“Your kids must be in shock!”
“I call her Tangerine. Isn’t she gorgeous? They tried to persuade me to take this blue one that they had on the lot but I said, ‘Oohh no, I want what I want and I’ll wait as long as I have to.’ ” She slipped behind the wheel and donned a pair of rock-star wraparound shades. Those were new, too. “You take care driving, now.”
“I will. See you Saturday.”
I’d considered asking about her relationship with Eddie, but that could wait. Maybe after the wedding we’d have lunch and a heart-to-heart talk—as long as we talked about her heart and not mine. Given her interest in Aaron, that might get tricky. Mom was bound to have questions, and I was short on answers. So for now I just held my peace and began waving good-bye.
But then I waved at her to stop. “Wait a sec! You haven’t said which wedding planner Tracy is using. Is it Manhattan Memories?”
That was the top firm in New York, the big time, the major league. Working with them, even temporarily, would add a certain pizzazz to my portfolio. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea.
“That’s the best part.” Mom lifted her sunglasses and smiled. “Now, I know you’ve had a little bit of a problem with him in the past, but seeing you two on television that time, I could just tell how well you’d hit it off if you really tried. And he’s
so
good-looking.”
“Mom, don’t tell me—”
She nodded, her eyes alight with mischief. “Tracy hired that gorgeous Frenchman, Beau Paliere!”
Chapter Four
HALF AN HOUR LATER I WAS IN MY RENTAL CAR, SPEEDING down I-84 South. Speeding and fuming. Beau Paliere! Of all the wedding planners in all the world, why did Tracy have to hire Beautiful Beau? And why did my mother have to railroad me into assisting him?
I could always refuse, of course. I could look my old chum Tracy right in the eye and say...what? I don’t care if it’s
the most precious day of your life, I won’t lift a finger to help?
OK, I couldn’t do that. But maybe Tracy wouldn’t even want me to get involved. Maybe this was just my mother and her own chum Cissy doing some ill-advised matchmaking. Maybe—
A glance in the rearview mirror interrupted my musings. The column of smoke I’d seen from the plane still hung in the sky, distant and blurry, beginning to disperse. I wondered if any of Brian’s crewmates from Boot Creek had jumped into this new fire.
If so, they might still be there, chopping out underbrush and digging a fire line of clear dirt to starve the flames, too exhausted and endangered themselves to grieve for their dead comrade. By comparison, Monsieur Paliere was just a petty annoyance. I sighed, and returned my gaze to the road ahead.
For the next hour, from Boise to the air force town of Mountain Home, the drive was just as tedious as I remembered. Vast empty miles of sagebrush desert stretched south to the arid Owyhee Mountains and beyond into Utah, with little to vary the monotony except power lines and an occasional freight train in the distance.
I left the interstate behind, and went swooping across the hills of southern Idaho with the sun at my back. I’d put the windows up to keep out the dust and the wind, and two minutes later I’d found the button for the air-conditioning. That was kind of fun. My van in Seattle doesn’t even
have
air-conditioning.
As I zoomed along, heat mirages wobbled up from the black asphalt ribbon. To my left, the grassy hills were broken by low basalt outcrops fringed with sagebrush. Behind them the hills rose to forested heights that would eventually rise to mountains, the Sawtooths and the Pioneers and the White Clouds.
To my right, sunflowers popped up among the sage and rabbitbrush, and the creek bottoms were richly green with cottonwoods and willows. Someone once said that you have to blow the dust off Idaho to appreciate its beauty. It’s true, but the beauty is there.
Suddenly, out past a yellow OPEN RANGE sign with its black cow silhouette, I caught a rippling flash of movement. Four or five small slender forms, tan-and-cream-colored with delicate horns, were racing along parallel to the road. Antelope are nothing at all like deer, really, just as deer are nothing at all like horses. They don’t even run, they seem to float—
Watching the antelope, I almost hit the dog.
It was a huge, tawny, toothy beast, galloping across the highway trailing a rope leash and barking like a mad thing. I swerved around it, brakes squealing, and saw a convertible slewed across the shoulder up ahead, the driver’s door hanging open and no driver in sight. A blown tire? I honked at the dog, trying to scare it off the road to safety, and pulled in front of the other car.
Here in the open hills, grasses burned brown by the sun, stepping out of the AC was like tugging open an oven door. As I crunched along the gravel shoulder, heat hammered down from the sky and welled up from the asphalt, gripping me like muscular hands, squeezing me breathless.
I felt prickles of sweat all over and the staccato beat of my pulse as I approached the convertible, afraid of what I might find. First-aid class was a long time ago, too long...
