Last Dance (16 page)

In a sharp voice that cut through the music of the rock station they had playing and the sound of steak on an indoor grill, she said to them, “There’s a fire in the brush by the croquet court.”

Startled, they looked up to see a pretty brown-haired teenager in a dancing dress.

“This outside door is closest,” she said, gesturing to the door with its huge red EXIT sign. Flinging the door open, Kip began pointing at each person in the kitchen. “You! Find the outdoor faucet and hook up a hose to it. You Get that big bucket under the sink! Carry it out to dump on the fire! We may be able to put it out before it spreads! You! Call the fire department. Tell them to come into the lower parking lot. You!”

And just as the teenagers had obeyed her when she stopped them from swimming in the pool two hours earlier, the kitchen help obeyed her now.

It didn’t occur to any of them not to.

Kip had such an air of authority that even the assistant cook stirring a sauce that would burn if he didn’t keep tending it just moved the sauce onto a cold burner and ran to obey his orders.

“You!” Kip said to a busboy. “Round up the waiters without any fanfare and get them out there to put out the fire.”

“Right,” said the busboy, turning on his heel and heading for the dining room.

“You!” Kip said to the chef. “Get that fire extinguisher. You! Get blankets from the linen closet in the hall. Maybe the fire can be extinguished by smothering it.”

Kip had not spent a minute and a half saying this.

Now she was out the door herself to get her people organized at the fire’s edge.

Gary and Mike and Con searched fruitlessly among the trees. The steep sides of Mount Snow rose above them, and this was no open ski trail, but a dense wilderness of vines and undergrowth, ragged rock edges and crawling clinging tree branches.

“Beth Rose! Beth! Beth!”

But no one answered their yells, and the dark closed in on them like the arms of the leafy trees.

Gary tried to tell himself that if she had fallen into this it would have cushioned her like a net beneath a circus act.

If
she fell? he thought. Who am I kidding?
If
.

He tried to look up the mountain and locate the trail’s edge where Beth had gone over, but of course it was impossible. Not only was it too dark to see anything, but the trees growing higher up leaned over him, sheltering him to the point that he thought in a rainstorm he could probably stay dry down here.

And dry was the word.

Underfoot everything his shoe touched crunched like breakfast cereal. Good weather for a forest fire, he thought, and once more he shouted for her, crying, “Beth Rose! Bethie!”

Nobody answered.

He could hear Con shouting, too, beating at underbrush as if fighting through a jungle after the enemy. Gary’s head felt thick. He saw a square of pale light ahead of him and thought—
it’s her dress.
He stumbled toward it, muttering her name, gasping for breath, blundering into unseen fallen logs and stepping into a quagmire of wet soft earth where an unexpected spring had soaked the ground.

But it was not Beth Rose, or anybody else.

It was simply an opening in the forest ceiling and moonlight pouring down, reflecting limply on the huge leaves of some evil-looking cabbagelike weed.

It was pointless.

They could find nobody, see nothing in the thick woods by night.

Mike was the first to give up.

“Beth Rose! Beth!” came Gary’s voice, despairing, raw.

Standing on the path, staring into the nothingness of a forest at night, Mike thought, She must have broken her neck. Hit her skull maybe. Or else she’d moan, or answer us, or—

There was a moment of silence in which none of them was shouting Beth’s name.

In the silence Mike could hear Kip.

He couldn’t make out her words, but he could hear the authoritative ring of her shout.

Giving marching orders to somebody, that was for sure! A lot of somebodies.

It was enough to make a guy surrender. Could that girl not get along for an hour on her own without subjecting everybody to a military drill? Kip seemed to have a whole army at her disposal right now. Out of doors? It couldn’t be the VCR prize and the questionnaire she was marshaling them all to solve. What on earth could they—

But of course.

It would be Kip who found Beth Rose. Mike could not imagine how Kip would manage this, but she managed everything else.

“Gary,” he said. Horror thickened his throat and it came out a whisper. He tried to stay mad at Kip for getting involved, but horror over what condition Beth Rose might be in covered his anger. Because why would Kip need all those people except to move a body out of a terrible spot?

