Fire and Rain (2 page)

“Just my imagination,” she called back, fumbling in her purse for a mint. When she got to her feet, the muscles in her legs seemed barely able to hold her upright. She slipped off her heels for the walk back to the van.

“Call came while you were out there,” Craig said when she had taken her seat again. “Fire’s hit the north ridge of the canyon and is nipping at the rafters of guess whose house?”

“Whose?” she asked, not following.

“Your favorite ex-pitcher. You know, the one who has now brought his staggering credentials to Valle Rosa’s political quagmire.” There was some chuckling from the back of the van.

“Chris?” she asked stupidly. “Chris’s house is on fire? Is he okay?”

“Apparently Mr. Mayor is not at home.”

She leaned forward to pick up the cellular phone. “He’s probably still at his office,” she said. She had to call information for the number, and although it was after nine, she wasn’t surprised when he answered.

“The Cinnamon Canyon fire’s reached your house,” she said. “We’re headed over there now.”

There was a short silence on Chris’s end of the phone. The two female members of the crew broke into a poorly harmonized rendition of the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” and Carmen covered her ear with her hand to block them out.

“You’ll be there?” Chris asked. “You mean, with
News Nine
?”

“Yes.”

Another beat of silence. “Okay,” he said, “I’m on my way.”

ORDINARILY THE DRIVE FROM
his office in the so-called heart of Valle Rosa to his home on the rim of Cinnamon Canyon took Chris fifteen minutes, but tonight he would make it in ten. He knew the hairpin curves and the way the road pitched and curled and clung to the side of the cliff. He’d learned to drive on this road, twenty-five years earlier, his father a patient teacher. Chris could drive it without taking his eyes off the orange glow in the distance.

He had heard about the children. Don Eldrich had called him an hour earlier. Don worked for the fire department and sat on Valle Rosa’s board of supervisors. He’d been responsible for getting the rest of the board to shift Chris into the mayoral spot after George Heath’s death had left the position vacant. Chris had taken the job with great reluctance, acknowledging that, as a high school teacher with the summer off, he could take a leave from his work more easily than anyone else on the board. But Heath had left a mess behind him, and the mess was growing rapidly. It was out of control, and Chris had no idea what to do about it, which was becoming increasingly apparent to the people of Valle Rosa as their avocado and orange crops withered in the ceaseless drought. He had no idea how to take control of the thirsty monster that had sucked most of the life from Valle Rosa and now seemed poised to burn what little was left.

But it wasn’t Valle Rosa that absorbed him as he drove home. He thought only of Dustin. Dusty wasn’t there—he had never been to the house—but there were pictures. Photograph albums. Chris hadn’t realized how desperately he needed them until that moment. Even his guitar and his trophies seemed immaterial by comparison. He didn’t want to lose the only pictures he had of his son.

Camino Linda was so clotted with police cars and fire trucks and ambulances that he had to leave his car and run the last quarter-mile to his house.

At first he thought the fire had spared him, but he was only seeing the hulk of the
News Nine
van in front of the house. Behind it, flames shot out of the roof—the new roof he had put on himself in the spring. He stood in the street, trying to size up the situation, trying to keep his mind lucid. Right now the fire seemed contained in the southern half of the rambling house. The small family room, where his photograph albums, guitar and trophies were kept, was as yet unscathed. Could he slip in the French doors on the veranda?

Carmen suddenly appeared at his side. It had been a while since he’d seen her, although he had watched her news reports these past two months since she’d been back on
News Nine
‘s evening broadcast. They’d given her a few brief minutes of North County news, three times a week, something he was sure felt like a slap in the face to her given what she’d meant to them in the past.

“I’m so sorry, Chris,” she said, keeping her eyes on his house..

“Do you think I could get into the family room?” he asked, as though she might somehow have the answer. “Take a few things out?”

She frowned at him. “Of course not. Look at it.” She nodded toward the smoking, crackling house. “Your trophies aren’t worth risking your life for.”

“It’s not the trophies,” he said, quietly. “It’s the pictures of Dustin.”

