CHAPTER 30

The ride back down Highline was like driving through a hellscape. The Type 3 carried them down the hill at a speed Mel wouldn’t dare; dust flew up in their wake to mingle with the burning ash they now had to clear from the windshield, the wipers flicking across the grimy glass in quick arcs. Even so, visibility was more of a pipe dream than a reality; embers flew up across the glass like sparks flying from a welder’s grinder, showering down on them in a hailstorm of fire. Their driver, a man Mel didn’t know, swore under his breath, swerving to stay on course. If this vehicle didn’t weigh whatever it did, they’d be squirreling out on the road like teenagers on a joyride. Luckily, it drove like a tank, tearing through the dirt, leaving new ruts in its wake.

They swerved often to avoid the worst of the smoldering hot spots where the fire had breached Highline, the flames still licking their way across. Despite the fact that it was not yet nightfall, Mel reached over and flipped the headlights on, and the light from the beams shone orange instead of yellow, bouncing around through the flames on every rut and pothole they hit. It reminded her of a flashlight in the hands of a toddler. Next to her, Sam pressed in close, sitting tall and straight, his eyes on the road.

The fire burned hotly on both sides, a red carpet the truck plowed through like a field of poppies.

“No way Claude’s truck could have made it,” Sam said, an observation echoed from the driver’s seat. Even if it had started properly, even in four-wheel drive, Claude’s truck tires had been in danger of losing traction or popping altogether in the heat of the burning underbrush and sage, leaving him, Sam, and the girls stranded like sitting ducks.

Mel kept reliving the moment when she’d found her daughters in the bathroom, then witnessed their evacuation, Annie burdened with medical paraphernalia, Astor crying out at the sight of the fire lapping at the house and road. On the EMS rig ahead of them, they must have witnessed the same terrifying scene Mel was subjected to now, and imagining their abject fear left a dull feeling of despair in the pit of her stomach. Thank God they had True.

On the right-hand side of the road, all Sam’s neighbors’ homes burned. It was like a movie; they were on a set, Mel would have told Astor and Annie, tearing along the road past balls of fire and thick billows of smoke, just waiting for a director to yell, Cut! It actually helped to tell herself this as well, because this couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be happening.

On the left, the houses down near the bottom of Highline remained standing. Apart from the red haze in the air, they looked normal. And then Mel nearly laughed out loud at the absurdity of this thought. They’d left “normal” behind hours ago.

They finally reached the base of Highline Road, where hazard tape restricted entry coming from the direction of town. The going was slower here, and their driver made his way more carefully, lights flashing, until finally they were at the entrance to Carbon High, where evacuees still streamed out of the gym doors, piling into the remaining cars and trucks.

“They’ve decided to open up the county fairgrounds,” a woman suited up in Outlaw County Search and Rescue orange told them. A good twenty miles south. Out of the path of disaster.

“My girls?” Mel pressed. “They were just ahead of us.”

The woman nodded toward the gym. “Just waiting on their mama.” She gave Mel a sympathetic smile. “Your friend is with them, and your neighbor, sitting with your youngest.”

At the door, they met with yet another gatekeeper, this one checking evacuees off a list. Mel gave their names—Sam Bishop, Melissa Bishop—and the man wrote them down on the clipboard. Mel barely registered any of it, focused on how nice it felt to say their names in tandem again, her mind, now that they were out of the worst of it, having room for only what felt most essential.

But then the man looked back up, a frown on his face.

“Did you say Bishop?”

“That’s right,” Sam supplied.

“There’s been a request that you report to Sheriff Paulson just as soon as you get to the shelter,” he said.

Sam looked confused. “Me?”

“No, her. Her, and a ...” The guy looked at his clipboard again. “A Kristina Truitt. Paulson needs a statement regarding John Fallows’s arrest.”

Mel’s gut instantly tightened, but she tried to press forward again with a vague nod to acknowledge she’d heard. This man and his requests did not constitute essential in Mel’s book. Not right this second, anyway. She needed to get to her girls. And she needed to keep Sam by her side.

