Chapter 24 - THE GILDED COLLAPSE
"Get the girl!" Marcus roared, already kicking open the gun cabinet in the corner of the mudroom.
He didn't reach for a hunting rifle. He grabbed two heavy brass fire nozzles and the keys to Arthur’s old 1974 John Deere four-wheel-drive tractor, which was hooked to a five-hundred-gallon water tender Arthur had used for controlled burns along the orchard line.
The United States Marshals were already on the porch. The lead agent, a woman named Perez with tactical armor strapped over her black windbreaker, had her service weapon drawn.
"Miss Holloway! Stay inside the perimeter!" she barked. "We have a perimeter breach on the logging trail! It’s a commercial tanker truck—they’ve laid down an accelerant line along the firebreak!"
I didn't listen. I ran to the cot, grabbed Waverly, and pulled her boots onto her small feet. "Waverly, look at me. Look at my eyes."
The child was shivering, her face pale in the flickering orange reflection dancing across the unfinished ceiling. "June? Is it the fire again?"
"It’s just an old brush pile, baby," I lied, pulling my heavy shearling coat around her shoulders and pinning it shut with a brass safety pin. "Marcus and I are going to put it out. You stay right behind Agent Perez. You don't let go of her belt. Do you hear me?"
Waverly nodded, biting her lower lip until it turned white.
I thrust her into Perez’s arms. "Get her down to the blacktop. Don't let anything come up that lane."
"You're not going out there," Perez ordered.
"That's my father’s timber," I said, my teeth clenched so tight my jaw clicked. "And I know which way the drainage ditches run. If that fire reaches the old sawmill pit, there are three thousand gallons of diesel fuel buried in an unvented tank from 1982. It will take this whole ridge down."
Without waiting for her reply, I sprinted out the back door into the biting, sub-zero wind.
The heat hit me before I reached the barn. It was a physical wall, an engine of roaring wind created by sixty acres of standing pine going up like matchheads. The sky had turned the color of bruised copper, vomiting thick, greasy plumes of soot that drifted down like black snow.
At the edge of the clearing, caught in the blinding glare of the flames, was not a stranger.
It was my brother-in-law, Claire’s husband, Bradley.
He was standing beside Eleanor’s silver Mercedes SUV, his tailored cashmere coat smoldering at the hem, holding an empty five-gallon steel fuel can. His face was blackened with soot, his hair singed down to the scalp on the left side, his eyes wide and glassy with the pure, unhinged panic of a man who had never done manual labor in his life and had suddenly realized fire does not obey a court injunction.
"Bradley!" I screamed over the roar of the crown fires.
He whipped around, dropping the can. The steel bounced off the frozen ground with a hollow clatter.
"She said it would just be the outbuildings!" Bradley shrieked, his voice breaking into a high, girlish wail. "She said if the survey markers burned, the land would go into receivership! She said we could claim the insurance!"
Marcus came barreling around the side of the barn on the John Deere, the diesel engine screaming at full throttle. He didn't slow down for the fence line. The heavy steel front loader crushed Arthur’s old cedar rail fence like kindling, swinging the water tender into position between the advancing wall of flame and the dry timber walls of the house.
"Move, you idiot!" Marcus shouted from the tractor seat, pointing the high-pressure water monitor directly at the brush line.
A blast of water hit the burning briars, producing an explosive hiss of superheated steam that knocked Bradley off his feet.
I didn't stop to help him up. I walked through the falling ash, grabbed Bradley by the collar of his ruined thousand-dollar coat, and dragged him across the mud to the driver’s side of the Mercedes.
"Where is she, Bradley?" I slammed his head against the tempered glass of the driver’s door. "Where did Eleanor go?"
Bradley was sobbing, blood and soot running down his nose. "The… the bank in town. The regional trust vault. She’s got the bearer bonds. She has the safety deposit key Arthur thought he lost in 2015. She’s clearing the vault before the eight o'clock federal wire freeze!"
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Behind us, the siren of a second federal convoy began to wail from the valley below, cutting through the crackle of the burning pines like a trumpet of judgment.
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