Colorado Wildfire. Cassie Miles

threat to her daughter enraged her, made her as fierce as a mama grizzly. But it also terrified her. Was she tough enough to keep her child safe? Sam couldn’t take that chance; she needed to get Jenny far from harm’s way.

      Luckily, the solution was obvious: her dad was a captain in the Portland, Oregon, police department. Sam had already called him and arranged for Jenny to visit Grandma and Grandpa. The approaching fire provided a good excuse for sending her daughter to safety, while she herself stayed here and helped Wade investigate.

      About six miles outside town, she made a left onto a curvy asphalt road that she paid extra to have cleared by the snowplow in the winter. Now, in springtime, the drive was green and pleasant with the new growth of shrubs and leaves sprouting on the trees. Runoff from the snowmelt made a sparkling rivulet in the ditch beside the road.

      After her SUV passed the neatly lettered sign that marked Kendall’s Cabin, her nearest neighbors, she drove around a stand of aspen to the two-story log home that she and Wade had built. The peaked roof above the second floor covered a balcony that stretched across the front of the house and provided shelter for the wraparound porch. A huge cedar deck jutted from the south end of the house outside the kitchen. At this time of year, she and Jenny usually ate dinner at the picnic table on the deck, where they could watch the hummingbirds zoom around the hanging feeders filled with red-tinted sugar water.