“Hello?”
The empty car was an old Cadillac with tail fins like a jet plane’s, painted and repainted a dull tomato-soup red between the patches of rust. The backseat was full of camping and fishing gear and other junk, and one side was scarred by a long ragged scrape like a lightning bolt. But that was rusty, too, not recent.
Puzzled, I looked around. No sign of a collision, no sign of people, just the hot wind and the vacant road and the distant horizons.
And the dog, now racing toward me at a shocking speed. I stumbled backward in the soft gravel, then braced myself just in time. Broad paws slammed into my chest, massive jaws gaped just inches from my face...
“Off!”
I love dogs, but they have to behave, even in emergencies. I grabbed this one by the front paws—
his
front paws, for he was clearly, not to say obtrusively, male—and held him away from me.
“Off!” I repeated firmly, and thrust him toward the ground. Immediately he leapt again, and again I grabbed his paws. This time I held on for a moment, keeping him balanced on his hind legs just long enough to consider the error of his ways.
When I set him down again he stayed down, grinning up at me and wagging a short, crooked, muscular tail with a scar near the end. He had scars in several places, showing through a short rough pelt the same shade as the desiccated grass. But he certainly didn’t seem injured.
“Where’s your owner, big guy? Is he all right?”
The dog raced away, hind legs flying out to either side, toward a nearby tumble of boulders shaded by aspen trees. Leading me to the driver, thrown clear of the Caddy?
I made to follow but the dog reappeared, galumphing back toward me with something clamped in his huge jaws. Something that glinted in the sun and trailed a golden stream of liquid behind it.
A beer can, draining rapidly into the dust. My new friend dropped his gift at my feet, spattering my sandals, and barked delightedly. A voice emerged from the rustling bushes.
“Gimme that back, you son of a bitch!”
Soon the owner of the voice, and apparently the dog, emerged, as well. He was a burly, dark-haired, darkly tanned man in his mid-thirties, dressed in a sweat-stained gray T-shirt and a pair of ragged cutoffs.
The puzzle was instantly solved. He was zipping his fly.
“Sorry,” I managed to get out. “I didn’t mean to... Your dog was in the road.”
“He’s always in the road, aren’t you, you son of a bitch? Gimme that!”
The man snatched up the can and then grinned at me, his teeth even bigger and whiter than his companion’s. In fact, he resembled his dog, as people sometimes do. The two of them were hearty and muscular, roughed up by life but intensely alive and brazenly sure of themselves.
Lucky you,
their grins seemed to say.
You get to meet me.
And somehow it worked, for canine and human alike. During the Muffy summer, Tracy and B.J. and I had developed a glossary of men, with categories like Unbearably Cute and Ugly-Sexy and Ugly-Ugly. With his low forehead and battered nose and ropey, black-furred forearms, this man was Ugly-Sexy.
“Thanks for being a good Samaritan,” he said. His voice was deep and rough-edged. “Domaso Duarte, pleased to meet you. And this troublemaker”—he ruffled the dog’s floppedover ears—“is named Gorka.”
“Carnegie Kincaid,” I replied automatically. And then, just for something to say, “What kind of dog is he?”
Domaso shrugged. “No idea. He adopted me, three–four weeks ago. Hey, you must be Louise’s daughter.”
“You know her?” Hearing Basque names like Domaso and Gorka was no surprise, not in Idaho. From early-day shepherds to present-day ranchers and merchants and mayors, Basques were common enough. But having this character toss off my mother’s first name put a bizarre twist on an already odd situation.
He shrugged again. He was good at it, working his face and his shoulders together. “I work for her.”
“At the school?”
Domaso stared at me and then laughed, a deep rich chortle that set me smiling and the dog barking in glee. “What, like a teacher? No! I do odd jobs, small construction. I dry-walled her study there at the house. She said it used to be your bedroom. Nice.”
His eyes traveled over me as he said it, and I nodded uneasily. When I was in high school, the hottest boys were always Basque. Dark-eyed, brooding, fight-starting, loud-laughing Basque boys. In fact, I knew the name Gorka perfectly well. That was the name of the boy who sat next to me in algebra and distracted me from polynomial equations. Remembering him after all these years, while Domaso talked about my bedroom...
“So you’re the wedding planner,” he continued. “You going to Tracy’s wedding?”
“Y-yes. You know her, too?”
“Oh yeah.” He coughed a little, then poured the last of the beer down his throat and crumpled the can the way I crumple paper. “I’m doing some work for her father up at White Pine. There’s two kinds of people in Sun Valley, you know. The ones with three houses and the ones with three jobs. Guess which one I am?”
