Page 108 of Into the Fire

Epilogue - Dante

The larch turned in the third week of October. The ridges east of the base ran gold in long seams, and Fellhauer drank his morning coffee at the racks, whispering, “I told you so.”

We fixed the eave at Dutch’s cabin the second Saturday, with new flashing and straight nails. The season was winding down. The Otter went up twice that week for smokes that were out by dark, and Hollis’s winter training plan sat on the ready room table with my name on the third line.

My appointment became permanent on the fifteenth. Helena took eleven days to process a form Marty would have walked through before lunch.

An envelope came in the base mail on a Tuesday, hand-addressed, with R. MENDOZA over a return address two states away. I hadn’t seen the name outside the old manifest in five years. I carried it to the ready room table under the window and opened it standing up.

The note was short, written in a square, careful hand.

I heard what Keene did. A federal agent called me last month about Carson Ridge, and I told him what I remembered, which wasn’t much he didn’t already have. Afterward, I went through a box I’ve been hauling around for five years. I don’t know why I kept this. That’s not true. I do know why. It’s from that June. Somebody at Silvertip should have it. — Mendoza

It was a photograph. Dutch stood at the edge of a creek with a rod in one hand, caught mid-sentence, squinting at whoever held the camera. Behind him, a downed log crossed the water, and the far bank rose in a shape my eye zeroed in on.

Every piece of paper Carson Ridge ever produced had passed through Marty’s hands. The statements, summaries, and boxes in the records room. He’d spent five years making sure the record said what it was supposed to say. The photograph had spent the last five years with Mendoza.

I set the photo down and pulled out my phone. We’d photographed every page in Dutch’s cabin, every map and every fold, and the pictures lived on my phone as well as Boone’s. I found the Carson Ridge map and spread two fingers across the screen until the creek came up, and the crossing, and beside the crossing, in Dutch’s hand, the two letters I’d read past a dozen times because they didn’t belong to anything.

R.M.

Boone came in with the forecast in one hand and stopped just inside the door.

“What?” he asked.

Before I could answer, he crossed the room and put his free hand on my shoulder, looking down at the table. I pointed at the screen beside the crossing.

“Here.”

He looked at the letters, the envelope, the photograph of Dutch standing in a creek in June, saying something to the man behind the camera.

Then he pulled out a chair and sat down beside me.

“Show me.”

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