Read Online Nest in the Ashes by Christine Goff - Free Book Online

backtrack. Not much was said. Everyone seemed to be saving their breath.
    The next effort proved more successful. The second gulch wormed its way up the mountain, the slopes rising steeply on either side. Snags and dead trees littered the hillsides, and they huffed and puffed over fallen logs and around large, moss-covered boulders.
    “Wait,” Lark said.
    Eric turned to find her leaning against a large boulder, holding her side. “Tired?”
    She made a face and pointed. Three-quarters of the way up the trunk of a dead pine tree, a male three-toed woodpecker pushed grass into a nesting cavity.
    Eric raised his binoculars and trained them on the bird. The black and white barring on its sides, flanks, and back set it apart from similar species. Its black head, shoulders, wings, and rump appeared inky against the reddish-brown pine. A black tail displayed white outer-tail feathers spotted in black, and it had a white post-ocular stripe widening on the back of its neck. The three-toed woodpecker turned as though sensing the scrutiny, then cocked its head, offering Eric a clear view of its yellow cap and white mustache.
    A gust of wind swirled through. The bird departed, and the trio moved on.
    They’d only gone a few hundred yards when the landscape changed again. This time due to fire. Flames had ravaged the area. Smoke puddled around their boots, and the smell of charred wood assailed their nostrils. Small campfire-sized fires still burned on the hillside. The soil felt warm.
    Eric radioed Hanley. Their location placed them midway up the steep ravine, and Butch told them to start scraping a fire line along the edge of the burn.
    “You heard the man,” he said. “There are only three of us and no saws, so we’ll diagonal upslope on the south side. Keep the burned area on your right, and keep your eyes open. The fire’s up there somewhere.”
    Pulaskis in hand, Harry and Lark started climbing, scraping a three-foot-wide boundary along the edge of the burned area with the hoe end of the tool. A narrow fire break, but in most cases enough to prevent a flare-up from jumping into unburned territory.
    When Eric didn’t follow, Lark stopped digging and turned around. “Aren’t you coming?”
    “I’ll be right behind you.” He gestured across the slope toward the other side of the gulch. “I’m going to scout the lower perimeter.”
    “We’ll see you up top,” Harry said.
    Eric turned back, working downslope along the lower edge of the burn. He wanted to make sure no fire lay below them. Like prevailing winds along a seaboard in the fall, mountain air currents followed patterns. On the coast, the winds surged toward the ocean early in the day to be pulled ashore in the afternoon by heat rising off the land. In the mountains, air flowed downslope in the morning, then roared up the gulches late in the day.
    Reaching the bottom of the ravine, Eric started to turn around when a flash of yellow in the burned-out area caught his attention. Too low to the ground to be a tanager, he thought. Besides, the birds seem to have all fled.
    A small spot fire, maybe?
    He scrambled closer, skirting a still-glowing stump, following what appeared to be tire tracks in the dirt. Rounding a small boulder, he stopped abruptly. Bile rose in his throat, and he gagged. The charred remains of a body lay sprawled in the soot.

CHAPTER 8
    Eric crabbed his way across the slope, keeping his eye on the body.
    Was it one of the missing boys?
    He didn’t think so, based on the tatters of clothing that had survived the heat. The body appeared to belong to a firefighter.
    Eric’s heart pounded.
    Wayne?
    Eric refused to believe it. Wayne might have headed up toward the mountain, but he was too experienced to be caught by the fire.
    Nora?
    Based on the radio conversation, she’d been out of touch for over an hour.
    The closer Eric got to the corpse, the more convinced he was that it wasn’t Nora’s body. The size and stature suggested it was the body