Fire, The Read Free Page A

and a buyer to attract. Kevin probably wouldn't see the inside of a local mine, or anything beyond the city limits, before Monday.
    Kevin snapped out of his daze and mentally rejoined the tour. As a graduate student facing immediate academic and financial challenges, he had, frankly, more important matters to ponder than blue lights, mines, and cryptic references by wisecracking professors.
    Of course, he could say the same about blazes, brothels, and pistol-packing rangers. They were no more important in the grand scheme of things and probably less relevant to his future. But they were interesting. Walt's tour was a nice way to start the summer.
    Kevin walked up to the front of the group and paid closer attention to its leader. Following the crusty old guy around town was an adventure. What Kevin didn't know is that his adventure in Wallace, Idaho, was just beginning.
     

CHAPTER 3: KEVIN
     
    Thursday, June 20, 2013
     
    If there was one thing that could be said about houses on the edge of small towns, it was that they were quiet – eerily quiet. Kevin could actually hear nature outside the window of his bedroom on the second floor of his grandfather's house on Garnet Street.
    He couldn't hear birds in Seattle, at least not over the din of cars, stereos, sirens, horns, dogs, and human voices that assaulted the ears with annoying regularity. Not so in Wallace. Over the past few days he had heard everything from songbirds, owls, and crickets to foxes and even wolves. He understood now why his ancestors had kept this magnificent home through the years. It was a retreat for the mind and the senses, a perfect place to unwind for two weeks.
    Wearing a T-shirt and shorts, he leaned back against the brass headboard of his surprisingly small double bed and stretched out his feet. They extended to the edge of the mattress.
    At six-foot-one, two hundred pounds, Kevin wasn't Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he wasn't Danny DeVito either. He had gotten his size from his father, Brian, who had been tall and thin as a boy but had filled out in the Army and had maintained that bulk. His mother was just the opposite. At five-four, one hundred ten pounds, Shelly Preston Johnson looked every bit like the gymnast she had been in high school. She had passed her physique onto her daughter.
    Unable to sleep at ten after ten, Kevin turned on a small lamp and stared at two books lying atop a nightstand. He had already read most of the first, a comprehensive account of the Big Burn, so he reached for the second: a spiral-bound document his grandfather had compiled for a family reunion in 2005.
    When he flipped through the pages, he could see that Grandpa Roger had done a thorough job. Everything Kevin had ever wanted to know about the Johnson family of Idaho, Oregon, and points beyond could be found in ample detail in the illustrated fifty-page work.
    Kevin knew much of his family's history but still found the stories interesting. The Johnsons had been a clan of surprising achievers, from Asa Johnson, a London trader who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1894 and made a bundle in mining, to Brian and Shelly Johnson themselves. Though born into middle-class families, Brian, a real estate broker, and Shelly, an author of children's books, had invested wisely as young adults and managed to become financially independent before their children were out of grade school.
    When he had compiled the family history, Grandpa Roger had understandably focused less on living relatives than on the rascals and characters who were no longer around to defend themselves. He had written a lot about Asa. The family patriarch had come to America to work on Wall Street but had found his calling as a mining broker in the West and, according to rumor, a trader in illicit diamonds. By the time he died of a heart attack at the age of forty-one on July 22, 1910, he had amassed a fortune of three hundred thousand dollars.
    Asa's oldest son, Randolph, had also succeeded as an entrepreneur.