Page 40 of Into the Fire

“Would he have?”

Boone thought about it. “No,” he said. “He wouldn’t bring it up until he had an answer.”

I pulled the drawer of the side table open. It was full of papers. I dug through them.

“Dante.”

It had stacks of receipts and rubber bands so fragile they broke when I touched them.

“Dante.” Boone reached for my hand. “Slow.”

“He kept things.”

“I know he did. We need to remember where everything was. If this drawer matters, the way he left it matters.” I pulled my hands out of the drawer.

He was right. I made myself do it his way: one item at a time, pulled out and looked at, then put back in order.

Going slowly, I didn’t miss it. Halfway down, in a plain envelope with a hardware-store logo, between a furnace manual and a folded seed catalog, was a photo.

The envelope wasn’t sealed. The flap was tucked in. There was one print inside.

It was the most ordinary photograph I’d ever worked so hard to get my hands on.

It showed a strip of survey ribbon tied off on a spruce limb at about chest height. The tail of it lifted a little, so there’d been wind when he snapped the photo. Duff and deadfall littered the foreground. Timber rose behind. High in one corner, out of focus and unmistakable, was a notch of skyline.

It was the saddle.

I knew that country blind. The trees were spruce and subalpine fir, shade species, and the light in the picture was the cool light the North Fork holds in the middle of the afternoon while the south face cooks. The ground behind the ribbon dropped away. He’d been standing partway down the fork with the saddle over his shoulder.

“North Fork,” I said. “He’s below the saddle. Standing about here.” I poked the map on the pencil line, high in the draw.

Boone took the photograph and held it beside the map. “He wrote it down,” Boone said. “Drew the line and then went back up with a camera.” He set the print down on the map. “Notice it. Record it. Then ask about it. That’s his order for everything.”

“He was still on ask when we jumped.”

Boone stared at the ribbon. “There was no timber sale, no work in that fork that summer. If something were going on, I’d have known.”

“That’s the job number that isn’t there,” I said.

“A ribbon with nobody’s name on it,” Boone said.

I was looking at the photograph when everything went quiet. I was still in the cabin, but my mind wasn’t. The ground fell away, and Dutch was below me and to the left with his face turned up, and he said something, and I reached—

“—the back of it too, so we have the date,” Boone was saying. He had his phone out over the map. “And the drawer before anything goes back in.”

I came back to the cabin. My thumb was pressing a dent into the edge of the photograph.

“He said something to me out there,” I said.

Boone stopped taking pictures with his phone.

“I’ve always known he was shouting. That was in what I told everybody, for all the good it did.” My voice was calm. “This is new. It was specifically from down there and was about what he saw. I never had that before.”

“Is it about the flagging?”

“I can’t say.”

“Okay,” Boone said.