He laughed uproariously at his own joke and added, “I know the whole family. I’ll be at the wedding, too. You can dance with me.”
“Did you know Brian Thiel?” I blurted, without quite knowing why.
“No.” He looked away. “I heard about him, though. Some kind of relation to your family, huh? Sorry.”
“Thanks. We weren’t really—”
“Well, you probably got to hit the road.” Domaso flicked the can over his shoulder. “Thanks for checking on me and my friend here.”
“You’re welcome.”
I paused, waiting for him to turn toward the convertible. But he didn’t move, so I crunched back to the rental and climbed in, gasping at the touch of the superheated car seat. As I pulled away, I looked back to be sure that Gorka didn’t follow. But man and dog stood watching me go, until they disappeared from my mirrors behind a bend in the road.
The highway soon ascended to a viewpoint, where I pulled over to take in the vista of sagebrush and basalt and aspens. Far below me I could make out the now-tiny figure of Domaso Duarte. But instead of returning to the convertible, he was retracing his steps. As I watched, he bent to tie Gorka to a bush, and then vanished into the trees.
Chapter Five
DRIVING UP THE WOOD RIVER VALLEY TOWARD KETCHUM, you pass through the pleasant but unremarkable little town of Bellevue, and then through the larger but still fairly little town of Hailey. Hailey seems unremarkable, too, until you skirt the local airport and notice that the tarmac holds several million bucks’ worth of private jets.
Or maybe you notice the name of a Very Famous Actor on the marquee of the local theater—only it’s not a movie theater. The actor is starring in a play because he lives in Hailey, at least part of the year. So does his Even More Famous Ex-wife, and the new governor of California, and the richest woman in New York City, and various other celebrities. One minute you’re watching the deer and the antelope play, and the next minute you’re hip-deep in headliners. You haven’t even hit Sun Valley yet, but you and Toto have definitely blown out of Kansas.
Cruising past the Hailey airport with my AC on high, I wondered how many of the Lears and Gulfstreams parked there had transported Tracy’s wedding guests. Probably quite a few. Was it worth crossing Beau Paliere’s path to get close to these folks? Or would I just be handing Beau another opportunity to do me dirty? I chewed on that the rest of the way to my destination.
Ketchum is an appealing, outdoorsy town of just three thousand residents—and three traffic lights—but its small scale belies its cosmopolitan soul. You can buy a mountain bike that costs more than a car in Ketchum, or an oil painting that costs more than that, not to mention superb sushi and divine French cuisine and the very latest in drop-dead resort styles. All this and the best of Mother Nature, too. The town nestles between Trail Creek on one side and the Big Wood River on the other, with Bald Mountain rising broad and green—not bald at all—in the background.
It was Old Baldy that caught the eye of Averell Harriman, the chairman of Union Pacific, back in the 1930’s. Ketchum had boomed and busted with silver mining, then revived a little with sheepherding, but Harriman introduced a third and grander S-word: skiing.
Harriman envisioned a European-style winter resort to lure passengers onto his trains. The valley outside of Ketchum was perfect. In 1937, Sun Valley Resort opened its doors and its ski lifts—an innovation at the time—to the stars of Hollywood and the millionaires of both coasts. Errol Flynn and Claudette Colbert showed up right away, Ernest Hemingway not long after, and Ketchum hasn’t busted since.
On the way into town I passed the smoke-jumper base, a small airstrip, a low office building, and the big “ready shack” building where the jumpers maintained their gear and supplies. One end of this main structure was tall and narrow, almost like a barn: the parachute loft. I took such sights for granted. Along with Sun Valley, smoke jumping was a colorful part of Idaho history.
Today, though, I had a more personal history in mind. As I drove, the saffron light of late afternoon played over the brick and sandstone storefronts and the timbered, deep-eaved hotels, and glinted on a sign that said MAIN STREET. It should have said “Memory Lane.”
There was the bookstore I used to haunt, and there was the art gallery where I applied for a job once, when waitressing got me down. And over there, near a Starbucks that was new since my time, stood the Pioneer Saloon, which was old when I first arrived. Night after night at the dark and smoky Pio, the three Muffies would camp out in a corner booth and evaluate the guys at the bar. And vice versa, of course. Those were the days....
A few more blocks and I was pulling into High Country Gardens, a hardworking little nursery whose hardworking little owner was out front, stacking sacks of bark chips next to a display of ornamental grasses.
B.J. wore a polo shirt and khaki shorts that stretched across her full breasts and hips, with a baseball cap yanked low on her forehead. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t the faint, uneasy smile she wore as she pushed back the cap and came to hug me. She smelled like the sun.
