“Here it comes,” Suzy says.
I swivel around to see the fire making its way down the slope behind the row of summer homes, tearing through the trees. It sounds like a train roaring down tracks. The flames are so hot now that the snow is beginning to melt all around us, dripping off the eaves of roofs, forming puddles at our feet.
The fire won’t stop until everything is gone.
I should have grabbed more, I think. Some of my mother’s things. Photographs. Her jewelry. Her favorite seafoam-green sweater hanging in her closet.
But now there’s no time.
The stars overhead slink into the background, no longer visible through the smoke and ash and embers swirling all around us. We run through the trees, back to the shore, until we reach the marina.
“What are you doing?” Suzy shouts when I dart toward the boathouse.
“Keep going!” I yell back. “I have to warn someone.”
She shakes her head and stops in the snow, refusing to go without me. I rush up the porch steps and pound my fist against Mr. Perkins’sdoor. I hear him cursing on the other side, ambling to the front door. A second later it swings open, and for a moment, the breath is caught in my lungs as I gasp for air. “A forest fire,” I manage, pointing out at the lake where the trees are burning on all sides.
Mr. Perkins steps out onto the porch, holding a hand over his eyes. “What the hell?” he asks in disbelief.
“You have to get out—now.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he answers, lowering his hand and shuffling back toward the door.
“It’s going to burn everything,” I say.
He nods, wrinkles pinching around his mouth. “And if I’m lucky, it’ll burn me right along with it.”
“Please,” I say. My lungs rasp with each inhale, smoke in my throat, suffocating me with every breath. “You have to go.”
He lifts his gaze and stares out over the water—the place he’s lived his whole life—then he points a long bony finger up into tree line. “Why don’t you go warn whoever’s been holed up in the old Harrison place?”
At the line of summer homes, where the Harrison home sits hidden in the trees, I can just make out a narrow spire of smoke rising from the chimney. “No one should be in there,” I say. The Harrison place is rarely used, a small single-story cabin that sits vacant most years.
“There’s been light in the windows at night—candles, I think.”
I swallow and step down from the porch.It could be Oliver.
He was gone from my room when the boys broke in. Maybe he went to the Harrison house, maybe he’s been hiding out. Although I don’t know why.
Still, I need to be sure.
I look back at Mr. Perkins. “If you won’t leave, then I won’t either.” A threat, a way to force him into coming with us.
He levels his gaze on me, testing me, to see if I’m serious. “Just as stubborn as your grandmother,” he says, grumbling, before reaching behind him and pulling the door shut with a bang. There’s nothing he wants to take with him, nothing to save. But at least he’s coming with us. He’s fleeing these mountains.
I grab his arm and help him down the steps. “Go with Suzy,” I tell him. Suzy shifts from one foot to the other, impatient, ready to run.
“Where are you going?” Suzy asks.
“I have to check that house, then I’ll be right behind you.”
She raises an eyebrow like she doesn’t believe me.
“I promise,” I say. “You get a head start.”
She blinks, powdery ash drifting away from her lashes. Even her soft russet hair is now a charcoal-gray. “Okay,” she says, nodding, and she and Mr. Perkins continue away from the lake, through the dirty gray snow. If they don’t slow down, they’ll make it down the mountain. They’ll make it out before the fire reaches them.
But my heart won’t let me leave until I knowhe’ssafe.
