Those Who Wish Me Dead Read online

  They didn’t hear her advice but they followed it anyway, and she listened as they sent a trenching team a half a mile farther up the mountain, where they could cut the blaze off from the next stretch of forest and hopefully leave it to burn out in the rocks.

  “It will go sidehill, guys. It will have no choice, and the wind will help it, and then you’ll have to fight it at the bottom.”

  That was what they probably wanted. The fire would be bordered by creeks and road and rock there, and they would believe they had it sequestered. Unless the wind had different plans.

  Her first fire with Nick hadn’t been all that different from this one. A wooded windblown hillside. She was on her second summer then and had a sophomore’s cockiness—been there, done that, seen it all, though of course she hadn’t. Rookie bravado, sophomore cockiness, and veteran’s wisdom. The three stages she’d come to know. She suspected that some sort of law required wisdom and loss to be partners. At least, they always seemed to ride together.

  She’d loved Nick from the start. In the way it wasn’t supposed to happen, the way you weren’t supposed to trust. Love at first sight was a fairy tale. Tough girls rolled their eyes at it. And she’d meant to, she had absolutely meant to, but the really special thing about love was that it scorned your attempts to control it. That was a great thing. Sometimes.

  Rule number one for a woman on the fire line: you had to outwork everyone.

  Rule number two: when you did, you’d be considered less of a woman because of it.

  That had been infuriating in the first summer. Fighting fires was a male-dominated world—weren’t they all, though?—but she hadn’t been the lone woman. There were three on the crew, but she was the only rookie. The jokes came early and often, but she was cool with that, because, frankly, that seemed to be the way it went. Boys being boys. Giving each other shit over any perceived weakness, circling wolves settling pack order, and her weakness, as they saw it, was readily apparent: the extra X chromosome. So you took the jokes and you gave them back and then you went to work, and here’s where it mattered—would you live up to the identity that the jokes created, or would you forge a new one? You couldn’t be the joke, there was no respect to be found there, no room for softness among crew members for whom fatigue was often the starting point and not the finish line. When you erased the jokes, though, when you matched the guys’ work or exceeded it, a fascinating thing happened—apparently, you lost your femininity. Now the jokes came out of respect, and the tone was altogether different. Once your nickname was Princess; now it was Rambo.

  All of this wasn’t to say she had had bad relationships with the boys of summer. On the contrary, they were some of the best friends she’d ever had, or would ever have—if there were no atheists in foxholes, then there were no enemies on the fire lines. But dating someone on the crew was different. It was like giving something back that you’d worked hard to earn. She’d made a rule before the second summer, a sophomore’s rule, the unyielding kind that broke the minute you applied it: The fire line was work. End of story.

  And so of course there had been Nick. And of course he hadn’t been just on the crew; he’d been the boss.

  That was the summer she wore makeup to a trench line, the summer of the cosmetology-school jokes, the summer of the happiest days and nights of her life. She’d become certain of the invalidity of her own rule—it didn’t have to be all work. You could work with someone you loved, even on the most dangerous of tasks.

  She no longer believed that. On the witness stand, pointing at the topographic map and the photos and explaining how it had all happened, she knew that her rule had not been invalid. You fought fires as a crew. Lived and died as a crew. And if you were in love with one person on that crew, just one? All your best intentions didn’t mean a damn thing. Love always scorned your attempts to control it.

  She sat in her tower now with her feet up and her eyes on the wispy smoke over the mountains and she spoke to the radio without keying the mike, spoke as if she were out there with them. A constant stream of chatter. She was warning them to watch out for widow makers—burning limbs that dropped from above without warning—when the pump truck reported a victim.

  Hannah lifted her hands to her face and covered her eyes. Not already. Not on the first fire of the season, the first she had called in. She felt as if the death had come with her, somehow, as if the death had followed her back. A certain wind chased Hannah, and it was a killing wind.

  Fifteen minutes after they announced the victim, they came back with more:

  “I think we’ve got a campfire source. Appears to be a fire ring here, stones, and the fire must have jumped it and gotten into the trees that were brought down. Look like fresh cuts too. Only seeing one DOA. Can’t tell if it’s male or female. Burned up pretty good. We’ve secured the body and what’s left of an ATV and, I believe, probably a chain saw.”

  There was your source. Someone had been felling timber and decided to keep a fire going while he did it, then left it untended, in the wind. Oblivious to the risk.

  “Stupid bastard,” Hannah whispered, thinking of those who were walking into the flames right now for some foolish mistake, thinking of all that might be lost just because someone wanted to roast a hot dog.

  It felt strange, though. Somehow, it felt off. She’d spotted the smoke around four and the sun had been high and hot, hotter than it had been all summer. Nobody would have needed or wanted a campfire for warmth. And it was late for lunch and early for dinner, and it didn’t sound as if the victim had been camping, anyhow, not with an ATV and a chain saw. He’d been working, probably. And what person doing sweaty work on a hot afternoon wanted a campfire?

  There was something off with the fire source, no question. But the first task was putting the blaze out fast enough so they could figure out what the real story was. Until those flames were gone, nobody was concerned about determining their source.

