the century. There weren't enough women, so the men danced with each other."

Devon flipped back her hair and looked bored.

"No kidding." He kept on. "The guys with the longest hair pretended to be gals."

"They were probably gay."

"Maybe." Steve looked at Clare. "I think most of them were just lonely."

As lonely as she'd been last night when she knew another woman held him from beyond the grave.

"Haywood, party of three."

They followed the hostess to the bas.e.m.e.nt steakhouse. After recommending the ribeye, Steve turned to Devon. "I also have a research project that involves the Nez Perce War of 1877."

Devon looked like she was in history cla.s.s waiting for the bell.

Steve elaborated. "Your mother said your family has some Nez Perce in it."

"I didn't know that." Devon turned blue eyes on Clare. "I don't look like an Indian."

"No, of course you don't," Clare soothed. "My great-grandfather was a quarter Nez Perce, making you one sixty-fourth."

"Why didn't you ever tell me?" Devon insisted.

Clare shrugged, but she felt uneasy. She'd been acting like the "folks" Garrett had talked about, not wanting to mention their Native American ancestors for fear of being ejected from the drawing room.

With smooth ease, Steve saved her by regaling them with stories about the old days in Jackson's Hole, when the fur trapping of the early eighteen hundreds gave way to turn-of-the-century homesteading and running cattle. Ranching "dudes", guests from California or the east, had gradually taken over, evolving into the tourist industry that sustained the region in the late nineteen-eighties.

Clare relaxed and enjoyed the evening more than she had imagined possible. The steaks were fork tender. She ordered a gla.s.s of red wine and hoped it didn't bother Steve as he drank his c.o.ke.

When they stepped out of the Cowboy, Sat.u.r.day night traffic was thick on Cache Street. A charred undercurrent came to Clare's nostrils, borne on the wind from the Teton Wilderness. The fires had consumed nearly a million acres in the Greater Yellowstone Area. Some called it disaster, as Connie Chung, Dan Rather, and Jim Lehrer entertained the nation nightly with forests in flames. Others, like Steve, believed that fire was natural, old trees giving way to an astounding variety of new life.

"Are you driving up to the park tonight?" He leaned against a knotty pine support.

"We've got a room at the Antler Inn." His obvious weariness reminded her that she was still exhausted from yesterday's brush with death.

Devon knelt on the sidewalk to examine the Cowboy's woodcarvings of stagecoaches. Clare frowned at the hint of swelling breast that showed at the side of her tank top.

Steve s.h.i.+fted his weight from one foot to another and she wished they might have a few minutes alone. "I'll head back north." He pushed off the post.

"Come by the room and call to check on the roads," Clare suggested.

He agreed. She was glad he put his arm around her shoulders as they walked down the boardwalk. Even at Devon's dark look, she did not pull away.

The motel room smelled faintly of prior guests' cigarettes, but was clean and comfortable. Devon flung herself on the bed farthest from the door while Clare removed her boots.

Steve dialed Fire Command and asked for a status report. After hanging up, he said, "It could be tomorrow afternoon or the next day before the south entrance is open."

Clare leaned against the part.i.tion that divided the bedroom from the bath. Bluish shadows beneath Steve's eyes told her he hadn't slept worth a d.a.m.n last night, either.

He moved toward her and put out his un-bandaged right hand. "Come here."

She let him draw her out onto the second floor balcony. The murmur of traffic and the talk and laughter of tourists walking around town had subsided. Even the air had changed, turning oppressive. Lightning flashed above the manicured ski slopes carved into Snow King Mountain.

With a glance at Devon, Clare pulled the door shut but did not latch it. "You can smell the rain," she hoped.

Looking up, she realized that the water falling from the clouds was evaporating before it reached the mountaintop. In Yellowstone and the surrounding National Forests, flames swept on through the night. Fueled by the tinder-dry forest and nourished by wind, the lightning of each rainless front sp.a.w.ned more.

"It's got to end soon." Steve echoed her thoughts.

"All fires go out."

Something in Clare's throaty voice reminded him he was losing the best thing since Susan . . . before it got started. Clare would be going home to Houston and he didn't know how soon.

With his wife, there had been a slow and gentle progression from friends.h.i.+p to intimacy. Nurtured by the coc.o.o.ned environment of the university and the long slow semesters, they'd had the luxury of time. This summer he felt like he'd been chasing even an hour with Clare, mostly in vain. When she had flown away with Deering this morning, he'd watched her go with a sense of what could only be called desperation.

Maybe he'd been a fool, as he'd told her, to sit on Mount Washburn and imagine. Maybe he'd been doubly the fool when he'd tossed the cold remains of his coffee in the kitchen sink, packed his kit, and leaped to the wheel of the ancient Park Service truck.

He turned and found her closer than he'd thought, almost against him. With bare feet, she hardly cleared the top of his shoulder. He wished he were drunk, loose enough to slide his hands up her shoulders, then reversed that, fiercely glad he had all his senses to appreciate her.

Her eyes were a little red, but so were everyone's who'd been on the line. Her lips' slight chapping moved him more than Revlon red. Did her curve of smile invite, or had it been so long since he'd made the first move that he'd forgotten how?

He decided on the old "nothing ventured, nothing gained" gamble, and bent toward her. She looked up at him and he believed she was receptive.

"Mom," said Devon, three feet away in the doorway.

Steve stepped back. His face went hot while a flush stained Clare's cheekbones.

Although physically a woman, Devon studied them with a child's suspicion. "Have you got the keys? I left my bags in the car."