Page 36 of Into the Fire

“Okay.” Boone didn’t push. “I know what else we don’t have. Somebody else saw the fire come down the fork.” He paused, and I got there half a beat ahead of him.

“Dutch. But he’s gone.”

Boone stared at the papers spread across the table.

“Dutch kept notebooks.”

“What kind of notebooks?” I asked.

“Everything. Training, jumps, equipment. Maps. Twenty years of whatever he thought was worth writing down.”

“You think he had something on Carson Ridge? Something he collected before the fire?”

“I don’t know.” Boone looked at his statement, then at mine. “But this is all we have.”

“Nobody went through his things?”

“I was supposed to, but I couldn’t. I don’t think anyone’s touched his cabin for five years.”

“It’s still there?”

“Yeah. It’s up past Thompson Falls, about an hour and a half away. I drive by every few months.”

“You have a key?”

“I do.”

Boone closed the Carson Ridge box.

“We’ll go tomorrow.”

Chapter ten

Dante

Boone drove. The route ran north out of the valley on a two-lane highway past Thompson Falls. A forest road peeled off and turned to gravel within a mile. The truck raised a cloud of dust behind us.

We passed a leaning mile marker somebody had shot and a gate with a wired-on NO WOOD CUTTING sign. After that, it was timber, washboard, and enough turns that I stopped keeping track.

The road climbed alongside a creek. I watched Boone slow over a cattle guard, ease around a washout, and turn onto a narrower road I wouldn’t have picked out as a road at all.

“How many times have you been up here?”

“A few.”

“When was the last time?”

He didn’t answer right away. The truck found another stretch of washboard and he let it shake through.

“I drive by every couple of months,” he said. “Check the roof from the road. Make sure nobody’s broken in.”

“From the road.”

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever been inside?”

Boone kept his eyes on the ruts that passed for a road. “Five years ago. I came out that October to shut the water off.”