She turned away abruptly, and when one of her crew called to her, she left Chris’s side without another word.

Chris watched as she took the microphone from some guy’s hand and stepped in front of the camera. The throbbing whir of a helicopter above the canyon and the shouts of the fire fighters prevented him from hearing what she said, although he could imagine: “Fire tonight reached the home of Valle Rosa’s acting mayor, Christopher Garrett.”

After a moment, the red light on the camera went off and Chris heard the sharp tones of an argument between Carmen and a male member of the crew. She was shaking her head. “
No
,” she said. “Please.” They glanced toward Chris, and he suddenly understood what was happening. They wanted her to interview him, to shove that microphone in front of his face and tape his grief for all of southern California to witness. Carmen didn’t want to do it. That much was obvious, and he was grateful. Yet he knew she couldn’t win the debate. They would insist, and she would comply. She had to earn back the trust she’d lost these past few years. She had to earn back her reputation as the hard-nosed, tough, and confrontational reporter she had been before her four-year leave of absence. She had to show them she was still strong, still had what it took to do her job.

And so he would spare her, spare both of them. He turned away from his smoldering house and lost himself in the crowd that had gathered. He found a safe spot some distance away, and from there he watched Carmen search the crowd for him. He could almost see the relief in her eyes at not being able to find him. She shrugged and said something to the man at her side. Then she turned back to the house just as the roof caved in above the family room. Chris wondered if she thought about what he’d said, about Dustin’s pictures being in there. Did she care? Did it make any difference to her at all?

Carmen looked back at the crowd. Her eyes moved in his direction, and he knew she could see him now. Maybe she’d been able to see him all along. He allowed himself to stare back at her, allowed their gazes to lock. If anyone should understand how he felt to lose Dustin’s pictures, it would be Carmen. After all, she was Dustin’s mother.

DAMAGE.

Mia typed the word, black and sharp, at the top of the page. Chris had asked her if she minded typing this list, this recitation of what had been done to his home, what he had lost, and she, of course, had agreed. But no matter what she typed below it, the word at the top of the page taunted her.

She was a halting, two-fingered typist, although she had improved greatly during her month and a half as Chris’s office manager. He didn’t complain, but then, he could hardly fault her; she’d been completely honest with him about her lack of secretarial skills. She’d told him she was twenty-eight years old and an artist, and that the only other skills she possessed were those she’d picked up over the years of caring for her invalid mother.

He’d hired her as easily as if she’d said she’d graduated at the top of her class in secretarial school. Mia learned quickly that he did most things that way—easily, unhurried. Not much seemed to shake him, as though he expected little out of life, as though when she’d shown up to apply for the job, he’d fully expected her to be unqualified.

She had been the one to find the file. While cleaning out the previous mayor’s rickety oak file cabinet, her fingers caught on a folder tucked beneath the rest. It was unmarked, and something about it—the way it had been hidden, perhaps, or the way it was held closed by three paper clips along its open end—made her take it to Chris without looking at it herself.

Chris sat on the corner of his desk, plucking the clips from the file and laying it open on his knee, and she remembered seeing the color drain from his face as he read its contents.

“Jesus.” He looked up at her, a flash of uncharacteristic anger in his pale blue eyes. “Heath sold our water,” he said. “He sold our water to a development on the other side of Cinnamon Canyon. Do you believe it? We’re in the middle of a drought! Everybody’s got plastic dams in their toilet tanks to save a couple of gallons a day, and he sells our water to a bunch of money-hungry vultures. No wonder the reservoir’s nearly dry.”

Mia knew Chris had grown up here, during a time when Valle Rosa was even smaller and sleepier, and that he took every infraction against the town as a personal affront. He had wondered aloud to her how George Heath had afforded his Mercedes, his sailboat. Or the private plane he’d chartered to fly him to Sacramento, where he was supposed to have met with other government officials to discuss the drought. Ironic that he’d used the profits from his water deal on the plane that had taken him to his death.

Mia was typing the last item on Chris’s inventory of his damaged possessions when the outside door opened. A man stepped into the office, a stranger, accompanied by a gust of hot, dry, Santa Ana wind that rustled the papers on her desk. One paper rose from the blotter, floating in the air for a second before slipping to the floor, and the stranger bent to pick it up.