“Gary!” he tried again.

“You found her?” Gary’s voice was raw from shouting.

Mike couldn’t see him. He wondered briefly what they would do if all of them got lost down here. “I think Kip did. Higher on the mountain. Come back to the path, Gary. We’ve got to head toward the Inn.”

The fire had found a dead bush among the thick pretty hemlocks, and the bush went up like a torch and was consumed so quickly that Lee, the only witness, was not sure he had really seen it. It almost exploded, and its sparks leaped across the grass, and its flames circled the hemlocks and captured dead leaves and the smallest trees on the forest rim.

And even as he turned to run for the phones, and Kip flung open the kitchen door and ran with the first bucket of water to the fire, the fire crawled up another tree and licked branches that reached into the woods.

Molly stared at the kids in the ballroom.

Oh, it reminded her of so many other dances.

As always, the girls seemed to be at one event, and the boys seemed to be at another one entirely.

Girls had spent hours, weeks even, getting ready for this. They had shopped for dresses, made hair appointments, worried about the color of their shoes dyed to match their dresses.

Boys, however, had simply shown up. As usual there were a dozen boys who simply refused to dance at all, even slow dances, so their dates had the questionable privilege of being at a dance where they never got out on the floor. One of those girls was Roxanne, a wonderful gymnast, a terrific jazz dancer, who looked incredible in a tight shimmery short dress made to show off long legs and graceful moves. Her date was so unwilling to dance that he wouldn’t even leave the tables where the food was spread.

Roxanne had begun dancing alone, and the rest of the girls in that position had joined her. This seemed to make the boys very happy: no longer guilty about not dancing, they could stand with a bunch of other boys and talk about what they would do on Sunday, which would be a good day, as opposed to Saturday night, which was a dance and therefore boring.

Molly gave some thought as to which group she would join.

The boys?

Molly was always ready to join boys.

But Molly was always ready to dance, too, and like the girls on the dance floor, she lacked a partner.

Molly’s feet tapped. Molly’s hips swayed. Molly’s shoulders moved, and her hair swung lightly with the music. It was the girls she joined.

She lost herself in the dance.

Hypnotized by her own rhythms, Molly stamped and whirled and slid and reached. Half the time she had her eyes closed. They danced fast and hard, and the band, thrilled that finally somebody was out there living it up, played faster and harder and they spun like cars around a race track, endlessly circling, and loving every minute.

A hose was found down by the rose garden. The waiter assigned to that chore unscrewed the hose and carried the whole awkward roll of it up the path and over the croquet court.

The fire actually seemed to know that trees arched above it: that if it could just shift a few yards into the woods, it could climb—climb an entire mountain! Swallow a whole resort!

The wind played in the leaves as if teasing the fire to join its dance, high up there, out of reach, out of control.

The people below prayed for the wind to drop.

If anything, the wind picked up, and fire grew gold fingers, orange at the tips, like a witch’s hands.

Swirling as the wind swirled, the fire went west, stretching for the forest. It consumed everything in its reach. It cooked. It grilled. It baked.

It spread.

Lee and the busboy dropped two heavy wool blankets down where the fire was low, not raging. He wasn’t afraid of it, yet.

He had a sense that it was a tie score so far: Kip’s team could win at this stage.

The chef assigned to call the fire department raced across the lawn to report to Kip that they were on their way.

Two waiters turned on the ground sprinklers to keep the Inn side of the fire wet and safe.

Lee was standing right over one sprinkler when it went on. A gentle spray of water climbed up his legs and filled his shoes. Somehow it was an all too familiar feeling.

Second time tonight I’ve been drenched, he thought. He turned to share the joke with Kip, but she was far too busy to notice or to care.

Lee thought, This woman is amazing. I have never seen authority and leadership like this.

Fearless, too.

She gave orders calmly, so that while the waiters jumped into activity, they were also steadied by Kip’s purpose; nobody was frightened, nobody was wasting time, nobody except me is just standing here.

