“I guess so.” She didn’t feel free to share what Sam had told her privately, so she opted for vagueness.
“I can’t say I’m surprised. Sam is one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet, but he’s closed off, if you know what I mean. He was that way even before his wife died, except maybe with her.”
Mary felt the kick of interest. “Did you know her?”
“Sam’s wife? Sure. We weren’t best friends or anything, but Earl and Sam have been great friends from the instant Sam moved to town. So Earl would invite me and my late husband over sometimes, and Sam and Beth would be there. She was fun. Outgoing, unlike Sam. Young.”
“Young?”
“Not in years. She was close to Sam’s age. But…I don’t know. She always impressed me as being about eighteen.” Maggie shrugged and flashed a grin. “Probably because I had a daughter and she didn’t. I was buried in responsibility, and she was still having fun being married and in love. You know what I mean. No criticism, by the way.”
“I know.” Mary felt the hovering black cloud that never quite left her reach out for her heart. She hadn’t told a soul in Whisper Creek that she’d had a son. Not one. She couldn’t bear to explain. Or to be reminded.
“Or maybe,” Maggie said after a brief pause, “it wasn’t that she was young. Maybe it’s that I was so emotionally old at the time myself. Going through bad things. Maybe I just envied her vivacity.”
Mary nodded. She could understand that. She felt as old as the hills herself in some ways. Too old to laugh easily, too old to take pleasure in much. Too weary. But she didn’t want to think about herself. “What was going on?”
“Oh.” Meg shrugged. “It’s still hard to talk about. But my first marriage…well, we were going through a rough time back then. I was feeling isolated and pretty down.”
Mary nodded again. “I can identify with that. Things have a way of…going sour, sometimes.”
“They sure do.” Maggie sighed. “Then, of course, my husband died, and there was no way to fix anything. Thank God for Earl.”
“He’s a nice man.” Although Mary didn’t know him very well. She’d pretty much kept to herself since taking the job in Whisper Creek. Her friendships were all superficial, extensions of her job. She didn’t want anyone getting close enough to find out the truth about her. Not only because she felt so guilty, but because she felt so ugly.
“Yes, he is.” Maggie smiled. “And so’s Sam. I’m glad he and Earl are friends. Well, maybe you can drag Sam out of his cocoon.”
“Me?” The thought made Mary blanche. Dragging anyone out of their cocoon meant she would have to come out of hers, and she wasn’t about to do that.
She had a sudden, vivid memory of a caterpillar one of her students had brought to her classroom in Denver. Back then, she’d been teaching third grade, awaiting an opening at a nearby high school.
The girl had brought the caterpillar in a mason jar, along with a small, leafy twig. It was a pretty caterpillar, probably why the girl had liked it. Before the morning was over, the caterpillar had started spinning its cocoon.
The excitement in the classroom had been palpable, so instead of asking the girl to let the poor beast go when she got home, Mary had allowed her to keep it in the classroom as a science lesson. They’d all been surprised by how fast the cocoon was created.
Then had come the morning when the butterfly had emerged. Everyone had crowded around the jar, watching excitedly. The creature was weak, its wings folded and stuck together.
At that point, Mary’s compassion had overborn the necessity of teaching a science lesson. She’d suggested they let the little butterfly go free. Everyone had agreed.
Outside, they’d waited and watched as slowly the wings had dried and spread. But one of them was deformed, and that butterfly would never leave the ground. Seeing what was coming, Mary had swiftly herded her students back to the classroom.
An hour later she went out to check. As she had feared, the butterfly had been killed by ants because it couldn’t escape. There was little of it left.
And that, Mary thought, was why she needed her cocoon. Her wings were deformed. She knew it. The ants would kill her if she ever emerged.
“Why not you?” Maggie asked, her cheerful voice penetrating the haze of Mary’s memory. “You’re the right age, you’re pretty, you’re nice, and Sam seems interested.”
“He’s not interested,” Mary blurted before she could stop herself.
Maggie peered at her, the shadows on her face highlighted by the limited range of the kerosene lanterns. “Not interested? He was bringing you to dinner.”
Mary shrugged. “That was…well, it wasn’t a date. We agreed on that.”
“Oh, my word,” Maggie said, and fell silent.
Mary chose not to pursue that comment, even though it sounded disbelieving. What was the point, anyway? What Maggie might think had no bearing on what was actually happening, or on the fact that Mary never would have accepted the dinner invitation if Sam hadn’t said it wasn’t a date.
“Well,” Maggie said presently, then said no more.
Needing solitude, Mary walked away from the food tables toward an area from which she could see the fire better. In the darkness, a red fog seemed to fill the north end of the valley, and here and there tongues of fire burst above it. It was getting closer. Showing no mercy.
But then, the world, or the universe, or whatever you chose to call it, didn’t show mercy. Ever. It was a cold, heartless world, where bad things happened no matter how good you were.
“It looks like the fires of hell,” Elijah remarked.
Mary started, surprised that he had joined her. She wondered if he was going to stick like a burr to her. And if so, why. “It looks like a forest fire,” she said flatly.
His face, only dimly illuminated by the lanterns behind them and the glow from the fire, looked dark, a ruddy black. His shaggy white eyebrows seemed to glow with their own light. They lifted. “You don’t believe in hell?”
“Oh, I believe in it, all right. I just don’t think we agree on what it is.”
“I see.”
She averted her face, hoping he would take the hint and leave her alone. He didn’t.
She heard what at first sounded like the rush of running water. But then, as the pitch-black treetops began to sway against the slightly lighter sky, and as the kiss of the breeze nipped at her ears, she knew what it was. The wind was coming up strongly.
Not just the earlier occasional gust, this was strong, steady. Exactly what they didn’t need.
At first it seemed content to sweep the mountain-top and ignore the valley. Mary tensed as she waited, hoping against hope it wouldn’t sweep down the slopes and spread the fire. Beside her, she heard Elijah begin a low-voiced prayer. Almost instinctively, she reached out and took his hand, silently joining him. To her surprise, she felt him squeeze her fingers.
And she wondered yet again why Elijah seemed to be haunting her.
6
Dawn seeped through the smoky haze, bringing a dim gray light to the men who had struggled all night to build a firebreak below Edgerton Pass. Even though the fire was nowhere near reaching them yet, the area still looked as if it had been bombed out. Trees had been cut down, and during the night bulldozers had arrived to shove them away from the cleared area. Now there was nothing to be seen except a wide, barren strip they hoped the fire couldn’t cross. There was still more work to be done, more land to be cleared,