Fire with Fire

IT’S EASY TO GET THE PICTURES. I SNEAK INTO THE gallery, grab them out of the bathroom sink cabinet, and sneak straight back out. And then I go find my brother.

Pat and all his friends are camping. I know roughly where the spot is, a wooded clearing near the bluffs that he found on one of his dirt-bike rides. I park as close as I can get, on the side of the road, and head through the woods in my dress and my heels. The trees are so dense the snow barely hits the ground.

I find them. They’ve got a fire going, and everyone’s festive and drunk and cold as shit.

“Kat,” Pat says, standing up from the log he’s sitting on. “What’s up?”

I walk straight up to the fire and toss the stack of Rennie’s photos on the flames. “Someone pour me a whiskey.”

Ricky passes me his bottle. I down what’s left in one thick, smoky gulp.

I sit quietly for a while, while everyone else parties. Every few minutes I send Rennie a text like, Where are you? and Let me know where you are? and Rennie, WTF?!!

Then, through the crackle of the logs and the conversation and the Led Zeppelin, I think I hear a siren. Like a fire truck or an ambulance. I can’t tell. But it sends a shiver down my spine. I glance down at my cell. Rennie hasn’t answered my texts, not a single one.

I’ve got a feeling. A bad feeling.

“Everyone shut up a second!”

Pat laughs at me. He’s sitting across the fire on his sleeping bag, cooking some nasty-looking hot dog on a stick. “You hear Big Foot out there?”

The rest of the group either laugh at his lame joke or ignore me and keep talking.

I take a few steps away from them and strain to hear. Now it sounds like two sirens. Maybe even three. I run over to the radio someone brought and shut it off in the middle of a killer Led Zeppelin guitar solo. Someone whines. I say, “I’m not kidding! Shut up.”

I guess something in my voice tells them to take me seriously. They shut their traps. And then we all hear it. Like every fire truck in Jar Island is on its way to something bad.

“Ricky!”

I’m running over to his bike and putting on a helmet as fast as I can. No one knows what to make of this, but Ricky, bless his heart, doesn’t hesitate a second. He roars the engine and we peel out, sending a spray of dead pine needles and snow.

We drive toward the sound. It’s not far off. But we can’t get close. One of the fire trucks has blocked off the road. I climb off the bike and run to the side of the road, where a fireman is pulling caution tape across the pass. A jagged cliff, a few hundred feet in the distance, seems to glow. My eyes trace the light down its jagged edges to the water, where a bright orange ball burns in the cove. It . . . it looks like the water is on fire.

“What happened?”

He gives me this look, like I’m some stupid rubbernecker wanting the gory details. “There’s been an accident.” And then he turns his back to me.

I grab his arm. “What? Who was it? Was it a white Jeep?” As soon as I say the white Jeep bit, he spins around, his face completely different.

I fall to my knees and let out a howl like a wild animal.