Page 56 of Into the Fire

Chapter fourteen

Dante

Boone worked the windows while I took photos of the shelves. He checked each latch, then the door to the lean-to, and then the door that sagged. I moved around the room with my phone, putting everything on record a second time.

I kept stopping in the middle of the room.

Whoever he was, he’d stood there. Right where the light from the south window fell. It was the logical place you’d stand to read. He’d held Dutch’s notebooks in his hands. He’d worked out which drawer mattered.

Boone saw a break-in. I couldn’t stop seeing a man turning pages. Taking his time. Knowing enough about Carson Ridge to know what he was looking for.

“The notebook comes with us,” Boone said. “The June one. The photo and the map, too.”

I looked at him. “The last time you gave me a speech about why we should leave them. You said authorities should find them here, not in a box in your truck.”

“That was when I thought nobody else knew they were here.” He was already at the side table. “It was all safe here for five years because nobody was looking. Now somebody’s looking. If we leave it here, it could disappear.”

He was right, and I hated it anyway. I watched while he squared the notebook on top of the folded map. Instead of securing evidence, it felt like taking Dutch apart and carrying him out in pieces.

“Not the manuals,” I said.

Boone paused over the shelf of Forest Service handbooks, some of them old enough to predate both of us.

“Nobody in history has ever broken into a cabin for a 1987 fireline handbook, Boone. Let the man keep his library.”

“Fine.” He moved down the shelf and stopped. He lifted out a coffee can, and I heard it before I saw inside. Pennies. Nearly full to the rim, with a strip of masking tape across the side, and on the tape, in Dutch’s handwriting: BITTERROOT.

Boone held the can for a moment. Then he put it back where it had been, exact to the ring in the dust.

Boone locked the door and lifted the handle until the bolt seated, and we stood a second listening to how quiet it was, the larch dropping needles on the roof of the truck.

I had the notebook and the map in one hand and the envelope with the photograph in the other. I turned to say something about the road, and the light was wrong.

That was all it took.

The afternoon sun came through the timber at a low slant, cool under the trees while the open ground cooked. The ground tipped away downhill in front of me, and there was smoke thickening across the far slope, heat on my face from the wrong direction.

Dutch was below me and to the left, face in profile. He was looking down the fork. Something bright sat against dark bark at the edge of what I could see. His mouth was moving.

“—want them on the seat or behind it,” Boone was saying.

He’d asked me something. I was standing in front of Dutch’s cabin with his notebook in my hand, and I hadn’t moved or answered.

Boone stopped with his hand on the truck door.

I held still and let it come. It was different this time. Dutch hadn’t been shouting up at the crest about the fire coming over. He’d been turned in the wrong direction for that. He was looking down the draw. Whatever he was shouting about was below both of us.

I’d never known that before.

I put myself back on the crest and pushed, the way you’d shoulder a door, but it held. Everything faded away. Dutch’s face was the last.

“God damn it. It was right there,” I said. “He was looking down the draw, Boone. Not at the fire. There was something on a tree, and I tried to bring the rest back, but I couldn’t—” I broke off. “It was right there.”

“It will come,” Boone said.

He opened the truck door and stood holding it. I climbed in. Boone put the truck in gear and headed down Dutch’s drive.

“He was looking down the fork,” I said. “So it’s about the drainage. Maybe he said drainage. Or the fork, the North Fork—that’d fit what’s in the notebook. Or the route. If he’d worked out there was a route down that—”