“Hey, Carnegie. I shouldn’t have asked you to come, but it sure is good to see you. I’m sorry if I’ve messed up your schedule.”
“No problem. I could use a vacation, and it’ll be nice to see Matt.” That sounded heartless, so I tried again. “Is there a memorial service?”
She nodded curtly. “It was this afternoon, while most of the jumpers were still at the base. Oh, damn, I’m sorry. I didn’t tell anyone you were coming. Maybe they could have delayed it for you.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just tell me what’s going on. You sounded awful on the phone.”
“Yeah.” She stripped off her work gloves, avoiding my eye. “I think I was overreacting or something.”
“To Brian’s death? Do you know the details yet?”
“I’ll tell you everything over dinner, OK? Give me a minute with Liz and we’ll walk over to the Pio. Liz is my assistant; she knows more about plants than I do. You can leave your car where it is.”
After two hours inside my little bubble of air-conditioning, the walk to the Pioneer was a stroll in the Sahara. I flinched behind my sunglasses, feeling the arid heat invade my mouth to suck my breath away.
“Awfully late in the day to be this hot,” I said, just to break the silence. “And awfully early in the summer.”
“Wimp.” B.J. bumped me with her hip. “You’ve been in Seattle too long.”
I bumped her back. “Don’t give me that. It must be a hundred degrees!”
“Ninety-five at the most,” she said, pulling open the tavern door. “Actually, it is unusual for June. We’ve been breaking records all week, even at night.”
Getting inside was a relief, if only for the shade. The Pio’s been around for half a century, and its mode of decor is Early Taxidermy, so we stood adjusting to the dimness under the glassy gaze of various elk, deer, and buffalo.
Turning my own gaze to the humans, I was surprised to see so many tables filled on a Monday evening. The Pio had gone no-smoking, but the crowd had a familiar feel, mostly young, mostly casual, with a few older couples dressed up for dinner elsewhere. Two such couples were just leaving a booth in the corner—the Muffy booth.
“Just like old times,” said B.J., laying claim to the spot before someone else snagged it. “Must be our night.”
“Must be.”
I settled in and took a long, fond look at her. A wealth of dark unruly curls still framed her heart-shaped face, and her eyes, even bloodshot from weeping, were beautiful. They were eyes just made for flirting, huge and velvet purple, with long lashes under winged brows. B.J.’s dimples might be deeper now, and her cheeks a bit fuller than before, but I en-vied her eyes and her curves both.
My own curves are minimal, to put it mildly—talk about your late bloomer—but at least I have red hair. My late father, a copper-top himself, told me again and again growing up that redheads were special, and I came to believe him. So my hair was my secret solace, just as being flat-chested was my private bane. Tracy used to say that if you added me and B.J. together and divided by two, you’d get a perfect figure. Meaning, of course, hers.
I was still waiting for B.J.’s explanation, but she flapped open her menu. “Think you can manage a humongous hunk of beef like you used to?”
“Why not?”
These days I’m more of a pinot grigio and grilled ahi kind of girl, but these rough-hewn surroundings called for heartier fare. When in Rome . . . We ordered a couple of New York strips, medium rare, and two bottles of Moose Drool Ale, keep ’em coming. I was so parched that my second bottle was half gone before I really noticed. Meanwhile B.J. chattered away, as if to keep me from asking questions.
“Some of the jumpers will probably come in here later. The whole crew that jumped at Boot Creek has been taken off the active list until after the wedding. It’s safety protocol. They don’t want anyone who’s distracted working a fire.”
She was definitely stalling. “Do you know many of the guys?”
“Most of them. Actually there’s a woman, too, Pari Taichert. They call her the Little Tyke. A real jockette, good buddies with Jack. Most of the crew are friends of his, so they came for the memorial service and then they’re sticking around for the wedding.” B.J. frowned. “Kind of creepy, isn’t it? I know Brian was new on the crew, but still, you’d think Tracy would postpone.”
I noticed she blamed Tracy and not Jack. Which was probably accurate, since the bride was the star of this show in more ways than one.
“Be fair,” I said. “Big weddings are a nightmare to reschedule, even if you’re not a celebrity like Tracy. Vendors get booked up, and there’s all the arrangements for out-of-town guests—”
“OK, point taken. Sam’s spending a fortune on this one weekend! He spoils Tracy even more than he does Cissy. Wait’ll you see her dress—Tracy’s, I mean. Although Cissy’s outfit is pretty outrageous, too. Pink dress, pink shoes...”