But he’d stopped. “What arrest?” he asked. “What about Fallows?” His eyes narrowed as he glanced from Mel to out across the chaos of the room, seeking True, the look of suspicion on his face eerily similar to the one she’d caught the other night in the Eddy. “What on earth could be important enough for the sheriff to request a statement in the midst of this insanity?”

When she didn’t answer him immediately, she felt that suspicion slide toward anger. Justified as it was, it made Mel’s stomach constrict again.

“I have the right to know what’s going on,” he told her through a clenched jaw.

Of course he did, but their girls were waiting for them. Astor was upon them already, launching herself at them from a cot near the door.

“Mommy!” she yelled, and Mel didn’t miss the significance of the extra syllable, which she had been adamantly declaring babyish for months now, rolling right off her tongue. The sound of it threatened to undo her the moment she laid eyes on her.

She assessed Annie next, who still appeared listless but otherwise unscathed, hugging her tightly as Sam relieved Claude so the old man could ride out with the other evacuees. The second she released Annie, Sam’s eyes were on her again, seeking answers.

But could she give him what he needed? The chaos of the past three days made it impossibly difficult to determine just where she’d gone wrong and he’d gone right, and vice versa. Health decisions, money, property ... it had all combined and combusted in her head somehow, fueled by their decisions during this fire.

She managed a nod, and, catching her intent, True ushered both girls out of earshot with a murmured “We’ll get everything all organized to go.”

Once they were alone, or as close as they were going to get, with volunteers and public-service personnel still dashing here and there, herding people toward the door, Sam said firmly, “Start at the beginning.”

And so, with her heart still in her throat, Mel cast her mind back to the initial spark that had spurred her and True to action so many months ago, with Kim’s nephew’s arrest. At the end of this sordid tale, would he still have any respect for her?

“The opportunity just opened up, right before my eyes,” Mel told him, beseeching him with her eyes to try to understand. She explained the symbiotic timing of True’s rafting trips with Fallows’s trafficking needs, the relief that had washed over her each week as she’d deposited the cash that would fund Annie’s next round of prescriptions. “I thought I’d found a solution after so many setbacks.”

“But you kept me in the dark,” Sam said, betrayal in his eyes. Mel had to look past it to answer him.

“I had to.”

Her meaning simmered in the air between them. Any firefighter worth her salt knew that every spark needed an ignition factor, and Fallows’s nefarious business operation hadn’t been the sole element involved. Oxygen, heat, fuel. All three were necessary to ignite a fire such as the one she and True had stoked. The whole thing had gotten completely out of control, yes, but it hadn’t happened in a vacuum.

Sam had a blind spot when it came to Fallows, and in his attempt to course-correct and find his own path, his pride got smack in the way, placing obstacles in Mel’s path, too. Obstacles she’d had to make her own way around.

Sam didn’t contest the point. “But how did all this lead to an arrest tonight?”

Mel exhaled. This would be the hardest part. She picked her way carefully as she told him about finding the stash at the grow site and the confrontation on Highline Road, but Sam’s agitation grew with every word anyway.

“I told you to never have anything to do with that man,” he interrupted, color rising hotly in his cheeks as it always did when he felt the threat Fallows posed to his family. Mel didn’t argue. Here it came, the moment when Sam lost trust in her altogether, just when she’d learned to trust him . “I knew something was going on,” he continued, and then his voice broke as something else occurred to him and he asked, “Was Chris ...”

“Chris wasn’t there,” Mel told him. This, at least, would bring Sam a small measure of relief.

Instead, he spun the wheel of blame to point the needle at himself ... so characteristic of Sam, Mel could have cried. “I should have trusted what my gut has been telling me for days,” he told her. He took a step toward her. “But you’re all right? Tell me you’re all right.”

The distressed little boy he had once been stood right in front of her, the decorated veteran of two deployments smaller, somehow, than Mel had ever seen him as he scanned her up and down, taking full measure of her battle-worn self. Mel knew he couldn’t possibly distinguish between the bruises Fallows and his men had placed there and the soot and grime that had preceded them, but that didn’t seem to matter.