“Sorry.” He placed the paper on her desk. He didn’t quite smile. He wore a brown-and-red Hawaiian print shirt, tan chinos. Tennis shoes without socks. He looked freshly showered, scrubbed clean. She could smell soap.

His eyes ran over the cheap walnut-colored paneling, the worn brown carpet. “Is this Chris Garrett’s office?” He looked down at her—
through
her—and she was struck by the symmetry in his face, by the angles of his jaw, his nose, his cheekbones. His eyes were a dark, opaque blue, but there was a light in them— something burning there.

“Yes,” she said.

“Is it possible for me to see him?” The near-smile again. He had to work at producing it. He was holding a map in his hand, and he waved it in the direction of Chris’s office. “My name is Jeff Cabrio. He doesn’t know me.”

She was staring, imagining how the angles of his face would transfer to her clay, and she dropped her gaze to the intercom on her desk. Punching the button, she called Chris. He sounded surprised to hear there was someone to see him. Since she’d been working for him, only a few people had come to the office—including a few of the kids Chris had coached in baseball who tried to convince him to “chuck this lame job and come back to Valle Rosa High School.” Chris had said there was nothing he would like better, but that right now his first responsibility was to all of Valle Rosa, not only the high school’s fledgling baseball team.

Mia hung up the phone and told Jeff Cabrio to have a seat, that Chris would be out shortly. He sat down, spreading the map open on his knees. As he traced routes with the tip of his finger, Mia slipped a piece of typing paper onto her desk top and began sketching him. Surreptitiously. Looking up, down. Growing more brazen as she realized he was absorbed in his map and unaware of her.

He was what Glen would have called an artist’s lure—someone an artist couldn’t resist, someone born to be painted, photographed, sculpted. Mia had been Glen’s student long before she was his lover, and he had taught her how to pick a lure from a crowd. “Not a classic beauty, necessarily,” he had said in his clipped London accent, “but someone whose features will transfer to the clay with an element of drama.”

Mia wished Glen could see Jeff Cabrio. Glen would have to exercise enormous self-control not to approach him, not to ask him if the planes of his face and arms and hands were reflected in the rest of his body. He would be too well-mannered to do that, of course, but not too polite to stare. Blatantly. More than once Glen had been propositioned by other men who had caught him staring unabashedly at their biceps, thighs, or buttocks.

Glen had told Mia she had the body of a lure, but not the face. “Your cheeks are too full,” he had said. “Your lips are too pouty.” At the time, she had been so convinced of his love for her that she hadn’t thought to take his words as an insult. “But your body, Sunny. Your body is a lure, pure and simple.”

She’d been twenty-four then, a born and bred southern California girl who didn’t fit the mold. She wasn’t tan. Her dishwater blond hair bore no sun streaks. She was slender, so slender in fact that every muscle, every tendon, was visible beneath her skin. The muscles hadn’t come from surfing or skating or a health club. They’d been earned over the years from lifting her mother, turning her, helping her into the bathtub.

It was the way her calf muscle shifted just below the skin that had intrigued Glen, the way her long, delicate fingers slipped over the clay that had made her a lure in his eyes. He had asked her into his office early that school year, where he told her that she was extraordinarily talented—”It’s frightening, really,” he’d said—and that when he watched her, when he saw the smile grow on her face as she lost herself in her work, he felt something “very deep” inside himself.

But Glen was ten years her senior and ever the gentleman. He would never have wanted to suggest impropriety. “You’re my student,” he had said, disappointing her, “and as long as you are, I won’t act on my feelings.”

After her graduation ceremony, he approached her, took her hands, leaned down to whisper in her ear. “I want to take you someplace wonderful for dinner,” he said. “I want to sculpt you. And I want to make love to you.”

“In that order?” she asked.

“In that order.”

She was only mildly taken aback by his desire to sculpt her, although she knew that he meant to sculpt her in the nude. She was accustomed to working with nude models in the classroom.