I followed B.J.’s lead, and as we sawed at our steaks I told stories about my brides and their gowns. Then I asked for a cup of decaf, but B.J. changed the order to a round of Irish coffee. Apparently, whatever she had to tell me required a lot of liquid courage. Finally, I lost patience.
“Let’s hear it, Muffy,” I said. “What’s going on with you? Why am I here? And what exactly happened to Brian?”
B.J. sipped from her tall glass mug and answered my last question first, using smoke-jumper jargon that she knew I’d understand. Both of us were born and raised in Idaho, and familiar with the basics of wildland firefighting. In fact, there’s a smoke-jumper base at the Boise airport, and in junior high I’d had a desperate crush on a boy whose dad worked there, the glamour of the father shedding luster on the son.
So as B.J. sketched out the story of the Boot Creek fire, my imagination filled in the details. Just as it had on the plane this afternoon as I’d looked down into that curtain of smoke and wondered what it was like to leap into hell.
“Brian and the Tyke were first stick...”
A “stick” is a two-person team that jumps in quick succession from the smoke-jumpers’ plane, once the spotter by the door gives them the signal. They have to keep clear of each other, but each one watches where the other lands. In puncture-proof Kevlar suits and heavy grilled helmets, they steer their parachutes toward an agreed-upon target, the jump spot, trying to avoid the trees and rocks and snags racing up from the ground like weapons, hungry to crush or stab. Or kill.
“The wind got fluky and Brian blew way off the spot, into a burned-over area on the other side of a ridge. What they call the black zone. The Tyke couldn’t see where he landed. The next stick was Todd Gibson and Danny Kane—”
“Tracy’s brother?”
“Half brother, yeah. You know him?”
“I met him a few times at Cissy’s house.” I remembered Danny as a tall, weedy fellow, his eyes small and worried, his dark hair soft and untidy. “He seemed nice.”
“I guess so. He’s been jumping quite a while now. Sam says it’s too dangerous, but you can tell he’s proud of him. Only son and all that. Anyway, Todd and Danny and the Tyke headed for the fire, but kept an eye out for Brian. Between the smoke and the rough ground, they got separated...”
That was the part that amazed me. After jumping from an airplane—scary enough in itself—these people packed up their gear, picked up their chain saws and Pulaskis and meager rations, and tramped through brush and rocks and ravines into a fire. No roads, no trails, just smoking trees and erupting flames and long unrelieved hours of intense physical labor.
I hefted a Pulaski once, on a tour of the smoke-jumper base in Boise. It’s a double-headed tool, ax and hoe both on a long wooden handle, and I knew instantly that I couldn’t swing one for fifteen minutes, let alone fifteen hours. All wildland firefighters do that kind of backbreaking labor. Smoke jumpers just use different transportation to commute to work.
“The Tyke spotted his parachute in a grove of ponderosa pines. It had hung up in a big snag, so he’d used his letdown rope. You know, that they rappel down with?”
I nodded. Smoke jumpers learn to lower themselves from trees with a long rope—actually it’s nylon webbing—that they tie off securely to the trunk or a limb, or else to the risers of their parachute, if they’re certain the chute will stay put.
“Don’t tell me his line failed?”
“No, the line was sound. But Brian tied it off wrong. He secured it to his own harness instead of a riser, and he rappelled right off the end of it. Todd found him in the ashes at the bottom of the tree. His neck was broken.”
“Oh, my God...”
“Some jumpers are more worried about falling from trees than they are about fires, but not Brian.” B.J. drained her mug. “One night when we...one night he was talking about the training program, and he said letdown was a piece of cake. He was so cocky all the time, like he was invincible.”
“Wait a minute, B.J., back up. What aren’t you telling me? Were you involved with Brian?”
“No, I wasn’t ‘involved’!” She glared at me, tears welling in her eyes. “It was just—don’t look at me like that! I should have known you wouldn’t understand!”
The tears brimmed over and she left the table abruptly, shoving her way through the crowd toward the rest rooms. My own mug, still full, was tepid by now, and I curled my hands around the glass as I put the pieces together. “One night when we...” When we what? I thought I knew, and I wished that I didn’t.
“Well, if it isn’t long, tall Carnegie Kincaid.”
I looked up into the face of a man I hadn’t seen in years. I knew every feature by heart. The topaz eyes that met mine in a steady gaze, the narrow face whose high, hard cheekbones were burnished by wind and weather. The thin, mobile lips, as always, seemed to be smiling at some private joke. And the sinewy body, as always, showed a graceful economy of effort as he moved to sit across from me.
“Hello, Jack,” I said serenely, and spilled Irish coffee all over the table.