“The place looks nice. You and Dad did a good job rebuilding the deck on cabin four. And did I see sauna plans—finally—in the office?”
“Finally, yes. And a new playground. But what we really need is Internet.”
She made a face.
“Eden, you’re not there. It’s isolated. Remote. Families want to be connected; teenagers want to update their Facebook status.”
She stirred her malt. “I noticed we only had two cabins full this week.”
“The Schmitts and the Iversons arrived yesterday. The same week every year for the last decade.”
“God bless them.”
“But their kids don’t come. We gotta do something. Nobody wants to go to Evergreen Lake and rent a paddleboat or sit on the dock and read.”
She considered him. “So what do we do? Convince Mom and Dad to sell the place? What would they do? Where would they go?”
“Sell? No. Of course not.”
She held up her hand. “Sorry. I just thought . . . Well, it felt like you wanted to move on—”
“I want to make it better, Sis. I’ll do whatever it takes to put Evergreen Resort back on the map, to pack out the house like in the old days. For Mom and Dad. And for Tiger.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s a change. Are you convincing yourself, or do you mean it?”
“I mean it. Don’t you think Tiger deserves the childhood we had?”
Eden finished her malt, then picked up her trash. “You want to make Tiger’s childhood better? Give him a future? Call Ivy.” Getting up, she walked around to Tiger and wiped his mouth. “C’mon, pal. Did you know if you put salt on a seagull’s tail, you can catch him?”
“Really?” Tiger talked with his mouth full, climbing off the bench.
“Nice, Eden.”
She gave Darek a toothy smile and led Tiger off toward the beach.
Her words netted in Darek’s chest. You want to make Tiger’s childhood better?
Yes, he did.
Darek took a breath, pulled out his phone, and walked away from the table, toward the parking lot. He just had to call her. Ask her what she was doing this weekend. Maybe take her fishing.
Fishing? Oh, c’mon. He could do better than that. He stared at the phone, wishing for words. Anything.
Hey, Ivy, it’s Darek. He’d gotten that far in his head when he heard a vehicle pulling into the lot. He stepped back onto the grass and looked up just as it rolled to a stop beside him.
He stilled. It couldn’t be.
The vehicle resembled an ambulance, with two bay doors in the back that opened to supplies and beds. Along the outside of the truck, door handles indicated four compartments—he knew from memory that the other side contained identical spaces for personal gear, foodstuffs, medicine, firefighting supplies.
A fresh coat of lime-green paint covered the surface, with the words Jude County Hotshots painted along the top.
Darek lowered the phone.
The Jude County Hotbox had just rolled into town.
And then—he should have expected it—the door opened and from the passenger side jumped the man who’d been his squad leader. Now Jed Ransom wore the word Foreman on his shirt pocket.
“I told you we’d find him, guys.” Jed approached Darek, hand out. “Dare, how you doing? Feeling like fighting some fire?”
“WE HAD A FLYOVER SIGHTING on Sunday morning, around six.” Jed unrolled a map on a large conference table in an interior room of the National Forest Service building. He always stood a foot taller than other men Darek knew, not just in size but in stature. Dark-haired and from Montana, with the slightest Western drawl, Jed could read a fire like no one else. He’d started as a ground pounder when he was eighteen, risen up the ranks, graduated from Butte College with a degree in fire science, and now trained and worked as the ramrod of one of the tightest crews in the West.
He was the man Darek had once hoped to be.
The Jude County Hotshots trained in Ember, Montana, but deployed out of Boise, from the National Interagency Fire Center, their type-one crew often called first when a fire started to blaze. Especially one in the tinder-crisp forest of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, where a blowdown ten years ago had left dead trees like matchsticks across a million acres of forest.
Darek could barely contain the adrenaline shooting through his veins as he heard the conversations of arriving hotshots, the buzz of radios in the NFS office. “Where did it start?”
“They think here, on the southeast corner of Swan Lake.” Jed pointed to a place on the map twenty-three miles northwest of Deep Haven, thick in the BWCA. “Weather service pinpointed a thunderstorm there Friday night with somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand lightning strikes. Could have been one or more, but no one noticed any activity until the morning.”