Burn Out Read Free Page B

and care that the Whittingtons had put into this place over their fifty-year marriage, let alone the happy memories of all the people who’d stayed here.
    Of course, it was hard to argue with a would-be buyer’s logic; these buildings were not salvageable. I only hoped that whoever bought the acreage would leave the trees.
    I parked behind the lodge where the Land Rover couldn’t be seen from the highway, carried my deli lunch down the rocky slope to the rickety dock, and spread an old blanket on its planks. Sat down, feeling the pale autumn sunshine on my face. The lake rippled on the stones below, and in the distance I could see plovers doing touch-and-goes on the massive central island. The lake is a major stop on the Pacific Flyway, along which approximately a hundred thousand migratory birds travel, and over the years I’ve seen most every kind there. If the lake had not been saved through the efforts of dedicated environmentalists like Hy, the birds would have had a long journey to their next stop.
    A natural wonder restored, a man-made resort dying.
    Suddenly I didn’t feel as sad about the Willow Grove Lodge’s demise. Long after whatever replaced it was gone, the lake would endure.
    The book I’d brought along wasn’t very engaging—a long-winded narrative about a former alcoholic holed up in the woods to contemplate what he claimed wasn’t a midlife crisis, but that damned well sounded like one, as I should know. After I finished my lunch, I dozed off while reading and woke to a chill wind gusting off the lake. The shadows of the trees had moved over me.
    I sat up, disoriented. In my peripheral vision, something moved through the dark grove to the right. I turned my head, narrowed my eyes. Nothing there. Then I saw it again—a figure that darted from trunk to trunk, creating a ripple effect.
    An animal? A person? Either way, I was the interloper here. Time to get going.
    I folded the blanket, grabbed the book and the sack of leavings from my picnic. At the Land Rover I looked back at the grove. No more motion, but a prickly sensation arose at the base of my spine, spread up to the back of my neck. Something colder than the wind washed over me.
    My old woolen peacoat was in the Land Rover and before I drove out I put it on. As I stopped at the top of the drive, I saw the yellow-leafed aspens in the declivities of the hills to the far side of the highway swaying softly in the breeze; the late afternoon sunlight made them gleam like a river of molten gold.
    There had been gold in these hills long ago and some poor veins remained. Normally the beauty of this view would have entranced me, but now its glow was dimmed by the aura of what I’d felt at the lodge. I thought of the ravages that cyanide—which the big mining companies had used to extract gold from the waste dumps and tailings of played-out claims—had wreaked upon the land.
    The thought took me back to the case I’d been working here when I met Hy, investigating a conglomerate that planned to start up a large-scale and environmentally unsound mining operation above a semi-ghost town called Promiseville. I remembered us fleeing hand in hand from a dynamite blast that took out a part of a mountain. And Hy saying, as we lay on the ground gasping and panting from our flight, “. . . You’ve got even more of a death wish than I do.”
    Not any more.
    I waited for a logging truck to pass, then turned left toward town. The highway topped a rise, then began a gradual descent into Vernon. Halfway down I saw an old brown pickup truck, its paint spotted gray like a piebald horse. It was pulled onto the opposite shoulder and, as I approached, its passenger-side door flew open and the figure of a woman hurtled out into the ditch. The truck’s driver—bearded, with a knit cap pulled low on his brow—got out and stood on the edge of the ditch, yelling down at her.
    Reflexively I U-turned across the highway and pulled onto the shoulder. As I jumped out of