Kip said, “Lee, the hose isn’t going to do it, and there’s only the one water hook-up here. We’ve got to organize a bucket brigade from the kitchen.” She turned to the rest. “You! You! You!” And beckoning them to come after her, she ran back to the kitchen and they followed, Lee among them.

Lee thought he had not met a girl before who could do this.

In fact, he didn’t know if he’d met anybody before who could.

Marshaling her workers like an army, he thought. She should go to the Naval Academy, or West Point. She has what it takes.

He started to tell her that he had decided on the perfect future for her, but it was definitely the wrong time. Kip simply put a spaghetti cooker in his hands and a lobster cooker in the next guy’s arms. It would be a long brigade. There was a long, long stretch of wet grass to hand the buckets down.

Kip put the assistant cook in charge of that and sent Lee to the ballroom to get the rest of the kids.

“Me?” Lee asked dubiously. He didn’t know these kids, the band was playing very loudly, everybody was happily dancing—how would he break into this and—

Kip shrugged and ran to get them herself. The important thing was to cause no panic, but to get them working quickly—get the fire stopped.

She was in the ballroom in ten seconds and stopped the band short in one more. She simply held one flat hand up to them and took away the mike in the singer’s hand.

Nobody argued with Kip.

But then, nobody ever had.

Not successfully anyway.

Fire
.

The word was both terrifying and exciting.

Fire.

There were those who shrank and those who jumped up.

Fire.

Matt, working on this third enormous sandwich, was one who was rather delighted. From the time he was a toddler, he had always wanted to be a fireman. Matt was first through the doors, and the sight of the fire stopped him short.

He had expected some little piddly grass fire: a little smoke, a few charred embers.

This fire—it was a real fire.

Flames taller than he was.

All the colors of fire: hot red, orange, yellow, gold, even white.

The colors of destruction and death.

Matt began running again almost the same moment he stopped, with the result that he stumbled and Kip caught up to him. “Bucket brigade,” she gasped. “You be on the fire end. At this stage I think we can douse the actual fire.”

Whew, Matt thought.

He was not at all sure they could put the fire out. If he had been in charge he would have opted to wet down the surrounding area, and hope the fire would burn itself out once it used up what it was eating now.

But he was not in charge. Kip was, and he obeyed her.

In the girls’ room Pammy gave up and wandered off. Anne and Emily sighed simultaneously and rolled their eyes at each other.

“I’m grateful to her, though,” Emily said.

“Really? Why?”

“Well, she made it all normal again. I was feeling as if I had fallen off the edge, and nothing about life was average, and everything in life was overwhelming. But life is really just old Pammy being a pain, and running out of Kleenex, and wondering how Matt is doing.”

Anne grinned.

They fixed each other’s hair, taking a serene pleasure in making their exteriors smooth, no matter how chaotic their insides might be.

The door opened and they winced, expecting to be interrupted again by a Pammy type, and feeling, unfairly, that they should be allowed to have the girls’ room to themselves for an hour or two of peace.

But it wasn’t a Pammy type.

Not at all.

Gary got up to the fire first, and Kip stuck a scrub bucket in his hand and a spaghetti pot in Con’s.

Gary was a relatively relaxed person, but having to search for the body of his girlfriend—and now to find instead an empty scrub bucket in his hands and a fire raging where he had expected to see Beth’s body on a stretcher—Gary just stood there.

“Run the bucket back to the beginning of the line, Gary,” Kip said.

The next bucket was passed down, flung on the fire by Matt, and tossed to Gary, so that now he held two of them.

Gary stared at the buckets, and then at Kip.

Irritated by his slowness, Kip said, “Move it, Gary. The wind is picking up. Either we get the fire now, or it gets away from us.” She gave him a gentle push toward the Inn.

“Kip, Beth Rose is missing. I think she might have fallen off the cliff path.”

Lee, in line now next to Matt, saw that Gary said this as if expecting Kip to solve it. Gary, who had defeated him in wrestling matches, standing there asking Kip what to do?

“
Might
have?” Kip repeated. “Did she scream? Did you hear her fall?”