“Oh, Mel,” he said. “I get how you would be willing to do anything for Annie.” His voice sounded striated, like something vital had been excavated from somewhere deep within him. “God knows I get that . But what if I had lost you, too?”

Hope flickered in Mel. “You didn’t think you had already?”

“Had I?” He was studying her again, but this time, Mel didn’t think he was trying to identify bruising. At least not the ones evident on her skin.

“No,” she said softly. “You hadn’t. You still haven’t.” The moment she had watched him let the house on Highline burn to the ground, the last of that chip on her shoulder, the one that had weighed her down for far too long, had lifted.

A breath Sam must have been holding came out in a choked sort of sob, and he pulled her to him tightly. “I know I haven’t always done right by you,” he said into her ear. “By you or by Annie.”

Mel shook her head against his chest. “Working for Fallows—even for Annie’s sake—kept me tied to that man every bit as much—more, maybe—than you hanging onto the house ever did.”

Sam embraced her tighter in response, and in that touch, she felt a sort of release, a deflating of the pressure that had lived in her body for so long. After clawing her way through motherhood from the moment Annie had been born, she, like Sam, now had to let go of the fear of not being enough, providing enough, giving enough, for the people who mattered most.

She pulled back to look at him, an almost forgotten but much more welcome heat stirring within her as their shared culpability of impossible choices burned off in the air between them.

“Let’s get the girls and get out of here,” she said. “Together.”

They found True by the door, Annie on one hip, no easy load to cart around, Mel knew. As she relieved her of the burden, True’s eyes flitted from Mel to Sam with caution. “We all good?”

“All good,” Sam said, laying a hand on her shoulder as Mel added, “No more secrets,” with a sigh of relief.

Annie’s eyes flitted closed against the crook of Mel’s neck. “Mommy, I just want to sleep now. Can we go home?”

Mel pushed that problematic word—home—stubbornly aside and focused only on the sleep part. She and Sam had been trained by proxy by the best pediatric-cardiology team in the Pacific Northwest. Tired equaled low O2, and low O2 could almost always be attributed to subpar circulation. What caused subpar circulation? A weak heart. It always came back around to Annie’s heart. She studied Annie more closely. They couldn’t risk another tet spell.

She addressed Sam over the top of Annie’s head. “Forget the shelter. We need to get her out of this smoke now , before she worsens again.”

He didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Directly to Portland, then, where she’s closer to her cardio team.”

“Where’s her medical bag?” True asked.

“Astor managed to bring it with her, though not all the medications made it along for the ride. At last it’s not charred to bits, still in the cab of Claude’s truck.”

True’s face fell. “Maybe we should have stashed away some of Fallows’s cash after all. We didn’t know you’d need it to replace the prescriptions.”

Mel gripped her hand. “We needed Fallows put away more.”

“And if that money had been on you when he ran you off the road, he would have jumped you for it in about thirty seconds,” Sam muttered. “And be in the wind about five minutes after that.”

Mel’s steps faltered, the implication of what this meant hitting her full force. “Evading the arrest that was crucial to silencing his threats,” she said.

True smiled at her. “Well done. I would have rather that money burn to ashes than end up back in Fallows’s grubby hands.”

“We’re not criminals,” Mel agreed. She glanced at Sam. “This whole summer, it’s felt like ...” She searched for just the right term. “Bad juju.”

“Bad karma,” True said.

“Bad blood,” Sam added darkly.

“Besides,” True said with a slight upturn of her lips. “Photos can get erased, or photoshopped. Without that physical evidence—all of it—it would have just been Fallows’s word against ours.”

“Which is hopefully still at least slightly more respected in this town,” Sam said. He added a soft, if slight, smile to punctuate this, and when Mel smiled back, True caught the look between them and grinned, too.

“About damned time,” she said as they made the dash through the parking lot to get Annie into a car and out of the smoke of Carbon.