  The tower swayed more as the sun descended, the wind freshening at dusk.

  12

  As the boys sipped water and stretched aching legs beside the campfire, Ethan sent Allison a short text on his GPS messenger:

  ALL FINE. WE ARE ALONE IN THE WOODS.

  He put the GPS away then and let his eyes drift as he scanned the rocks and forested hills and the high mountains beyond. Empty. He had told the truth: they were alone. They had hiked all day beneath a high hot sun and a cloudless sky, and if you’d told people that only a few weeks ago, the Beartooth Pass had been closed with two feet of snow, they’d have laughed in your face.

  No one was out there.

  Not yet, at least.

  And what if they come?

  He’d asked himself that question the night Jamie Bennett had arrived and every waking hour since. What if they came, these men who were trained killers?

  I’ll handle it. I’ve had my share of training too.

  But he hadn’t. Not that kind. He didn’t end up in the Air Force by mistake. The son of a Marine who didn’t leave the combat overseas quite as well as he should have, Ethan had grown up pointed toward the military, and enlisting was the same sort of free-will decision that the sun made when it chose to set in the west. All his father had wanted was another Marine—a fighter, not a teacher. His old man hadn’t been impressed when Ethan tried to explain that he was teaching military personnel how to have what he called a survivor mentality.

  “There are two kinds of men in war,” his father had said. “The killing kind, and the dying kind. If you’re the dying kind, you won’t survive shit. If you’re the killing kind, you will. It’s already in there. You’re teaching woodcraft, and that’s fine. But if they’re the dying kind, all your tricks won’t save ’em.”

  Ethan shook himself back into the moment, back into watching, which was his job; killing wasn’t. The smoke from their campfire wasn’t heavy, the wood had been properly selected, but only a few miles out, someone else had one as well, the smoke visible above the ridgeline. It seemed li
ke a lot of smoke. Ethan watched it for a while and wondered if a campfire had gotten away from someone. With this wind, it was certainly possible.

  “You guys see that?” he said. “That smoke?”

  They were tired and uninterested, but they looked.

  “We’re going to keep an eye on it,” he said. “That one could turn into something.”

  “Turn into something? You mean, like, a forest fire?” Drew said.

  “That’s exactly what I mean. These mountains have burned before. They’ll burn again someday. Now, all of you look at the smoke and then look at your maps and tell me where it’s burning and what it means to us. First one to do that, I’ll build his shelter myself.”

  Jace cared, and maybe that was a problem. The caring had started with the fire, when he struck two pieces of metal together and made a spark that made a flame that made a campfire. His vision of Connor Reynolds as a boy who did not care began to vanish. His bad attitude was disappearing even when Jace tried to keep it in place, because this stuff was pretty cool. It was real, it mattered in a way most things you were taught didn’t—this stuff could save your life.

  He didn’t know what Connor Reynolds was running from up here, but back behind Jace were men who intended to take his life, and he began to think that maybe Connor should pay a little more attention. For the both of them.

  Now Ethan had laid down a challenge, and while Jace really didn’t care about winning the shelter—he enjoyed building them, and they were improving with each night’s effort—he did want to be the first to place that column of smoke accurately. This was the sort of thing that most people couldn’t do. The sort of thing that could save your life.

  He looked up at the mountains and down at the map and then back up again. To his right was Pilot Peak, one of the most striking landmarks in the Beartooths, easy to find. Move along from that and there was Index, and the fire wasn’t in front of either of them. Keep rolling and there was Mount Republic and beyond that Republic Peak, and now he began to get it. They were supposed to hike to Republic Peak, then claim the summit—that was what Ethan called it, at least—and hike back down the way they’d come. On every trip, though, Ethan gave them an escape route. Jace enjoyed those, even if the rest of the boys thought the idea was corny. The other kids didn’t know about the need for escape routes yet.

  The smoke wasn’t between their camp and Republic Peak, but it seemed to be coming from the back side of Republic Peak. Connor traced the contour lines that lay to the west of the peak—they fell off in a tight cluster, indicating a steep and fast decline, toward Yellowstone National Park, and then those to the north were more gradual, spaced apart. A creek wound down from near the glacier that lay between Republic Peak and its nearest cousin, Amphitheater.

  “It’s burning by our escape route,” he said.

  Everybody looked up with interest, and Jace was proud to see it on Ethan Serbin’s face as well.

  “You think?” Ethan said.

  Jace felt a pang of uncertainty. He looked up at the mountains, wondering if he’d gotten it wrong.

  “That’s what it looks like,” Jace said. “Like if we had to use the escape route and come down the back side of Republic, going backcountry, the way you were talking about, we’d run right into it. Or pretty close.”

  Ethan watched him in silence.

  “Maybe not,” Jace said, and now he was searching for the Connor Reynolds attitude again, shrugging and trying to act as if he didn’t care one way or the other. “Whatever. I don’t mind building my shelter, I don’t need you to do it.”

  “You don’t? Well, that’s too bad because I was about to start on it.”

  “I got it right?”

  “Yes, you did. If that fire actually is spreading, which is how it looks right now, it’s going to be spreading pretty close to our escape route.”

