Despite the beard, she could see the corners of his mouth tip up slightly. “I’ve noticed that.”
Mary smiled, prepared to be as noncommitally friendly as he allowed. “Is there something I can do for you?”
He didn’t answer immediately, and she had the sense that he was struggling with something. After a minute or so, she decided to take the bull by the horns.
“Sam is your son, isn’t he?”
Elijah’s intense eyes jumped back to her. “Yes.”
“He’s a fine man.”
Again Elijah said nothing, but this time Mary refused to speak, either. If something was troubling him, he needed to tell her or take it back home with him. Their gazes locked and held while time ticked by.
Finally Elijah spoke. “He carries a gun.”
“Yes.” She wasn’t about to say anything regarding that, either. Offering opinions to this man might be dangerous, unless she wanted lectures.
“A man who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”
Mary bit her lower lip, wanting to defend the necessity of police officers but realizing that Elijah’s real problem was something else. Something she wasn’t ready to wade into.
His gaze seemed to bore into her; then he nodded and walked back to his house.
What a strange man, she thought, staring after him. Then a thought struck her: maybe he was genuinely worried about Sam’s safety. Maybe his objection was something more than that Sam hadn’t become a minister.
And maybe she was being too generous to him. She certainly had a tendency to see the best in everyone other than herself.
In herself she saw only the worst. It was a pain she lived with, one so old it was comfortable.
Shaking her head, she went back to her weeding.
Sam continued to be troubled by the occasional whiffs of smoke he detected and the haziness to the west. Finally he called dispatch and asked if anyone had reported a fire.
Nary a whisper about one. But he couldn’t escape the feeling that something was wrong, so he told the dispatcher that he was going to drive up Reservoir Road and take a look.
The reservoir had been built to provide water to Denver and in return had provided a great recreational area for visitors and the residents of Whisper Creek. The road looped around the entire perimeter of the reservoir, a man-made lake that looked as if it had been there forever. Campsites and picnic sites abounded, and the fishing was pretty good. Branching off the loop was a rutted dirt road that headed up to the pass between the two highest peaks visible from town. From there he could see the valley beyond.
As his car ascended, bumping all the way, the air grew cooler and thinner, taking on just the suggestion of a chill. Pines shadowed his way, hinting of ancient mysteries in their depths.
Every time he got out in the woods like this, he found himself thinking of what it must have been like a hundred years ago for the first settlers. They’d come looking for gold but had found silver. When silver prices crashed, they’d suffered until the next big boom. Right now they were getting by on jobs at a molybdenum mine and the surrounding resorts. It had been a while since times had really boomed.
But the first settlers must have thought that a bright future lay here. And certainly in the summertime the place was hospitable. Plenty of water, plenty of sun and shade, but cool enough for a person to work hard. Of course, at this altitude there wasn’t a whole lot you could grow in the way of crops, but there had always been plenty of deer and elk.
It was easy to imagine setting up camp away from everything and just getting by on the land, maybe trapping beavers for their pelts. He could see why people had come and stayed.
Hell, people still came and stayed. People who wanted to live apart in small houses in the woods. People who were more interested in privacy and freedom than neighbors. People looking for a place where they could be unconventional, or a place where they could walk out their own back doors and ski in the winter. And so many of them came with dreams, just like the first settlers.
His car jolted in a deep rut, shaking him out of his reverie. Better pay attention. The pass was up ahead, but the higher he went, the worse the road grew, because it was so rarely traveled. The only things up here were a couple of microwave repeaters and the kind of woods he always thought of when he read that Robert Frost poem.
The smell of smoke was getting a little more noticeable, too. When his car bottomed out in another rut, he turned it around carefully and parked it to one side on a bed of pine needles. Better to hoof it the rest of the way.
He’d come up another two thousand feet, and he could feel the difference as he hiked up the road. He was well above ten thousand feet now, at a place where even his altitude-adapted lungs labored more than usual.
Most summers, the sky would have been overcast by now, heralding a thunderstorm so regular you could set your watch by it. Not this year. This year the sky stayed perfectly blue from sunrise to sunset, unmarred by so much as even one little puff of cloud.
He was approaching the tree line now, and after climbing another fifty feet he had an unobstructed view of the valley and lake behind him. Another fifty feet upward and he reached the pass.
His puffing lungs forgot to breathe as he saw the smoke filling the valley on the other side of the mountains. Ignoring his fatigue, he trotted forward along the vanishing road until he could look downward.
There was a fire at the north end of the valley. Not too big yet, but a definite threat to the woods down there. A definite threat to Whisper Creek by way of the Edgerton Pass to the north, lower and well-enclosed by trees. Maybe a hundred acres were burning right now, and the valley stretched south of the flames like a smorgasbord.
Sam reached for his radio. With nothing between him and Whisper Creek, the connection was as clear as a bell.
“We’ve got a forest fire on the west side of Meacher Peak, about two miles north of Edgerton Pass.”
“How much involvement?”
Sam looked again to double-check his earlier impression. “Maybe a hundred acres.”
The dispatcher said he would take care of it. Sam stood there for a few minutes longer, looking at one of nature’s most ferocious beasts. And for some reason it made him think of his dad.
Although “dad” seemed like too familiar a name for the man who had sired him. In fact, he couldn’t remember a time when dad or daddy had seemed appropriate for Elijah. Sam’s tender years had been filled with terrors of the devil, nightmares about burning lakes and the endless screams of the damned. Countless nights, horrific visions of the end of the world had kept him from sleeping after he’d listened to his father preach.
Elijah’s brand of religion was all about fear and punishment. For some people that was great and exactly what they needed. For Sam, however, it had driven a wedge between him and his father. To a young boy, Elijah had seemed the embodiment of threat and punitive love. A tall man, a very large man to a small boy, whose face twisted in rage when he spoke of sin, whose voice thundered judgment over every peccadillo. For a sensitive child, it wasn’t the right brand of religion.
Sam shook his head and tried to banish thoughts of his father as he drove back down to Whisper Creek. Maybe it was time to consider taking a job elsewhere, because there was no way in a town this size that he wasn’t going to run into Elijah around nearly every corner.
He wasn’t sure he could deal with that; there was just too much bitterness.
5
The Whisper Creek airport, a small private landing