  13

  The horses woke her.

  A whinny in the night, answered by another, and Allison was awake quickly. She was a deep sleeper usually, but not since Ethan had gone into the mountains. She had no fear of being left alone on the property; most of her life, she’d been alone on the property. Some days she wanted to send him into the mountains just to be alone again.

  This summer, though, the ill winds had blown through her mind daily. She tried to adopt Ethan’s amused disregard for such things, but she couldn’t. You could offer the heart all the instruction you wanted. The heart was often hard of hearing.

  She was a different woman this summer, and not one she cared to be. She was a fearful woman. In the corner of the room, leaning against the wall near her side of the bed, was a loaded shotgun. On the nightstand where usually a glass of water and a book sat, she had her GPS, the one Ethan would text her on if something went wrong. Only a single message received today: they were alone in the woods. That was all he would say, and she knew that, but still, she’d taken to looking at the GPS far too often, and though she knew well that the horses had woken her and not the GPS, she checked it anyhow. Blank and silent.

  Bastard, she thought, and hated herself for it. How could she think that? Her own husband, the love of her life, and that was no joke, better believe he was the only love she’d encounter in this life, at least the only one that would run so deep. Deeper than she’d believed was possible.

  And still she cursed him now. Because he’d made a choice, and he hadn’t chosen her. The resentment had plagued her ever since Jamie Bennett left Montana, the deal made. How could you resent a man who’d agreed to protect a child?

  Jamie was reckless, and he knew it. She appealed to his ego, and he let her. I warned him, and he laughed…

  Stop it. Stop those thoughts.

  She rose, considered picking up the shotgun for a moment, then dismissed the idea. There was no need for a weapon, or for her resentments. Ethan had made the right choice; the only danger was with him, and she should be thinking of him instead of herself. She would go as far as the porch and see what there was to see. If there appeared to be real trouble in the stable, then she’d return for the shotgun. Occasionally you heard of problems with mountain lions and livestock, the sort of thing that happened when you offered up perfectly good prey in the homeland of a perfectly good predator, but in all her years there, the horses had never been bothered by one.

  They also rarely woke her in the night.

  She crossed the living room in the dark. A dull orange glow came from behind the glass door of the woodstove, remnants of a nearly extinguished fire. She hadn’t been asleep long. Just past midnight now. Between the living room and the porch was a narrow storage room, the washer and dryer crammed inside, rows of shelves surrounding them. She found a battery-powered spotlight by touch and then pulled a heavy jacket off the hook beside the door. Summer, sure, but the night air wouldn’t admit to such a thing, not yet. In the pocket of the jacket she put a can of bear spray. You never knew. One year they’d had a grizzly on the bunkhouse porch; another time one had inspected the bed of Ethan’s pickup after a garbage run. If a grizz was out there now, the pepper spray would be far more useful than the shotgun.

  She went out into the night, and the breeze found her immediately and pushed its chill down the collar of her jacket. She walked to the far edge of the porch, leaving the door open behind her. Fifty yards away, in the stable, the horses were silent again.

  She knew the shadows that lay between the cabin and the barn from years of night checks. In what should have been a stretch of open ground, every tree cleared from it long ago, something stood, black on black.

  Allison lifted the spotlight and hit the switch.

  A man appeared, halfway between her and the stable, and though he blinked against the harshness of the light, he seemed otherwise untroubled by it. He was young and lean and had bristle-short hair and eyes that looked black in the spotlight. The glare had to be blinding, but he did not so much as lift a hand to block it.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Serbin.”

  This was why she had t
he shotgun. This was why it was kept loaded and propped near the bed and now she had walked away from it because for too long she had lived in a world where a shotgun was unnecessary.

  You knew, she thought, even as she stared at him in silence. You knew, Allison, somehow you knew he was coming, and you ignored it and now you will pay.

  The man was advancing toward her through the narrow beam of light, and his motion induced her own, a slow backward shuffle on the porch. He did not change his pace.

  “I’d like you to stop there,” she said. Her voice was strong and clear and she was grateful for that. “Stop there and identify yourself. You know my name; I should know yours.”

  Still he came on with that carefree stride, his face a white glow and his eyes squinted nearly shut. Something was wrong with that. His willingness to accept the glare, to walk directly into it without taking so much as a side step, that wasn’t right. She’d caught him in the beam and for some reason he was embracing it. Why?

  “Stop there,” she said again, but now she knew that he would not. Her options rolled through her mind fast because they were few. She could wait here and he’d come on until he’d joined her on the porch and whatever had brought him here in the night would be revealed. Or she could turn and run for the door, close and lock it, and get the shotgun in her hands. She knew that she could make it before he caught her.

  He knows I can too. He can see that.

  But still he walked without hurry, squinting against the spotlight.

  She knew then. Understood in an instant. He was not alone. That was why he was not hurried and it was why he did not wish her to move the light away from him.

  She pivoted and headed for the door only to stop immediately. The second man was already almost to the porch. Far closer to the door than she was. He’d come from around the other side of the cabin. Long blond hair that glowed near white in the beam. Boots and jeans and a black shirt unbuttoned almost to midchest. Pistol in his hand.